Systemic enquiries
Systemic enquiries
One of the suggestions I brought into my organisation is to think of our work as a set of systemic enquiries through different, thematic portfolios. What is a systemic enquiry, though?
In simple words, I see it as a kind of 'learning by doing' approach, others simply call it adaptive management. Some might also call it action research. Each systemic enquiry would start with three simple questions:
What do we need to better understand now in order to know what to do next? (What are our learning questions?)
What types of shifts would we like to see in the conditions that shape young people's wellbeing through our activities? (What are our change hypotheses?)
What data do we need to collect to see whether these shifts happen and to answer the learning questions? (What is our monitoring and evaluation plan?)
The same questions can be asked on different levels, from the whole of the foundation to individual thematic portfolios, down to individual projects, in collaboration with partners.
If we pair these questions with Dave Snowden's three questions that guide engagements in complex human systems, we have all we need to start our systemic enquiries:
What aspects of the complex system can we manage or change?
Out of these, which ones can we monitor so we know whether a shift is happening?
Out of these, which ones can we amplify if the shift is favourable or dampen if it is not?
Dave and his Cynefin Company have developed a whole set of tools and methods around these questions, including the Cynefin framework or the more recent Estuarine framework.
So far so good. Now we need to tie these things up into a set of processes that honour our working principle of adopting a relational approach. I imagine this could happen in the following way.
Once we have defined the thematic priorities we want to focus on (which is indeed a task we are working on, making sure that our thematic priorities reflect real needs of young people), we can start engaging with organisations who have similar thematic priorities and are working in the contexts we are interested in (in secondary cities in low- and middle-income countries, or on topics like adolescent mental health or education). We sometimes call these organisations our intermediaries, who then convene various stakeholders in these contexts or on these themes to run processes to co-create possible activities around the thematic priority with the aim to improve young people's wellbeing. The idea is to build a diverse portfolio for each thematic priority, rooted in the realities of young people.
Once these activities are under way, a number of sense-making and learning processes are going to be organised with a regular cadence on different levels - the closer to 'the ground,' the more often they would happen. At Fondation Botnar, we are already piloting an approach to sense-making and learning in our cities portfolio. We call it Evidence to Action (E2A) and we co-developed it with the Melbourne Center for Cities. The approach works on different levels, starting with individual cities, where activities are co-developed by coalitions of actors, who are then brought together to learn what works and how. The next level up is bringing together cities in one country, and finally, the top-layer is at a global level, facilitating learning across our cities portfolio, which will then feed into our Strategic Learning and Evaluation system (which is obviously still under construction).
I also like the results, sense-making and learning (RSL) approach of the BuildingLife initiative (described here), which is quite similar to the above. They also run sense-making and learning processes on three levels: (1) in an individual location (they call it 'juristicion'), (2) between localities, and (3) across the whole initiative. In the latter, they connect the sense-making and learning to the results framework of the funder, Laudes Foundation.
I'm currently trying to figure out how to build an effective interface between the learning that is going on in the portfolios and the organisational level to be able to learn across our portfolios, answer our organisational learning questions and see what difference we make as a whole organisation.
The Paper Museum
This is a fascinating metalogue written by Gregory Bateson in 1971, but never published by himself. It was published later by Philip Guddemi (Bateson 2017). In the metalogue, a father and a daughter talk about whether there is a conspiracy (the title of the metalogue is "Is there a conspiracy?"). You should read the whole thing (available here). At one point in the metalogue, they talk about the systematic and directional error in what people do when faced with “crisis.”
D: Well – what do they do?
F: They invent something. And what they invent has particular purpose related to that particular crisis.
D: And that is wrong? Regularly and systematically wrong?
F: Yes – regularly and systematically wrong.
D: But Daddy, that’s progress. All machines and inventions and laws and everything – it’s all directed at specific purposes.
F: Mostly – yes – almost all inventions are anti-biological for that very reason. Machines are single-minded and that makes them ultimately destructive. But there is also biological evolution, and that is different. And a few inventions are pro-biological, not anti-. For example, cheese. And poetry...
D: Daddy, stop it. Poetry is not an invention. You are being silly –
(...)
F: It looks as if men were told by the machines what sort of thing an invention should be...
D: But machines don’t talk
F: No, of course not – but the men who invented invention surely got the idea of invention from the tools and machines which they were making and using. It wasn’t just their idea. It was their thinking, guided by the machines. And when you say that poetry is not an invention, you mean that it’s not the sort of thing that the machines would let you classify as an invention.
D: So the machines “told” people how to think about them?
F: Yes, indeed. And, more than that, I think the machines told people to hurry up and make more machines and what machines to make.
Why have I added this to my Paper Museum? It links to both my quotes of Richard Power's book Bewilderment over the last few weeks and specifically to my email from last week. To the former because in the metalogue as a whole Bateson explains why faced by a slow crisis we are often not reacting in the right way - as is currently happening with the ecological crisis we are facing on this planet. We are inventing new things to address small aspects of the crisis but we are not reflecting how these inventions are based on a way of thinking that is based on the technologies that led us into the crisis in the first place – perpetuating the crisis. To the latter as I was writing about AI last week and that we admire machines that can do less and less, more and more efficiently. As opposed to nature that also searches for things that can do more and more things but maybe not optimally efficient. So indeed, it seems that the machines told us how to decide what is 'better' and to build new machines. In a way the machines are not becoming more human-like, but we are becoming more machine-like. Spooky.
Reference: Bateson, Gregory. 2017. ‘Metalogue: Is There a Conspiracy?’ Transdyscyplinarne Studia o Kulturze (i) Edukacji, December, 24–33.
More for you to enjoy
I wrote a blog post for Itad, our Strategic Learning and Evaluation partner: Developing a learning system rooted in relational wellbeing
The blog post was published in the run up of an event I will be part of on 29 March: Exploring new technical innovations in MEL for systemic change
Photo
The Tinguely Fountain in Basel. My own photo.