Cassie Robinson The Point People @CassieRobinson - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Cassie Robinson

The Point People @CassieRobinson www.thepointpeople.com

Some of our Systems Change work: www.systemchangers.com https://issuu.com/thepointpeople/docs/finalkeywords

SESSION | WELCOME RESIDENTIAL

“Can, and how can the insights of frontline workers influence systems change?”

SESSION | MEET THE SYSTEMS CHANGERS

SESSION | DESIGNING THE PROGRAMME

DESIGN PRINCIPLES

How we thought about designing the programme.

SESSION | WELCOME RESIDENTIAL

• Insights not solutions
• Discovery & questions, not answers
• Holding multiple perspectives
• Prototyping to radiate a system
• Separating people and the change
• Collective intelligence, not just individual insights
• Avoiding expected framing
• Making change visible
• Generative and dynamic
• Archeology and architecture
• Time and space
• The right tone to be heard

SESSION | INSIGHTS FROM THE PROGRAMME

SESSION | RESIDENTIAL

THE RESIDENTIAL

Content design

SESSION | RESIDENTIAL

People and Place; Building Community & Trust

• What it means to be a Systems Changer and reflexive practice
• Giving them a set of metaphors to work with and to understand how

we have imagined their role.

• Ways of thinking about journeys and finding some common language.

Expressing systems and using nature based metaphors

• Develop some rituals for different times in day/programme that we all

commit to using

SESSION | RESIDENTIAL

Thinking About & Seeing Systems

• Introduction to systems thinking
• Seeing one another's systems
• Building empathy between them
• Identifying where there is overlap in their systems
• Seeing how they understand their system and developing their

perspectives on that

• Mapping of all the elements that are hidden..the culture, the

relationships, the tacit knowledge

SESSION | RESIDENTIAL

Theories of Change

• Unpicking their beliefs about how change happens
• Looking at theories of change at an individual, organisation and

systems level

• Identifying other factors that influence change and how to design them

into levers of change

• Mapping out their skills for change

SESSION | RESIDENTIAL

Peer coaching and wider relationships

• Deepening their relationships and setting up structures for support

within the cohort

• To consider skill-set of coaching
• To hone skill of listening
• To explore resonance/dissonance in coaching relationships
• To practise skill of designing an alliance
• Working with their peer coaches to identify the wider networks of

support in their organisation and beyond

SESSION | WELCOME

Tech Audit

• Identifying ways that they can use technology within their learning and

reflection and getting them set up on it.

• Introduction to different digital technology to be used throughout the

programme

Tactics & Toolkit

• Developing tactics and confidence to get others on board in their
• rganisation
• Tools and methods for engagement

SESSION | RESIDENTIAL TOOLS

SESSION | LEARNING LAB

DESIGNING THEIR SPACE

Tools to take back into their organisation.

SESSION | WELCOME RESIDENTIAL

SESSION | WELCOME RESIDENTIAL

SESSION | WELCOME RESIDENTIAL

SESSION | WELCOME RESIDENTIAL

SESSION | WELCOME RESIDENTIAL

SESSION | WELCOME RESIDENTIAL

SESSION | MEET THE SYSTEMS CHANGERS

SESSION | MEET THE SYSTEMS CHANGERS

SESSION | LEARNING LAB

SYSTEMS PROTOTYPING

Some of the tools we used

SESSION | WELCOME RESIDENTIAL

SESSION | WELCOME RESIDENTIAL

SESSION | WELCOME RESIDENTIAL

SESSION | MEET THE SYSTEMS CHANGERS

SESSION | LEARNING LAB

LEARNING LAB

What happened inside the Lab?

SESSION | LEARNING LAB

SESSION | WELCOME RESIDENTIAL

SESSION | WELCOME RESIDENTIAL

SESSION | LEARNING

• Typeform survey weekly
• Learning calls for generating insights, fortnightly
• Character tool
• Call between Jennie & learning partners
• Call as a whole team
• Blogs/diary
• Manchester space

SESSION | WELCOME RESIDENTIAL

“What does the crowd know that the individual doesn’t?”

