Systems Changers, looking back thinking forward
When I joined The Children’s Society I was quickly swept onto the systems change journey. The simple concept of creating more positive impact for young people in need, by improving and changing the systems that repeatedly fail them made sense to me.
Systems change was a journey The Children’s Society had chosen to embark on. Our organisation’s strategy had made an intentional move to design services and programmes that would purposely shift the focus from the child to the systems around them. We wanted to grow our systemic thinking and needed a way to test and learn more about this way of working and new (to the organisation) approaches. The Children’s Society knew that it alone could not make the fundamental changes needed to ensure positive impact for disadvantaged children. Working systemically and ensuring greater collaboration would be essential — Peter Grigg’s blog explains this well.
When I ventured into the School of System Change I likened my own developing understanding of systems change to an old fashioned coffee percolator. The slow drip, drip of content, theory, practice and talk of change, reflection, experiment and futures slowly altered my way of seeing the world. Initially I was overwhelmed by it all — sitting with emergence, not having the answers, shifting the way I was approaching problems. I found it emotional and hard, but eventually clarity begun to prevail. I see similarities here with the way in which the learning from the Systems Changers Programme has become part of The Children’s Society’s DNA.
In 2018 The Children’s Society, in partnership with The Point People and funded by Lankelly Chase began to adapt and develop the Systems Changers Programme for application in the youth sector, with those working directly to provide support services. I’m not going into the detail of what and how we did it over the 9 month Programme, that’s contained in our learning report, written by Caitlin, which is purposely lengthy to share all we’ve learnt about creating and delivering the programme. A short learning synopsis is also available.
We didn’t directly lift the Systems Changers Programme on completion in 2019 and implement it within our practice base at The Children’s Society. Instead we worked to adopt the principles and approaches to our work.
This blog contains my reflections, as a participant on the journey, of some of the impact of the Systems Changers Programme on our organisation. This is not impact we have quantified, these are reflections I’ve noticed — the patterns that have emerged since the programme began. I note my own bias, increasingly I’m leaning towards systemic ways of thinking and being — attracted by the possibility to make change. I’ve been encouraged by my colleagues to pause and celebrate this significant personal shift in my own thinking and being. As a person renowned as a doer, a fixer, working at pace to deliver actions, I found it really hard to slow the pace, reflect and think even bigger and systemically.
What stuck?
Changing narratives
Systems Changers encouraged us to change narratives — internally and externally. It gave explicit permission to speak out, to challenge and legitimately work to disrupt the parts of the system that we could see not working in the best interests of children and young people.
One of the best examples of this is within our Disrupting Exploitation programme, funded by The National Lottery Community Fund. It has given us the space to test our systemic practice. This programme was our first conscious effort to develop a systematically informed programme. We were excited and motivated at the time to design this — because to our minds, this was the first real manifestation of our strategy at any kind of scale. Designing to be consciously systemic. The Disrupting Exploitation programme has yielded lots of learning at multiple levels, and in delivering this programme, it has helped shift organisational mind-set towards systems change. Our recent blog illustrates this in more detail.
In services and programmes designed with the space to implement systematic ways of working and thinking, the principles, tools and approaches from the Systems Changers Programme have thrived at The Children’s Society. We are now having new conversations about the same ‘old’ problems, the big shifts that need to happen — but bringing different perspectives together to seek solutions. Developing strategies that lead to change, rather than lists of outputs. Examples of some of these shifts to address systemic change include:
- A new Theory of Change for the Disrupting Exploitation programme, developed in collaboration with the Dartington Service Design Lab.
- In our second year of the Prevention Programme significantly reducing the number of key performance indicators being measured, with a recognition of the value of wide reaching preventative and system focussed ‘tasks’ to contribute to the prevention of child exploitation.
- Ceasing to measure the number of systems change ‘tasks’ in our national programmes.
Emerging principles
Five core principles emerged during the Systems Changers Programme that applied to our work two years ago, and have as much, if not more resonance now in the context of our new organisational goal and vision.
As I write, The Children’s Society is in the midst of strategy development and these principles form a vital context. Given the increased complexity within which we live and work, we strive to identify ways of navigating this. We place greater emphasis on discovery — sitting with questions rather than speeding to find the answers. The value of collective insight is becoming increasingly apparent across clusters of services, whilst knowing that collective insight alone won’t ever make change. We are currently working with the Dartington Service Design Lab to reflect on the parts of the system our three national tackling child exploitation programmes work within, drawing together insight, learning and patterns that are emerging across all three. We want to understand where we can have greatest impact and what collectively can be achieved.
Our Covid learning approach is a recent application of some of these principles — where we created tests within the organisation — feedback loops to explore our responses, in order to inform future practice.
Building on this, three core elements of the Systems Changers Programme have stuck within The Children’s Society. We don’t always, explicitly refer to them in the way they are described below but they have percolated our thinking and approaches. These elements remain core to our ambition, but our experience since Systems Changers is that the emphasis on each has altered.
Seeing the system is as relevant as ever, but for us, there is less emphasis on theory and systems mapping. Instead we are seeing systems through patterns — noticing patterns, recording patterns and collectively raising awareness of patterns as they emerge (in and out of the organisation). My reflection is that the third, ‘making change happen’ is the hardest and least developed. Scaling up change is very difficult — we know we can’t lift and shift our work, given the complexity of the systems we work within.
I love ‘finding the flex’ to make change happen or, in more simple terms, pushing on a slightly open door to see where it gets you. This comes up time and time again. Through our collaboration with partners and allies, we work together to locate opportunities to make change. Where systems that have appeared fixed or stuck, working with others, we find room for improvement.
