Reflections on a systemically-informed service to disrupt criminal exploitation
Written with Nerys Anthony, Becky Fedia, Craig Grady and Gemma Drake.
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Back in March (you remember — a lifetime ago) Nerys and I spoke at the SD in Gov Conference. We shared The Children’s Society’s work to develop a systemically-informed service to disrupt child criminal exploitation. Our plan was to publish a write-up shortly after the event, but the pandemic re-ordered our to-do list. So, better late than never, here it is… updated with additional reflections from colleagues, shared over the past few months.
Standing on the shoulders of a Systems Changer…
One morning in 1881, in south London, two young boys didn’t turn up to Sunday School. Their school teacher, Edward Rudolf, grew concerned and went to look for them. He found them begging for food on the street because their father had died and they were in poverty.
There was no welfare system to care for these boys. Orphaned children and poor families were sent to workhouses. Edward Rudolf couldn’t bear the thought of this — and so he decided to act. He worked with the Church of England to establish an organisation to provide small, loving homes for orphaned children. This contributed to a paradigm change. It helped transform the way vulnerable children were perceived and looked after. No longer would they be sent to workhouses. Edward Rudolf was an entrepreneur and a systems changer. He was brave, ambitious and radical.
One hundred and thirty eight years later, the organisation Edward Rudolf established still exists — and we are The Children’s Society. We no longer provide homes for children, but as a national charity with over 800 staff and 10,000 volunteers — we provide more than 50 different services for over 15,000 children across England, including children in care, young migrants, and young people who are being sexually and criminally exploited.
Disrupting Exploitation
This blog post shares the thinking that underpins a programme of work called Disrupting Exploitation, which was funded by the National Lottery Community Fund in 2017. (We mention the Lottery not just because it’s good etiquette to nod to your funders, but because they challenged us to design a response to the growing criminal exploitation of young people — and we were really lucky they didn’t impose lots of rigid constraints around the design. This was key. They have been brilliant to work with.)
The programme has a staff of 16, working across three regions — London, Greater Manchester, and Birmingham. To illustrate the systems change work the team has been doing, we’ll tell you a brief story — featuring Liv (in the blue dress) and Lucy (in the Red dress). We’ll then unpick the design thinking that went into Disrupting Exploitation, before reflecting briefly on some of the challenges and lessons we’ve learned about delivery of a programme that aims for systems change.
If you happen to be a Hollyoaks fan, you might recognise the image of Juliet above. Juliet is one of a number of young people who, in a recent Hollyoaks storyline, were groomed to carry out criminal activity. This means someone was creating and then taking advantage of an imbalance of power to manipulate or coerce her to undertake criminal acts.
The Hollyoaks storyline, which The Children’s Society Disrupting Exploitation team helped to develop, focuses on a particular type of criminal exploitation called County Lines. In simple terms, this is where young people are made to traffic drugs and money across the country, often from urban to rural counties. They’re given a mobile phone and an address where they’ll be required to stay for a number of days. The phone number is then distributed to drug users in the area, who meet the young person to get their drugs. 50,000 young people are thought to be affected by County Lines, and it’s a growing issue.
The Disrupting Exploitation team are providing 1–2–1, relational and practical support to young people in London, Greater Manchester and Birmingham who are being exploited through county lines.
What we know from our work with exploited young people up and down the country is that different young people are affected, but many of the same problems are seen and experienced time and time again. When delivering the Disrupting Exploitation programme, Liv and Lucy noticed a pattern whereby the police would find young people in a town (not their hometown) with large quantities of drugs and cash and — understandably, you might think — arrest them.
This decision has a huge affect on the rest of their journey — if young people like Juliet are criminalised — sent into the criminal justice system, then they immediately face huge additional risks and the poorer life chances that follow. Alternatively — she could be recognised as a victim of crime and supported — her path changed…
So what Liv and Lucy did, is dive into the problem of young people being criminalised. They did ‘discovery research’ to try and better understand it. They spoke to police officers who are present when young people are found. They spoke to children’s social care and other professionals who work with those young people. They shadowed police custody sergeants and custody staff on their shifts to observe what happened when young people are brought into police stations. They learned from young people through our 1–2–1 work with them. They listened to them and heard about their experiences.
Then they worked with colleagues to develop hypotheses and a portfolio of experiments to try and change ‘the system’ at the point of arrest. These included changing the questions young people are asked, changing where they’re asked questions, and changing the information flows (i.e. who is notified when a young person is brought in, and what adults are available to support them). They also tested ‘softer’ measures like providing child-friendly books that officers on duty could give to young people in the cells, and getting orange squash and cans of coke put onto the procurement system (young people don’t tend to fancy a tea or coffee). This was intended to help officers build relationships and trust with the young people, creating an environment where young people would feel safer to reveal criminal exploitation.