SESSION | LEARNING LAB

FIELD TRIPS

Offering other perspectives in practice.

SESSION | WELCOME RESIDENTIAL

• Manchester City Council Innovation Lab
• Trafford Housing Trust
• Policy Lab
• Citizens Advice
• Forum For The Future
• FutureGov
• Government Digital Service
• People’s History Museum

SESSION | VISITS

SESSION | VISITS

SESSION | VISITS

SESSION | INSIGHTS FROM THE PROGRAMME

KEY INSIGHTS

Insights from the Systems Changers and the programme.

Individual

SESSION | INSIGHTS

• The need for building legitimacy
• Building capacity - the skills that frontline workers need
• This is an emergent way of working that has no shared

language, metaphors or concepts

The need for building legitimacy

Frontline Workers (“FWs”) need to establish their legitimacy as valid agents of system change and for others to value this. This requires them to develop their identity and to build trust with their colleagues. It also requires them to be confident in their own ability to develop an evolving identity within the system: “It’s about changing roles not leaving the system” and “can you be a Systems Changer from inside the system?” However, language and labels in the system can make FWs feel excluded from power. They often bring to their role a fixed set of beliefs about who they are and what they are capable of. Examples include: “I left school at 16…” and thinking of everyone else around them as “the experts….”. The Systems Changers looked for ways to gain validity and to build trust through things like attending other people’s meetings and seeking to understand commissioners.In doing so, they encountered some obstacles, including a fear of loss of control from middle and senior line managers and confusion about how a Systems Changer’s role intersects with that of a line manager. A further challenge is the need to work with middle managers at the same time to create the permission and space to operate.

SESSION | INSIGHTS

Building capacity - the skills that frontline workers need (and others working in the system)

FWs are skilled at listening, advocacy, problem solving, and making things work. But changing the system requires more than those skills alone. It also needs: networking with powerful people and knowing how to influence them (being politically savvy); analysis (and knowing what to do with it); the capacity and knowledge to implement large-scale change effectively; leadership skills, especially for complex teams; empathy and insight, including about those people who resist change; knowing how to challenge effectively; judgement, and the confidence to use it; continuous learning and reflection and the humility to apply it; knowing how to building a compelling vision - and how to sell it; and mapping impact (or being honest about the lack of it). There is also an opportunity to skill up FWs in understanding technology and data which would enable them to build system capacity for the future and have a more open access route to questioning existing paradigms. It would also help to overcome the traditional literacy divide and shift power down and across the system. Lastly, Myron Rogers, the Systems Thinker who has been engaged in the leadership, design and delivery of large-scale strategic change efforts in the private and public sectors throughout the world, talks about “keep connecting the system to more of itself” and technology offers tools to be able to do this more frequently, more efficiently and more democratically.

SESSION | INSIGHTS

This is an emergent way of working that has, as yet, no shared language, metaphors or concepts

The Systems Changers talked in similar ways about the service delivery models that they want to move towards but they currently lack any shared metaphors for describing how these new models will look and feel. For example, one metaphor used for a specialist/acute/emergency model was “We need a High Octane team...”; but the System Changers need to have the time and space to work differently with people and actually work out what this type of team might do and how it might do it in practice. They felt that staying in the experimental prototyping mindset is hard: - it’s easy to slip back into “delivery- mode”and let their own biases and preferences take charge. Overall, the need is for a reflective, generative space in which difficult questions can be explored and helpful answers might emerge.

