How change happens
The landscapes are where complex social challenges such as corruption, conflict and over-exploited ecosystems play out. Change in these landscapes emerges from the behaviours and interactions of the many people and organisations that inhabit them, each playing different roles.
I’m one small actor, and my garden is just one corner of these wider landscapes. So my contribution to change is likely to be modest: sparking someone’s curiosity in a way that leads them to think, and perhaps act, a little differently, seeing the world as a garden to be tended rather than a machine to be engineered.
How my work contributes to change
Keeping track of the difference my work makes isn’t easy. Once it’s released into the wild, it is very hard to see how it travels or what difference it might be making. The examples below are some of the ripples I am aware of, but do not represent the full picture. They fall into three loose groups.
Finding it interesting or useful
- My piece on ecosystems, emergence and social change was shared with colleagues at a foundation working on health and wellbeing, and in an online systems community of inquiry.
- My note on reflective relational practice was shared in the School of System Change’s newsletter, and I was invited to talk about it at three gatherings of practitioners, including the Towards Relational Public Services conference in Manchester.
- A session I ran on complexity, corruption and change, on a Basel Institute on Governance course for mid-career anti-corruption practitioners from across Africa and Europe, was very well received, and I’ve been invited back.
Seeing differently
- An impact investor focused on conflict and peace-building found the regulatory landscaping framing helpful for their work in fast-changing regulatory environments, and indicated that it would inform their thinking about investment strategies.
- A practitioner working on an update to a widely used framework for systems practice in international development drew on my reflections on systemic investing in context.
- An evaluator in Uganda looked again at his earlier evaluation reports through the lens of my work on positive deviance and relational practice, and wrote about what it helped him see: the communities were already gardening, while his team had been trying to architect change.
Acting differently
- A colleague working on regenerative agriculture in Central America reworked a vision paper about their place-based approach to systems change, drawing on feedback I’d provided about behaviour, interests and power.
- A team developing a proposal on using political economy analysis to inform and manage investment risks in Africa revised and improved the proposal in light of my work on systemic investing and regulatory landscaping.
- A specialist in regulatory capture in environmental protection included a piece I co-wrote on regulatory landscaping in the further reading for a series of workshops with regulators across Australia.
Gathering information about how my work makes a difference is a priority for me over the coming months. I’m starting to track more carefully the pathways through which it travels, from the conversations it sparks to the papers, plans and practices it helps to shape. My hope is that this will help me make better decisions about what I do, so that what I offer is more useful. I’ll share what I learn, in case it provides useful food for thought for others.
Have you made use of my work in ways I might not know about? I’d love to hear: tell me how you’ve used it.