Doing it for ourselves: How we designed our own in-house systems change learning programme
If you’ve followed our journey at The Children’s Society, you’ll know we’ve been dabbling in systems change for a couple of years now. Since jumping in at the deep end with the Lankelly Chase-funded Systems Changers 2018–19 programme, and designing and delivering a range of systems-informed frontline services like Disrupting Exploitation and Prevention, we’ve been grappling with how we can support our 700+ colleagues across our 140-year-old organisation to learn about and ignite systemic change that genuinely shifts things for young people.
It’s not as easy as signing everyone up to a half-hour ‘introduction to systems change’ webinar, setting some key performance indicators (KPIs) and sending them out into the world to disrupt the status quo by lunchtime.
Yes, systems change for us is about theory, new language and tools (all of which can be usefully introduced and played around with in webinars and workshops) but we’re realising that a larger part of it is about mindset, experimentation, conversation and behaviour. People need time and space — and a host of other ‘enabling factors’ — to explore these and try them out in their everyday working (and probably personal) worlds in order to feel comfortable and increasingly confident in using them.
Time and space in the charity sector are hard to come by. We don’t have the luxury of sending everyone on long residentials, nor committing people to weekly or fortnightly learning sessions in the midst of their externally commissioned frontline work. So we’ve been creative — speaking with colleagues who are at different stages in their systemic learning journey (total newbies to those doing Masters courses), talking with managers and our learning and development colleagues, and asking our sector colleagues what they’re doing to help their colleagues learn. We’ve not rushed into designing anything rigid or universal because we’ve been trying to embody a learning mindset as we build a learning programme — feels a bit meta sometimes!
We now have a fairly urgent imperative to bring all our colleagues along for the ride. Our new organisational strategy commits us to systems change even over individual change. This is a huge shift for us as an organisation that’s worked with hundreds of thousands of individual young people since our inception — building relationships and doing face-to-face work with children is why we come to work. It’s not untrue to say this shift makes many of us uncomfortable — what does it mean for us as youth workers, social workers, and advocates to say we might shift our time and resources to focus on something bigger than ‘just’ individuals?
Firstly, we won’t stop working with individual young people. Far from it. It’s doing that intimate work with real humans that gives us the knowledge, expertise and visceral feeling of what needs to change ‘out there’, the bigger picture. But in addition to this we do aim for our staff to feel confident and equipped to push for wider change. For them to be able to see and articulate what’s broken about the system — why their young people keep butting up against barriers, or falling through the gaps. For them to then feel like it’s their place to do something about it — to have the skills to work in a multi-disciplinary team to create and test new ideas for overhauling that failing system.
It’s up to us as an organisation to offer our staff the opportunities, permission and space to learn how to do these things, and the support that says ‘we’ve got your back’ when our staff challenge the status quo or things get tough (which they almost inevitably will).
This February we engineered the opportunity to bring all our ‘learning about learning’ together — particularly building on our experience of delivering the Systems Changers programme — to really test out how we could design our own internal learning programme on systems change. In partnership with the Home Office, we designed and were launching a brilliant new service called Support Rethought that pilots a new approach to blending frontline delivery with systems change to tackle child sexual abuse (CSA). We needed to get the 15+ strong team, working across three geographies (Torbay, Nottingham, Newcastle) introduced to and early-confident with systems change, fast.
As Systems Change Lead, newly back from a year’s maternity leave and figuring out where the organisation was now at along its systems journey, there was a temptation to take the easier road and commission an external provider to deliver some discrete systems change training. But we’ve learned that these programmes are hard to buy off the shelf — firstly, they’re simply not very common and secondly, this kind of learning works best when it’s tailored to specific people and areas of work, and embedded in an ongoing support structure. We could’ve commissioned an agency to design a custom programme for us, but we were on tight timescales and tight on budget, and had an inkling that we might now have the experience and expertise to design a systems change programme ourselves.
