Riding the Mexican Wave of Change…

This week I have been fortunate enough to spend some time with colleagues from around the country as well as some from closer to home Gabby Wright Helen Fisher exploring models of systems change through some LocalMotion learning. Somewhat serendipitously we also facilitated our first online Challenges and Opportunities session for members where we worked together to identify and explore the challenges that we are seeing week in and week out in Lincolnshire Voluntary Engagement Team (LVET) member organisations (brilliantly for me this also gave me a chance to bring some learning immediately into practice!).

Conversations fairly easily flowed in an atmosphere of trust and collaboration and it was very clear that to make lasting changes happen we have a lot of work to do to surface ways to address the real challenges that lie underneath the ones we see. What do I mean? Well a simple example is that we may see staff disengaging from their role long before their contract is up because they know that it is a one year, two year or three year temporary contract and that of course impacts on the support communities get and the funder is less likely to engage in conversations about continuation funding. I’m sure you can think of many other challenges linked to this scenario. So what do we need to do to change or influence the systems that view three years as ‘long term’ funding? How do we support staff to stay with a programme to the end and help them find the next right step on their career with organisations that we are probably working closely with anyway – how can we make those transitions better. No ready-made answers from me… yet… and no answers on how we work more effectively with multiple systems to bring about change.

I was also very excited to be involved in the shortlisting for a Systems Change role as part of a new Strength and Leadership programme funded by The National Lottery Community Fund and working alongside colleagues at Lincolnshire Community Foundation

I am very aware that our colleagues in statutory organisations including Local Authorities, NHS Trusts and Integrated Care Boards are currently working really hard to understand how they can juggle their statutory responsibilities and their budgets and how they can respond to central government demands to make savings. I feel for them and I certainly don’t envy them their task, though from the outside it looks as if everyone is shutting themselves away in their boxes, focusing on their own responsibilities and budgets and that more could be done to look at the challenge in a more coherent way – possibly bringing some systems thinking models and tools and working as a whole system (including their friends in the VCFSE) to explore the challenges and what could be done together. Of course, this is something we need to do all the time, not simply at times of pressure and we need to give this the time it truly deserves otherwise we risk making changes with only a partial picture of what the consequences might be and we may also miss a great opportunity to try something truly different that results in real change. We may also, by shutting ourselves away, miss the complexity and chaotic nature of the world outside ‘our box’.

So this brings me to the title of this week’s ramblings – ‘Riding the Mexican wave of change’ – what?!? Well a Mexican wave gives the illusion of movement, we jump up excitedly and the wave moves on but we sit back down in the same place – has anything changed? Without doing more to understand and drive system change perhaps we risk jumping up, getting excited and sitting back down in the same place with no real or lasting change.