Developing the behaviours

I’ve spent the last 12 years working as a design strategist focused on putting humanity at the heart of business, health and social equity issues. I was previously Innovation Director at Shift and I’m now a freelancer operating under the name Hello Brave in order to focus my attention and intentions on supporting a more equitable civil society response to mental health and support for families in the early years.

So I was lucky enough to work as the lead designer on this programme alongside Seth and Nicola from NPC, Raphaelle and Nick from Shift, Eliza and Mike from IVAR, freelancers Anna Wanhurst and Emily Bazalgette as well as an incredible team of advisors and funders. Together we have worked with over 200 civil society orgs, thought leaders and funders to shepherd this important work.

Through this work we were asking how we might define a set of principles that describe and define effective organisational development for nonprofits. The hypothesis was that a set of principles could provide an initial modest contribution to unifying the growing but fragmented practice of organisational development in the UK’s civil society, improving clarity, and building strong and shared practice over time. During this work, we conducted desk research led by IVAR, had 10 workshops and 43 conversations with nonprofits, funders and organisational development consultants led by NPC and engaged with a growing community of over 160 people interested in the future of organisational development.

Through this process we discovered that as many of you can attest to, organisational development is a chaotic concept, something that like other chaotic concepts like love, defy clean definition, structure and are in absolutely no way singular. We also, however, identified that while like love there are many flavours of organisational development, this moment in time provided an ethical imperative to draw out the foundational pillars that could make any approach to organisational development more human, supportive, people-centred, equitable and humane.

Across civil society, most of the physical and emotional labour we do to keep going, keep evolving, to respond, adapt, transition and even just to stand still comes out of the personal energy, time and wellbeing of humans. The process of change is as inevitable as it is exhausting. It exposes our insecurities, our hopes, our needs, desires, it exposes imbalances in power and resources, and places a microscope onto the best and the worst of how we show up with ourselves and one and other every day. For that reason, as this work started to mature we began to focus less on processes, and approaches, methods and tools (all of which are manifold and impossible to meaningfully condense). Instead we focused on muscles, behaviours, the way to show up, treat ourselves and treat each other when we are going through periods of subtle or significant change.

These behaviours that have emerged, the Patterns for Change, condense the thoughts of hundreds of people to describe the patterns of behaviour we can practice on a personal, group, organisational and hopefully sector wide level to make us all better able to participate in our inevitable transitions.

There are seven.

The first is know your why

This is a call to start and act from a clear individual, group or organisational why. This holds true whether you’re refreshing or strengthening your board or you’re exploring issues of racial equity across your organisations. Make sure the why that is held is resonant, important and visible to everyone. It will offer clarity, direction and energy for the journey to come. .

Set directions together

This asks us who is setting the agenda. And how can we set agendas in more equitable ways. Avoiding — where possible, engaging in top down processes and involving people from within and outside of your organisation. Taking care to share voice and power with the humans who are involved and impacted by the change?

Listen and share bravely

This is a call to do the hard work of listening and sharing our 100% with ourselves and others. This is deep and personal work. It requires cultivating a relationship with feedback, learning or relearning our ability to sense, and hear and share more of what we actually think. For organisations this is a demand for psychologically safe spaces in which to do this important change work

Build on what’s strong

This asks us to honour and appreciate what is working. We work in a sector and also a wider society that can often be deficit based — focusing in on what is not working, and thinking of people and organisations as something to be fixed. How can we cultivate appreciation, looking at our individual and collective strengths and taking time to honour the past and see assets in the present

Know by trying

This is a call to build knowledge and certainty by doing. There is a Rilke quote I love. “Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer” This calls on us to change by exploration, experimentation and creating safe and brave spaces in which we can fail.

Understand your limits

This is a vital and urgent call to center care as a prerequisite to change. Being thoughtful enough to limit the negative externalities of the processes we design, lead and participate in. We need to be clear and deliberate about who is benefiting from and who is paying the price for our change.

And finally connect generously

An important invitation to connect and contribute. To see ourselves as more connected than divided, to be open in our approaches, explore how we are strengthening the commons, asking for support and committing to leadership that is generous so that we can each tap into and contribute to the reality of abundance

The behaviours draw on concepts from permaculture, regenerative design, radical care, design justice and more. Weaving together concepts that aim towards a healthy collective future where the way we show up begets the environments we create, begets the change we can make and on and on.

We hope that they help each of us to reflect on how we are showing up during times of change and how we (nonprofits, consultants, coaches and funders alike) are each strengthening or sometimes weakening one and others abilities to commit to these behaviours over time. I personally have found these behaviours have helped me reckon with myself and how I show up as a consultant, showing me the ways I have encouraged and also often discouraged the practice of these behaviours, and how some of my practice has helped to hold inequitable, unfair and unhealthy change behaviours in place.

We look forward to the coming months and years when others, hopefully including many of you here, continue to evolve and adapt these behaviours, pulling them and all of us towards important emerging themes, concepts and ideas that they don’t yet capture or contain.

We hope however that this initial offering acts as a useful bridge to a future civil society that is flexible and strong, and helps us all to build a sector capable of creating radical, sustainable, collective change one behaviour at a time.

Previously Innovation Director of Shift, Tayo Medupin (she/her) operates under the name Hello Brave as a reminder of the important work of brave design, leadership and action needed to transform civil society for bold, abundant futures. Focused on the early years, mental health and those least served by dominant systems, Tayo brings over a decade of experience putting humanity at the heart of business, health and social equity issues.