So we had a go! We were humble enough to know we couldn’t deliver it all ourselves, so set out curating the programme and gathering together a dream team of systems leaders to deliver particular sessions. These included Seanna Davidson of The Systems School, Immy Kaur and Pauline Roberts. We were also adamant about embracing peer-teaching to amplify the voices and expertise of our internal frontline colleagues who are further down the line on their systems change journey — it meant we benefitted by having many of the sessions led by people familiar with how our part of the youth system works.
The nuts’n’bolts of our Ignite programme
We’ll offer more detail on the individual Ignite programme sessions in a future blog post, but what we ended up with was a 5-week kick-off programme, delivered virtually across April and May 2021 in 5 x 3.5 hour morning sessions, one each week. The five sessions focused on:
The programme was underpinned by a design approach and was inspired by the three foundational elements of the brilliant Systems Changers programme designed by The Point People (Seeing the System, Finding the Flex, Making Change Happen). We also wanted to test out incorporating specific space to launch participants’ personal journeys (Pioneer) and acknowledge the critical role that people play in systems — that half of systems change is about building relationships, shifting power and influencing people to behave in new ways (People).
As well as the 17.5 hours contact time, participants were encouraged through little homework prompts to take their learning back into their day jobs and try it out in practice, reflecting together the next week on what resonated and what jarred. We also invited them into our organisational Community of Practice (CoP) on systems change — a diverse forum of colleagues all dipping their toes into the choppy waters of systems change. Hopefully easing their transition from initial big-bang introduction into sustained engagement and learning in the everyday.
We had a small budget that paid for some of our keynote speakers’ time, but otherwise all the legwork was provided in-kind by internal resources. Along with Becky Fedia, our wonderful Programme Manager for the Support Rethought team, we curated the programme, commissioned the speakers, facilitated the sessions, dealt with budgets, created welcome kits, engineered busy timetables to make sure people could attend, and critically ensured that all our content ideas were actually useful and relevant for the real-life team and service priorities at hand. We created the programme guide in Canva so it looked like ‘a thing’, and delivered all the sessions remotely via Microsoft Teams.
Given it was all delivered remotely, we wanted to inject a little bit of creativity and joy into the experience, so borrowed our colleague Adam Groves’ idea of sending all attendees their own systems change welcome kits — including highlighters, post-its, notebooks and sweets — to use/consume at home and help them feel slightly physically connected.
We were keen that the Ignite programme felt different to the usual webinar or lecture and instead achieve more dynamic engagement. We encouraged people to document and share their learning using different methods and mediums, especially doodling, and we recorded sessions and shared them with the group afterwards so they could review in their own time and didn’t feel like they had to take copious pages of dry notes.
Lift off!
I’m not going to lie — it was a huge amount of work to pull together in a short space of time, about 7 weeks. But we were so fortunate to be able to secure some amazing external contributors and our internal colleagues pulled it out of the bag — bringing high-quality and relatable content rooted in tried-and-tested experience. We had a wonderful cohort of colleagues ready to learn, and so all that was left was to deliver it!
We learned A LOT at every stage — planning, curating, the logistics of securing international speakers, tech issues, creating bonds remotely, the balance of theory and applicable tools, ‘homework’, and supporting people to try things out and feedback. In this sense, it was a really successful pilot!
And it’s been amazing seeing the Support Rethought team dive into their frontline work with young people while they simultaneously test out their learning from the Ignite programme. It’s hard work blending the two, but as Becky reflects in this recent blog, systems approaches are enabling the team to develop a deeper understanding of their local CSA systems and identify key allies they can work with to redesign them.
In our next blog we’ll share the key things we learned about delivering the programme. We’re super keen to support our external colleagues across the youth system and beyond to begin their own systems change journeys. Ultimately we can’t change the world for young people alone — so if we can help other organisations support their staff to shift mindsets and behaviours then we might be able to create a movement of systems-informed allies. What a dream!
If you’re thinking of launching your own systems change learning experience in your organisation, please get in touch as we’d love to help you — not as experts but as friends, figuring this all out together.
