Making change stick — Sharing principles of collaborative changemaking
Designing for social change needs a model that is actually fit for purpose
Amazing examples of community-led innovation to deliver change are surfacing around the world all the time. Yet these pockets of real, potentially transformative ideas remain stuck, unable to break through and take hold. The pace of change at the scale we need remains desperately inefficient and slow. The sobering reality is that — despite best intentions and efforts — the model of how we seek to design, build, invest in and support new ideas for change is simply not fit for purpose.
As we close our doors at Shift, we’ve been reflecting on our own collective efforts to design for social change. Our synopsis on why meaningful change remains so difficult is simple — the current way the “design for good” sector works with those closest to social issues to bring new ideas to life is broken.
Instead of supporting and collaborating on ideas from those close to the issue, new ideas from the community are largely ignored, diluted, or killed in favour of ideas shaped by the sector itself. Without true community input and shared ownership, sector ideas are rarely fit for purpose and quite quickly struggle to deliver the impact intended. Disappointed by the results, funders quickly move on to other ideas with ‘impact potential’, or spend too long contemplating on ‘what next?’. And the community, as well as those in the sector, face the real consequences of another ‘innovation’ cycle of ideas that promised so much on paper — yet delivered so little in real life.
Where we’d got to by closing time
At Shift, we’ve seen multiple cycles of wasted ‘innovation’ in the sector where a new ideas get discarded by the sector within a matter of months, normally before any meaningful change or learning can be achieved. Shift has even been guilty in the past of putting ourselves at the centre of some of these cycles, and when funders or decision-makers in the sector put ideas aside, we often moved with them. But we got pretty tired of chasing the funding or trying to rationalise funding decisions to ourselves or those we’d worked with. Many of the individuals and communities we aimed to support in the past have felt abandoned, hurt, or just angry about the wasted resources and energy they had put into the work. We learned the hard way about how problematic the current model of ‘social innovation’ can be. We’re closing in part because we don’t believe the sector that we’ve been a part of can continue down this path.
What we do still believe in
Just because Shift is closing doesn’t mean we’ve given up on creating change or those we’ve worked with to make the world a better place. Last year, we articulated our latest thinking around a new approach to creating social change, inspired by others and our own experiences. We saw many new ideas and imaginative futures with great potential struggling to take hold in the here and now. In response, we felt we could support those with these new ideas to demonstrate that their idea actually worked for those it was intended to. And by demonstrating this — the world (including funders) would have no choice but to start accepting and adopting a better alternative.
We never really got to test out our new strategic approach before closing. Yet at the heart of our approach were two key things that Shift had done time and time again — 1) work in partnership to surface and nurture diverse groups with ideas for change, and 2) work with these groups to test, experiment and learn about whether the idea could work in real life. We still believe that when these two things are done together — and if there is enough time and space for them to evolve in the world — we can start bridging the gap between new and transformative ideas and what’s needed to make them a reality.
The purpose of this blog
We’ve learned so much over the years about where and how change can happen when the community and sector work together. This blog shares what we’ve learned has worked as well as the current patterns we’ve seen play out in the sector that can make community-led change so difficult. In many ways, this blog is a reminder to our future selves about what principles we must keep holding onto and what patterns to avoid slipping back into. We also hope it can help anyone working to create social change — regardless of who you are — to explore ways of working that foster true relationships and partnership working. In turn, we hope to see a sector that is actually fit for purpose — and the community-led ideas with real potential for change start to stick.
We’ve broken this long read down into three parts from idea to delivery:
- Developing new ideas
- Testing and experimenting with ideas
- Getting ideas ready and into the ‘real world’
We’ve written this blog to be read in sequence, but given it’s length, please feel free to scroll through to any of the parts below that feel most relevant to your experience or practice.
A note on language. We use jargon in this blog. It’s not our intention to use language that excludes anyone. Here’s what we mean when we say:
Sector — We mean any organisation or person getting paid to design for and attempt to create social change. In our case — social or community impact — typically working with those under-served or excluded from existing products, services, or social norms in order to be able to live a good life. We also include stakeholders who fund these ideas as well as those who hold signifciant decision making power regarding what get’s designed and implemented.