These changes were tested in one custody suite in London, then across London, culminating in new training for over 1000 Metropolitan police custody staff. They are now being iterated again in Manchester and Birmingham. This might seem quite intuitive to the designers and commissioners reading this. But it is really unusual for ‘frontline’ practitioners from a charity to have license to change the system in this way.
Why are we trying to devolve control?
To understand why we’re trying to devolve more control to our practitioners, it’s important to understand the types of systems we’re working in. We haven’t found a better, simpler explanation of complex systems and their implications for control, than this talk by Aaron Dignan. We’ve incorporated a few of his slides below (or of course you can watch the original!).
The words complicated and complex are often used interchangeably. But systems theorists will tell you they have very different meanings, with huge implications for how you interact with these systems.
Take a moment to consider whether you think the images below represent complicated, or complex systems.
What about these images?
The watch mechanism and the jet engine are complicated systems. They are causal and linear. They may have lots of moving parts — sometimes they’re really complicated. But an expert can understand and fix them.
The traffic flows and the murmuration of starlings are complex systems. They have a direction, but we can’t change them in exactly the way we want. They are more than the sum of their parts, a change in one area of the system induces a change in the rest of the system, which means they can surprise us. The agents in a complex system have a fundamentally unpredictable way of interacting. You’re never going to hear anyone say “I fixed the murmuration of starlings”.
To illustrate how we typically respond to complexity, Aaron looks at the example of traffic flows. The two images above show two different responses to the same challenge (the need for a junction). The traffic lights are premised on the need for ‘command and control’, whilst the roundabout is built on two simple principles — go with the flow and give way to the right. The roundabout presumes that drivers can be trusted and enabled to decide when to go.
In his talk Aaron challenges the audience to consider: Which one is safer? The roundabout. Which one has higher throughput? The roundabout. Which one is cheaper to build and maintain? The roundabout. Which one works better when there is a power cut? The roundabout. And yet, which one do we feel safer in? Probably the traffic lights… because we’re not made to think.
As designers we like to think of ourselves as challenging the status quo. But when we reflect on the task of designing for complex systems, I wonder if the continuity is more striking than the divergence. Rigid structures, performance dashboards and service blueprints — infrastructures of control — remain the norm for most services.
We wanted to take a new frame, and design a programme of work that would go beyond tightly controlled service delivery to enable systems change, and to build trust and autonomy.
Through our discovery work, what we quickly learned is that our practitioners’ resources are generally directed to crisis-point. For example, after the exploitation has happened — after the arrest — when young people are in dire straits.
They’re constrained to working at the end of the conveyor belt: which is why they told us they see different children with the same problem over and over again. One aspect of our reframing for this programme was to enable practitioners to move ‘upstream’ — to intervene earlier — so they could explore and act on opportunities to prevent young people from being exploited.
The second dimension of our reframing was to think about the leverage our practitioners could exert on the system. This builds on the work of a systems theorist called Donella Meadows.
Throwing more resources at a problem is the least effective systemic response. As you go up the Y axis you see changes which are more systemic — and also more challenging to implement. In devolving control to our practitioners, we realised we’d need to give them licence to dance with the system at multiple levels. If you think back to the story at the beginning about Liv and Lucy’s work in custody suites, hopefully you can see their portfolio of experiments operated at these first 4 levels — they were trying to reshape resourcing, information flows, the rules and the culture of the point of arrest and of police custody suites.
But if you give this licence to practitioners, the question becomes, what do they need to thrive?
Creating a ‘social infrastructure’ for systems change
Often, as a sector — and certainly as an organisation — we ask our practitioners to operate in more defined, more linear ways (delivering specific services to specific cohorts in specific contexts). We know effective work in complex systems doesn’t allow for this level of specificity. If we were not designing a ‘service infrastructure’ to direct how our practitioners should interact with the system, then what? We were left to design a ‘social infrastructure’ that would enable them to dance with the system at multiple levels — an infrastructure that should empower the team to ‘design’ its own responses to systemic challenges, through continuous learning and adaptation.
This would represent a significant change in approach for The Children’s Society. And as Sonja Bilhnaut has observed, it’s not easy to make this kind of shift: it’s hard to survive in the jungle if you were trained in a zoo. We feel safer at traffic lights, not roundabouts.
Our research to inform the programme design led us to six aspects of social infrastructure, which we sought to embed into the programme.
The first was ‘access’. We know that complex systems can’t be understood from the outside. You have to interact with them in order to understand them. Our practitioners are immersed in the challenge of criminal exploitation. It’s their day to day job. We wanted to retain (and expand) their access to the system, including through continued 1–2–1 direct work with young people. We also emphasised the critical role of collaboration — our original bid documents were clear that “the programme will not be bounded by [the priorities of] one organisation” instead it aimed to provide “capacity to respond to the shared priorities of partners in the system”.
