Over the years, the Centre’s focus broadened from social business and the impact economy, to a systems innovation lens, and we became Griffith Centre for Systems Innovation.

From the outset, our form was intentionally innovative for a university. We operated as a social business paying back a patient loan over a five year period and generating contract-based income to meet our operating costs.

The defined five-year exploration period ends on 4 November 2024, and we’re excited to share that a key outcome of the initiative has been the successful incubation of a spin-out entity The Good Shift (live from 4th November, 2024)— which will continue the work via a different platform, including posting to and managing this publication.

We shared an earlier blog post reflecting on the messiness of transformation and the essential steps of composting and chrysalising ideas, projects and organisations, you can read that here.

And so as this phase of Griffith Centre for Systems Innovation comes to a close we wanted to reflect on and celebrate some of the work and relationships we threw our energy behind. In this timeline you can see the evolution of the focus of our work, the relational ‘tail’ and gradual, slow build up of the trust and work, and the people who journeyed with us across that time.

This post is a gratitude note to all the people who have contributed along the way — to learning together, experimenting with new ideas together, exploring unchartered ways together, sharing ideas together.

People who have shared their experience and advised us, who have paved ways in the University for us, who have turned up wholeheartedly to courses and workshops and shared perspectives with us, who have been willing to be in community with us, who have partnered in action learning with us, who have shared our thoughts into their own networks to create ripples beyond us.

Stay tuned for more from The Good Shift on this channel, and look out for what sprouts when the dandelion seeds of the rest of the GCSI team land in fresh soil.

Chrysalising… was originally published in The Good Shift on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Joanne McNeill, Deputy Director GCSI

The Griffith Centre for Systems Innovation (GCSI) team has been working through a wind-up process for the Centre since April this year, with the closure date being 1 November 2024. We’ve written a few things about this previously, for example this blog — the short version is that our five year ‘exploration’ agreement with Griffith Business School has come to an end, so we’ve been busily composting and chrysalising different aspects of our work over the past six months.

One of those aspects is the cohort of Industry Adjuncts we’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with over the past few years. Each Adjunct has a different focus, and so how we’re winding up our formal arrangements with them is different in each case.

Kate Rich is one of the wonderful Adjuncts we’ve been in conversation with over the past year or so. Kate is an artist, trader and feral economist with 30+ years lived experience in and outside formal institutions. Her work specialises in opening up room to move in spaces that often seem stuck. Kate shares our fascination with the ‘boring bits’ and together we’ve been exploring day-to-day administration as a place where real change might be leveraged. Some of the initiatives Kate is central to include The Feral MBA, Feral Trade, and RADMIN — In Your Livelihood on which she collaborates with Chiz Williams.

The RADMIN course is an individual activity, which I participated in in January-February this year (2024) and found the process generated useful and interesting insights, through creating space for reflexive activities that helped me connect threads that were floating loosely through my thinking and practices. I also came out of it with a curiosity as to whether the process could perhaps be used with teams — to foster reflective learning, generate new and interesting approaches, and maybe help with ‘untangling’ the inevitable knots that arise from time to time when working closely with others.

When thinking with Kate about how we might constructively wind-up our formal Adjunct relationship, we hit upon doing an experiment with the GCSI team to explore whether and how the program could potentially be adapted to team contexts. I’m grateful to our ever-curious and generous team members for agreeing to be involved! Six of us (about half our team) worked with Kate and Chiz over the course of about a month to trial the approach they designed.

The timing — during August this year when our wind-up timeline was becoming very real — turned out to be fertile ground for the process. In different ways, we each found it cathartic — giving us space to discuss and reflect on how we were navigating the significant changes we’re facing individually and together. Collectively acknowledging and exploring a sense of sadness about not continuing to work together helped us also recognise the inevitability of impermanence and to move into looking forward to the opportunities new beginnings can bring.

We’re all really grateful for what came out of it for us and continue to draw on thinking we did through the RADMIN process. My hope is that there will be opportunities for Kate and Chiz to bring their approach to other teams — to explore, learn and create together. For those navigating turbulent times and/or wrestling with knotty issues, the method has potential to be particularly generative 😊

GCSI and RADMIN — In Your Livelihood was originally published in The Good Shift on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In May 2024 GCSI received news that the University would not be continuing the Centre’s funding beyond the end of our initial five-year exploration period, established in 2019. This gave us five months to consider how best to ‘gently unpick’ the Centre and what next for the people within and the work underway.

This year we evolved our Chimes practice to be called a ‘Fermentation Space’. Part generative conversation and part learning space. In one of these sessions we asked each other:

What does a good ending look like and how is GCSI chrysalising into its next form?

We’re sharing here what came out of that conversation, in all its meandering glory. It’s worth noting the interesting tension that exists between the collective and individual experience. We have all experienced this time differently and so we invite you to read the below as a pooling of different perspectives that may sometimes be at odds with one another.

The illustrations throughout are by our Director Ingrid Burkett who sketched them as part of a collective exercise testing a new team-based approach to the RADMIN — In Your Livelihood program (more about that towards the end).

Why does an ending sometimes feel like failure? And is it even an ending?

It’s a cultural construct of mainstream narrative that if something ends, it didn’t work. Or to be successful it must continue indefinitely, scale and grow.

But when we begin to learn from nature, and recognise the wisdom of Indigenous Knowledges we remember, as adrienne maree brown says:

“Everything dies, but that’s kind of good. It makes for a very rich world. All the richness, all that fecundity, all that beautiful miracle of life; it happens because we live in cycles, not perpetuity. Let’s learn what we need to learn and move on. To compost this and process it and see where else the resources need to flow… it’s vitality. What you’re speaking to is life force… mushrooms know this.”

(note — this quote is an excerpt of a podcast with Krista Tippet and we’ve moved the order around a little bit. We believe the intent is still honoured. It’s worth a listen to the whole thing!)

Acknowledging the messiness in transformation

Tied in with our society’s avoidance of talking about death is a tendency to gloss over the hard bits. Perhaps because we don’t want to make people feel uncomfortable? Or maybe we’re wanting to encourage with a ‘you can do it!’ achievement type mindset.

But we need to be prepared for, to hold space for and be ok with the messiness and grief in transformation.

If we look at two common metaphors for transformation — a phoenix and a caterpillar, we see the phoenix obtains new life by rising from the ashes of its predecessor, and a caterpillar breaks down its own body before rearranging its cells to become the butterfly (rather extraordinary actually!) Those metaphors helped us feel ‘ok’ with this messy stage. Although there was a reflection from one team member that they’re still quite individual processes.

We found that despite having moved on with a positive narrative and response (more about that below) for some of us there was still a little anger, hurt and anxiousness co-existing with that. We spent quite a bit of this conversation giving space to these feelings and observations.

And even though at GCSI we intentionally created opportunities to acknowledge and work through the complexity and difficulty of this particular ending, we were still somewhat surprised perhaps at the depth and lingering ‘shitty’ bits, as someone called them.

One person shared that when faced with the inevitable and well-meaning ‘pity or sad’ responses from people, she had to keep reminding herself that it was important not to see this through the lens of failure. That it wasn’t ‘good enough’ to survive. Even though she knew in principle that was not the case.

Which brought us to a conversation about success and what that actually looks like. Another team member reminded us that if we’re working in complexity and areas where we don’t yet know what success looks like, then holding our ‘thing’ lightly — whether it be a project, an organisation, an idea — and deliberately taking one step at a time to see what evolves, is actually success. Even when it ends or turns into something different.

In fact, we have always aligned with the thought that everything goes through phases

Phases of maturity, of growth, of learning, of delivery, of ending — and when we intentionally frame these phases, including intentional endings we have an opportunity to access great energy. The fact that we programmed in a five-year check-in point is one example of this, it instilled an entrepreneurial energy in us, reasonably unusual for a university centre.

And we have often spoken of biodegradability in our work. The notion that we are aiming for our partners to learn alongside us so we’re eventually not needed. An example is our partnership with Community Power Agency (CPA).

We started working with CPA in 2021 exploring together how we might create an online learning environment for renewable energy professionals that would contribute to our mission of distributive and regenerative futures. As we developed this partnership, we continually asked how we might create something that would contribute to growing CPA’s capabilities in designing and delivering their own transformational online learning.

The partnership matured through multiple iterations of the Socially Responsible Renewable Energy Development course and is chrysalising now to a self-paced online learning module so it’s accessible to more people. We will step out, CPA will run this, while another area of Griffith will facilitate it. Although our partnership has reached an ending phase, we can see how the ripples will carry learning opportunities into the future.

During this conversation one of our team shared how they were inspired by the intentional death date of AIME’s IMAGI-NATION:

“Declaring death in advance removes that sense that you are keeping secrets to increase profit or success. There is no hidden agenda when you have announced your own departure. It is responsible transparent and brave. Death can reduce the fear of bankruptcy which hobbles so many organisations making them wary of risk. The equation changes when you have a deadline. Removing that fear unlocks more potential.

Death introduces urgency — it makes you want to try out and spin up every great idea you might think you’ve ever had. No more saving for a rainy day. Spend while the sun is shining. Death removes the pretend permanence, the illusion of perfection, the promise of eternity.”

Excerpt from Hoodie Economics

Energy flowing elsewhere

In the book this team member referenced — Hoodie Economics — Jack Manning Bancroft also talks about energy flows. This had a lovely connection back into our conversation where one of the team suggested that for her this is less about endings and more about energy flows.

She talked of rivers, streams and redirecting flows. Sometimes the redirection may happen naturally and other times it might be imposed but still it flows. She reflected on how in the public service this is actually a given. If one decides to work for a reasonable period of time in the public sector part of the inbuilt framing is that at regular intervals your work and energy will be redirected towards different priorities — work on one project might end, or your whole department might change, but the flow of service continues.

Reflections on the role of universities in incubating innovation for impact

Throughout this process we’ve had a number of conversations about the best ‘home’ for this type of work, acknowledging there are different phases and stages to consider.

Universities the world over play key roles in fostering innovation and experiments across disciplines and contexts.

We are grateful for the support Griffith University has provided in incubating us as a bold experiment exploring how a university might activate its resources towards innovation that has an impact.

When we first started out, as the Yunus Centre in the earliest days, key leaders adopted an attitude of abundance and possibility — urging us to think and work creatively, to push boundaries and develop new prototypes of university-community partnerships, funding models and knowledge translation.

Being incubated within a valued institution like Griffith provided us the conditions to experiment and learn with partners locally and globally to test ideas about how to improve outcomes for people, places and the planet, in complex environments.

We evolved into the Griffith Centre for Systems Innovation while our context evolved around us — a global pandemic impacted mindsets and policies influencing universities. Attitudes of scarcity and constraint emerged prompting us to start thinking about “spinning out” — a common next step after incubation in many innovation spaces.

This musing from Hannah McDowall at Canopy felt very apt during our conversation:

“I am in a constant question-mark about how our kind of work should find a home. Established institutions give us a visibility, infrastructure and credibility which is very useful to platforming the work, and at the same time, they often embody systemic constraints which are totally counter to the decolonial thing we are doing. And so we are squeezed.”

What does ‘chrysalising’ look like for GCSI: Dandelions, butterflies and river flows

A thought that’s been bubbling with one member of the team is the difference between ‘the work’, ‘the job’, and ‘the platform’. She sketched out what she meant:

The work: refers to everything you do towards your underlying purpose, a north star (or southern cross in our part of the world) — the work can be an individual purpose, or it can refer to a collective purpose.

The job: refers to a particular role you might play in an organisation — in which you may or may not have full scope to do ‘the work’.

The platform: refers to an organising ‘vessel’, it could be an organisation, institution, a network, a project.

And if one is deeply connected to the work, the energy stays with that despite the job and the platform changing.

Indeed, the thing that remains constant for the team at GCSI (both current and past team members) is a dedication to continuing ‘the work’.

How that looks for different people — which ‘job’ and ‘platform’ they’ll continue it in — is going to be different.

A small number of GCSI’s current team will be spinning out into a start-up called The Good Shift, moving into new phases of our current work, thinking and writing. (They will continue to host this publication so stick around!)

A larger number of us have and will continue to break off like tributaries, or dandelions, taking our accumulated learning and experiences into new forms of the work.

While it’s wonderful to see where the dandelion seeds are landing, this is not an easy transition for everyone. Some dandelion seeds are still being carried along on the wind and we are working hard to support each other through the ‘disintegration’ phase.