Idea/concept — We mean an idea about something new or alternative that could exist in the future, or currently exists now but needs to be adapted or re-imagined to work. In this case we focus on ideas that could enable a better life for groups of people who currently feel the greatest negative impacts of the society we currently live in.
Prototype — We mean a simple and functional ‘thing’ (e.g. website, model, event) that helps you test your idea in close to real-world environments. It should easily break, so you can quickly build new and more effective versions to support continued testing until you see the results you are looking for.
Pilot — We mean something you test in the real world settings via a ‘fixed’ product, service, or resource. The aim of this is to demonstrate something that works in a real world environment end-to-end without the need to make significant changes or adaptations to influence it’s final result.
1. Developing new ideas
Patterns we see across the sector
There are two common patterns we regularly see playing out in the sector when it comes to developing new ideas with or without the community they aim to serve:
Pattern 1. New ideas get developed by organisations focused on meeting their own needs via funder-led requirements. Many of us have seen this time and time again — funders present a new funding call based on what they think a community needs. A ‘for good’ organisation explores the call within their team and develops an idea to respond to it, typically on paper, under tight deadlines, adjusting it as they go to optimise their response against any funding criteria. Demonstrating the idea is cost-effective or could be delivered at scale is typically prioritised over whether the organisation has any real evidence to demonstrate the idea will achieve the intended impact for those it’s intended to. Funder’s rarely like it when you say — “we don’t actually know how to best respond to this issue” — so you add in your own experiences, any existing evidence, or anecdotal stories to make the strongest case possible. Funder’s buy it. The idea gets delivered — exactly as it was outlined in the funding bid — rarely with any room to adapt the idea or its implementation based on feedback from those the idea aims to serve.
We’re reminded of the times we’ve put last minute funding applications together ourselves, with little (if any) input from others, where the need for self-preservation or efficiency trumped collaboration with those closer to the social issue. We’ve often realised (too late) how much better our ideas or delivery could have been had we involved and invested in those closer to the issue and collaborate on shared funding applications.
Pattern 2. Those in power, rather than those who might benefit from the idea, decide which ideas to take forward. Even when individuals looking to deliver a new idea have involved those with experience of an issue, it can be difficult to get these ideas taken forward. Funders or wider decision-makers often have their own views on what the ‘evidence’ tells them — defaulting to previous examples of delivery or perceived experts of an issue rather than those in front of them — dismissing any ideas that don’t satisfy their own self-defined criteria.
We’re reminded of when we ran an idea showcase with local tenants of a social housing provider. The co-design team presented two concepts which were loved by the tenants, but dismissed by the funder who had commissioned this work. Instead they were more impressed by the concepts that some of the co-design team had come up with but tenants hadn’t liked. Eventually, the funder decided they wouldn’t take any of the ideas further and the work was put on hold.
What we’ve seen work
We’ve seen the sector at its best when it can find ways to push against demands for scale and efficiency and start by focusing on creating an idea that might really work. We’ve seen this at its most effective when these ideas are developed through alliances of people closest to the issue in multiple and varied ways.
We hold three principles when it comes to supporting this stage of change:
- Ideas to solve social issues are defined and shaped by alliances — groups of individuals closest to but with different experiences of that issue. We find the more space and time there is for individuals to come together, engage in dialogue, debate, and come to a consensus about what could be taken forward yields the ideas with the greatest potential for real change. These ‘alliances’ aren’t just those who’ve directly experienced this issue, it can also be those who’ve spent years delivering services, entrepreneurs close to the community seeking to help, or individuals who bring a different perspective or stance on the issue itself. We think all individuals should self-determine which experiences they are bringing to the work — and collectively make sense and build consensus about how these experiences translate into coherent ideas for change.
- Ideas are given space to breathe and are interacted with —both early and widely. Once alliances have been formed, an idea needs exposure to those it’s there to serve in its most simple and accessible form. Ideas can be quickly and cheaply interrogated, challenged and built on by those who you’re trying to serve through community events like town halls, public access websites, concept videos or anything else that can explain the idea clearly and simply. By getting ‘live’ feedback at early idea stage, you can gain a much deeper understanding of how people experience the issue, develop early champions to build on your alliance, and importantly, create early data or evidence about why the idea has great potential — all of which is needed to build ‘legitimacy’ and keep existing power holders from pushing back.
