A Point People year in review.
2017 was an exciting year for the Point People because for the first time in 7 years, we had new people join us. We welcomed Sneh Jani, Jennie Winhall, Cat Drew, Cathy Runciman, Victoria Stoyanova, Abby Rose, Nish Dewan, Charly Cox and Joana Casaca Lemos. You can read about each of them here.
We had our first ever “Away Day” which we’d designed to be a mix between getting to know everyone and sharing learning from across our work, with each of us giving a 15 min talk to the group with presentations etc. In 2018 we are going to do some more open events so that we can meet with others and also share what we are doing more widely.
Systems Changers
This year we continued to work with Lankelly Chase on Systems Changers and in the last few months of 2017 we made some new plans with them focussed on how the work can spread and grow beyond us. In 2018 we will be experimenting with how Systems Changers works in place (place-based systems change), how it works if focussed on a theme or issue (like children facing severe and multiple disadvantage) and how it works based in one type of organisation, like the Police. More importantly though, we will be experimenting with how others can use it, adopt it, deliver it and adapt it.
Place-based systems change through a gendered lens
We’ve started doing some work with Agenda, the alliance for women and girls at risk, who exist to ensure that women and girls at risk of abuse, poverty, poor mental health, addiction and homelessness get the support and protection they need. There is a growing body of evidence around place-based systems change. However, there is limited work which takes a gendered approach. They have commissioned us to do a piece of work to build on the existing evidence base and consider how systems and services in a locality can be redesigned to take into account the particular experiences of women and girls. Katharine, who is the Director of Agenda just wrote this great piece for the Guardian, which highlights the kinds of issues that Agenda is committed to working on. We hope the work we are doing will feed in to this and be useful across the sector.
Leading and navigating through complexity
This Autumn we also started some work with the International Futures Forum, in particular with Graham Leicester and Maureen O’Hara, authors of Dancing at the Edge. We love the book and have started to collaborate with them on how the contents of the book can be discovered and used out in the world more. It’s a great guide for anyone that wants to be better at navigating through complex times and we think it has relevance for a lot of change work that people are out doing in the field.
Designing systemically for change
Throughout 2018 we will be partnering with the Design Council to develop the practice of “designing for systemic change.” This will begin as a series of small roundtable events, as we explore questions about the role of design in complex, systems change with people in the design community who are already thinking beyond service design. We will then broaden this work out to some larger events and create content around it.
This is all the work we are doing together as the Point People, in different formations, however it is also the work that we each do individually, that we actively bring insights from, into our collective space , that is important to who we are. When we meet each month we invest time in learning from one another, connecting up the dots, taking a systems view so that through the different work we are all doing there are always important links to discover and make sense of. Below is a short update on what each of the Point People have been doing in 2017 or will be working on in 2018.
Short snippets of individual Point People activity
Sophia continues to grow Little Village, an organisation that aims to put the community back into raising our families. Little Village now has 3 sites in London and has just raised £250,000 from a foundation to scale its work.
Ellie is the Director of Good Lab, a unique set-up whereby 10 of the largest charities are collaborating together, through Good Lab, to design ways of strengthening the third sector.
Ella is building on her work bringing together creativity & systems change. In early 2018 she will be publishing an article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review on the role of story in systems change, continuing her work with The Comms Lab on systems change within the creative industries, launching work around framing & narrative with the Gulbenkian Foundation & also starting the Longer Now project to catalyse cultural content that helps us see our existence in a longer time frame.
Sneh is working as a consultant at Mutual Ventures alongside growing Bread & Roses, a social enterprise which trains refugee women in floristry and in the process provides them with the space to learn English, develop skills and build their confidence.
Jennie M is working at the Tavistock in their consulting team, working with leaders in organisations, networks and partnerships to unravel the emotional life of the systems in which they work.
Sarah’s consultancy Liminal Space is going from strength to strength. They are developing a strong expertise in public engagement for complex issues, working with organisations like the Wellcome Trust on topics as varied as egg freezing and most recently on Abortion.
Jen has raised further investment for EasyPeasy this year, she was featured in Wired talking about children and screen time and her partnership with the University of Oxford Education Department helped evidence the social impact EasyPeasy is having on young people and parents. Jen has also been training as yoga teacher this year.
Nish has recently started working at Nesta, leading their Flying High challenge, the first programme of its kind to convene city leaders, regulators, public services, businesses and industry around the future of drones in the UK.
Cathy is dividing her time between her own content platform, Atlas of the Future, which is an amazing source of hopeful change stories from around the world, as well as working with openDemocracy on partnerships and strategy, and is in the team that’s leading Civil Society Futures.
Hannah is dividing her time between New Zealand and the UK and growing her coaching and facilitation practice. She draws on a range of disciplines including Co-Active coaching, positive psychology, eco-therapy, systems thinking and the Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku (‘forest bathing’).
Jennie W is dividing her time between Denmark and Canada, and intermittently in London doing strategic work with the Design Council. In Denmark she works with the Rockwool Foundation Intervention Unit leading a team that is designing new services for excluded young people. In Canada she is running Alt/Now at the Banff Centre, an incubator for social ventures which focussed on economic inequality last year and in 2018 will be focussed on the future of work. She also became a Doteveryone Fellow this year.
Abby is just about to launch a new app to go alongside other farming tech that Vidacycle has been developing. This one helps farmers monitor their own soils. As Abby says “ the health of our soils = the health of all beings.” Abby’s Farmerama Radio continues to be a must-listen-to podcast for anyone interested in the growing small-scale farming movement too.
Cat is full time as the delivery director at social design and innovation agency Uscreates, her role is detailed more here. She’s also dome some great talks this year including one linking up service design and systems thinking at the Service Design Global Conference in Madrid and helped the Point People host the (Her)story event at London Service Design Fringe.
Victoria continues to run the London chapter of Creative Mornings, and this year was also announced as one of the first On Being Fellows. In 2017 she also launched a new podcast, The Work We Do.
Kyra has recently gone back to work after her second child was born, and is working in a book shop in Sydney. She’s also written a second book in that time and it will be published later this year.
Charly is working with a colleague in India on a project looking at what makes some people do things for the good of the future (legacy) not the present ( shareholder value) and they will be turning the insights from this into some “how to” content.
Anna is on maternity leave, having given birth to Eve 6 months ago, we look forward to her coming back later this year!
And I’m still working as the Strategic Design Director at Doteveryone, and have done some small exploration projects on how gig economy workers can own their own ratings, and how we can use citizen social science to call out pricing discrimination and algorithmic bias.
Farming, kindness, storytelling, nature, legacy, poverty, motherhood, design, systems thinking, psychodynamics, organisational change, the ethics of the internet, cities, building character, young people, refugees, sector-wide collaboration, collective impact…. so many dots to connect!
Thank you to everyone who has supported our work and provided us with endless inspiration. If you want to read more about the Point People, these are the questions we most frequently get asked — http://www.thepointpeople.com/ask-us
