Navigating Complexity in Nottingham – What’s next for Systems Changers?

The Children’s Society has been exploring how systems change can challenge how we operate and see ourselves as a national children’s organisation, and how it can deepen the impact of our work with young people. This month we’re moving into an exciting new phase by formally working with cross-sector colleagues on creating a new place-based Systems Change Community of Practice (CoP) in Nottingham.

Throughout its development I, aka the learning catalyst, will be sharing our live learning through blogs, tweets and rich pictures. We know there’s growing interest in systems change as a framework, so we want to offer practical learning on how to set up a CoP, what hurdles and opportunities might be encountered, and the collective insight that can be generated when partners come together to build a shared picture and approach in their local system.

This is the first in a series of blogs, and here I’ll set the scene for why we’re creating a CoP in Nottingham. Stay tuned to follow our journey!

Local place-based systems change — our journey towards partnership

In 2018–19 a cohort of staff from The Children’s Society embarked upon the boundary-pushing Systems Changers programme in partnership with The Point People and funded by Lankelly Chase. This 10-month programme sought to build capacity and confidence amongst youth sector frontline professionals to enact change to the systems affecting young people facing multiple disadvantage. Not only did practitioners test out their learning about systemic thinking and design approaches through their everyday frontline practice, this work also became a catalyst for our internal systems change journey in The Children’s Society. We share detailed and honest reflections about the programme and the impact it had for us an organisation in our report and blog post.

Working closely with Lankelly Chase to reflect on our learning and consider ‘what happens next?’ it was clear The Children’s Society could play an important role in sharing what we have learned with the wider sector and acting as a catalyst to encourage others to come together.

In fact, the programme highlighted The Children’s Society alone could not make the fundamental changes in local or national systems needed to genuinely halt persistent problems and achieve sustained positive impact for disadvantaged children. So we need to move from trying to understand systems change for ourselves, to working with others to try and enact it.

Our logic around systems change and partnership goes like this:

As our colleague Lucy so brilliantly describes it in her recent blog, ‘’systems change is about knowing one day you will get that feeling you have changed something for more young people than you will ever see’’. If that’s not a convincing reason to focus on addressing systemic issues then I don’t know what is?! When we talk about systems change, what we really mean is going beyond delivering frontline work with individual young people by unpicking wider complex problems that affect how the world around young people works. To achieve this huge mission, it’s clear one person and even one organisation can’t do it alone. Multiple parts of the system influence young people’s lives simultaneously, so addressing inequalities and failures in the system requires a multi-pronged approach from multiple people working in unison. Partnership and collaboration are key — but this is hard to do if we don’t have shared spaces to communicate, build trust, learn from each other, and plan coordinated action.

‘Going where the energy is’ — Building a Systems Change Community of Practice in Nottingham

A key principle that emerged from the Systems Changers programme was for us to ‘go where the energy is’. Conversations with colleagues from Next Generation Nottingham demonstrated there was huge potential for change in Nottinghamshire, with key partners wanting to deepen their collective working in order to scale change across the county. The energy and appetite for change among partners was clear.

Change Nottingham, a collaboration of cross sector charities, was already coming together to challenge the systemic issues leading to severe multiple disadvantage in the region. The partnership is made up of:

1. The Children’s Society — Next Generation Nottingham (young people’s service)

2. Opportunity Nottingham — systems change for adults with multiple complex needs

3. Small Steps, Big Changes — systems change in 0–3 early years

4. Active Notts (Sport England) — using system change to address inactivity and inequality

5. Practice Development Unit — an online space to promote and facilitate collaborative learning

All of the above organisations and partnerships work to support people with multiple and complex needs or support those who are facing health inequalities and deprivation. Since early 2020 these organisations have been collaborating to establish and develop a place-based system change approach for children, young people and adult services across Nottinghamshire. These pioneering ‘change programmes’ each bring experience of what leading in a wider system, not just in an organisation, entails. We have aligned ourselves acting collectively, to initiate change.

Developing our response: A new Community of Practice

We’ve recognised that this novel collaboration in Nottingham provides the foundations from which a Community of Practice could be supported to develop and build place-based change. This also provides a valuable learning opportunity for us as an organisation so we have committed in-kind support to the programme and we’re really grateful to Lankelly Chase for funding it. We’re also excited that Small Steps Big Changes and Active Notts have funded an independent evaluation of the CoP — demonstrating shared commitment to maximising learning and influencing the sector.

The partnership will be applying systems-thinking methodologies working to develop collaborative leadership for the locally-led network to thrive.

Some of the ways we hope to do this are:

· Bring people together to paint a shared picture of our local system

· Build trusted and close relationships with each other

· Identify shared, complex problems that we may not have seen or fully understood by ourselves before

· Try out new ways of working together

· Scale and share promising ways of working across our local system

· Openly share our learning and reflections on the work with partners across the region and country

Thanks to Lankelly Chase’s resourcing, we’re able to create what is a rare space in the children and young people’s sector to stop, reflect, and stimulate deeper understanding in three ways:

1. To reflect back live learning to the CoP members and help them collectively see patterns emerge that would not be possible to see individually

2. To garner insight, share and join the dots with our other ground-breaking systems change frontline programmes

3. To share our honest and practical learning with our wider colleagues across social care, health the voluntary sector and beyond — so that anyone wanting to try out a similar approach can benefit from our explorations (perhaps the most exciting bit!)

What have we done to set up the CoP?

So far we’ve been getting our heads into systems coaching, introducing this to our new partnership and have been working through the practical basics to get our first Community of Practice up and running.

Since September 2020, we have:

· Commissioned the support of a systemic coach to help break down and facilitate the systems learning journey

· In addition to the core group of founding organisations (Change Nottingham) noted above, we have gathered the key local members of the community of practice to establish our aims and outcomes

· Built relationships and trust across the partnership

· Started drafting and agreeing the terms of reference for the group

· Planned dates for virtual meet ups of the community

· Mapped out the roles we considered would be beneficial to form part of the core group and community and started to reach out to those who we feel are missing

· Set a strong agenda for our first community of practice meeting

What’s next — the first big day:

The Change Nottingham partnership’s hard work — in the face of Covid-19 and multiple lockdowns — means we’re all set and have ran our first meeting this week! The first Community of Practice was all about sharing passions and understanding the system in which we sit. This weeks session and future sessions will be run virtually and hosted through Nottingham’s Personal Development Unit. Of course we will also share insights from this CoP in a follow up blog coming soon.

If you’re in Nottingham and want to get involved please register your interest via the Practice Development Unit (PDU).

We will be sharing more of our journey on twitter @TCSImpact and monthly blog posts, including more rich pictures.

If you want to know more or have any questions about involvement drop either an email to either myself Chloe.Dennis-Green@childrenssociety.org.uk or Gabriel who is based in Nottingham Gabriel.Hall@childrenssociety.org.uk

We look forward to you joining us for the adventure and letting us know if you try out any of this in your local area!