Systems Innovation in Three Movements

This blog post sums up the week long online festival ‘Step Into System Innovation - A Festival of Ideas and Insights’ on Nov 9th to 13th, 2020. Watch the recorded webinars and read about the events here.

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We called it a festival because we wanted it to be more than a conference, to convey something of the richness of perspectives that we hoped to bring together. Looking back at the week, we hope we succeeded. 

Alex Fox of Shared Lives Plus and Sophie Humphreys of Pause and Whatever It Takes shared their insights into how to change systems from within. They described their experience of infiltrating systems and creating enclaves within systems - zones of relative autonomy - in which alternatives to the system can plant roots and grow. 

Al Etmanski, from Vancouver, Diane Roussin from Winnipeg, and the irrepressible Immy Kaur, from a canal boat in Birmingham, in the UK, took us into the heart of systems change and revealed the importance of uncovering those often hidden assumptions that sustain the status quo; who is dependent on whom for what? They encouraged us to see how the care dispensed by the welfare state needs to be animated by empathy and love to stop those systems becoming inert and unfeeling.

Giulio Quaggiatto, Alex Sutton and Chrisann Jarrett demonstrated how funders of systems innovation have to work collaboratively to amplify learning from shared experimentation. We must widen out the funnel to include more people in bringing about change, rather than narrowing it down to scale a few single point solutions.

Anna Fjeldsted, the Rockwool Foundation’s chief psychologist and Jennie Winhall, its director of social innovation, plunged into a deep dive on the details of how frontline workers must be central to systems change in order to make it a daily reality in their routines. Anna explained how developing working practices built around shared principles helped to bring about fundamental change right down to the nitty gritty details of everyday tasks.

Finally, Dr Sania Nishtar from Pakistan and Anir Chowdhury from Bangladesh invited us to step with them through a membrane into the future, to see how emergency systems for welfare payments and telemedicine created in the Covid pandemic could open the way for new digital social support systems. Both demonstrated how Pakistan and Bangladesh could be shining examples for a 21st century welfare state, which is digital, personalised and relational.

We hope this cast of reflective and thoughtful practitioners of systems innovation fulfilled our ambition to encourage more deliberate, practical efforts at systems innovation to open up opportunities to create better, different kinds of social support systems.

How can one possibly make sense of a week of such varied perspectives and stories while doing justice to their diversity? About 1,850 people from 73 countries signed up to the festival, testimony to the appetite for discussion about systems innovation across the world. We plan to make all the material freely available so people can dip back into it: the Green Paper we wrote in the lead up to the festival, the interviews we did with speakers ahead of time, the recordings of the sessions themselves and our blog posts.

We think the inspirational stories told by our practitioners put flesh on the bones of the three models we introduced at the outset, which we summarise as three levels, four keys and twelve roles. 

• Understand how systems change as a result of developments at three levels: the macro landscape, micro niches and the regime itself in the middle. 

• See how systems can be opened up to change using the four keys: power, purpose, resources and relationships. A shift in any one of these can start a process of reconfiguring a system to adopt a new logic.

• Look for people playing the twelve different roles needed for systems change including: visionary entrepreneurs who develop system shifting ventures; insider-outsiders, who operate inside the system but can see how it must absorb new ideas; convenors who bring together different players from across the system; and long term investors with an interest in helping to shift an entire system and not just promote a single solution.        

Let me try to sum up what I learned in three movements. 

The first is the movement from relationships to power and purpose. 

Early on we introduced our four keys to unlock systems innovation: purpose, power, resources and relationships. My colleague Jennie Winhall did a brilliant job throughout the week explaining how these four could be reconfigured. 

Of course the lesson we’ve all learned from the great systems thinker Donella Meadows is that the most powerful lever to shift a system is to change its purpose, what it is for. So when early on in the week we polled our audience on what they thought the most important lever was, I have to admit I was a little surprised when they said, by a comfortable margin, that relationships were the most important place to start.

Pernille Kapler Andersen, a strategist at the municipality of Roskilde in Denmark, drew on her experience to explain why relationships should be put first. She had found that it was important to get into a different dialogue with citizens, service users and staff before attempting to shape what the new point or purpose of a service might be. To decide on the purpose without creating a more open, inclusive and trusting relationship would likely end up back at square one with a purpose which reflects the priorities of those running the service. 

The need to recast relationships and put them at the heart of more effective social solutions was repeated throughout the week. The relationship between skilled case workers and women escaping domestic abuse is at the heart of Pause. Shared Lives Plus is founded on the relationship between a caring host family and the person they care for in their home. Alex Sutton talked about creating stronger relationships between the different players trying to change the UK migration system. 

Creating stronger, more trusting, inclusive relationships, so people can have a more open dialogue that combines different perspectives, is the prerequisite for more fundamental changes, shifting power and purpose. 

Skilled systems innovators start by building relationships and move onto power and purpose. 

The second movement turns a problem into an opportunity.

The field of systems change is peppered with people who start with systemic, deep rooted, intractable and wicked problems which cannot be addressed successfully using conventional means. Even starting with a complex problem, however, can easily put you in a mindset which is all about delivering solutions to fix problems within current systems. 