- Power holders are in service to and not in charge of alliances for change. The intention should never be to exclude those in power with helpful experiences or alternative views on what ideas may or may not work. Shift has often held positions of power with strong opinions on a direction forward. Yet instead of these views becoming authority, we believe these views should be collected as part of the idea development process, rather than an assessment of one at the end. By integrating views of funders and power holders often and early, and weighing them up alongside (but not more favourably) than those the idea aims to serve — alliances can make better and more informed decisions. To support this, we’ve worked more closely with funders in recent years to commit to the process over all and any outcomes — establishing clear funder commitments upfront both publicly and through project contracts. This provides a mechanism for those in power to re-shape their role, ways of working, and decision-making practice in service to rather than in tension with alliances of those closest to the issue.
A recent example from our work: Last year, we worked with the Stroke Association, Mind Cymru, and a co-design group and lived-experienced consultants to develop new ideas to respond to the gap in mental health support for stroke survivors in Wales. We spent time developing these ideas before funding was sought for the continued prototyping and eventual piloting of these ideas. The intention being to have a strong idea collectively imagined by an alliance of stroke survivors, local delivery partners, national charities, funders and design professionals before applying for valuable public money. Spend should only be committed to a strong idea that is backed by the community it’s intended for.
2. Testing and experimenting with ideas
Patterns we see across the sector
Once ideas have taken shape, the next logical step is thinking through how they might work in practice. In our experience, this is often when the sector looks to take over from community members with ideas for change to start delivering change themselves. We see many in the sector consider this their role and responsibility, with two common patterns emerging when ideas get handed over:
Pattern 1. New ideas get retrofitted into existing operating environments. As delivery providers consider how to take an idea off paper and turn it into reality, the impetus is to use existing resources, assets, and processes from the sector which have been designed to serve people with differing needs. In this case, the ease and efficiency of adapting ‘what you know’ is prioritised over what might be needed. As a result, a series of trade-offs get put in place, and the idea can no longer be tested as originally envisioned — with little awareness of what capabilities are needed or how the idea could actually work.
We’re reminded of a funder who once asked us to help bring in a US-based online budgeting solution and implement it to serve low-income women in London. They asked a local delivery provider to do this — who had a completely different service offering, skillset and relationships with the community than the US provider. The local provider had run their own idea development process with women across three local neighbourhoods — and had heard that a peer support network would work more effectively. As a result, the delivery provider tried to embed a combination of both ideas into their service provision using existing resources and processes. Ultimately, the US-budgeting solution was never adopted.
Pattern 2. New ideas get rushed through to scale before testing its impact in real life settings. We’ve seen delivery partners who quickly need to show that the money invested in developing new ideas is ‘worth it’. As a result, half-formed ideas are turned into full-scale pilots. There’s rarely time or money available for early experimentation and it’s assumed that learning at scale will give a better indication of whether the idea works. By doing so, any significant risks, unknowns, or likely ‘points of failure’ between the idea and what’s needed to deliver on that idea are tested in a high stakes environment, with little wiggle room to significantly adapt in real-time. By testing the idea at an increased scale, there is rarely any remaining budget to experiment further if the idea doesn’t deliver what was originally envisioned.
We’re reminded of working on a digital support programme during Covid-19. One of the ideas was to test a “cluster” funding model — supporting a consortia of both national and local delivery partners to work through a shared sector problem. Given the desire to get money out of the door quickly — many of the assumptions about how the “cluster model” would work weren’t tested and a funding pilot was quickly implemented. Despite some promising ideas that surfaced from the initiative, key risks around partnership working and the amount of funding available to test these ideas quickly limited the amount of progress that could be made across almost all of the funded clusters.
What we’ve seen work
We’ve seen the sector work well with those looking to experiment with their idea when key questions about efficiency and scale don’t overtake the most important aim — seeing if the idea actually works for those it’s intended to. We’ve seen promising results for change when people have more time and space to experiment with an idea regularly — in constant dialogue with those closest to the issue, adapting or improving the idea until we’re confident we’re seeing the intended effect and impact.