Our journey to ending

During our conversation we lamented a little on the lack of material and metaphors surrounding collective endings, although once we started drafting this piece we re-found some of the wonderful sharing by initiatives like Stewarding Loss, The Decelerator and the thoughtful humans behind them.

It’s heartening to see the way we have approached this phase aligns with the material on endings we have enjoyed reading. We greatly appreciated reading about the experiences of others so we share ours below to add to the body of thinking and reflections, using the same or similar headings from their case studies.

Pre-decision

In the lead up to the decision we stayed true to our ethos of transparency. Our entire team knew we were preparing business plans and scenarios to contribute to the conversation around whether we would extend past our exploration period or whether we would explore what transformation looked like.

Once we knew

As soon as possible after a decision came through our director called the whole team into a meeting to share what she knew. Despite knowing this was one of the options, there was still much disbelief, and a grief that surprised many of us.

We received assurances from both the Business School leadership and GCSI leadership that we would undertake this ending with care, and support every team member in the way that they needed.

How we dealt with it early on

We already had scheduled one of our regular ‘Team Days’ just a few days after the decision so we used that to continue our processing, reflection and next steps in a way that centred care and a commitment to embodying our principles of giving a damn, making good happen, being open and transparent and being radically flexible.

We invited team members to embody how they were feeling in the moment and possible next steps in their journey. The team member who crafted the gathering chose a tool developed by the Presencing Institute called the Stuck Exercise. It was interesting to note how so often the body already knew what the mind wasn’t ready to see. Upon reflection at the end of the day this was the most appreciated segment.

We then invited people to share, if they felt inclined, what their personal priorities were for the next five months, any thoughts or preferences for next steps in the work, and what support we as a group might be able to offer.

Next, we imagined in pairs what it might look like in 10 years if this ends well. We called it an ‘Interview with the Future’ and imagined running into someone in 10 years’ time who commented on how the impact from these GCSI / Yunus Centre years has continued to ripple out, and asked us how that came to be. Some of the ideas imagined out of that session were:

• Team members took care of one another and carefully and considerately wrapped up work with partners.
• We made sure the thinking and learning we had shared was still available, accessible and continued to ripple.
• The idea of GCSI as a dandelion — making sure that all the seeds found good conditions to continue to thrive and grow.

And before we broke for an optional virtual lunch together, we got into some more practical discussions around considerations for messaging and ideas for how best to pull together our ‘Composting Plan’.

Comms / Narrative

We recognised early on it was important for us to be intentional about the narrative. That if we were to be true to our belief that endings and transformations are natural and essential phases of this work, then we needed to get in front and walk the talk. It’s easy for people to slip into pity or sadness in this situation, especially when things are going well, but that didn’t feel helpful. We wanted to understand this as an evolution and be thankful for the opportunity to incubate the work in the ‘safe’ hands of a university.

We quickly co-created a list of partners and connections who should find out about the change from us. We considered who needed to know immediately due to live conversations about partnerships, who should receive a call, those for whom a personal email would be appropriate, and who should be the one to connect. And only once those people understood the news did we go public on LinkedIn and in internal university platforms.

Composting

We developed a ‘composting plan’ and check in on it as a team every week. And we tried to maintain space for generative conversations — about options for chrysalising, and how we were each journeying through the time.

We perhaps got a little caught up in the doing for a while, but the conversation that led to this blog was a good reminder to return to the intentions we laid early in the process.

There will always be a tension due to the ‘different rates and speeds of composting’ as one team member puts it, so to stay true to the aims of a good ending, it’s important to keep checking in.

Deeper reflection

With serendipitous timing, one of our Adjuncts, Kate Rich invited us to help her and collaborator Chiz Williams test a new team-based approach to their RADMIN — In Your Livelihood program. A group of six (half our team) were involved in this during August this year.

Having a process hosted by people external to the team gave those involved the space to dig further into where they were at and what they were holding, without some having to ‘lead’ the others. All reported a cathartic experience that supported evolving their thinking and feeling responses to the context. You can read a little more about how it came about and their experience in this piece.

Ending

In step with our intention to ‘end well’, once we’ve closed the Centre at the beginning of November, we have planned a final gathering for current team members to take some time to reflect and celebrate the work, relationships and ripples we’ve nurtured, and contemplate what seeds may be sown in this fertile soil. And, it must be said —to take a moment to simply appreciate each other and have some fun, because joy and connection are equally as important in this work.

Thanks for reading our journey. Here’s the full series of Ingrid’s ‘cathartic cartoon’, in order of how she felt it.

Contributors to the conversation and editing: Ingrid Burkett, Joanne McNeill, Athanasia Price, Cathy Boorman, Michelle Smith, Sidsel Grimstad, Neiewa Taumayauna, Suzie Parnell, Rena Frohman, Katie Stubley

What does a good ending look like? was originally published in The Good Shift on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In September 2023 we published a blog that explored some of our thinking (at that time) about growing social infrastructures to support place-based initiatives. More recently, we published the first in a three-part series exploring governance in and for complexity. In that second piece we outlined a draft typology to hone thinking around the roles and functions of systems shifting intermediaries. In this piece, we expand on the place-based theme and bring some of our thinking about ‘types’ of intermediaries to explore the current state of the place-based ecosystem in Australia and to offer some thoughts on ‘where to’ from here.

A decade of field building

Place-based work is not new in Australia (see for example Reddel, 2017), but it has experienced a renewed focus over the past decade or so through both policy development and the progress of a number of key place-based initiatives around the country. ‘Place-based work’ is positioned as both an approach and a programmatic frame for addressing complex issues in Australia. There are now a range of programs, projects, initiatives, funders, policy makers and researchers interested in place-based approaches and some promising outcomes are developing.

Supporting all this activity and interest, a number of ‘intermediaries’ have also been established around place-based work, collective impact and other ‘community-led’ approaches. In addition to supporting individual initiatives, these intermediaries are usually aiming to contribute to the broader development of knowledge, capabilities and other resources that can support place-based agendas. Some are also involved in fostering networks and coalitions designed to support systemic shifts that could help realise “equitable and durable outcomes at scale” (Farnham et al, 2020).

In effect, all the various actors involved are engaged in ‘field building’, that is they are part of . . .

“a community of organisations and individuals working together to solve a common set of problems, develop a common body of theory and knowledge or advance and apply common practices” (O’Neill, 2015).

Despite, or perhaps because of, all the activity in recent years we have also seen a contraction of diversity across the field — with certain methods (e.g. collective impact) becoming almost synonymous with the ‘field’ of place-based work.

Further, there remains a degree of fragmentation across this ‘field’. Whilst there is a universal recognition of the importance of collaboration in place-based work we have experienced undertones of organisational singularity and ‘hero’ narratives. These are sometimes also exacerbated by opaque relationships to power and unnamed issues of competition — particularly as newer actors move into established fields.

In the impact space, where everyone has great intentions and wants to maximise their contributions to better outcomes, even raising these issues can be difficult. So how do we move dialogue, policy and practice forward in this context?

Towards an ecosystem approach …

Drawing on the draft typology (mentioned above and developed in this piece, we suggest focusing attention on the range of intermediary roles and functions needed to drive change in complex contexts. In the ‘first cut’ typology we outline six of these (there may be more!), with ‘field building’ being just one.

Starting with this lens, below we start to imagine one possibility for moving from relatively fragmented field-building activities towards more emergent and integrative ecosystem-oriented approaches to supporting the development of place-based initiatives. As the Figure below suggests, we also think this perspective creates openings for the potential coming-together of a number of adjacent and complementary fields — and thereby opens up opportunities for the creation of a broader ‘ecosystem’ around place-based and community-led practice, policy and investment.

But firstly, what is the difference? Ecosystems are less focused on codifying practice and more on drawing together diverse actors and stakeholders to amplify and multiply value towards particular outcomes that require collaborative action. Intentional efforts using this approach would explore and unpack the potential for one or more platforms around which such ecosystems could develop. The shape, structure and realisation of any proposed platform or other organising approach should not be pre-determined but evolve out of the exploration.

This approach would require a more critical and engaged conversation about the complex relationships between ‘field’ actors than we are currently seeing in Australia. Shifting towards ecosystem approaches requires an openness to more nuanced understandings about how collaboration and competition play a part in change processes — and ultimately, will likely require a willingness for all to give up some part of their current functions and positioning in order to grow potential for stronger overall impacts in the ecosystem.

In commercial business contexts the use of ‘ecosystem’ concepts is expanding exponentially–(see for example, Grueler and Schneider, 2021), and often refers to a mixture of new models, platforms, and integrated commercial value chains that support multilateral partners to interact for broader value creation than can be achieved by any one business (see Adner, 2017). In the context of impact, we think it is more likely to refer to new organising frames, which focus on leveraging the power of the many in order to maximise and amplify potential for better outcomes (in this case, for people and places). Ecosystem approaches require rethinking the ways we can organise ‘assets’ — such as organisations, resources, people, knowledges and capabilities — to co-create new or better opportunities for impact.

Why ecosystems?

Ecosystem approaches challenge ‘old’ ways of generating change that rely on scaling singular institutions, or competitively dividing resources across various programs — as is often the result of a continual focus on reducing duplication as core to efficiency and effectiveness. Instead, the focus is on developing more fluid organising frameworks and more creative approaches to how value can be co-created. Necessarily this requires some focus on how a ‘commons’ of resourcing could be fostered in order to respond to complex social challenges. In an ecosystems approach there is also more focus on how multiple organisations can ‘amplify’ what works and innovate to adapt to different contexts and to changes in contexts, rather than ‘scaling’ or otherwise growing individual organisations.

In the context of place-based work, the potential benefits of an ecosystem approach could be:

• Testing of more diverse approaches to or applications of place-based work — particularly those that focus on larger or deeper challenges; like, for example, local care economies, or place-owned energy and communications infrastructures, or community-led approaches to adaptations to climate and biodiversity crises, to name just a few;
• Generating more focused, context relevant and detailed practice-based ‘evidence’ — that demonstrates what works in specific contexts or under certain conditions, rather than relying on the decontextualised or universalised ‘evidence’ methodologies that are characteristic of much policy and programmatic research. This may involve, for example, place-based data, collaborative analysis processes and development of joint actionable insights which could be tested across organisations and citizens;
• Fostering ‘amplification conditions’ — through providing greater opportunities for innovation in contexts that could enable communities to try, test and learn — and then share these learnings on platforms that connect them to other contexts, ultimately creating opportunities for innovation multiplier effects;
• Supporting the development of ‘learning cultures’ — increasing opportunities for diverse actors to collaborate and learn together through creating foundations for greater localised capability building and self-organisation.

Reframing Organising Relationships: The hard bits are also the bits that grow greater impact

Realising these benefits will require a shift in how we organise for collaboration, and in how we resource the (often invisible) activities and processes that are the life-blood of collaborative endeavours.

Understanding how more nuanced forms of relationships and organising frameworks can stimulate and amplify impact is critical to ecosystem approaches because core to such framings lies a commitment to collaborative rather than purely organisational goals.

In the context of place-based work, there are some enduring relational patterns that often keep us from exploring greater ranges and more diverse scopes for what happens between organisations, initiatives, actors and stakeholders. We suggest that unpacking and expanding these could help this growing ‘field’ edge towards the possibilities ecosystem approaches offer. Below we explore two examples of constricting relational patterns, and pose some opportunities that could improve the impact of place-based work in Australia through an ecosystem approach.

Competition AND collaboration . . .

Both competition and collaboration play a role in creating momentum towards any kind of collective purpose or goal. However, when new infrastructure and new resources are put on the table, there can be both explicit and implicit tendencies for actors to seek the security of quite a binary position — it’s either about collaboration OR competition and everyone chooses a ‘side’ (whether explicitly or implicitly).

In an ecosystem approach we need a more sophisticated understanding that both competition and collaboration are important and can co-exist across the ecosystem and amongst actors (See for example, Fuller et al, 2019 who explore this dynamic in business contexts). There will be areas in which ‘field’ organisations or initiatives compete; there will be areas where some entities are better placed than others to make a contribution (again, see the typology mentioned earlier for some starter thoughts that could help inform exploring this aspect); and there will be areas where collaboration will deliver better outcomes.