SESSION | INSIGHTS

Organisation

SESSION | INSIGHTS

• The system can benefit from using the frontline workers’

knowledge and experience of how to manage risk

• Establishing clear roles (and role models) for frontline

workers as agents of change

• The space to act on systems change is inherently

constrained

The system can benefit from using the frontline workers’ knowledge and experience of how to manage risk

FWs bring a set of unique skills to the way that services are delivered, which need to inform how the whole system operates at scale. This includes how frontline workers handle and think about risk, how they deal with power authentically, how they use responsibility in a healthy way, how they stay aware of organisational needs versus their client needs and how they act in an asset-focused not problem focused way. For example, at a senior level in an organisation relationship to risk is about containing it, and providing services so as to manage it. Middle management is all about how to avoid risk and monitor it. FWs are actually holding all the risk and know how to do that. They have an inherent understanding about where that lies and how to work with it.

SESSION | INSIGHTS

Establishing clear roles (and role models) for frontline workers as agents of systems change would make a huge difference

FWs are a key lever for both bottom-up and top-down change. A challenge is to reposition them - from not only being deliverers and implementers to being “suppliers of policy intelligence, holders of risk and movement builders.” These different roles and ways of acting need to be made visible. Currently ‘mavericks’ are the only example given when people talk about change. However, being in it for the long-term leads to a different quality of decision making and action for those they are working with (who need consistency and trust baked into their interactions and participation in services) - with more vulnerability, personal investment and grit. Additionally, FWs don’t want to step out of their services - being part of it seems essential to doing system change right. They feel they would lose validity or a sense of what needed to change if they weren’t still linked in to clients. They also have a greater sense of their

• wn power to directly change lives. Making these approaches tangible would demonstrate the difference between evolution and

revolution and where Systems Changers need to put the emphasis in their everyday work.

SESSION | INSIGHTS

The space to act on systems change is inherently constrained

The commissioning and funding structures force frontline work and service delivery into a reactive space where it is difficult to run experiments that can highlight where and how to keep creating change in the system. Other current constraints include having the time and space to do anything different, navigating how to step back whilst managing the day-to-day crisis, a lack of money for strategic problem solving tools and mentorship and restrictive targets and aims - criteria and thresholds means that there is a lack of steps to measure before outcomes.

SESSION | INSIGHTS

Services

SESSION | INSIGHTS

• Square peg services
• The frame is outdated and defined through the wrong

lens

• The need to transcend fragmentation

Square peg services

Access is not the issue. The highest risk clients access the lowest threshold services. Those are not necessarily what they need. Is the problem that clients cannot access services or that services cannot access clients – ie meet them where they are and with their often multiple needs? When those needs are complex and acute some clients can seem too ‘risky’ for services. Individual services are accountable for a specific user need. Housing only looks at housing, drug and alcohol services only look at that and so on. And often access to one service is dependent on completing with another e.g. no mental health assessment till someone is

• ff drink. The result is that nobody can take responsibility for tough clients.

Whatever the ‘service’ offering, humans in distress require relationships. There are few incentives in existing systems to encourage the emergence of long-standing supportive relationships. If anything the opposite is true as cuts drive a ‘light touch’ approach with individuals who need much more than that.

SESSION | INSIGHTS

The frame is outdated and defined through the wrong lens

“What’s statutory isn’t what’s needed.” Services – particularly statutory services – are defined around problems. That is already a choice that makes it more difficult to consider assets and favours a ‘fix or maintain’ frame rather than a ‘change or transform’ frame. It is also a choice that privileges those who get to define the problem. Is it the service provider (or statutory funder) or the service user? When the service provider then goes

• n to elaborate on the problem definition with detailed criteria and thresholds to qualify for the service the power in the framing is all the

more evident – to the extent that the provider effectively ‘owns’ the client. That makes the client’s own resources for recovery all the more difficult to access and mobilise. “There is a key difference between services that maintain people’s lives and those that change people’s lives.”