We hold three principles when it comes to supporting this stage of change:
- Focus on the quickest and cheapest way to deliver the outcome you’re looking for. Rather than creating a fully-fledged product or service — you really just need something that delivers the effect you seek. This should focus on testing only the key components of the idea. In the first instance, a basic prototype — such as a bare bones service, website, product or event — can help focus learning towards this goal. Experimentation should happen again and again until you’ve adapted your idea to generate positive results, ideally multiple times. By doing so, you can build and share your collective understanding about what’s needed to deliver the idea and who might be well placed to do it.
- Bring in the people who helped develop the idea to support its experimentation. We don’t think alliances should end once they’ve come up with an idea. In turn, we see that many of the individual’s closest to the issue have access to the resources, assets, or networks that can be combined and adapted to help solve them. We’ve often ended up hiring those who were involved in the ideas phase to help test it — precisely because of their knowledge, experience of the issue, and trust with those they want to help. The more you can open up your alliance to as many people as possible able to contribute, provide steer and feedback throughout the experimentation phase, the more likely your idea can adapt and evolve into something that actually works.
- Keep close control over your testing environment. When it comes to social change, we believe in testing things in the real world. But one of the biggest challenges we see when trying to embed new ideas is that those experimenting with ideas have little or no control over the environment they test them in. This can be challenging when new learning surfaces which suggests the environment is limiting the idea’s intended effect. It’s important to only experiment with resources and infrastructure that you can either adapt yourself, or run a process to find appropriate alternatives. This doesn’t mean lengthy procurement processes or spending thousands of pounds on ‘new things’ — almost always there is a quicker, cheaper way to do something with the resources already available in a local place or space.
A recent example from our work: A few years back,we partnered with the Centre for Ageing Better, two lived-experience consultants and a group of older workers recently made redundant to develop something new that would help people back into good work after redundancy. After a phase of co-design, we landed on an idea: a 3 day course to help you sell yourself for the job you want after redundancy — led by an experienced coach with a group of peers. Given the co-design approach, the lived experience leadership in place and the levels of testing and iteration done during the idea development, we were confident the idea had legs. Instead of going straight into a pilot or real-world delivery, we spent a few months doing three “pop-up” courses testing the experience, content and immediate outcomes. This allowed us to quickly spot what was working well and what needed to change before finalising the design, ensuring we could evidence ‘how and why change’ was happening.
3. Getting ideas ready and into the ‘real world’
Patterns we see across the sector
Once we have a fully tested idea, we need to demonstrate that it works in a steady state, real world environment. We see many ideas getting to this stage still unclear about exactly what it is they are trying to achieve. Without a laser focus on what new ideas are aiming to demonstrate (and clear boundaries around what they aren’t), power holders can quickly step back in and make decisions based on their own view of what success should look like:
Pattern 1. Scaling the ideas ‘solved for many’ over the ideas ‘designed for one’. Given the scale of need with so many social issues in the UK and across the world, it’s natural when designing something new to try and solve multiple needs and use cases. The challenge with this design approach when seeking social change is you make too many trade-offs and try to solve for too many needs. You end up putting something into the real world that is designed for someone that doesn’t actually exist and no one’s unmet needs get met.
We’re reminded of a coaching programme we co-designed with social entrepreneurs and delivery partners to help social entrepreneurs increase online sales. The early results showed promise in a deeply tailored and relational model with coaches ‘accompanying’ the social entrepreneur through their online sales journey over a number of months, increasing online traffic and sales conversion rates for many participants. Despite these promising results — the funder de-commissioned the programme as it didn’t have the initial ‘participant reach’ that was promised, in favour of developing a more scalable and standardised online training, with no evidence of it working.
Pattern 2. Learning becomes lost, replicated or outsourced — limiting what can and can’t be demonstrated in the real world. When ideas are ready to move into the real-world, we often see a handover from those who developed and tested the idea to those who will implement and deliver the idea. It’s here where grounded insight and learning from the previous stages can get lost as existing pressures on delivery teams impact whether ideas can be delivered in the real world as intended. As a result, we’ve seen many ‘pilots’ no longer achieve their intended effect, and often have to repeat the learning process taken during the experimentation phase to understand why. Alternatively, delivery partners decide to outsource learning to an internal or external team — who are focused on assessing the idea — but aren’t embedded into the team — meaning that delivery stakeholders aren’t even aware if their delivery is having the effect that was intended.