Beyond just getting more nuanced and transparent about the roles different actors could play in relation to these different modes, we also suggest and illustrate in the Figure below, that bringing an ecosystem lens can also help us to recognise and appreciate how these seeming opposites could be combined to create new perspectives and opportunities to support more transformational agendas.

Traditionally in social infrastructure the development focus centres on growth of individual entities or projects as the measure of success in efficiency and/or effectiveness — more programs, more projects and more entities (with the underlying assumption that more leads to better) — rather than looking at how each contributes to deepening outcomes, and then focusing on the nature of relationships between entities in pursuit of this purpose. It is much more about looking at the texture of the whole, and how the dynamics of competition and collaboration across the ecosystem could spark a broader generosity that contributes to better outcomes and deeper innovation that benefits people and places.

In this way, the focus shifts to how parts of the ecosystem relate as a whole and thereby contribute to a genuine ‘more than the sum of the parts’ approach.

Duplication is not all bad . . .

One of the perennial relational patterns we see when it comes to resourcing social infrastructure is the fear of duplication. Neoliberal fiscal policies seem to have rather successfully reduced understandings of duplication to a myopic focus on improving efficiency.

However, in complex systems (which Places are) duplication is not necessarily a bad thing and includes attributes critical for enabling innovation and experimentation within complex systems. Understanding the important role duplication can play, particularly in relation to overlaps and redundancy, is a key perspective shift needed to move towards an ecosystem approach. This includes exploring the deeper roles overlaps and redundancy can play — particularly around ensuring continuity and contextual relevance, enabling flexibility of responses to match the diversity of need and context, and providing enough ‘slack’ for innovation and creativity within an ecosystem (Hollander, 2010).

And a more nuanced understanding of ‘amplification’ is needed . . .

As well as reframing duplication, we suggest an ecosystem approach to achieving collaborative place-based goals requires intentional engagement with amplification agendas and methods. However, too often amplification is understood simplistically, as being just about ‘scaling’. In complex systems, amplification is not about more or bigger services, programs, or capability building — it is about complementarity, roles and niches within the existing ecosystem, and understandings of scale that go beyond scaling big and out, but also up and deep (for more on this, drawing from a specific context, see our earlier post on right scaling).

In the Figure below we visualise a different way of thinking about how the two connect — and what could be explored if their relational qualities were intentionally intersected. We suggest exploring, through practical test initiatives in Places, how these kinds of evolved relational patterns will offer many opportunities for improving understanding of place-based ecosystem dynamics.

Arguing for more nuanced approaches to duplication and amplification is not about just adding ‘more’ to an ecosystem. It is about intentionally creating connections between and across programs, initiatives, organisations and actors to create the conditions that support generating resilience and innovation. Restricting the focus to efficiency and scaling ‘designs in’ a ‘thinness’ to an ecosystem, which can lead to brittleness and fragility in and between the actors involved.

Conclusion

As the place-based ‘field’ in Australia matures and interest continues to grow, there are both significant opportunities and many challenges to face. To date, those interested in development have primarily focused on funding and otherwise supporting key intermediary entities — as this is one way to grow the field as a whole.

To move into a next phase, one that lifts the gaze towards an ecosystem approach, will require much more focus on actors demonstrating their value directly and in relationship to other entities with an interest in the collective purpose. Our hunch is that this would lead to a reshaping of the trajectories, landscape and the entities that make up the ecosystem. Critical questions that should guide this reshaping include the perennial ones — who makes the decisions, and how the ecology of actors is resourced and supported over time.

Acting on current political and other commitments to strengthen ‘community-led’ decision-making will require place-based ecosystems with capacity and capability to engage in the necessary processes (for two very different examples see: https://tinyurl.com/8u2pzdb4 and https://tinyurl.com/yc43nftk).

Realising the ambition that ‘community-led’ approaches offer will also require genuine engagement with and involvement of those at the heart of this work — the communities, the people, the places who are leading the practice. How much these influence and shape the goals and activities of ecosystem actors should be a key indicator by which we measure the effectiveness of the nascent field.

Contributors to this post

Prof Ingrid Burkett and A/Prof Joanne McNeill

References

Adner, R. (2017). Ecosystem as Structure: An Actionable Construct for Strategy. Journal of Management, 43(1), 39–58.

Farnham, L., Nothmann, E., Tamaki, Z. and Daniels, C., (2020) Field-Building for Population-Level Change: How funders and practitioners can increase the odds of success, Bridgespan Group, March, available at: https://www.bridgespan.org/getmedia/6d7adede-31e8-4a7b-ab87-3a4851a8abac/field-building-for-population-level-change-march-2020.pdf

Fuller, J., Jacobides, M. & Reeves, M. (2019) The Myths and Realities of Business Ecosystems, MIT Sloan Management Review

Gueler, M., & Schneider, S. (2021) The resource-based view in business ecosystems: A perspective on the determinants of a valuable resource and capability, Journal of Business Research, Volume 133, pp. 158–169

Hollander, R. (2010) Rethinking Overlap and Duplication: Federalism and Environmental Assessment in Australia, Publius, Oxford University Press, Winter, Vol. 40, №1, pp. 136–170

O’Neil, Kevin. 2015. “How do you Build a Field? Lessons from Public Health.” Rockefeller Foundation, November 18. https://www. rockefellerfoundation.org/blog/how-do-you-build-a-field-lessons-from-public-health/

Reddel, T. (2017) Emerging patterns in place-based approaches: national and international perspectives, in Policy Roundtable Emerging patterns in place-based approaches: International perspectives Centre for Community Child Health November

Stachowiak, S., Gienapp, A. & Kalra, N. (2020a). Not Always Movements: Multiple

Approaches to Advance Large-Scale Social Change, available at:

Stachowiak, S., Gienapp, A. & Kalra, N. (2020b). Not Always Movements: Multiple

Approaches to Advance Large-Scale Social Change: Going Deeper, Building a Field, available at: https://tinyurl.com/yc6kp9dh

Should we move beyond ‘Field Building’? was originally published in The Good Shift on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

From time to time we like to share pieces from, or collaborate with, people whose work we greatly admire. The following piece from Hannah McDowall and Ruth Kennedy offering the experience of Canopy, The Public Office and the people of Canvey Island, Essex is a fantastic and generous contribution to the material on growing Imagination Infrastructure. (The Good Shift Team)

In March 2024 the Public Accounts Committee reported that “the Government is unable to provide any compelling examples of what Levelling Up funding has delivered so far”. But Canvey Island in Essex tells a different story. The County Council, working with its existing budget, has taken a unique approach to Levelling Up quite different to those apparently ‘shovel ready’ programmes which have received central government Levelling Up funding.

Canopy and ThePublicOffice have supported Essex colleagues to grow ‘imagination infrastructure’: ways of being with each other, seeing the world through the experiences of the community, and doing new things together intended to break us out of stuck patterns of inequity. The local partners are now developing five exciting new strands of work which respond to the imaginations of the community. This work has been cited in a successful bid to central government for £20 million of Levelling Up funding to develop Canvey Island town centre in a way which is supported by this new ‘imagination infrastructure’.

This is an approach to Levelling Up which will work wherever the local infrastructure is itself ‘shovel ready’: i.e. willing and able to be turned-over by the imaginations of the people, and to re-learn how to become the kind of soil that can nourish the wellbeing and creativity of all.

This extended article includes a detailed methodology of how we worked with the team to build imagination infrastructure over the course of six months.

Levelling up the life chances of children and families on Canvey Island

“For the last 20 years we’ve been noting the same problems, and more or less trying the same solutions! It’s rinse and repeat — we don’t learn from our mistakes.” (Community worker on Canvey Island)

This quote comes from a community worker who supports struggling families on Canvey Island in Essex. It’s the kind of thing people say when they are ready to learn and ready to change. These people are our dream team. With no direct financial investment to cover their time or to support new projects, activists from the public, business and third sector have come together to reimagine their relationships to one another and to the community.

Levelling Up is a long-term policy regime of the UK Government intended to address inequality in opportunity as it is regionally distributed across the United Kingdom. Headline big spends are on supposedly ‘shovel ready’ infrastructure projects such as improving digital connectivity, improving transport: investing public funds outside the Southeast to leverage twice as much private investment to those regions. But beneath these flashier national investments, local authorities are responding with their own commitments.

Focusing on the life chances of children and families living on Canvey Island, local leaders in Essex asked themselves:

“What is it about the way we work as community infrastructure (public, third sector and business) which prevents some children and families from flourishing and bringing their dreams and energy to shaping Canvey?”

This question demonstrates a deep understanding of systems thinking; it is in transforming the relationships between us that the most powerful change can be created. Our work as ThePublicOffice and Canopy has been to support them to build different ways of relating to one another and to the community, and from there to encourage them as they prototype projects through which they could practise and embed these new ways of relating.

Unlike the centrally funded flagship levelling up infrastructure programmes, we sought to build the infrastructure through which new ways of imagining Canvey Island could flow.

The Social Imagination Compass

Before jumping into the project journey it is helpful to share one of the tools that really resonated with the core leadership team: the ‘social imagination compass’. The compass invites us to notice how our established ways of ‘seeing’, ‘being’ and ‘doing’ shape (and limit) the future possibilities we are able to imagine. It invites us to transform these so that a whole new set of possible futures becomes imaginable. If you can’t imagine it you can’t create it. The compass tool supported the team to repeatedly explore the patterns of relating and doing that keep recreating the same outcomes. As leaders heard from community members about their places of need and exclusion, they were prompted to question how their own ways of being, seeing and doing sustain inequity.

The project journey

The lead officers at Castle Point Borough and Essex County Councils started by inviting all those who support children, young people and families on Canvey Island to join the project, working with us for six months. These included people from the voluntary sector, faith groups, local schools, youth services, local businesses, local authority officers and those in health services. A group of about 15 people committed to forming a ‘core leadership team’ that worked closely with us on the project.

The image above summarises the developmental journey the team went on over the course of the project journey (detailed methodology given at the end of the blog). Using the metaphor of a forest, we imagined the community infrastructure — represented by the core leadership team — to be the soil. Soil must offer the right kind of conditions for things to develop that enable the community (the forest ecosystem above the ground) to flourish.

The stages of the journey that happen below ground represent where we were working on ourselves and growing as a leadership group, noticing how we currently related to each other and the community, where we got stuck, and practising again and again to be, see and do differently. The stages above ground represent where we invited the insights of the community. These challenged us, offering an essential mirror, revealing where our existing approaches failed to meet their energy and needs. They also inspired us, revealing how they see the world, offering brilliant ideas and a desire to be active in shaping the future of Canvey (voices of the community can be accessed in the methodology section below).

After six months of listening to the community and practising new ways of being, seeing and doing with each other, the core leadership team have started prototyping different ways of working on stuck issues in partnership with the community. Some of these projects are totally new and some combine existing projects in ways which respond to our learning from the community stories. Their emergence has only been possible through investing in learning how to be, see and do differently. They include:

• a multi-agency group working to resolve persistent housing problems, specifically living conditions, experienced by 8 local households
• converting a bungalow into an indoor social space for young people
• creating a ‘community village’ space where the voluntary sector, public sector and community can come together to work in new connected ways
• support for parents of under 5s to network and support one another
• a new youth employment/internship programme

This work has been started without any new funding: the only new thing is how colleagues work with one another and with the community — the new imagination infrastructure. The lead officers are clear that although these prototypical pieces of work are encouraging fruits of the project, they are not the most important outcome: that is the culture change itself that has enabled them to arise.

As well as the prototype projects, Castle Point Borough Council has just won £20 million of central government levelling up funding to regenerate Canvey Island Town Centre. Those who led the bid are clear that our small project on imagination infrastructure supported the framing of how they will work with the community to deliver the work.

A ‘shovel ready’ project is one which digs us over

As the Canopy and PublicOffice support comes to an end, we have reflected with the Essex and Castle Point council officers that initiated the approach. They don’t know what the fullness of the ripple effect will be, but they are more excited by the culture change created: the good soil they have become, than the specifics of the outputs and outcomes achieved so far. This project was emergent, each gathering or listening phase revealed what we were to work on next; we often didn’t know where we were heading or where we would end up. But the Essex team believe their core leadership act has been to model trust in the process and to hold the uncertainty for the wider team as it finds its way. They’ve offered an open ‘yes’ to people’s involvement, no defined roles or gatekeeping, and as we’ve progressed more organisations have been eager to jump in. The question they now ask is ‘What does this soil need to stay active? What is their role in enabling the flow of oxygen it needs?’

