Slowing down to speed up — Listening and really hearing!
Part two:
Part one of our blog series covered why we decided to carry out an organisation wide systems change listening exercise. Read all about it here.
We have now connected with over 45 colleagues from different departments across the organisation. We intentionally focussed our energies (in the most part) speaking to colleagues who weren’t our systems change ‘usual suspects’. Our brilliant national programmes are commissioned to carry out systems change work and our policy and campaigns team challenge systems daily but outside these we wanted to uncover the wider understanding of systems change and how connected colleagues feel to this work.
Our interviewees included social impact directors, retail colleagues, human resources, campaigns managers, research managers, policy officers, frontline practitioners, service managers and more. A real mix of colleagues working in different roles but all with a shared passion to improve the lives of young people.
We had 7 standard questions that we shared ahead of our interview so colleagues had time to think about their responses beforehand if they wished. During the interviews we roughly followed the question format but in all honesty we just let the conversation flow. Our intention for each interview was to create a safe space and be fully present to encourage openness, honesty and deep conversation. Every interview was a total joy! Some started with colleagues feeling unsure about systems change but by the end each one gained a new perspective. It felt really powerful to be building relationships with colleagues in this way, by having these conversations we were already making systems change more accessible.
Once the interviews were completed Donya Lamrhari and I spent a day together to synthesise our findings. Initially this felt like a daunting task but we kept focussed on why we’d carried out the listening exercise in the first place.
Explained in part one:
‘’The Children’s Society is committed to building a society that works for all children, In order to achieve this we need to lean harder into systemic approaches. To do so we must consider the conditions we need to create as an organisation to maximise the impact we have on improving the lives of young people’’
This period of reflection was always about challenging ourselves, being curious and listening with an open mind. It’s important to remember that we weren’t starting this work from scratch. The Children’s Society have been on a systems change journey for several years. In 2017 our organisational strategy made an intentional move to design services and programmes that would purposely shift the focus away from the child to the systems around them. The system changers programme in partnership with Point People funded by Lankelly Chase catalysed our journey. As the programme progressed we developed our own ‘Enabling Conditions’ that need to be in place in large organisations, workplaces and other collectives to enable people to engage in systems change.
Keeping these enabling conditions in mind and always going back to our original intention we quickly realised clear themes were emerging — five to be precise! These are the five areas of focus colleagues felt would enable staff to fully embrace systemic approaches and maximise the impact we can make for young people.
1, What is systems change?
Unequivocally every colleague we spoke to was applying elements of systems thinking to their work but the vast majority didn’t recognise it as such. There were many reasons for this but inaccessible / confusing language played a critical role. One colleague started her interview by saying ‘’I don’t know much about computer systems’’ as that’s what immediately came to mind when we’d asked her to talk about systems change. By the end of the call we were celebrating the ways of working she instilled in her teams — embracing and learning from failure, collaborating externally, giving autonomy at all levels to try new things, developing trust and psychological safety being her number one priority — her whole approach enabled staff to work systemically but due to confusion over language it was not being recognised.
Throughout all interviews colleagues talked about language needing to be more inclusive and accessible. They also asked for clarity about our organisational narrative on systems change, being clear on what systems change means for The Children’s Society so this can be fully embraced by all staff and also shared with external partners.
2, Self-Awareness
Many colleagues talked about the importance of recognising we all exist within systems. Our own beliefs & behaviours will be impacting that system and vice versa, the systems around us will be impacting us. In order to change systems we need to have high levels of self-awareness so we understand our own internal dialogue (our system!) and recognise when this might be playing out in our roles. This is where anti-racist practice was discussed and how critical it is to understand our own biases. In order to do so we need to ensure space for reflection and psychological safety is built within teams so you can have these conversations in a safe space.
The second part of this theme was about building emotional resilience, recognising that changing systems can be hard work! Everyone talked about relationships and how skills to enable relationship building such as active listening and asking questions cannot be underestimated.
3, The Children’s Society as a system
There were great levels of honesty throughout all our conversations and a real willingness to explore what could be deemed challenging or difficult topics. Reflecting on how our organisation operates as a system and the impact we have on the systems around us was discussed with great integrity. Conversations included considerations about power dynamics and how these could shift to create more autonomy, how we can create space for reflection in demanding outcome driven services, the importance of understanding and being really clear about who we are as an organisation — standing up for what we believe in and building on what we are good at and how we can influence the commissioning field without being reactive. Also improving how we work collaboratively across different functions, finding ways to operate as one coordinated system enhancing each other’s capacity and impact. Such rich conversations with lots of ideas to explore.
4, Measuring Systems Change
Measuring and demonstrating the impact of our systems change work has been a thread throughout our systems change journey. You can read more about our learning and approaches here.
Throughout this theme colleagues talked about 2 elements:
1, The need to develop approaches and be clear about the expectations of measuring systems change outside our national programmes (who are commissioned to do systems change work). As mentioned above the listening exercise discovered lots of systems change work taking place but some of it isn’t being recorded.
2, The importance of continuing to learn and build on our approach to measuring systems change, ensuring we are clearly demonstrating the impact of systems change work. The power of storytelling was discussed a lot and how we should weave this into our work as much as possible — sharing stories of both what works well but also what doesn’t!
5, External Partnerships
Relationships and collaboration were discussed in every single interview as being the absolute key to systems change work.
As one colleague so clearly described:
“We can’t change the system alone. We must have an external profile and be viewed as an ally.”
Conversations covered the importance of widening the scope of who we work with & influence, including building sustainable relationships with grass root organisations and embedding human centred design approaches.
It has been an absolute privilege to take part in these conversations, we were overwhelmed by the thoughtfulness and passion of our colleagues. We feel a huge sense of responsibility and excitement to build on these discussions and take our systems change work to the next level. The themes have become the basis of our work as systems change leads where, in collaboration with our brilliant colleagues, we are turning these incredible insights into practical actions. We will continue to share our journey openly throughout this blog series. Look out for our next one on how we are using existing frameworks to build our organisational definition, narrative and systems change storytelling power.
