Systems change from the frontline: sharing the learning
In 2021 at The Children’s Society we continued to deliver our National Lottery Community Funded, Disrupting Exploitation programme, taking the work from strength to strength. Not only do we support criminally exploited young people directly, we also working to change the systems around those young people and their families that perpetuate harm, are unhelpful and create barriers to positivity. We’ve blogged about this brilliant programme before.
But we all did things a bit differently in 2021.
As the Disrupting Exploitation (DEx) Programme continued, we realised the way we evaluated and tried to measure the impact and success of the programme needed to change. When we first started out, we commissioned an evaluation partner to evaluate the programme. By 2021, having run the programme since 2018, we wanted to try a different approach to make sense of what we were learning through delivery, and how the DEx programme was influencing our thinking and practice more widely at The Children’s Society.
We commissioned the Dartington Service Design Lab as our learning partner to gather the learning and make sense of our experiences and work. Our key learning is fascinating and we are really pleased to share it. This blog uses content from the learning report to summarise the five distinct learning journeys that we travel:
1. Devolving control in systems change initiatives
Devolved control and distributed leadership are central themes when working in the dynamic and complex contexts of system change initiatives. Senior leaders remain accountable for quality and hold ultimate responsibility for risk while practitioners are permitted to innovate, explore, test and shift the traditional boundaries of their roles to identify what works to meet system change goals.
Key Learning Point: Different practitioners will need a different balance of freedom and scaffolding for learning and developing as a system change practitioner, depending on their confidence and skillset.
2. The importance of collaboration
Collaboration is essential for any system change initiative because of the nature of the system: a network of factors and entities whose interactions and relationships create behaviours, patterns, and outcomes. Changing the interactions and relationships for positive ends requires working with others in the system.
Essentially — this is complex, we can’t make change alone.
Key Learning Point: Creating the conditions for positive and trusting relationships is essential for effective system change.
3. The challenge of defining priorities in systems change
A system change programme is no different to any other in that it needs strategic priorities to align staff, support resourcing decisions, and guide monitoring and evaluation. However, in a system change programme, defining priorities before understanding the patterns, feedback loops and relationships which drive the system is extremely challenging.
Key Learning Point: The process of starting wide (seeing the system) and then reducing the number of strategic priorities is valuable in itself, for understanding the system structures and opportunities to leverage change.
4. How to engage in meaningful measurement
Monitoring progress within a systems change programme, and considering measurement of its impact, is challenging for several reasons. Change in a complex system will not be attributable to one effort or one organisation within the system. It may not be linear, and often takes a long time. A programme needs to identify reliable enough indicators of change, which can be plausibly linked to programme efforts, while accepting that they may look small next to the overall change the programme is hoping to create, and that they cannot capture all the effects of their activities at a given time.
Key Learning Points:
· Take time to see the system
· Quantitative metrics on their own are not enough to measure the impact of a system change initiative within a complex environment.
5. Increasing ability to work within a context of uncertainty
Working in complex systems inevitably involves uncertainty. This is not just the case at the beginning of the programme, as The Children’s Society began to learn and navigate the system, but throughout: unanticipated consequences and the changing nature of the system means that there will always be some uncertainty around the best course of action for change and the likely outcome of any given action. With a programme predicated on linear change, Key Performance Indicators can create a sense of certainty and a binary of sense of having achieved or not. With system change, progress is slower, and the goal posts necessarily change as you learn more about what is possible and what is desirable.
Key Learning Points:
· Working within uncertainty is necessary in a system change programme, primarily as change is not linear nor easily predicted.
· Measurement needs to be nuanced and creative to evidence change within this uncertainty.
· Clarity within uncertainty can be created through prioritisation over time, and scaffolding and support for staff to engage in this different way of working.
As we enter into a new phase of delivering the DEx programme, this learning is invaluable. Not only for the DEx programme, but for The Children’s Society’s wider systemic work and initiatives across the country. We are keen to carry on the conversation about this work. If you want to have a chat, get in touch.
Thank you to The Childrens Society Disrupting Exploitation team — colleagues past and present. Without you all we would have learnt nothing. And to The National Lottery Community Fund for the continued financial support.
Acknowledgment and thanks to the Dartington Service Design Lab. Authors of the Disrupting Exploitation Programme Learning Report and creators of a lot of the text contained within this blog.