‘Shovel ready’ is the name given to big-ticket levelling up infrastructure projects which claimed to be ready to go when they received funding in the first round of levelling up awards. As mentioned at the opening to this blog, the Public Accounts Committee found them to be a lot less ready than claimed. The Levelling Up grande fromages are right about one thing, this is soil work but not in the way they think it is. Being ‘shovel ready’ shouldn’t mean ‘We’ve got the answers, we know what to do, give us the money to do what we always do, it’ll work this time!’. Being ‘shovel ready’ should mean seeing yourselves as the soil from which any new initiative can emerge. It should mean being honest about what that soil needs to be revived. Being prepared to be dug over: being ready to learn together, build new relationships together, create new imagination infrastructure together, enabling radically new and different possibilities to grow.

Methodology in detail

Step 1: Gathering the willing

It’s important to say up-front that the budget for this piece of work has not included any funding to account for workers’ time in participating, nor resourcing for any new work arising from their new relationships and from listening to the community.

An initial meeting was held with community infrastructure organisations who run services for children and families on Canvey Island. These included schools, youth services, primary health services, faith communities, Active Essex, the Police, Libraries, local authority officers, food banks, and many more. They started to identify together the barriers to children flourishing that they witnessed in their work. Some of the most insightful things they noticed is that whilst there is considerable need for support within the community, some of the services on the island are underused by the community, and that the key inequalities which limit people’s opportunities are the same today as they have been for the last 10 years.

From this initial gathering, those who wished to continue this very emergent exploration were invited to form what we called the core leadership team. The commitment was to work together for six months to reconfigure their system-shaped seeing, being and doing, and learn more about how to centre the seeing, being and doing of the community.

A social imagination approach means using tools and facilitation approaches which take us away from our usual ways of thinking about things. It supports us to reveal the patterns of thinking and assumptions we make about what is possible right now, and create a space in which new things can be imagined un-constrained by those established mindsets.

Many of those in the core leadership group already knew each other, and it was very important to establish a new space for collaboration which was different to what had gone before.

Step two: building new foundations, imagining ourselves differently

We spent a day together working with a range of imagination practices. As the focus of this work is children and families, we started by remembering our 17 year old selves and asking ‘what was important to me at that time?’. Voicing the things our younger selves did, cared about and dreamt of was a powerful way to step outside of our existing focus on service delivery to this age group, as well as a very new way to connect to one another and discover shared and different back-stories. Hearing everyone we noticed:

‘At 17 we all faced decision points’

‘At 17 it felt like we were embarking on a big ‘next step’

‘We all have taken unexpected meandering routes from 17 to where we are now’

We asked ourselves: How could these insights inspire us to turn wholeheartedly towards the children and young people of Canvey Island as we start this work?

Making sense of levelling up for Canvey

Through a simple drawing exercise (called Rich Pictures), participants cast their imaginations 5 years forward to consider what levelling up would look like, feel like and mean to a particular family in the context they knew best. This revealed some values we wanted to stick to:

• Reducing barriers
• Broadening and informing people’s options
• Not being prescriptive
• Empowering the community — which might mean giving power away

Through a systemic constellations activity participants explored how the system (including themselves) is currently constellated and how and where it has positioned the community in its efforts to create change. This revealed some stuck dynamics particularly about who owns the change work, the habitual failure to place ownership within the community, and questions about how the community could be invited into a space of ownership and agency in a way that did not put a burden on them to fix things, or position them as ‘needing fixing’.

The beautiful invitation

We realised that we wanted to put the insights, dreams and energy of community members in the centre. That needs a new way of meeting: an appreciative way, a way that demonstrates their importance in shaping the Levelling Up work on Canvey. We needed a beautiful invitation. When you are invited to a special event it usually starts with a beautiful invitation. Maybe that’s a phone-call, maybe it’s a fancy card, maybe it’s a short video. Participants identified the voices which were often missing when planning happens (eg. the voice of SEN children/parents, or the voice of young people, single working parents, grandparents, but also some of the missing organisational stakeholders like businesses and some of the faith communities). Choosing the invitees they felt most knowledgeable of, participants formed small groups to imagine the beautiful invitation for that audience. What would it look like? What would it say? How would we reach them with the invitation? Who is best placed to make the invitation? Should it include ice cream?

As well as giving us lots of ideas, this exercise presented a stark challenge: how often do we think about the invitations we send out through emails, letters or surveys? Are they beautiful invitations to a conversation, or do they feel like a tax bill?

Committing to new ways of being, seeing and doing as leaders of this work

As we went through these immersive imaginings, we reflected on the ways of being, seeing and doing we wanted to uphold as we formed the core leadership group. We agreed the following:

• We would show up as ourselves not our job title, as compassionate people eager to learn flex and feel together. We will look for strengths, and we will listen to the community ahead of anything else.
• We will trust one another, share our ideas and creativity, we’ll prioritise relationship building between us and we’ll be honest and make space for reflection. This includes offering critical friendship, challenging and supporting where needed and being alert to when the tendency to maintain the status quo shows up.
• We are going to own this thing, give it the time it needs and keep showing up.
• We’ll think systemically, bringing our networks with us.
• We are committed to action, using our influence and assets to do new things together.
• We’ll use imaginative ways to plan and do, this should be fun for us and the community.

Step 3: deep listening

Having established our foundations as a core leadership team we all agreed that the next step was to speak to young people and families on Canvey to hear how they experience life on the Island, what they dream of being better and what they hold dear.

Over the summer holidays we visited holiday clubs and the beach and talked to families about their experiences of living on Canvey, what inspires them and what they find challenging. These conversations were prompted by images which people of all ages were invited to reflect on and use as metaphors to prompt their thinking. We met together to unpack what we had heard collaboratively in a sensemaking session. As we shared the stories people had shared with us, it was profound to see common issues emerge. These brief conversations gave us initial hunches about the themes which matter most:

• Canvey pride and community strength — we have a long history of community support and neighbourliness.
• Not enough for young people to do socially, especially inside, and not enough work or apprenticeship opportunities
• Not enough further education / employment opportunities for young people on the island. Most young people leave the island for apprenticeships, internships or employment opportunities.
• Infrastructure challenges — Our housing costs are very high, housing stock is in poor repair and new builds are aimed at middle class professionals. Because there are only two roads on and off the island, traffic is a nightmare and the cost of buses is very high.
• Safe spaces — community policing has fallen away and some people feel vulnerable
• Design with people — we don’t get a chance to shape what happens on Canvey
• Finding out what’s going on — it’s hard to know what is going on in terms of community activities and support services, we don’t know how to find out.
• Schools as trusted community anchors — although trust in local authority staff and services might be low in places, people really trust their schools. Can schools signpost parents to good services that they can trust?

Having developed these themes through short conversations we wanted to get a better sense of how they show up in the detail of people’s lives, how they intersect with the economic, social, education, infrastructure and health challenges at the heart of the levelling up agenda. So we did seven in depth interviews with 4 community members and 3 community facing organisations (links to these below).

The four people we met in the community were so inspiring. They identified 18 challenges they saw on Canvey, but offered 30 solutions! These can be viewed in the story write-ups.

Community members:

Lucy’s Story

Helen’s Story

Brodie’s Story

Bernice’s Story

Community Facing Organisations:

Sara’s Story

Emma’s Story

Alex’s Story

Step 4: dreaming

Those in the core leadership team invited their wider networks, anyone they thought had a role to play in working differently to support children and families on Canvey Island. These included civil society, public sector and private businesses, who were beautifully invited to join them in a big dreaming session which put the community stories at the centre. They immersed themselves in the stories and used the passions and ideas they heard to guide them in proposing short prototype projects through which they could practise these new ways of being, seeing and doing together.

“None of what we heard and read at the workshop was a surprise. None of us can impact the biggest issues single-handedly, so we end up doing lots of small things that don’t really make a difference long term.” (Core leadership member)

From the many ideas prompted by the community stories. Four were chosen for a first round of prototyping. These were:

1. Boosting Canvey pride: offering activities for young people through a Canvey Festival
2. Services ‘village’: revive community spaces which have fallen into decline by bringing services together, increasing visibility and accessibility in the community and encouraging joint working and signposting.
3. Collaborative Community Space: create a shared community space, which is flexibly used and stewarded by the residents to empower communities to thrive and create collaborative solutions.
4. Lived experience research into the housing challenges: take the lessons we have learned about deep listening to do focused work on the issue of living conditions, this can then be used to influence and design housing support which listens instead of ignores local residence.

Step 5: learning by doing the 100 day challenge

Our work has been to provide the initial imaginal grit in the oyster which will irritate and provoke new imagination infrastructure to support levelling up on Canvey Island. The immersive imagination practice we have offered them has enabled the core leadership team to:

• See the situation differently: to catch a new view out of their side-eye of themselves and the community. To see the community as the yeast from which good change will grow rather than a problem to be fixed. This has involved recognising their strengths but also owning their own stuckness.
• Be together differently: Working in communities where the need is mushrooming and resources and shrinking is incredibly stressful. It requires us to put on psychological armour, so we don’t become defeated or burnt out. We create ways of distancing ourselves; protection from the great sadness of our inadequate capacity. In short it stifles generosity and creativity and upholds a deficit mindset that takes a hold of us individually and collectively. But by opening ourselves wholeheartedly to our own imaginations and the imaginations of the community we have stepped into a space of collective possibility, where we want to dream and we want to try and we want to be in it together.
• Doing the work differently: our seeing and being different won’t become real until we do together differently. Design-led prototyping offers an enabling structure to hold the values and principles of the being and seeing at the forefront as we try some doing.

Our final offering was basic prototyping training, and light touch coaching support for a ‘100 day challenge’ to put each of the four ideas generated during our dreaming session into action. The lead at Essex County Council also offered a regular 30 minute checking-in slot to offer encouragement and connection between the groups.

As more of the system has connected to itself and found ways to say yes to new possibilities, the core leadership team size and the number of prototyping groups has grown with new ideas emerging all the time.

The prototyping groups continued to reach out to others locally who could join them in progressing the work, flexing their plans to incorporate each others’ expertise and capacity. The three groups looking at the festival, a community infrastructure hub and a collaborative community space have been working together to deepen their ideas and have now recruited members of the community to join them as they design and plan the different aspects of the work. Officers from Castle Point Borough Council have successfully applied to central government for £20 million to develop the town centre. Everyone agrees that the conditions this funding arrives into are much better than the conditions which were present a year ago. This is what ‘shovel ready’ really looks like.

The Dept of Work and Pensions have also been invited to join the prototyping approach. They are eager to work with local businesses to create more employment opportunities for young people on the island but have struggled to get engagement with local businesses. They have now connected to ‘We Rise’, a youth movement on Canvey Island who have good connections with employers and together they are progressing a youth employment prototype.

A bungalow is being converted into a new social space for young people. This was a need that the young people who told us their stories repeatedly highlighted. Instead of having to drive that alone, the youth services involved in the project have been supported by other community organisations who they met and developed relationships with through this project.

The housing research project has morphed into an action research project. All the right people from housing, NHS, domestic services etc. have committed to work together to address the poor living conditions of 8 households. As an action research project they will be noticing not only what difference they have been able to make to these households but what are the ways of working that have enabled the solutions to flow, so they can reproduce it beyond the initial 8.

Another new prototype has also emerged to support the sharing of information about services and activities for parents of children under 5 years old. The intention is to grow and energise networks of parents so that they can reach out to each other for advice and recommendations. The starting point is to offer first aid training to parents as a means to both support them in keeping their children safe but also build relationships with them to take the deeper intention of a peer network forward.

All of this new work has arisen without any extra money for project delivery, it is simply mobilising differently the resource already there. Building the imagination infrastructure to be, see and do together differently is the only part which has received new resourcing.

An Imagination Infrastructure Approach To Levelling Up was originally published in The Good Shift on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A three-part series

At Griffith Centre for Systems Innovation (GCSI) over recent years we have supported numerous teams tasked with developing organising infrastructures and intermediation for achieving bold ambitions, including:

• standing up national sector development bodies;
• establishing intermediaries that are holding systemic change agendas — locally and nationally; and
• creating field-building organisations tasked with everything from growing capabilities to building markets .

