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Drawing on action research, this paper recasts evaluation as ‘action inquiry’, an embedded evaluative learning practice that can help navigate complexity when enacting collective leadership. It is offered as an invitation to inquiry amongst a reasonably well-informed audience of policy makers and practitioners who work in and for public services. It will particularly interest those who provide research, evaluation and facilitation support, and those seeking to develop a more relational...
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The world is complex. If we want to contribute to creating positive social outcomes, we must learn to embrace this complexity. This is the New World that funders and commissioners are discovering: • People are complex: everyone’s life is different, everyone’s strengths and needs are different. • The issues we care about are complex: issues – like homelessness – are tangled and interdependent. • The systems that respond to these issues are complex: the range of people and organisations...
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This paper draws on the science of complexity to outline alternative approaches to analysing and understanding problems faced in humanitarian and development work.
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This Field Guide is designed to support budding systemic designers to facilitate and lead systemic design projects. It’s designed for systemic designers who have basic familiarity with SD concepts and are looking for some practical tips and tools to put theory into action. While this Guide was designed with Government of Alberta staff in mind, the content applies across a range of issue areas, sectors, and intersections. The Guide goes through a systemic design project from concept to...
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This report takes the Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI), a twophase pre-procurement innovation programme that aims to match social challenges with new ideas, as its primary case study. It suggests augmenting the excellent design thinking deployed through SBRI with a think like a system, act like an entrepreneur lens in order to drive better social outcomes from SBRI-originating innovations. Programmes like SBRI have great potential to drive change and address pressing challenges, but...
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As with all public policy work, education policies are demanding. Policy workers need to ‘know’ a lot—about the problems they are addressing, the people who need to be engaged, the promises they can make in response, the context they are working in, and the processes they will follow to implement. Most policy workers answer questions about such issues within the structures of plan and control processes used to devise budgets and projects. These structures limit their knowledge gathering,...
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This Background Note outlines key lessons on impact evaluations, utilisation-focused evaluations and evidence-based policy. While methodological pluralism is the key to effective impact evaluation in development, the focus here is on the factors that need to be considered for impact evaluations to be used in policy and practice – regardless of the method employed.
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This paper presents the case for systemic organisational change in the humanitarian system. The paper firstly shows that that organisational learning has tended to reinforce existing ways of working and has not been able to shift a culture that values action over reflection. As a result, the rest of the paper asks about the most significant changes in the humanitarian sector
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This field guide helps to navigate crises using the Cynefin framework as a compass. It proposes a four-stage approach through which we can: - assess the type of crisis and initiate a response; - adapt to the new pace and start building sensing networks to inform decisions; - repurpose existing structures and working methods to generate radical innovation; - transcend the crisis, formalise lessons learnt and increase resilience. The guide stresses the importance of setting and managing...
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This systems change rubric describes different performance levels according to various systems elements, such as policy (formal rules), practices and relationships and connections. Programmes can use the rubric to assess the performance of systems to help decide where and how to intervene, or during and post-implementation to conduct progress assessments, and assess the effectiveness of interventions and type, breadth and depth of systems change. Each performance level description...
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In South Sudan, a new water treatment system that provides a community with more clean water at a lower cost. In Sierra Leone, a poster explaining how to prevent the...
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A step-by-step guide on how to develop a Transformative Theory of Change, for innovation projects, programmes and organisations working on systems transformation. The MOTION project was initiated with one key question in mind: how can we help projects and organisations be more transformative, using the framework and concept provided by the multi-level perspective? And what kind of tools, methods and frameworks can we co-design that translate scientific concepts into practises relevant for...
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This paper explores participatory methodologies (PMs) associated with a paradigm of people, contrasted with a dominant paradigm associated with things.
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