System Innovation: Why now, why you?

This blog post was part of the event Step Into System Innovation - A Festival of Ideas and Insights on Nov 9th to 13th, 2020 and sums up the first webinar of the week. Watch the recorded webinar and read about the event here.

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Donnella Meadows, the doyenne of systems thinking, famously said that shifting purpose is the most powerful lever to transform a system. Yesterday, in the opening session of our Systems Innovation Festival, Jennie Winhall guided us through an explanation of the four keys to unlock system change: power, purpose, relationships and resources. We then asked the hundreds of participants for their view, and the majority said that the most important way into systems innovation was through relationships. These were the full results:

Which of these four keys are most important for you to work with?

39% relationships 
20% power
34% purpose
6% resource flows 

Recasting relationships is more important than purpose per se in starting to shift a system. The margin is slim. But it suggests that you cannot start to shift a system, including shifting its purpose, until you have started to reconfigure the relationships. 

That was a point well made by one of our contributors, Pernille Kappler, a strategist in Roskilde municipality, who said she had found that when the council created a new relationship with citizens and staff, then it became possible to imagine a new purpose for public services. Without shifting the relationships, making them more inclusive, engaged and empathetic, it would be difficult to find a new purpose. 

What’s also interesting to note is that only 20% of our participants thought that power was the most important key, while resources was voted for by a mere 6%. That suggests that the introduction of new or additional resources is not the critical ingredient in shifting a system. Such a shift may well require investment, sometimes substantial investment, but resources only play a small role in getting the process started. It’s much more important to start with relationships and purpose, leading to a shift in power and resources. 

This was born out by the two examples that Jennie gave: the way Karyn McCluskey had orchestrated Glasgow’s highly effective response to knife crime and the growth of Shared Lives schemes for adult social care. 

Our other respondent, Cassie Robinson, from the The National Lottery Community Fund in the UK, angled the question in a slightly different way by asking: at a time when the purpose of so many institutions has been shaken, how do we still know what something is for? Cassie said there was more emphasis on fixing broken and dysfunctional systems rather than imaging and creating entirely new ones. 

In yesterday’s session we also presented three frameworks we use in guiding practical efforts at systems innovation. The session provoked a myriad of questions. This is but a short summary of some of the discussion. 

First, we talked through our version of the multi-level perspective model developed by Manchester University academic Frank Geels. That model says change in systems comes from the interaction of three levels: the macro (landscape), the meso (the system regime) and the micro (niche). We describe three states that a system moves between. It may start relatively aligned and then becomes misaligned and disrupted by a shift in more than one level at the same time, and then eventually, it becomes realigned in a new configuration. 

In the process of talking through this model, Charlie Leadbeater threw in a couple of concepts which we are still developing: the system shifting venture and the minimum viable system. 

The system shifting venture is a new entrant venture which puts forward an idea for a service or product which could shift the logic of the entire system. In our live webinar today (Tuesday), Sophie Humphreys, the founder of Pause and Alex Fox, of Shared Lives Plus, will describe system shifting ventures in more detail - they do not serve the system but shift its logic. 

The minimum viable system is when the complementary ingredients to create a new alternative system start coming together. Eric Ries in the Lean Start Up urges entrepreneurs to create a minimum viable product which they can test and develop with real consumers. We think there’s an equivalent to this in systems innovation. An example might be how in Africa the elements of new solar powered electricity systems are coming together. 

One participant asked: 

“What are the “conditions” for a Minimum Viable System? The enabling conditions would be a good topic to address in more detail. How do you know you’re close to supporting a MVS? What would need to be true?”

We agree and we are interested in understanding more about how you can spot a genuinely system shifting venture and how as an innovator you can become part of a minimum viable system. 

Many of the questions in the Q + A were about working across and between these three levels : “How would you knit together those 3 levels to create opportunity?”

As one participant put it: 

“Too much happens in silos. We work within a specific system and use the tools and resources within that system. It seldom happens on the macro level that we work across silos in order to solve a problem.”

Another participant asked to link the three levels to the well known three horizons model which guides people to think about change in the here and now, in the nearly here probable future and on the third far horizon of what is possible. This is something we’ve played with and Graham Leicester at the International Futures Forum has done a lot of work on this. We think there is a lot of focus on fixing current systems: Horizon 1. The trick, which is what systems shifting ventures do, is to introduce the possibility of radical change into the here and how. This is a way of seeing the third horizon. 

A further question was: “How do you work at the macro level? What kind of work does that entail?” There is a big debate about whether change at the macro, landscape level happens because of big shifts in demography, climate, norms, or whether it is something that actors can consciously influence. We will come back to this in our later work. 

Second, Jennie talked through our four keys model (brilliantly using some visuals created by our designer Sisdel Ludvigsen). Jennie explained how when systems are stable, power, purpose, relationships and resources are locked together. Innovation requires that configuration to be opened up in some way. That opening up – through new relationships for example – then allows an exploration of possible new configurations to emerge. Eventually, when a new system takes shape, that is what happens. 

That resonated with many people. 

One questioner added: “In the poll regarding the four keys for systems change, another option should be added – Courage.”

An interesting question was about how people involved in big change find a shared sense of purpose. As one asked: “When do a lot of small purposes become one big one?” Often when systems are changing, the people changing them do not set out with big goals in mind. They want to tackle quite specific challenges they face. Sweeping change comes about, we think, when alliances and coalitions form to bring all these people together into a larger, shared common cause. And as another questioner remarked, that involves crafting a shared narrative of change which people feel a part of. 

Another questioner made that point: “When we talk about systems change / innovation, it's often wrapped in the mechanics of how we tell it as a story. What happens when 'what works' is not a neat or linear story? And how does the way we tell stories shape and limit our understanding of  'what works’?”

Third, we talked about the roles we see people playing in the process of systems. We think there are four key roles: system shifting entrepreneurs; insider outsiders, who operate inside the system but want to open it up to new influences; convenors, who bring the insiders and outsiders together and what we call commissioners of the future, the people who want to bring the future system into being, whether they are visionary campaigners, people with lived experience or politicians. 

Around those four key roles we see many others: historians, who open up how the system came to be made in the first place; investors, (public, philanthropic and private who want to back efforts to shift the system); scalers, who excel at scaling new ventures and exiters, who specialise in closing down the old. 

Systems innovation is hard in part because it requires the orchestration of all of these roles. Luckily, on Thursday, we will hear from Alex Sutton, who directs the Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s work in migration, who will explain how, as a funder, he has tried to convene the entire field. 

One group that definitely needs to be part of this conversation are politicians, as one questioner pointed out: “How do we invite the danish politicians - national and local - into this conversation about system change and the need for it?”

Thank you to everyone who participated in the live webinar. It was a fantastic start to the week and we look forward to hearing from all of you again in today’s session.