We have also evaluated and catalysed ecosystem approaches to collective action and investment, and tested governing infrastructures for Challenge-led Innovation that aim to support steps towards complex goals such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s).

These experiences have led us to reflect deeply on how governance arrangements of complex, multi-stakeholder intermediaries, platforms, organisations and/or initiatives could better support bold ambitions and create real and robust foundations for collective action.

We’ve distilled these reflections into a three-part exploration of governance in and for complexity.

• In the first of this three-part series we explore how these reflections translate into organisational landscapes — what we’ve learnt about modelling collective governance within intermediary organisations.
• Part two will explore governing beyond intermediary organisations — where there are no formal structures, but governance functions across ‘ecosystems’ or ‘portfolios’ that encompass diverse actions and stakeholders are still essential.
• Part three will dive into whether and how new technologies could support governance in and for complexity.

Collective governance within intermediary organisations

The quest to catalyse large-scale change or shift systems often begins with or is supported through organisations — that is, containing structures that enable a group of people to work collectively in a coordinated way for a shared purpose.

With coordination at the heart of these efforts, increasingly, many of these organisations are taking on ‘intermediating’ and/or ‘platforming’ roles, with some combination of the following aims:

• providing the mediating and organising mechanisms needed to draw together diverse groups of people,
• catalysing collective sensemaking and initiating collaborative action;
• increasing the flow of resourcing (funds, etc) across ecosystems; and/or
• generating learning, knowledge and other forms of resourcing across an ecosystem to support transformative change.

Though some may consider it the ‘boring’ part of transformational work, our observation is that often governance is the element that ultimately enables or undoes collective action initiatives. In complex change contexts, the governance of these entities needs to be acting as both the glue and the compass guiding the collective action.

The role of Intermediary Organisations as catalysts for innovation and transformation

Intermediaries are entities that can take a variety of forms (e.g. organisations, support services, initiatives or bodies), and are essentially focused on enabling the formation of collaborative ecosystems. In this role, they are usually charged with initiating and/or maintaining infrastructures that support ecosystem actors to more effectively work towards transformational agendas.

Intermediary organisations are widely understood as essential infrastructure in commercial and financial landscapes (see Vaughn Tan’s great analysis here.)

More recently they have attracted attention as core to effecting systemic transitions towards sustainable and regenerative futures (See for example Ehnert, et al. 2022 & 2023). While they have received less attention in the space of catalysing social transformation, they are increasingly becoming part of the landscape of practice in spaces like ‘field building’ (see Cabaj, 2021; Hussein et al, 2018; SVA, 2022). Below we have illustrated various roles we’ve seen intermediaries playing to support innovation towards regenerative and distributive futures.

All intermediaries aim to serve the ecosystem — but diversity and ‘right fit’ are key to effectiveness

Here at GCSI, we have been drawing from work undertaken in sustainability research (see particularly Kivimaa et al, 2019) to unpack the beginnings of an intermediary typology — aiming to make more visible the different kinds of intermediaries that are working to support systems transformation, particularly around social innovation, place-based work, service transformation, and social justice fields.

Intermediaries in the space of sustainability transitions and systems shifting are starting to proliferate across many ‘change agenda’ spheres of activity. But (in Australia at least), to date we have not reached a level of maturity around this work where we differentiate, distinguish, and otherwise make clear the diversity of forms and approaches that can and are being taken. This can mean we expect all intermediaries to do ‘everything’, and/or that we fail to recognise the many different ways that intermediation can support transformation.

We have not named individual intermediaries in this typology — but we have a hunch that in Australia, most are probably primarily either ‘field-building’ or ‘grassroots’ focused — meaning we likely have a predominance of types in a couple of areas and little intentional focus in other activity domains.

Systems change often requires multi-pronged approaches, and so skewing and gaps in the intermediary space could have significant impacts on progress towards transitional objectives.

Below we translate and reframe some of the latest sustainability research on intermediaries (eg. Janssen et al, 2020; Ehnert et al, 2022; Kivimaa et al, 2019) to refine and focus understandings and so begin to generate a more nuanced typology for intermediaries. Of course, in practice, the boundaries around these roles may be somewhat porous — with some entities sitting across more than one type and/or engaging in a mixture of roles that draw on some portion of the characteristics within any one type. Nevertheless, as this sphere of activity is at a nascent phase of development, at least in terms of ‘thinking frameworks’ that help to progress effective action, we think it’s a useful exercise to tease out some of the nuances.

We offer this as a ‘first cut’ typology to support the development of more nuanced thinking and practice about the roles of intermediary entities in the space of systemic social change; including around what the ‘right fit’ types may be for a given context, and to improve understandings of whether a ‘right mix’ of functions is developing to support any particular ‘shift’ agenda.

For example, do we have multiple of one type and none in other crucial areas? These are good questions for those establishing and those resourcing intermediary functions to — collectively — consider.

As always, we welcome input, debate and discussion from colleagues around the usefulness of developing this kind of typology and on how to further refine it — including what other kinds of intermediaries may warrant surfacing in the context of shifting social systems.

Governing intermediaries for System Shifting: Possibilities, Constraints and Learnings

In this section we draw on the typology outlined above to sharpen our thinking around two key issues we have identified that intermediaries — and those who support them — face in effectively performing their roles around enabling systemic social change. But first, let’s be clear what we mean by ‘governance’.

The Landscape of Governance — foundational concepts

Governance includes all the structures and processes undertaken across an organisation or initiative that support and enable people to work together towards shared or aligned outcomes (see this description from the Governance Institute of Australia). Some suggest that governance includes both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ elements (see for example, the fabulous work of the Futures Centre).

Elements of governance themselves stretch and evolve in context, and our view is that all these elements include both hard and soft aspects which become more or less visible in different situations or contexts. Below we illustrate key elements of governance.

The remit of intermediaries — to support and enable diverse actors and stakeholders to achieve complex and ambitious goals — necessarily requires working across multiple functions as illustrated above.

There is often some blurriness around these functions, including in the boundaries between. As a result, in practice, traditional governing infrastructures can be stretched a long way beyond what they were originally designed or envisaged as containing.

In the remainder of this piece, we explore two particular ‘stretches’ that we’ve experienced working with and on intermediaries.

Biodegradability, Composting + Shape-Shifting

Systems shifting work is both generative and generational — it does not progress through or within programmatic, political and predictable approaches or timeframes. So, it is unlikely that singular intermediaries will be able to play anything but a part in a much bigger process (despite rhetoric to the contrary!) Understanding the generational nature and the horizons of transformation (see: https://tinyurl.com/3pxuahk2) can help us appreciate that such change requires an ecology of intermediary actors — and that this ecology will shift and change over time. Ultimately, we think this means we need to understand not only the structure and roles of intermediaries, but their lifecycles over time.

Unfortunately, intermediaries in the social change landscape are susceptible to becoming institutionalised at different points in their life cycles — slipping into a focus on their own survival rather than on their overall purpose and as part of a larger ecology. Within the broader system, this can also lead to competition between intermediaries emerging, which can over time impact progress towards broader change goals:

“When a transition progresses it is likely that less intermediation will be required and many actors performing such roles become redundant. This expectation is likely to create battles within and between intermediaries, taking attention away from their intermediation activities, with potential consequences on the speed of the transition” (Kivimaa et al, 2019;p.1073).

If we are to truly transform or transition systems, then we need to understand the role of single intermediaries within a broader ecology of intermediation — for example, drawing on our ‘straw man’ typology, the overall mix and the nature of relationships becomes more visible.

In addition to greater clarity around role type/s, to really attune the governance function to long-term change ambitions, the Boards of intermediaries must really grapple with what governance means in the context of generational change. Practically, that might mean that the governance of intermediaries needs to include intentional and ongoing consideration of:

• Balancing internal and external focus — i.e. between organisational and ecosystem responsibilities — including keeping a close eye on whether the intermediary they are governing continues to be delivering the ‘best benefit’ into the ecosystem, and whether the trajectory or direction of travel towards ambitious goals continues to make sense;
• Building biodegradability into the design — including processes for monitoring and identifying when ecosystems have evolved, and so when different kinds of intermediation and shifts in intermediary types and/or functions may be needed. Boards of intermediaries need to encourage not only growth and innovation, but also address purposeful decline and ‘excavation’ that enables the ecology to flourish, even if that means individual intermediaries ‘compost’ their learnings and transform into new ways of working.

Using the intermediary typology provides language and a lens that the intermediary itself and its ecosystem stakeholders can use to probe for ‘right fit’ and ‘best benefit’ at various stages of the lifecycle.

Where needs and/or context have shifted, we think this may make it easier to explore what organisational design features could be evolved to better serve the overall change agenda — so as not to get distracted by maintaining the entity’s status quo or become ‘stuck’ in one approach.

Engagement, Representation + Power

“All governance involves power: more powerful actors receive more favourable outcomes than less powerful ones; equality and fairness are rare” (Morrison et al, 2019; p.2).

As the quote above suggests, acknowledgement of power flows and relations in governance and the consequent implementation of processes aimed at addressing structural inequities is a constant issue raised across research and practice — particularly in initiatives that are committed to social or transformational agendas.

The design of intermediary organisational structures that effectively support transformational agendas requires both collaboration and collective action inside the organisations, as well as external support from ecosystems that are critical to moving in the direction of their bold goals.

To achieve this, the governance of these organisations needs to demonstrate true multi-stakeholder engagement in action. Very often the default approach to engagement in governance is ‘representation’, so that multiple stakeholder groups have a representative either on the board or at certain forums, committees or other venues where decision-making processes occur. However, there are also a range of other ways in which multiple stakeholder groups can be engaged — as members (and particularly voting members, as often they are the purpose ‘keepers’) — as illustrated below.

Where Members are part of the organisational design of a socially focused intermediary — voting members are often those who are closest to and impacted by the purpose of the work. When the purpose includes shifting power relations (a common aspiration), this is often approached through seeking to improve the participation of people and communities who have previously been excluded through the election of ‘representatives’ into the governance function (such as a Board). However, in the whirl of daily operations it can be easy to forget that voting members can and often should hold power and decision-making authority beyond that of voting for elected board members.

The critical thing is not ‘what’ form the engagement takes, but rather, how it is resourced, made meaningful, integrated with decision-making, and transparently communicated to all actors involved with the initiative. This always requires a deep exploration of power. This is not only critical, but also complex and (usually) long-running and ongoing work.

Intermediary goals around improving participation and/or representation should trigger thoughtful and ongoing reflections on who the ‘owners’ of the purpose and the outcomes are, how they are participating, and what that means for governing structures and processes over time. We outline some of the key questions we asked of one intermediary grappling with these issues in the figure below.

One of the key tensions in governing for collective outcomes is centred on how principles are reflected in governance behaviours and how these evolve over time as context shifts — particularly if there are multiple stakeholders involved.

For example, if one of the principles is that governance practices should reflect and embody the intent of equity principles, how this is reflected in and demonstrated by the processes, responsibilities, culture and behaviours of the governing bodies should be a key concern of the intermediary. This requires active resourcing — by all those with an interest in the outcomes, but also through allocation of resources to specific roles, communication platforms, rhythms and time.

Some of the complexity of governing an organisation or entity that includes multiple and diverse stakeholders can be navigated with right-fit structures and rules. However, careful articulation of intention and a focus on more intangible infrastructures like culture, norms and behaviours also need ongoing attention and monitoring.

There are no easy answers — but there are many lessons to be learnt from intermediaries involved in governing various types of collective action that have sought to address these issues through governance structures and processes, working across social and environmental issues and in complex contexts.

Designing in different ‘choice levels’ is one way this has been approached — whereby different groups of people are involved in different types of decision-making” (see Sacks, 2024; p.34, and Sacks & Galabo, 2022, for examples from work around Commons governance) both for accountability purposes, but also to enable effective power-sharing.

We think that the draft Intermediaries Typology can help with thinking through what decision-making structures might be ‘best fit’ to support the purpose goals of the different types outlined — including who needs to be involved at different stages and in relation to different issues.

Conclusion: what it means for how to start, proceed and implement

Initiatives that seek to govern complex, multi-stakeholder actions will be most effective in making progress towards their transformational agendas if their governance structures and processes are intentionally designed for this purpose. We offer the thinking outlined here as a contribution to moving beyond ‘one-size fits all’ approaches to governance and towards adopting leadership principles that are not only able to engage with complexity but are purposefully designed to navigate uncertain conditions and evolve with shifting contexts.