What stood out about all our practitioners was that they started with problems that were often keenly felt, from a perspective of lived experience to some degree, but turned their frustration and anger into an opportunity to create approaches which generate further options and opportunities to create value for people. Rather than deliver a solution to a problem, they allow people to create better ways to live. They start an unfolding, dynamic process of growth rather than fixing a defined, bounded problem. 

What was interesting is how practitioners made this shift from problem to opportunity, opposition to proposition. 

It starts with how to reframe the problem in a way that ensures it can be turned into an opportunity. Al Etmanski provided one of the most memorable epithets of the week when he said he preferred to see problems as mysteries to be unravelled by tracing them back to the underlying causes. 

Diane Roussin reminded us never to try to go in a straight line from problem to opportunity. Problems need unpacking; they need to be seen from many different angles to work out how to untie the knot which holds them in place. Assembling and understanding those perspectives takes time. Rushing that process is counterproductive. 

You have to invest in the capacity to see, sense and imagine opportunity. Some people seem to be born with the ability to sniff out an opportunity. But many people find it hard to make that leap, not least if they have spent years being ground down to lower their expectations, limit their ambitions and curtail their imaginations. Systems can school people to expect no more than the system currently delivers. It is not enough to ask people to choose from the menu the system provides; people need to be able to imagine a new menu of options. But stepping into that possibility itself requires investment to help open up the imagination, to go from “what is” to “what if?” Often asking “what if” seems pointless when the systems we work with are so unbending.  

The ROCKWOOL Foundation’s NExTWORK initiative presented by Anna Fjelsted and Sophie Humphrey’s Pause programme invest in building up people’s capacity to imagine a completely different future for themselves. Dr Sania Nishtar could already imagine a digital welfare safety net for millions of the poorest people in Pakistan; it took the Covid crisis to make her colleagues in the government see that was an opportunity that had to be taken. 

Skilled systems innovators know how to move from problem to opportunity without going too fast and by building people’s capacity to believe a different future is possible, for themselves and the systems on which they depend. 

The final movement is from products to principles and practices. 

Most of our practitioners created a “product” - a relatively concrete, repeatable service which they can offer to people. Al Etmanski helped to create the Registered Disability Savings Plan as a financial product for people to save for later life with disability: the RDSP now has $5bn Canadian invested in it. Dr Sania Nishtar created a mobile phone based process to distribute $1.25bn US to more than 15m people, in part by creating new bank accounts for them. Shared Lives Plus is a care service, provided by local households, which a local authority can procure and provide for their community. NExTWORK is a programme to help groups of young people develop stronger professional identities in collaboration with groups of like-minded local employers. Chrisann Jarrett campaigned for specific changes to legislation which governed whether young people with indeterminate migration status could get student loans to go to university. Immy Kaur is developing very concrete models for communities which are central to local economic development. 

These products matter because they can be described, delivered and measured. They appear to have a beginning and an end, a front and a back. But on their own, tangible products and instruction manuals are never enough to shift a system. Something deeper is required. 

Systems really change when products are embedded in daily life in the new practices of teachers and pupils, doctors and patients, social workers and clients. Education is a classic example of why products rarely transform systems. Over many years educational reformers have hoped that new kinds of schools (outdoor, open-plan, small, specialist) and new kinds of technologies (television, visual aids, whiteboards, the internet) would transform learning. Yet education has remained pretty much unchanged despite the radical promise of these interventions, largely because little has changed in the daily practice of teachers and pupils. The format of classes, classrooms, lessons and exams has remained quite similar. 

Making this deeper shift from products into practices requires what Anna Fjelsted and Jennie Winhall call new principles to organise the work and ensure it is being done on both sides of the equation, by the client and the case worker, by the job seeker and the employer. The principles cannot be too vague and abstract. They are not a vision statement nor a philosophy. Effective principles can be guides to decision making and action. They must be something people can turn to in the work to help them decide what to do next, to define good practice and successful outcomes. 

The disability rights movement adheres to a principle: “nothing about us without us.” Pause operates with a principle of time and timeliness: building relationships takes time but it also requires good judgement on the part of those involved to know when the moment is right to make a change. NExTWORK operates on the principle that good approaches are many-to-many because that way risks, setbacks, triumphs and learning can be shared: that is why it organises meetings between groups of young people and groups of employers. No one is trapped in a one-to-one relationship which is uncomfortable. 

Spreading principles and products helps to tackle what Alex Fox called the paradox of scale: how do you spread approaches to millions of people which nevertheless feel appropriate, responsive and rooted in context. Working through a set of shared principles helps projects scale down to the intimate needs of people they help, scale out to other settings in which the principles can be applied in context and scale up to inform the coalitions and legislative reforms needed to shift entire systems. Skilled systems innovators excel therefore at creating products which carry with them key principles and practices. 

Systems innovation can be a daunting, complex task and in order to properly shift a system, many different people have different roles to play. Orchestrating that collaboration is central to leading systems change. We want to make it more practical and manageable to undertake ambitious systems innovation to create the systems we need. We’d love to hear from you about what you think you need to further your efforts in this field. 

For now, thank you for being part of our festival of ideas and insights and we look forward to continuing, deepening and widening these conversations on systems change.