Our adaptive strategy — why we are shifting our goals
The School of System Change strategy and plan for 2025 — highlighting strategy as an adaptive process of responding to the emerging work and needs in the world
We set our new strategy at the School a couple of years ago, with the launch of our website, new brand and shifting our relationship with our hosting organisation. At the time we did not set a time horizon of, say, three to five years as many others do; as a commitment to leading in complexity we need to adapt to the context as the future emerges, not knowing when we might need to shift in a changing world.
Internally we have put in place different learning rhythms through the year, working with six week team cycles of planning and acting, and quarterly priority cycles, reviewing and reflecting as we go — strategy as process.
Through this iterative process we noticed how our work is evolving, as we adapt and test and experiment with different offers, projects and programmes, how we are positioned to others across the field and what the world needs. So as we started to think about our 2025 plans and how they are best organised we decided to evolve our long-term goals that help us organise our work and more importantly set the intentions for the direction we are and want to go in.
People, organisations and networks:
As a school our main way of contributing to the world is through our learning programmes and learning and practice partnerships: supporting people, organisations and networks design and deliver systems change programmes. What we have noticed over the years is that if we are to cultivate sustained cultures and structures of collective learning in context, then we need both the systemic capacity AND the facilitative capacity to do so. This is the basis of our irrigation strategy: that we need more partners who are taking systems change capacity into their networks and ecosystems to enact deep, lasting change. With the writing and publication (for our network) of our Systems Change Learning Handbook (for designing and delivering systems change learning) in 2024 we are now looking to deliver in 2025 more programmes, apprenticeships and approaches that help those facilitate processes and learning journeys — across sectors, place-based work and networks.
Knowledge resources:
Our initial intention and strategy eight years ago was always for the School to exist as a contribution to wider field(s) of practice, from field-building, working with contributors in our programmes, ensuring a multi-method approach to systems change to adapt and be relevant to context and need. What we have noticed over the years is that what is available and lifted up in the field often follows the western dominance of valuing theory and certain ways of knowing. We feel our contribution is to loosen these knowledge systems, valuing practices, multiple perspectives and ways of knowing in the resources we curate and partners and contributors we work with. This looks like curating stories and learning and facilitation resources that lift up practice: accounts that don’t just tell the “glory stories” of change, but messiness and realities of what happens, as well as laying the groundwork to cultivate capacity with partners across the globe, where the work is contextually driven and owned.
Enabling Environment:
As we celebrate more and more people bringing systemic practice to change, more agencies providing support, more learning offers, it raises the question of where we are best positioned as a non-profit organisation. We have always sought to be a systems change endeavour ourselves, seeking to nurture a systemic, living paradigm, where learning is change. What we notice now is that the dominance and barriers within our current change ecosystems and in education are still hindering ourselves and others in bringing this way of being, thinking and doing to the world.
Therefore we want to be more forthright in the work we do on contributing to an enabling environment for systems change practice — making the case for the deep systemic learning required and exploring how we contribute to the unlocking of investment and the paradigm required for this to occur. In 2025 we will publish our approach to systems change learning, undertake a systemic action co-inquiry into funding for transformational learning and share our own evaluation and stories of evidence of taking this approach.
Alongside these three goals and intentions we are also continuing to develop ourselves as a living, learning, healthy and regenerative organisation and network, which requires working with others and finding the resources to do so. So if you are interested in partnering on any of these areas, funding work to enable us to work towards these goals or participating in our learning then do get in touch!
Here are some examples in the past that our partnerships have enabled:
- Sector specific courses in finance with Aviva Investors and health through J&J Foundation
- Our introductory film series and articles, Stepping into Systems, drawing from 10 contributors across the globe, supported by The Omidyar Group
- Our Systems Change Learning Handbook, sense-making and co-inquiry with the school and is learning facilitators network, funded by Cisco Foundation
- The exploration of what we needed for systems change field building with others providers, funders and partners in the field.