Contributors to this post:
Prof Ingrid Burkett and A/Prof Joanne McNeill

References:

Cabaj, M., (2021) Evaluating the Results of Intermediary Organisations: A Paper for Intermediaries in Australia, Paul Ramsay Foundation: available at: https://www.paulramsayfoundation.org.au/news-resources/measuring-the-contribution-of-intermediary-organisations-e

Ehnert, F. 2023. Bridging the old and the new in sustainability transitions: The role of transition intermediaries in facilitating urban experimentation. Journal of Cleaner Production 417: 138084.

Ehnert, F., M. Egermann, and A. Betsch. 2022. The role of niche and regime intermediaries in building partnerships for urban transitions towards sustainability. Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning 24 (2): 137–159.

Janssen, M., Bogers, M. and Wanzenböck, I. (2020) Do systemic innovation intermediaries broaden horizons? A proximity perspective on R&D partnership formation, Industry and Innovation, 27:6, 605–629, DOI: 10.1080/13662716.2019.1618701

Miller-Dawkins, M. (2022) Growing fields, shifting systems A guide to effectively funding field-building intermediaries, Paul Ramsay Foundation, available at: https://www.paulramsayfoundation.org.au/news-resources/growing-fields-shifting-systems

Hussein, T., Plummer, M. & Breen, Bl. (2018). How Field Catalysts Galvanize Social Change. Stanford Social Innovation Review. Winter

Kivimaa, P., Boon, W., Hyysalo, S. and Klerkx, L. (2019) Towards a typology of intermediaries in sustainability transitions: A systematic review and a research agenda, Research Policy, vol. 48, pp. 1062–1075

Morrison, T. Adger, W., Brown, K., Lemos, M., Huitema, D., Phelps, J., Evans, L., Cohen, P., Song, A., Turner, R., Quinn, T., Hughes, T. (2019) The black box of power in polycentric environmental governance, Global Environmental Change, Volume 57, 2019, 101934,

Sacks, J. (2024). #commonize studio: Commons-making through studio experimentalism. [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Lancaster University, UK.

Sacks, J. and Galabo, R. (2022). A framework for Infrastructuring Commons Creation. In: Bruyns, G., Wei, H. (Eds) With Design: Reinventing Design Models. IASDR 2021. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4472-7_67

Sahni, N. Matsui, E. and Hult, L. (2017) When Building a Field Requires Building a New Organization, The Bridgespan Group, London, 26 May

Social Ventures Australia (2022) Insights on Australian field-building intermediaries and their funding journeys towards sustainable impact

Governance in and for complexity was originally published in The Good Shift on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Impact measurement is everywhere — in social change work, business, government — and yet it can feel like the more we hear about the importance of measuring impact, the less seems to actually change!

Over the last five years here at GCSI we have been involved in many projects where ‘impact measurement’ has been core to the work. Sometimes we have also played a role in measuring impact inside projects or initiatives, or helped to structure measurement and learning approaches alongside the work. In this blog we reflect on our learnings in the process and share how we are framing the landscape that is emerging in the impact measurement territory.

Measuring Impact — A Critical Starting Point

Every culture and society has a connection to measurement in some form — through narrative, country and landscape, navigation, story. Yet, much of what has informed the measurement of change has a much narrower cultural story — one that is grounded in Western philosophical and mathematical traditions. And so, much of the narrative underpinning impact measurement as it is commonly understood today is focused on the utility and benefit of measuring ‘progress’, with overtures of moral imperatives — as in, are you progressing towards the ‘right’ destination’?

As ‘measuring impact’ is now such a pervasive activity, we think it is important to unpack the ways in which measuring impact is actually the product of particular cultural and historical paradigms; whilst professing to present an objective assessment. There is a need for caution, critical reflection and decolonising practices when it comes to measuring impact (see for example, Joyce, 2020, Impact Measurement. A cautionary tale). This is a necessary starting point.

Measuring Impact has a History which is Shaping Current Convergences

Whilst the history of measurement is long and rich, in the context of caution and critical reflection we would like to highlight three historical threads that have shaped the landscape of modern impact measurement. These threads overlap but have been largely separated by disciplinary and contextual boundaries. Understanding the narratives inherent in these threads can also offer some insight into questions we should be asking ourselves, however we are using impact measurement at this moment in time.

Thread One — How Measurement became Core to Solving Problems

The first moment we’d like to highlight sits are the end of a revolution and transition and in the heartland of colonial expansion: London, in the 1840s and 1850s, just as the Industrial Revolution was transforming landscapes in England, Europe, and in the lands which were experiencing new waves of colonisation through population expansion. The story of how John Snow challenged the beliefs and practices of the time by collecting and analysing data, measuring the spread of cholera, and isolating the patterns and connection between those who had succumbed to the disease eventually led to significant shifts in public health, infrastructure and social policy across London and then more broadly (noting that this actually took a long time to eventuate!).

We start with this story because ‘data’ and ‘measurement’ have become embedded in how we think about creating change and solving problems. A field such as epidemiology helps us to remember the very real and powerful role that data can play in saving lives and shaping society, policy, practices and people’s beliefs and behaviour. However, it pays to remember that the ‘data’ itself did not generate the change — there were still powerful norms, ideologies and narratives that had to be challenged in order to effect change. This highlights that data and measurement are not enough in and of themselves to ‘solve problems’!

It is also worth noting the nature of the ‘problem’ here — it was complicated and involved ‘unknowns’ for sure. However, it was the type of problem that could be addressed with rigorous and careful research and analysis, by an expert who could help establish clear cause and effect relationships. It was not a complex, multifaceted problem — in the way that issues like addressing multigenerational disadvantage, or responding to the climate crisis, manifest. This is important because the narrative of ‘data + measurement = solutions’ has become embedded in political, policy and funding decision-making — and yet in complex contexts this narrative is just not that easy!

Some of the questions this story surfaces, that we should be asking ourselves are:

• How is the collection of data and evidence, the measurement of impact, shaping our current beliefs, institutions and practices?
• What are the frontiers of impact that are reshaping the world at this time of history?
• How are we shaping data and measurement in relation to the context and the type of ‘problem’ we are responding to?

Thread Two: How ‘Value’ came to be Embedded in Impact Measurement

So much of the impact measurement landscape focuses on how we ‘value’ and create trade-offs by establishing numerical ‘rankings’ of factors — and then often linking them to financial proxies to establish ‘value’.

Cost-benefit analysis is one of the core methods that has featured as a way to compare potential or perceived impacts of activity. Developed in the context of military and public works across two different continents (Europe and the US), cost-benefit analysis grew out of a desire for comparable, rational, politically justifiable measures that could demonstrate the ‘value’ of undertaking large-scale infrastructure work such as building roads, canals and railways.

The history of this method is a fascinating journey into how much we have come to trust mathematical measures to assess costs, benefits and reduce risks — particularly when much research now demonstrates the limitations:

“Forecasters, policymakers, and scholars tend to assume that cost-benefit forecasts are more or less accurate, when in fact they are highly inaccurate and biased, at an overwhelmingly high level of statistical significance” (Flyvbjerg and Bester, 2021).

Mathematical measures of impact have also developed out of other ‘risk’ based fields such as insurance — which started processes of “valuing lives” based on statistics and contributed to the creation of numerical foundations for assessing risk, often on foundations of inequity (see the brilliant analysis undertaken by Dan Bouk, 2015).

The lessons from the exponential growth of the use of such methods should prompt us to ask questions related to

• What assumptions and biases are built into the methods, and what does that mean for what should be considered in applying them to decision-making?
• How do numerical methods and the monetisation of measurement create a narrative of certainty and security when many of the contexts we are working in are complex, shifting and unsettled; and what should that alert us to in adopting such methods?

Thread Three: How Predicting and Evaluating Impacts became Separated

Impact Assessment and Evaluation evolved from different starting points, but interestingly have some overlapping narratives focused on how we determine the worth or value of an activity or intervention. The origins of ‘evaluation’ sits across two connected streams (Alkin and King, 2016) . One linked to testing — the start of quantitative assessment in the context of schools in the 18th Century, measuring the performance of individuals in terms of their academic achievement (Hogan, 2007). The other stream related to the use of social research methods in the assessment of broader, collective endeavours such as projects, programs and initiatives. For example, during the Great Depression in the UK, when the public expected government to address record high levels of unemployment there was a significant push to evaluate how the social programs that were funded actually delivered impacts (Alkin and King, 2016). The professional field of evaluation emerged in 1960s and 1970s (Madaus et al, 1983).

Impact Assessment started as a way to determine both potential value and consequences of planned interventions, so that both decision-makers and people affected could understand and participate in responding (see Jacquet, 2014). While it started in the environmental field, it has since grown to encompass assessment of potential social and cultural impacts. The history of Environmental Impact Assessments is relatively brief — with some historians claiming it started with forestry projects in the US in the 1970s, and others taking the history back into mining and extractive industries in the 1960s, often starting with the 1967 example of copper mining in Puerto Rico as the starting point of a movement towards EIA measurement (see Mayda, 1993). Though EIAs are now often embedded in legal and policy frameworks nationally and in more regional jurisdictions, questions remain about whether they actually protect people, places or the planet (see for example, Singh et al, 2020).

The thread that ultimately connects them centres on how we define and determine impact. Both evaluation and impact assessments in the main, focus on relatively small units of activity — in the form of projects, programs or initiatives. Whilst it may appear rational to assume that such projects can achieve outputs and perhaps outcomes, IMPACT is more associated with cumulative actions — where the whole is greater than its parts. So, the questions that should be drawn from both these fields, relate to how we build coherent narratives of impact across parts. In other words, we may have thousands of project-based assessments and evaluations but still have no real understanding of any change, or of the cumulative impact of all these projects. If that’s the case, then how do we really know that any of the activities are generating positive momentum in the desired direction of travel? And in the case of impact assessments, if every one of the 500 industry projects that we assess has completed an environmental impact assessment but none reference the assessments in the 499 others, then how could we really hope to understand the environmental or social impacts potentially created across a particular region or sector?

Why is Impact Measurement so Ubiquitous at this Moment in Time?

We are working in a critical moment — the increasing recognition of climate and biodiversity crises, the growing challenges to peace and democracy, the increasingly evident and grotesque expansion of inequality are unsettling and generate a heightened sense of uncertainty.

While many proponents of impact measurement argue that such methods aim to ‘reduce risk’, it may be more accurate to suggest that they are an aid to navigating uncertainty (for a compelling analysis of the difference see Vaughn Tan’s work — https://vaughntan.org/). The more uncertain things become, the more the push for methods that help us generate a sense of certainty grows — and we think this should also make us a little cautious about the efficacy of those methods. Impact measurement is proliferating across industries, sectors and disciplines — as we seek to understand the real differences being made, reach ambitious goals for transformation and ask questions about what we could do better to address what needs to change. In the diagram below we have collected together some of the imperatives behind the growth of impact measurement at this critical moment.

Making Sense of the Impact Measurement Soup: A Matrix as a Starting Point

Increasingly the landscape of Impact Measurement is crowded, dynamic and contains a diversity of frameworks and approaches — which can mean we end up feeling like we’re looking at alphabet soup.

As we’ve traversed this landscape we’ve tried to make sense of it in various ways, and have begun to explore a matrix to represent the constellation of frameworks, approaches and models we’ve encountered in the process. As shown below, the matrix has two axes:

The horizontal axis provides us with a “time” delineation. Dividing the left and right sides between retrospective (ex post) and prospective (ex-ante) approaches to measuring impact.

More specifically the retrospective quadrants include approaches/frameworks/models that ask about events in the past: What impact did we have? While the prospective quadrants include approaches that ask about the possible future: What impact will we have?

The vertical axis provides us with a “purpose” delineation. Dividing the upper and lower parts between Management + Evaluation.

The top-level Management quadrants focus on methods that count quantifiable data (i.e. time, dollars, widgets). These frameworks tend to measure outputs from activities/interventions. They tend to ask the question what happened or what could happen and rely significantly on quantitative data.