SESSION | INSIGHTS

The need to transcend fragmentation

“ Inherent ambiguity in words like coordination,collaboration, partnership. There is agreement about centrality of relationships in creating change but knowing this is not the same as knowing how to structure them so they yield transformative results.” The drivers and incentives for fragmentation are pervasive. There is competition between large and small service providers and between statutory and voluntary services. Different professions have different targets and indicators to achieve – eg clinicians and frontline service providers. Austerity has highlighted some of the incentives in the system. Saving money has started to trump other values and is heightening competition for funds. Economic incentives are assumed to be the most efficient way to coordinate diverse systems, including people’s own lives – eg sanctions as a way to force people back to work. What is the deeper purpose in the system that might be articulated and around which the services could configure and to which the

• ther incentives in the system might then be subordinate?

SESSION | INSIGHTS

Systems

SESSION | WELCOME RESIDENTIAL

• It’s not only about user needs, it is about the systems’

needs too

• Finding flex in the system
• New areas in which frontline workers have a distinct
• ffer for systems change

It’s not only about the user needs, it’s about the systems’ needs too. We are all part of the system

Frontline Workers are experts in why user insight matters; a challenge is that because absolute priority is given to the voice of those with lived experience it can distort the discernment about which insights could be best used, and how and where. Whilst the need to privilege and rebalance the system to hear user insights is essential, the conversation needs to be more nuanced than that. It needs to think about all the different users in the system and how those needs, pressures, obligations and demands become orchestrated. If we centre too much around one set of needs, where do the needs and desires of the other actors in the system go?

SESSION | INSIGHTS

Finding flex in the system

Part of being able to change a system means not only being able to see the system (perceive it and make sense of it) but also to know about its rules and constraints. Frontline Workers need greater awareness and understanding of the ‘absolute immovable rules’ versus the ‘discretionary rules’ within their roles and organisations. For some of the FW the Systems Changers programme helped them find where flex was by giving them understanding of where rules and regulation come from. Knowing the background to these rules gave them better judgement of whether there was flex to change them or not. Alongside the rules and regulation if FW had a greater conceptualisation of what data is collected across systems on their clients then that would also give them more literacy about how and where to flex the system. Additionally, because there is not enough clear information across services about what’s working, and what isn’t - and where there is any information, it can take too long to filter through, the intelligence

• n where to flex, pivot or adapt the system is weak and as a result there is poor awareness of unintended consequences.

SESSION | INSIGHTS

New areas in which frontline workers have a distinct offer for systems change

“ I’m motivated like they are [government people] - but I’m doing it from a different angle.” Systems change can’t be done with a project-based approach - what’s required is to build R&D capacity and mobilise movements of civil servants, practitioners and ordinary people. Within that, FW have an important role because they bring a different type of power. If FW link up across organisations at the frontline, they bring a lateral networked power. The frontline also has access to the stories behind the data and can generate a very different way of tying the micro to the macro and bringing data alive. They are also points within the system that can act as feedback loops at a more granular level. As Myron Rogers said “people who do the work do the change.” And being at the frontline means that these workers have an intelligence and insight into the day to day functioning of the system that is invaluable in shaping how the system changes.

SESSION | INSIGHTS

SESSION | WELCOME RESIDENTIAL

“What were the different areas that defined people’s learning experience?”

SESSION | WELCOME RESIDENTIAL

• The context of their organisation
• The leadership of their organisation
• The level of support that people had around them
• Their learning style
• Their sense of permission
• Their understanding of where flex is in the systems
• Security in their approach
• Their belief in keeping users in or out of the system

SESSION | RESIDENTIAL

WHAT WE LEARNT

What we will be doing differently next time

SESSION | LEARNING

• Accountability
• Learning vs coaching
• Feedback loops - learning lab
• Making things stick
• Balancing
• Language
• Involving organisations
• Digital & data
• Communications and storytelling

SESSION | DESIGN

QUESTIONS

How do you see Systems Changers fitting into your work? How would you like to be involved in this current programme and how can we best share insights with you? These are a few of our thoughts about the future - what do you think and where do you think it can/should grow?

SESSION | FUTURE THOUGHTS