We’re reminded of the 3 day course we described in the section above — the one for older workers to find new work after redundancy. Even though this idea went through meaningful rounds of co-design and prototyping, when handed over to a new partner to deliver the pilot, the key learning from previous work about how to market the course was lost. As a result, the pilot numbers were significantly lower than was aimed for (even though the impact for those who did attend stood true). This meant delivery and learning effort was expended on failed marketing and recruitment methods, rather than being able to demonstrate the medium and long-term outcomes across a larger sample as we had hoped.
What we’ve seen work
We’ve seen real-world ‘demonstrations’ work best when the parameters of what you are trying to prove are simple and clear to all stakeholders. Everyone has a full understanding and awareness of how something intends to work at steady-state. This typically means taking something through an end-to-end process, with minimal change, over a sustained period of time. Whether it’s beta testing a tech product, piloting a new service programme, or building a new community resource — there should be utmost confidence regarding how the idea intends to work at this increased scale and how you will measure whether it is or isn’t achieving this.
We hold three principles when it comes to supporting this stage of change:
- Ensuring delivery is as intended, based on conditions that work. If you’ve managed to run a successful experimentation process — you should have a tight brief for exactly how and why the idea works in practice. The end-to-end process should hold these conditions in place. This might mean that stakeholders delivering the service work closely with those who were part of experimenting, or there’s a training and handover process in place to ensure everyone feels confident of their roles at this stage.
- Identifying what needs to stay in a steady state and what can change throughout. There are always reasons why something may need to be adapted or altered when implementing an end-to-end initiative in the real world. But the focus should always be based on the question — is this being implemented in the way we know it needs to in order to work? At this stage, you should only be responding to the environment around you — managing any unforeseen circumstances which require minor adaptations to what you are delivering.
- Knowing what you want to learn and when. There should only be 1–2 things that you are trying to demonstrate with your end-to-end pilot. Whilst lots of learning may emerge from the process, it’s easy for this learning to become overwhelming or engender a sense of panic that it’s ‘not working’. In this phase, it’s important to measure the real thing that matters, and develop rhythms of shared dialogue and reflections from everyone who’s close to the pilot around what is and isn’t working and why. Once you’ve finished a cycle of real-world delivery, bring everyone back together to agree on and work through suggested improvements of the existing model — and what might need to evolve if the pilot were to be rolled-out at an even greater scale. If it didn’t work as intended in the real world, there should be a strong consensus on what needs to change and why.
A recent example from our work: We recently piloted a new participatory social investment approach called Vested. With strong evidence from analogous work within grantmaking that this approach could work, our pilot learning was tightly focused on whether individuals with no investment experience would be able to come to investment decisions that would be considered valid by ‘investment experts’. We were able to work with people previously involved in similar initiatives to outline what was needed to give the pilot the best chance of succeeding — including clarity on delegated authority, different expertise provided ‘on tap’ to inform confident decision-making, trust amongst panel members, and time to adapt the process to ensure all panel members felt confident and able to participate. With these conditions in place and by being targeted on what we wanted to achieve, the pilot was able to confidently demonstrate the viability of this approach as an alternative to existing investment models.
Moving forwards
We know how hard people work every day to deliver something better than what currently exists for those within communities least served. But many of the patterns that play out in the sector today reinforce a status quo that rarely if ever puts individuals close to the social issue(s) in the lead of solving for the issue(s). The urgency to deliver real change — effective transitions to real and better alternatives — may never be greater. If those of us in the ‘design for good’ sector can’t make community-led alternatives a reality — then perhaps the sector shouldn’t even exist.
We hope by sharing our learning we can offer just one of many alternatives to how the sector could work better for those it seeks to serve. We don’t attempt to place blame and advocate that we have all the answers. We hope our learning is shared in the spirit of openess, care, and self-reflection — we’re largely reflecting on our own need for better practice as much as anyone else’s. Sharing our own principles is not intended as a sector blueprint — we’re sure there are many other principles, practices, and approaches out there that can and do work — we just need some of these to become the norm rather than the exception. And quickly.
Moving forward — we hold hope that the sector can and will offer much — wisdom, expertise, resources, networks, and assets — everything that already exists to enable community ideas to take hold. And if we can let go of the things that no longer serve us — then we may finally be able to work in true partnership — bringing about real community-owned change at the pace and scale required to meet the moment we’re in.