The bottom-level Evaluation quadrants include a range of approaches that look at a broader range of questions beyond counting. They include questions like: what changed and why? What was or might the interrelationships between changes be? They tend to draw on a mixture of quantitative and qualitative data to create a more cohesive understanding of changes that occurred, are occurring or could occur.

A word of warning: As with all frameworks, this matrix is a “construct” — a way for us to engage in sense-making and to critically discuss how impact measurement is being undertaken in our current context. We are sharing this as a starting point for a broader discussion. We welcome feedback, reflections, and challenges around how we have represented different approaches — we are not seeking a ‘true representation’, but rather, a starting point for dialogue about how all the methods that now abound are connected, entangled and constructed.

We hope that will enable us not only to make sense of the methods, but also to engage in some rigorous discussions about the purpose of impact measurement and the challenges we should be raising as it becomes accepted as the norm in any ‘change’ oriented work

Measuring Impact in Complexity and Uncertainty

There are growing calls to ‘act’ for change — and equally loud calls for acting in ways that will actually result in progress or real shifts towards particular outcomes — sustainability, regenerative futures, justice, equity for example. And this is the conundrum that ultimately faces all impact measurement approaches purporting to help address the challenges we face.

The central question is ‘how will we know’ if anything is changing? But this is also where things get hard and messy in complex contexts. In the complex, entangled realities that characterise all the above challenges, we need to be wary of methods that privilege ‘causation’, certainty and targets (for a brilliant analysis see: Snowden https://thecynefin.co/the-banality-of-measurement/). On the other hand, we should also question methods that take the view of complexifying everything so that the hard and real conversations about whether and how things are changing become opaque and accessible only to the few.

In complex contexts we need methods that help us navigate forward in a direction — but, importantly, don’t fixate or confuse that direction with a destination (again, see Snowden, https://thecynefin.co/start-a-journey-with-a-sense-of-direction/). That raises questions for most of the methodologies in the matrix that focus on targets or boil things down to singular notions of ‘value’. These create the illusion of certainty, but may not actually help us figure out whether we are moving in a direction that is good for people, places or the planet.

In complex contexts we should also explore questions around the granularity of what we are measuring, and what that means for the potential that actions may have the kinds of impacts we are seeking. It is getting too common for impact measurement to focus on the granularity of individual projects, companies or initiatives with the expectation that measurement at these levels will somehow add up to overall impact across much broader fields such as sectors, industries and even systems. Measurement does not generate magic.

We have used a broader exploration of impact measurement to explore our own individual journeys in this work. And we have mapped where we think our work has predominantly sat, and where we find ourselves drawn to or working towards. As we work in complex contexts we are increasingly moving towards a focus on learning and experimentation (trying, testing, learning) as a way to figure out next steps in the direction of travel — navigational learning. Within this, our hypothesis is that ‘monitoring’ lead data, with rapid-cycle integration of learning, is a much more useful focus. We try as much as possible to avoid the delusion that we can ‘hit targets’ or set up perfect logic frames as we grapple with organising ourselves within and across tangled networks and practices.

We are interested in how others are framing ‘impact measurement’ in the context of complex challenges and systems shifting work, and what you are seeing that is helping with sensemaking in this increasingly crowded space. We offer these thoughts in the spirit of dialogue — so please feel free to share thoughts and ideas!

Contributors to this post and graphics:
Prof Ingrid Burkett and A/Prof Joanne McNeill

References and Sources:

Abelson, P. and Abelson,P., Cost-Benefit Analysis: Then and Now (April 5, 2022). TTPI — Working Paper 6/2022, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4080682 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4080682

Alkin, M. and King, J. (2016). The Historical Development of Evaluation Use. American Journal of Evaluation. 37. 10.1177/1098214016665164.

Bouk, D. (2015) How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual, University of Chicago Press.

Flyvbjerg, B. and Bester, D., The Cost-Benefit Fallacy: Why Cost-Benefit Analysis Is Broken and How to Fix It (September 6, 2021). Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis, October, pp. 1–25, doi 10.1017/bca.2021.9., Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3918328

Harford, T. (2021, Oct 09). The hidden costs of cost-benefit analysis: THE UNDERCOVER ECONOMIST [Europe Region]. Financial Times

Hogan, L. (2007) “The Historical Development of Program Evaluation: Exploring Past and Present,” Online Journal for Workforce Education and Development: Vol. 2: Iss. 4, Article 5. Available at: https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/ojwed/vol2/iss4/5

Jacquet, J. (2014). A Short History of Social Impact Assessment. 10.13140/RG.2.1.1470.5686.

Jiang, W. and Marggraf, R., The origin of cost–benefit analysis: a comparative view of France and the United States. Cost Eff Resour Alloc 19, 74 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12962-021-00330-3

Joyce, M., (2020) Impact Measurement: A cautionary tale, Medium, available at: https://tinyurl.com/5pndpf98

Madaus, G., Stufflebeam, D., and Scriven, M.S. (1983). Program Evaluation. In: Evaluation Models. Evaluation in Education and Human Services, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht.

Mayda, J. (1993) Historical roots of EIA? Impact Assessment Bulletin 11 (4), 411– 415.

Niţă, A., Fineran, S. and Rozylowicz, L. (2022). Researchers’ perspective on the main strengths and weaknesses of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) procedures. Environmental Impact Assessment Review. 92. 106690. 10.1016/j.eiar.2021.106690.

Singh G., Lerner J., Mach M, et al. Scientific shortcomings in environmental impact statements internationally. People Nature. 2020;2:369–379. https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10081

Tulchinsky TH. John Snow, Cholera, the Broad Street Pump; Waterborne Diseases Then and Now. Case Studies in Public Health. 2018:77–99. doi: 10.1016/B978–0–12–804571–8.00017–2. Epub 2018 Mar 30. PMCID: PMC7150208.

Now we are all measuring impact — but is anything changing? was originally published in The Good Shift on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Over the last decade the idea of ‘having an impact’ has taken flight as a strategy and an outcome — and suddenly it seems that everyone has started talking about ‘impact’! This is part one of a two part exploration of the framing and ‘measuring’ of impact in systems innovation.

Some of our colleagues have argued that ‘impact’ is tied up with metaphors of ‘force’ and ‘collision’. Others have argued that the term has become tainted with a fixation of short-term ‘fixes’ even if everyone acknowledges that the issues are complex. And still others complain that ‘impact’ is conflated with outputs and outcomes, so that even short, small projects are now expected to create ‘impacts’.

In the face of this context, we set out to explore the word, its history, how we used it and how others used it. We have ultimately decided to keep using it — but to do so with a clear awareness of how and why and what it means for our work.

We learnt that ‘impact’ has a longer history as a verb meaning to ‘press closely into’ and that it has developed into two directions in the twentieth century — one that signals an ‘impact on’ us or others or objects; and one that relates to how something ‘impacts’ us or others or something else.

We want to acknowledge and respect all these limitations of the word. Yet we also remain committed to walking forward with a more robust and multi-faceted perspective on impact. Similarly, we will continue to challenge loose, unjust, frivolous and hyperbolic uses of the term so that there remains a space for talking of change that requires commitment, rigour, debate and depth.

Does this matter?

Well yes, we think so! If we want to be clear about how we use language, and want to share openly what we mean, what we intend through the use of language, we think it is important to unpack words, metaphors and concepts (and be open to alternative view points!)

So here we explore five metaphors that shape the ways in which we use ‘impact’. They draw on both meanings and applications of the word, and they shape the ways in which we speak, use, visualise and translate this word in our practices. We welcome other viewpoints as we seek to open up a deeper dialogue about how language shapes the change we seek to contribute to alongside many others.

Contributors to this post and graphics:
Prof Ingrid Burkett and A/Prof Joanne McNeill

Navigation Metaphors for ‘Impact’ was originally published in The Good Shift on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Reflections from our conversation with Indy Johar of Dark Matter Labs

In March 2024 we talked to Indy Johar from Dark Matter (DML) as a part of our preparation for an event — and hopefully the spark of a local movement in what DML calls the Boring Revolution. We’re taking chunks of that conversation and sharing our reflections and local context over a series of short blogs.

It’s quite easy to get excited about the ‘shiny objects’ that populate thinking about innovation for a better world — better tech, better services, new products. But we’d suggest that re-imagining the ‘boring bits’ has a central role to play if we are to truly ‘change the world’.

Bits like the structural ways of working in institutions, organisations and communities — things like regulatory frameworks, procurement and contracting processes, compliance requirements, reporting priorities human resource policies, intellectual property arrangements …

Over many years we’ve been working across different domains where these elements have come up time and again as what needs shifting for greater change to initiate and, in many cases, to ‘stick’.

We see both constraints and opportunities in that. And while we’re excited about the opportunities we see in re-structuring the ‘boring bits’ there’s lots of exploration needed to understand HOW this could be done across diverse domains.

In addition to our own practice, we’ve been inspired and energised by the work of others in this space, particularly Dark Matter and their explorations into the Boring Revolution.

We sat with Indy Johar to get his views on why a Boring Revolution is important, and to explore some opportunities currently surfacing in the Australian context.

Listen to his perspective on why our current ways of organising as a society are self-terminating, and the worldviews that would support the shifts needed.

The conversation has furthered our wondering about how to catalyse and support shifts when we’re often operating in contexts that feel stuck. Indy’s positive perspective on this was both hopeful and challenging.

And so we’re committed to exploring how we might elevate the boring bits in our context.

Some in our team have backgrounds in examining opportunities that lie in procurement, but we’re interested in the many domains where the ‘boring bits’ play out (pretty much everywhere!)

To further learning and sharing of practice-based-experience we’re looking for brave partners to work with, who bring their rich contexts and technical experience, to work together on how we could open up that practice and thinking.

We’re also interested in exploring how to think more openly about and work constructively with ‘snap back’. When hard-won shifts are undone — as a result of people, policy and/or political changes in the broader context. It can be devastating for those who worked so hard to bring about the change.

We’re asking how we can connect learning and practice, so that insights generated through what Indy has called the ‘million micro experiments’ could be shared broadly so that useful practices can more quickly be integrated into the DNA of organisations? What can we do today to start on this journey? (We note that recently Indy / DML put out a call on LinkedIn to see who might be interested if DML or a combination of orgs hosted an open online “office hours” programme for people building real options for societal transition.)

Drop us a line at GCSI@griffith.edu.au if you’re a brave, curious explorer in these domains in Australia or Aotearoa New Zealand and are interested in working on this together.

Re-imagining the ‘boring bits’ #1 was originally published in The Good Shift on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Insights from developing monitoring, evaluation and learning practices for the SENS initiative.

Introduction

The Australian Social Enterprise National Strategy (SENS) initiative started in 2020. After extensive research and engagement to scope the potential for a national strategy, Social Enterprise Australia (SEA) was established in 2022 to facilitate and lead its development. SEA also provided a ‘peak’ function for social enterprise in Australia and sought to increase engagement with the Federal Government and other national bodies; and to support the sector to develop its collective capability and capacity, and to work together and with others towards shared goals.

Griffith Centre for Systems Innovation (formerly The Yunus Centre, Griffith) supported SENS by undertaking the initial research and strategy development. It then played a role, alongside other partners, in incubating the establishment of SEA and, more specifically, leading the design and implementation of the SENS evaluation and learning (E&L) framework. This work has been underway for around 18 months.

In this blog, we share insights generated through the process of developing and evolving the SENS E&L framework and embedding evaluative practices. While these are specific to this work, we believe they reflect some of the general challenges of undertaking and embedding E&L in new, ambitious, and stretched initiatives which are operating in dynamic, systems contexts.

We hope our learning will be useful to others grappling with similar challenges or to those seeking to support systems initiatives.

Juggling short-term survival with long-term success

Fuelled by ambition and driven by the desire to make a positive impact, for-purpose start-ups throw their energies into the many tasks required to set-up and get going. These include fundraising, networking, recruiting staff, and raising their profile in typically noisy operating environments.

However, amidst the busy-ness of doing, limited systematic reflection and learning may hinder the prospects of long-term success. It can lead to missed opportunities, poorly allocated resources, ineffective activities, and unintended consequences. The effects of poor learning may be amplified when more ambitious and complex goals — such as systems change — are set.

Therefore, establishing a culture of learning and the processes that support continuous improvement are necessary investments for early stage organisations to make if they are to succeed in the ever-changing landscapes they operate within. Research[1] has shown a range of benefits from learning that include:

• being a source of innovation that helps to create competitive advantages;
• improving an organisation’s performance;
• influencing expectations of future growth;
• enhancing team members’ competencies; and
• creating new knowledge.