The second was ‘agency’. Whilst we felt it was important for the programme to continue offering 1–2–1 support to young people, we recognised the need for practitioners to have greater agency to dance with the system. This came in the form of explicit permission to collaborate — establishing the partnerships needed to bring about change. We sought to unburden practitioners from unrealistic expectations of being able to ‘fix’ systemic problems — Disrupting Exploitation practitioners have license to engage partners without the pretense of coming with a ‘magic wand’ to wave away problems. Alongside this emphasis on collaboration, a ‘test and learn’ approach (or what complexity theorists might describe as a probe, sense, respond approach) was designed into the programme, enabling practitioners to experiment with new ways of working which might contribute to systems change (e.g. as with the custody suite work described above).
The third was ‘time’. Typically practitioners working for our services have ‘caseloads’, each case reflecting work done with a single child. These come with stretching targets, usually set by commissioners keen to ensure they are getting as much as possible for their money. However, we know interacting with a complex system takes time. Practitioners struggling to stay on top of ambitious targets would not be able to meaningfully engage with the system around them. So, with the support of the National Lottery Community Fund, we cut 1–2–1 caseloads for practitioners on this programme by 50%.
The fourth was ‘coaching’. We recognised that the ‘systems change’ work we were calling on practitioners to do is hard. Drawing on expertise from the The Children’s Society’s systems change and design team, we aimed to support practitioners with practical direction and tools, and to facilitate the regional teams to explore systemic challenges in their areas.
The fifth was ‘learning’. Alongside this programme we secured support from a funder called Lankelly Chase to equip a number of the programme team with systems change and design skills, and to provide a space for them to share learning. This was followed by Action Learning Sets, introduced to enable continuous reflection and peer-support.
The sixth and final aspect was a flexible budget for cycles of testing and learning. This would allow practitioners to take steps to probe the system (by prototyping new ways of working), sense the effects, and respond accordingly. This budget enabled the work in custody suites described above. In practice practitioners often haven’t needed to draw much on this budget in order to progress their activities (their experiments have tended to be quick, small and — initially at least — cheap).
The aim of this ‘social infrastructure’ was to reinforce and respect our practitioner’s professional identity. It sought to recognise their knowledge, skills and experience — and provide an infrastructure within which these could be fully realised.
In focusing on the ‘social infrastructure’ for practitioners, rather than tightly specifying the ‘service infrastructure’, we were consciously decentralising the importance of the ‘designer’ (or indeed anyone responsible for specifying projects — commissioners, bid writers, service designers… etc). Our logic was that in the context of a complex system, with ever changing and emergent characteristics, no amount of upfront research would lead us to the ‘solution’. We needed to let go of the illusion of control, and trust our practitioners — devolving more responsibility, power and resource to them. This approach also recognised that The Children’s Society is very much part of the system that needs to change. And therefore we are part of what enables the system to adapt. In this context, we aspire to liberate and scale knowledge about systems change and design — thereby contributing to a more adaptive system.
The jungle is real… some challenges we’ve grappled with
In delivering the Disrupting Exploitation programme, we’ve grappled with two overlapping layers of challenges — relating first to the programme, and second to its implications for our organisation (and our place in the wider system). Here are a few reflections on some key challenges:
Recruiting and retaining people for the Disrupting Exploitation roles has been difficult. Finding practitioners with the right mindset and skills is hard, and retaining them once they’re upskilled in systems change is also hard. We are aiming for practitioners who can work on granular levels of detail with young people and partners, and simultaneously zoom out to look at the bigger system. In some cases the challenge has been a positive one — providing practitioners with opportunities to affect systemic change when the task of continuously supporting ‘different children with the same problem’ risks undermining morale or leading to burnout. However, in other cases, the systemic challenges — including those in our own organisation (discussed below) — have felt overwhelming, and talented colleagues have moved on to new roles. This doubtless reflects on the strength of the ‘social infrastructure’ we’ve been able to create for the team.
To support Disrupting Exploitation practitioners grappling with significant systemic challenges we’ve had to improve our approach to coaching over the course of the programme. We have limited coaching capacity within The Children’s Society, and there have been times when it’s been directed outside of the programme. During these periods, implementation of systems change work has slowed down. From year 2 of the programme we have had a systemic coach (the organisation’s Systems Change Lead) working more intensively and consistently with the team.