Name it
I remember hearing comments, when we’ve tried to spread the systems change word, that we’ve ‘been doing it for years’, improving things, making lives better, supporting young people to be who they want to be. This is true, as an organisation that has been doing this for over 130 years but we are now framing this work differently — naming it. In recognition of this, we’ve got a current commitment to capture and share more stories of systems change in The Children’s Society.
In the report we reference different systemically-informed projects that were started as part of the programme. Some of these have mushroomed into significant services, or developments within wider work of The Children’s Society. Reducing school exclusions, positioning young people as victims in the criminal justice system (at the point of arrest and charge), transforming local information and intelligence sharing practices within police and social care to ensure they are child centered. These are real things that have happened, and I can say, without Systems Changers we would not have achieved so much.
In the spirit of simply ‘naming it’, one practitioner came up with the idea for this video when explaining systems change to one of the young people she supported. They talked about the arcade game ‘whack-a-mole’, that her work was usually about whacking different moles (problems) when they popped up — but working to change the system was different — working together to tackle the bigger issues — moving away from the usual ‘whack-a-mole’ approach.
Enabling, always evolving
Eleven enabling factors were identified during the Programme that allow systems change to motor. I can’t say that these are present all the time, in everything we do at The Children’s Society but it is a work in progress. We continue to work together to make sense of complex problems. Providing direct interventions to support young people, alongside agitating for wider contextual change. We’ve given ourselves the permission to work differently, and are also working to make change from within. We are learning to be more open, modelling different ways of working and trying out new approaches.
The leaders of the pack
At the end of the Systems Changers Programme we celebrated in Birmingham. We were wowed and moved, inspired by our colleagues that had put so much of themselves into this programme. But we didn’t then formalise this group’s role within The Children’s Society — as educators, as leaders, as the voice of systems change. I wonder, did we miss an opportunity to support this group to keep developing together — facilitating a space for more collective insight? They all went back to their roles and pioneered change in their own ways. If we’d brought the cohort together to keep the peer group alive would more magic have happened? Or was it better to let the ways of working to permeate like the coffee dripping through the percolator?
One of our Systems Changers, Lucy Belcher has reflected on this point:
“We might not have had the opportunity to come together and capture the collective insight, but that would have only been a collection of insight at any one given moment in time. Sometimes we have to be okay with the ‘not knowing’. Not knowing the exact influences that colleagues are making, but believe in the magic that there are 10 more people out there making changes to the world in a way they might not have done before the programme”.
Craig Grady, another participation on the programme builds on this:
“When we introduce change into a group of people or a context and we don’t actually know what would happen — at least not with total certainty — we can only trust in the process. So in hindsight; the damage was already done the second we were given permission or enabled to think differently, and now we have to place our trust in the process. Regardless of where I went after the programme, we were in the system now and starting to nudge it; and that felt profound enough a change”.
Is parity possible?
At programme end, Lucy Dacey & I were conscious we had a small group of systems changing pioneers bursting with inspiration to change the world, working directly alongside others who had not been privileged to join the programme. We worked with Janet Grauberg to adapt Systems Changers content and run a six month Action Learning Set (ALS) — with a focus on applying the ideas to live practice challenges. This adaptation of the programme, into a less intense, but equally as supportive peer development and learning group proved a success. It reinforced the learning for the Systems Changers graduates and enabled colleagues that were working alongside them to gain their own understanding and confidence in the content. We found this essential, for example when managing the Disrupting Exploitation programme to prevent having a two tier workforce of those ‘in the know’ about systems change, versus those who were not. As time goes on and there is turnover in staffing this is a continual tension to manage. Some staff have developed over time a great maturity in their systems thinking, working with those new to the field.
We’ve built this further by channeling the resource of The Children’s Society’s Systems Change and Service Design capacity, to support the testing and modelling of systemic approaches. Work has been undertaken to coach teams and systems, rather than individuals — bringing in specialist support and holding a dedicated space to reflect. This has included:
- Design and systems coaching for the Disrupting Exploitation programme area leads. Alongside whole team ‘systems coaching’ which has enabled them to progress systems change priorities.
- Supporting the development of further ALS with our Prevention Programme team.
- For the Tackling Child Exploitation partnership, at a pivotal point in their 3 year funding — the team are about to embark on a rapid programme of systems change workshops to collect learning, map and frame systems change actions and collectively as a team, design what levers the programme should focus on in year three.
- Gathering stories, learning and behaviours from staff across systems change programmes drawing out the capabilities and capacities needed for systems change.
These teams are working within complex systems, working to clear routes through the complexity, where there are no clear single solutions — this is difficult. Work to support and coach these teams is intentional — so staff are able to hold these spaces.
Collaborative endeavour
A collision of different events has meant that we have delayed publishing our learning report on the Systems Changers Programme. But we’ve worked to maintain collaboration for systems change. We are delighted to be now working with Lankelly Chase in Nottinghamshire to work at the sector level to develop systemic learning, embed Systems Changers inspired tools and to test ideas at an area level. This Autumn we launch a new systems changers community of practice — to be developed and tested in Nottinghamshire — with learning identified and disseminated with the wider sector throughout the journey. As my colleague Gemma Drake commented, ‘tools and systems maps don’t change systems, collaboration does’.
Sharing the simple stuff along the way
We’ve learnt that a long report at the end of a programme like Systems Changers is not the best way to convey complex and multi-layered learning. More frequent and simple blogs, and varied communications better illustrate the journey and the impact on the organisation.
Since the Spring, we have been actively and purposely sharing all sorts of learning from The Children’s Society and will continue to do so.
Our 2030 goal of reversing the damaging decline in children’s wellbeing cannot be realised without collaboration and systemic change. The Systems Changers Programme has created the roots from which we grow our work.
Thanks to Lucy Dacey, Adam Groves and Gemma Drake for comments on the draft.