Where we started

The initial SENS evaluation and learning framework was developed in 2022 with SEA. It laid out the principles, underlying evaluation approaches (participatory and developmental evaluation approaches[2]), and key learning questions organised around SEA’s spheres of control (or nominal control), influence, and interest[3].

We sought to answer questions related to what SEA did and what influence it had, while also looking at emergent changes in the broader social enterprise ecosystem and whether they are influenced by SEA’s activities. The primary aim was that E&L would support SEA (as the primary implementing actor of SENS) to generate timely, useful, and usable information to support its work. The approach also aimed to provide accountability to funders and sector stakeholders, and contribute to broader learning in the sector.

Unsurprisingly, implementation has diverged from original plans and intentions. For example, from early 2023 the co-design approach to developing tools and processes was undermined by SEA’s pace of change and limited bandwidth. This was stretched largely as a result of SEA’s presence and activities generating much higher levels of interest (and demands) than anticipated — effectively, success compromised capacity.

This led to systematic E&L largely being carried out in parallel to the core work program rather than being fully integrated into it and provoked discussions about what was possible and by when, with an acceptance that interim arrangements would have to adjust to fit reality. We were also forced to acknowledge the challenges of working in an emergent way where plans often change before they have even had the chance to be articulated properly. The following sections summarise where we landed to cope with constraints and rapid change. The medium-term aim remains that E&L will be fully integrated into SEA’s ways of working.

Shaping strategy and action by asking questions

Asking questions can be a powerful tool in embedding learning practices. So far in SEA, our E&L activities are helping to shape strategy and action mostly through asking, rather than answering, questions.

Even without having answers, questions by a critical friend can help focus people’s attention and practice learning. As Elder and Paul (1998) argue[4]

‘Thinking is driven not by answers but questions.’

Here are some strategies we are using:

• Asking questions of SEA have been helpful to pull team members’ out of busy operational work like setting up financial management and IT systems. Our questions have included what is SEA doing? How it is doing it? Why it is doing things? And how activities relate to the underpinning theory of change (the original framing of what SEA exists to do). Just the process of having to answer a question can help people to articulate their thinking and reveal gaps in their rationale and implementation logic. All of which can then trigger improvements.
• Following a simple after action review format, we use open questions, such as ‘What happened? So what? Now what?’ The benefits of this approach are:

1. Team members’ do not need a lot of preparation time (although some preparation helps).
2. Reflections can be timed in line with key project milestones and/or used on an ad-hoc basis as opportunities arise. Most of the ‘after action reviews’ we have conducted so far have been ad-hoc.
3. Complementarity with SEA’s ‘probe-sense-respond’ strategy process, whereby SEA tests stakeholders’ interests and needs through conversations and small actions, to identify demand and where limited resources can be best used.

This approach might be best described as trial-and-error learning whereby organisations inadvertently learn from the results of previous actions or improvisational learning where organisations learn while activities are in motion, thereby reacting to issues as they arise[6].

To enhance the benefit of asking questions and building an organisation’s ‘reflective muscles’, we learned to:

• Encourage open dialogue and create spaces for discussions that allow team members to internalise the importance of learning and what it might mean for their roles. This has been done by:

1. Using after action reviews to provide a simple framework for team members to ask questions of themselves and each other, thereby creating a broader culture where learning is a team responsibility and not that of a single team member.
2. Encouraging individual team members to share and discuss their progress and reflections, so as to weave together learnings and mitigate risks of siloed responsibilities in small teams.

• Navigate different views that may be necessary as team members are likely to have different experiences and perspectives on what has happened and why. It’s important team members can agree on a way forward, even if there are compromises rather than consensus. Done proactively, naming and working through differences (rather than avoiding them) can also lead to the strengthening of practices, culture, and ongoing learning.
• Capture data generated from individual team reflections in ways that allow it to be more easily analysed over time. Planning for data analysis, not just data collection, can improve the efficiency of analysis over the long term as well as the depth of the insights as patterns emerge. Deciding how data will be used, by whom, and what for early on helps to shape how data can be collected, categorised, and sorted in ways that enable better analysis.
• Expand who participates in reflections, if possible, since different organisations have different purposes and cultures. The value, however, may not necessarily be obvious or a high priority for partner organisations, who also have time constraints.
• Be proactive to complete feedback circles. In some cases, after action reviews have identified actions to be taken that have not been implemented because of changes in priorities or changes to the external environment. Capturing these changes is important to ongoing learning and ‘conscious’ decision making.

We also recognise that funders and boards play an influential role in helping to establish learning practices, setting the tone about learning and evaluation. A 2021 study of evaluation practices in Australia’s philanthropic sector found ‘Many boards were comfortable with anecdotal evidence regarding impactful work, as opposed to looking to evaluation and data insights to draw definitive conclusions.’[7] And like the managers of new organisations, their funders and directors may also be focused on short-term priorities.

As part of the E&L framework, the SEA Board has started to ask itself a range of questions about how it wants to frame and enact ‘impact governance’. Currently, it is articulating this role through:

• Ensuring SEA develops and implements appropriate E&L systems, processes, and practices.
• The board having a shared view of what information it requires of the Executive at any given time, how it relates to SEA’s strategic priorities and theory of change, and how they will interpret and incorporate data and learning into their wider duties (e.g. adapting/directing strategy).
• Ensuring SEA’s impact reporting obligations are met and that the needs of stakeholders with respect to information and impact measurement are anticipated and served.

The board recognises it needs to invest its own time and capability to set-up and implement these functions well. Such processes may also include reaching a common understanding of what good learning practices look like as board members come from diverse backgrounds and have similarly diverse views about learning and evaluation.

Shaping strategy and action through evidence

To improve the quality of our questions and discussions, we recognise that we also need to improve the quality of evidence. In 2024, SEA aims to create a broader body of evidence that provides insight into its effectiveness and influence. This will help SEA ask more probing questions as well as testing assumptions underpinning its strategy.

Because evidence gathering and documentation creates work in the short term, we are necessarily taking a light-touch approach and integrating such activities into existing management processes where possible. For instance:

• Developing simple systems that enable SEA to record and track progress against activities including what happened versus what was planned. Also, creating a simple dashboard that shows progress against core areas of work.
• Recording information that will provide a chronicle of SEA’s work. This includes asking staff to record their reflections of key meetings in addition to formal meeting minutes that are often sanitised versions of discussions, recording external ‘critical incidents’ that reflect key events in the broader sector (like policy changes, movements of key individuals between roles, and the launch of new sector alliances, etc.).
• Collecting data through periodic events like stakeholder consultations.
• Designing and planning stakeholder surveys and interviews in 2024.

In trying to move towards a more integrated E&L approach we are navigating the following issues:

Putting in place systematic data collection requires effective coordination around roles, routines, rules and plans, but new organisations often find coordination challenging.[8] Systematic evidence generation activities compete for time with other, often more short-term activities like getting the quarterly financial reports processed and updating the website, where people can see the immediate result. Indeed, systematic data collection may not appear to have an immediate tangible benefit because evidence needs to be built over time for it to add value. This can mean that this work continually drops to the bottom of the pile. Ongoing effort is needed to keep it on the agenda.

Effective communication is crucial, but effective communication requires more than using common words or agreeing that evaluation and learning is important and should be embedded in everything that an organisation does. Outsourcing the establishment of evaluation and learning may be seen as a short-term solution, but it doesn’t guarantee findings will be understood and/or implemented. To overcome these risks, we are:

• Encouraging team members who work alongside external supporters in the development of evaluation and learning to build in time for internal-facing engagement with colleagues to gather their inputs, feedback, and bring them along in the process.
• Asking that team members guide external supporters on the appropriate sizing of evaluation and learning activities.
• Preparing for a lack of understanding or misunderstanding that leads to extra work and adjustments to systems and practices.

Many learning and evaluation discussions focus on impact, which can contribute to an undervaluing of process information. Sometimes this may be that organisations do not see the link between processes and impact or assume processes will automatically lead to impact because of their intent. At other times, people associate evaluation as something that happens at the end of a program (as is common with government programs) and, therefore, can always be dealt with later. Undoubtedly, information about processes and impact are both important. Too much emphasis on either creates problems. For new organisations and initiatives, process-related evaluative activities provide greater real, or near real, time understanding on what may (or may not) be working. In the short-term, this helps to surface where improvements are needed and can be made and in the longer term provides important foundational information for impact-focused evaluations.[9]

While light touch approaches may be pragmatic, they may not provide sufficient in-depth insights particularly related to systems changes. For instance, initially, we had planned to conduct interviews with key sector stakeholders six-monthly to gather perspectives on changes in the sector and SEA’s relative contribution. This timing was intended to create a shorter-feedback cycle and increase understanding of what in the ‘system’ was changing, and help SEA adapt to emerging opportunities and risks. Several factors resulted in us taking a more episodic approach, whereby we would conduct interviews and a survey annually (yet to be implemented). These factors included: limited resources, prioritising gathering feedback from sector stakeholders to inform specific programming, and sensitivity to how often we could seek inputs from key informants.

End note

New organisations and initiatives juggle many tasks and pressures, and structured learning is often seen as a luxury that can be done later when the mission has matured and there is more time. However, practicing learning from the outset has immediate and critical impact, determining the trajectory and rate of development.

Our key learning about learning is that it has to be structured and enacted in ways that are pragmatic, manageable, and meaningful in order for busy teams to buy-in to it. And while E&L processes and practices are always somewhat subject to entropy, dedicated capacity (if initially external) and top-down expectations can be important enablers of seeing them integrated into core culture and ways of working over time.

Footnotes

[1] Sekliuckiene, J., Vaitkiene, R., & Vainauskiene, V. (2018). Organisational Learning in Startup Development and International Growth. Entrepreneurial Business and Economics Review, 6(4), 125–144; Byungyun Bae, Sungyong Choi (2021). The Effect of Learning Orientation and Business Model Innovation on Entrepreneurial Performance: Focused on South Korean Start-Up Companies, Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity, Volume 7 (4), p245; Yang Y, Zheng Y, Xie G, Tian Y. (2022). The Influence Mechanism of Learning Orientation on New Venture Performance: The Chain-Mediating Effect of Absorptive Capacity and Innovation Capacity. Frontiers in Psychology. May 30;13:818844.

[2] Better Evaluation (2021). Participatory evaluation. Accessed December 2023: https://www.betterevaluation.org/methods-approaches/approaches/participatory-evaluation; Better Evaluation (2021). Participatory evaluation. Accessed December 2023: https://www.betterevaluation.org/methods-approaches/approaches/developmental-evaluation

[3] This framing is from another evaluation approach, outcome mapping, but we did not use the full approach.

[4] Elder, L and Paul, R (1998). ‘The Role of Socratic Questioning in Thinking, Teaching, and Learning’ in The Clearing House, Vol. 71, №5 (May — Jun., 1998), pp. 297–301.

[5] Snowdon, D.J. and Boone, M.E. (2007). ‘A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making in Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2007/11/a-leaders-framework-for-decision-making

[6]Jones, M and Schou, P.K., (2023). ‘Structuring the start-up: how coordination emerges in start-ups through learning sequencing’ in Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 66, №3, 859–893.

[7] The study concluded that governance (boards and trustees) was important to influencing evaluative (and learning) practices and critical to strategic thinking at governance level. Weak board-level interest in evaluating practice, a lack of understanding and lack of curiosity around social impact from boards impeded progress. Asia Pacific Social Impact Centre (2021). Philanthropy: The continued journey to real impact and better practice. Are evaluation, strategy and social impact frameworks the key to achieving change?. Asia Pacific Social Impact Centre, Melbourne Business School, University of Melbourne.

[8] Jones, M and Schou, P.K., (2023).

[9] Rogers, P and Woodcock, M (2023). Process and Implementation Evaluations: A Primer. Center for International Development Faculty Working Paper №433. May 2023. Harvard University.

Contributors

Dr Donna Loveridge
GCSI, Adjunct Industry Fellow and Evaluation + Learning Lead for SEA

Alex Hannant
GCSI, Executive-in-Residence and lead on SENS project

Jess Moore
Social Enterprise Austalia, CEO

Learning about learning was originally published in The Good Shift on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.