Systemic inquiries: an update
Systemic inquiries: an update
I am back in the office after quite a long break. Besides two relaxing weeks of holidaying in southern France and the Swiss mountains, I also spent a week moving two households to Basel, where we are now based. Visiting the North East of England, where we lived for almost 9 years, and packing up the house we owned there, was quite emotional. I am looking forward to this new chapter, though.
But I don't want to write holiday stories here, even though there would be a few. Rather, I would like to share a bit of an update about the process of establishing systemic inquiries on our priority themes at Fondation Botnar. I have written about the original idea of using a systemic inquiry logic here and here. Of course, the idea is evolving and will be evolving further. So the below is really a snapshot of where we are standing, in the spirit of learning-out-loud. I'd appreciate to hear your thoughts.
While we are still fine-tuning the themes we want our work to focus on in the next couple of years, we are also engaging in formulating strategic intents for each of the themes. The iterative process of discussing which themes to prioritise while already defining strategic intents has proven helpful, as the latter is helping us formulate what we actually mean with a theme and what kind of change we would like to contribute to.
We define a strategic intent as follows: A Strategic Intent gives a sense of direction. It describes the change we want to see in the world in terms of its qualities, values, and desirable patterns without specifying concrete results. It is not in itself a measurable objective or a plan.
We are using a Vector Theory of Change logic, where you start from what we know about the current situation and define a direction of travel from here - rather than to define an ideal future state we want to reach. The direction is described in the form of what we want to see more of, rather than by specifying specific objectives to reach.
When looking at the draft strategic intents, we realised a few things. First of all, we could see again that we are often using jargon to describe the work we do or the change we want to achieve. The draft intents use words like "ecosystems," "environments" or "constellations," or talk about "structural conditions" and "social and commercial determinants." I do see the need to use some of these terms, yet we also decided that we should try to use as plain English as possible. At the same time, as a next step we will take each strategic intent and systematically unpack the key terms and concepts by providing examples from our current work to illustrate what we mean. Also, we will try to be more coherent and use the same terms across the themes. Concepts like environment, ecosystem or underlying conditions all speak to the same idea of not working on the symptoms but rather on the conditions that lead to these symptoms. We will try to agree on one term that expresses this across the themes.
We also found that it would be helpful to describe a few strategic actions that we are envisioning for each theme as this further specifies how we want to put in practice our working principles. We even in some cases clearly formulate what actions we do not want to engage in. We are also clear that the actions we are formulating now are based on what we know now and might - or are likely to - shift in the future.
So now we have strategic actions and strategic intents. What we are missing is an idea of what we need to look out for to know whether the strategic actions are contributing to the systems we work in move in the right direction - and with "right" I mean the direction set out in the strategic intent. The idea here is to define a number of "signals of change" that would be clustered into Domains of Change: Domains of Change further specify a Strategic Intent. While the Strategic Intent describes the direction we want to see the system shift in, the Domains of Change define possible Signals of Change that would show us that the system is (or is not) shifting in the right direction. They do not provide a definite list of signals but rather define what types of signals we expect to see if the system in question is shifting in the direction of the change we want to see.
Together, the strategic actions, the domains of change and the strategic intent form some sort of a middle-range theory of how we see change happen. For each of our grant or sometimes for portfolio of grants we can then formulate more contextualised theories of change that speak to this middle-range theory. Some of our themes can be informed by existing collections of theories like this one for policy change efforts. I see this approach sit somewhere along the lines of levels of abstraction and nested theories of change, as described by Tom Aston in this post.
The Paper Museum
Over the last few months, I have read Richard Powers' The Overstory (Powers 2019). An extremely powerful book about trees and forests - and humans.
A good answer is worth reinventing from scratch, again and again.
Why have I added this to my Paper Museum? In the book, Power writes a lot about evolution and describes evolution as nature trying new ways of doing things to find answers to local contexts. The idea of a 'tree' has been invented by nature in so many shapes or forms, but it seems to be a very useful and successful idea, so it is worth inventing again and again.
Reference: Powers, Richard. 2019. The Overstory: The Million-Copy Global Bestseller and Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Random House.
Photo
A horseshoe bend of the Ardèche river in Southern France, where we spent a delightful week. My own photo.