It starts simply enough; You go to a conference and learn about an exciting new framework for bringing about change. Maybe it’s Collective Impact, or Design Thinking, or Behavioural Economics. So you return to your community full of good ideas on what’s next. You’ve got a toolbox, a step-by-step process for change, and some great examples of how this approach worked in the past. As long as you follow the process, you’ll be successful, right?
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One of my roles as ‘curator’ of the Tamarack Institute’s Evaluating Community Impact work is to track and share ideas and methodologies that community changemakers might find useful in their work.
Over the next six months, I will focus on evaluating systems change and social change. Innovators all over the world are focused on reforming or transforming systems, whether they be related to energy, child protection, ecological education, economic, social systems, or (more likely) a mix of all them.
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Systems change work is about understanding all of the actors in the system and the dynamic flow of power, relationships, and mindsets that exists between them. John Kania, Mark Kramer and Peter Senge, in their recently released paper, The Water of System Change use the metaphor of water to describe systems. The water is the environment through which fish and other life exists but it is also a flowing, moving and changing entity.
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Many of us shy away from using the power that we have, often to our own and our community’s detriment. This was one of the nuggets of wisdom shared with the participants attending Tamarack's Adaptive Leadership Masterclass series that took us to five cities across Canada and wrapped up just last week. Liz Skelton, Co-Founder of Collaboration for Impact shared a story about working with Indigenous leaders in Australia. It was there that she discovered that leaning into her formal and informal power could be used to help the collaborative group drive change forward.
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We all seek to innovate for different reasons. Sometimes it’s that we feel the world is changing and we risk being left behind. Sometimes it’s because the issue we’re working to address hasn’t gone away, has gotten worse, or has changed. Sometimes it’s because we simply feel that we must.
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Community change initiatives are often set against complex and systematic problems – problems that cannot be solved in isolation and without authentic support from community stakeholders.
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