Day 1 take aways: Why do we need to shift systems?

This blog is one of a daily series crafted by James Oriel to capture his insights and reflections from the day. They can only hope to provide a quick peek into the rich discussions held, and we hope they offer an invitation in for those who may wish to explore further via the recordings, links and other resources provided.

A lesson in why tweaks are not enough

The main questions we held right across our Monday sessions were: why should we bother trying to shift a system? And how can we deliberately innovate the systems we have to create new ones fit for the challenges of our time? This is what we heard from people working in the health and education  systems.

Watch the recordings on the festival resources and recordings page.

Facing various crises, old systems are breaking, and in those crises lies the opportunity for something new. As Jennie Winhall opened with; people made the systems that we have now in response to the challenges of their times; we can remake them to meet the challenges of ours.

External crises have this habit of being extremely forceful, as Bo Lidegaard outlined, they can “ignite in the public a belief in its own ability to do things differently”. Awakening what he called a sort of revolutionary change, a self belief that the life once lived is no longer viable, and something new must take its place. So there’s a need to have a sense of agency, of belief in things being better than they are.

But it’s not only dramatic external crises that spur the kind of systemic change we might imagine. It can be in the slow power of shifting social norms, as old values rescind and give way to new ones, or long forgotten ideals are freshly cherished. Sometimes this is intentional, sometimes it’s the steady rebalancing of what Charlie described as “a new centre of gravity”.

We were reminded right across the day that so much systemic work is a relational process. It’s making friends, shaking hands with politicians, or for Alvaro Salas it was going door to door, day by day and speaking to families about their health. There wasn’t a shortcut. Just a thousand conversations. A thousand stories to be heard.

That’s often why things didn’t seem like they’d lead to systemic change at the beginning, sometimes it wasn’t even the initial ambition. Listening to people’s hopes and fears isn't a dramatic act. But it’s a quiet, albeit powerful step. Loni Bergqvist’s “work is really about trying to unearth that meaning again”. It gets people in touch with what’s important to them, their values.

So many of our speakers had ways of engaging with their own, and others’ core values. From Karen Ingerslev’s futures thinking exercises “creating an activism inside [their] organisation”, to slow processes of reflection, to what Greg Behr described as “meeting people where they are, in unexpected places”.

For Rod Allen, this kind of work culminated in the dawning realisation that they “were winning at a game, but were actually playing the wrong game.” In India, Vishal Talreja had a similar epiphany, that “not just the rules of the game, but the game itself [that is] changing”. Without a strong sense of what’s valued and what’s not, it’s all too easy to be caught playing silly games.

This is where the stories we tell ourselves – the inner work of systems change – can clash with whatever the dominant narrative is, what Valerie Hannon called the “dominant purpose”. For her, the power of crafting new, grand narratives that can transcend different groups is the difference between a collection of exemplary examples and something cohesive and forceful. Because it’s stories that hold it all together. They can blur the “boundaries of the mind”.

Transcending those groups could be the “cultural fluency” between indigenous groups that Melanie Goodchild practiced, or the role of translator that Raquel Mazon Jeffers played between government and communities, working to “engender trust in those two systems and understand the constraints that each system was working within.” This isn’t the time for the heroic individual, but the collaborative communicators. 

That’s not to deride the power of doing good things. We need good projects! Because good work can take on a life of its own, they are the steady hum of background dynamism, the backdrop and birth of more radical change. As Behr told us, it’s as much about launching a thousand little bets, as it is about going out with a bang. Small can be big, it’s just hard to say in advance which small thing will go big.

Suresh Kumar’s experience chimes with that, he told us how they really had no blueprint for palliative care, they were simply responding to demand, adapting to what people needed and learning as they went. So whether you start an educational programme, or train some healthcare workers in one coastal town, or start talking to people about dying– you have to start by starting, and see where it takes you.

That’s one of the contradictions of all of this, systems change can feel both fast, furious and radical as well as slow and incremental. Melanie Goodchild shared the wisdom of a Peruvian elder that sits neatly with this tension; “I don't choose sides between ideas. Instead, opposites dance together until a third present shows up. It's finding the magic and the medicine of emergence in the space between ideas.” Sometimes, it’s not about forcing the change you want to see in the world, but noticing it, coaxing it, nurturing it.

And, word to the weary, the work never stops. Systems are fluid, ever evolving things. Even those systems that seem immovable aren’t static. The conversation of forming and reforming our systems isn’t one that we should willingly opt out of.

Two quotes

“this is ongoing movement building. And movement building happens based on the relative relationships and trust that the adults hold together.” – Greg Behr

“we realised that the change we wanted wasn't a policy shift. It was a shift and in our very thinking and in our core about what we believed – Rod Allen

And a question

As we move - at speed - from one system to another, how do we help those who built the old one, let go of it?