Lack of time can sometimes be a challenge despite dropping practitioners’ case loads. The Disrupting Exploitation team works on life and death issues. We’ve given practitioners more time to pursue systems change, but when push comes to shove — safeguarding and responding to crisis comes first. Equally, when additional time is available for the testing, learning and relational work at the heart of systems change, team members report sometimes feeling guilty. They worry that other services (inside and outside The Children’s Society), which have high caseloads and stringent targets, might be looking and thinking “what are they doing?”. Systems change work can feel slow and uncertain when people are used to working with caseloads, where activities are specified upfront and then the ‘race is on’ to reach the agreed targets.
The question of agency has also raised difficult questions for us at both programmatic and organisational levels. If you invite and equip your colleagues to challenge the system, and if you as an organisation are part of the system, you should — of course — expect to be challenged! The result is this is not an easy programme to manage. This is especially so in the context of a large and old charity, which has an organisational culture and structure optimised to work in a commissioning context focused on ‘service delivery’. For example, whilst the National Lottery Community Fund was happy for us to work without targets, during the programme mobilisation quantitative targets were introduced for the systems change activities. This allowed the programme to fit with the organisation’s existing norms of performance monitoring (itself shaped by the expectations of commissioners and funders — the flexibility shown by the National Lottery Community Fund is not the norm). It also soothed concerns (discussed more below) that evidencing the impact of systems change is notoriously difficult. Whilst the targets themselves are not unreasonable, members of the programme team reflect they have sometimes had the effect of constraining the team’s agency to focus on larger, slower, more systemic pieces of work.
In a similar vein, because the majority of our services are focused on delivering highly specified activities, we did not have a strong pre-existing culture of ‘test and learn’ within the organisation. Whilst Disrupting Exploitation practitioners have the agency to test and learn on paper, in practice experimentation has sometimes focused on smaller, more discrete issues rather than being used as an engine for probing and progressing core programme goals. (Recognising this, since year two of the programme, we have focused ‘test and learn’ activities on three core areas — the point of arrest, ‘assessment tools’ used by services, and school exclusions). Nonetheless, there can be a tendency for ‘test and learn’ to be perceived as something “we can do a bit of, but not too much”. It is a constant work in progress to build a culture that recognises testing and ‘getting things wrong’ is an inherent part of learning in a complex system — when tests reveal something doesn’t work, it is a ‘praiseworthy failure’. Finding ways to articulate this internally and externally is itself part of the programme’s systems change work.
In many ways The Children’s Society has provided a strong and supportive enabling environment for the Disrupting Exploitation programme. But the organisation is aware it is near the start of its journey towards more systems-informed practice, and we don’t have everything right. The programme — and the lessons that have emerged from it — have definitely informed organisational change, but it is not a frictionless process. As a design team, we paid insufficient attention to the organisational context for the programme — specifically, the need to start with changing our own systems. This is key, because the social infrastructure for the programme is constrained by wider organisational norms. We could have ‘designed in’ better feedback mechanisms allowing for a more agile organisational response to learning from the programme. At times this task has instead become ‘hidden work’ that has fallen on the programme team and their management.
In acknowledging this, we don’t mean to portray the task of organisational change as a purely technical challenge. There are lots of different roles The Children’s Society might play in the system: service provider, convenor, catalyser… etc. Just because we can play a certain role doesn’t mean we should. For example, The Children’s Society’s business model sees us compete for contracts put out to tender by commissioners. In that context, there will be circumstances where we can play a convening role, but there may also be circumstances where other organisations — with less of a stake in the system as it is right now — are better placed to take on the responsibility. These are tough questions with big strategic implications and risks tied to them. The ‘friction’ involved in tackling these questions exists for good reason.
Finally, we are continuing to explore approaches to evaluating systems change. Our evaluation team have blogged about this challenge and their learning (see also this literature review, informed by insight from the Disrupting Exploitation programme). Even with in-depth qualitative research, by its nature, change in complex systems is hard to ‘measure’. The timescales for change are unpredictable and attribution (or even contribution) are difficult to establish due to the characteristics of complex systems. The challenge is exacerbated because our practitioners are often focused on parts of the system where data does not exist. And where quantitative data may exist, it can be difficult for us to access it or for organisations to share it. Moreover, there is a fundamental tension, which is that the more practitioners focus on ‘higher order’ systems change — that is, changes with potential to have the most profound effects (for example, cultural shifts) — the harder measurement becomes. Without simple measures that can be used to demonstrate ‘outcomes’ and impact, the harder it is to manage the work, and the harder it is to secure sustainable funding. By way of contrast, it is (relatively) easier to evidence both the ‘need’ and efficacy of interventions for 1–2–1 work with young people who the system has allowed to reach ‘crisis point’.
Want to hear more?
This post aimed to give an overview of the design thinking that went into Disrupting Exploitation, and some of the lessons and challenges we’ve been focused on. If you would like to learn more about The Disrupting Exploitation programme or our wider systems change work, get in touch with Nerys Anthony or Becky Fedia.
