AWN #WeekNotes w/c 12 June 2023
Exploring systems change practices; Designing a 5-day Innovation Lab; Changing Course reflections.
I am writing newsletter of #weeknotes of starting the Atelier of What’s Next (What’s needed, What’s ready? What can we do? What next?). For my rationale for starting the Atelier see here.
This week:
Exploring system change practices.
Designing a 5-day residential innovation retreat for systems innovation in Net Zero Heat
0/ DETECTING: Changing Course on how we manage fresh water.
Exploring systemic change practices.
Step: 5/DELIVER. Themes: Role: Practice advisor; Transformation Practices; Community-led change.
As I'm not sure quite how much of this work I can put in the public domain, this part will be a little truncated and with [redactions].
This week saw the 7th and final session of a series Exploring Systems Change Practices with a [redacted charity]. The charity is aprt of a new-ish wave of organisations that exist to help deprived or marginalised communities, but are trying to do so in ways where the community itself determines what needs to be done and does it. The norma has been to tell people in those communites what they should want, and then build it for them (and then wonder why the new community asset isn't being used).
Roughly, the ambition for this emerging group of funders and agencies is: wanting a world where communities are taking a more active part in creating their own version of the good life.
You can want that for lots of reasons:
Ethical: who are we, the technocrats, to say what they should want?
Democracy and social justice: people should have the loudest voice in determining their own future.
Pre-figuration and adaptation: building pockets of local capacity now gets us ready for a disrupted future, where every local will need to flex.
Pragmatic: people own what they create (to quote a mxim of complexity practitioner Myron Rogers).
The challenge was how to keep improving the work of [redacted charity], particularly by providing a systems lens.
Now, there are ways in which 'systems thinking' has achieved a cultish status in some parts of the sustainability movement. To caricature slightly: (1) Our problems come from not seeing how interconnected everything is: nation with nation; humanity with nature; people today with future generations. Therefore, (2) the solution is to act in an interconnected way. Therefore, (3) all we need to do is systems thinking. Problem solved!
Systems thinking was at the heart of the Masters I did (Responsibility and Business Practice) and the espoused methods of Forum for the Future. Which means I have, in principle, been doing 'it' for 20 years. Perhaps because of this, I don't believe it is the panacea that is often promoted. Nor do I think all the most successful examples of systems change have come from people explicitly using systems change methods (yes, afterwards we can fit what they did into our systems change framework; but that's not the same as them using that framework at the time).
All of which means, for this event series, the need was not to tell people They Should Do More Systems Thinking. But to help them explore how they could use systems change practices in their work. (Where 'systems thinking' is thinking about system X; while 'systems change practices' are doing things because they are informed by systems thinking.)
We needed to make it practical. So, we used Wasafiri's SystemCraft framework (explainer here). This is, quite simply, the best plain English articulation of a complexity-informed systems practice for change that I have come across. I do not say that lightly.
Over the seven sessions, people applied the key elements of Wasafiri to their own work, chose some experiments for them to try stuff out, and did some peer-clinics for learning.
This week was the final, wrap up session, drawing out the main lessons for the organisation and the sector. Folks shared lots of insights they had gathered, and new strands of work started because of the sessions. Hurray! They have those articulated in a document which also has the SystemCraft tools summarised. A fieldguide, if you will. But I won't write about those here.
What I will write about is what I learnt. But, what was 'in' the Atelier? Essentially, me being a 'practice adviser'. It is a bit meta: my practices in helping people develop their practices for their purposes (here: a world where communities are taking a more active part in creating their own version of the good life).
My abilities as a practice adviser developed quite well. Certainly, in any future similar engagement, I'd have a faster tempo (we had 6 weeks between sessions, thinking that would give people time to absorb, but we just lost momentum). And push for more pre-work on diagnosing the current culture and operations of the organisation? Do people have the time and permission for even the small experiments needed for practice building?
Also, there is something subtle about avoid pushing systems practices at people ('You Should Use This') and giving people the chance to use the systems practices they might need.
WHAT NEXT? I think the outcomes of the sessions (insights, capacities, new projects) are already getting absorbed into lifeblood of the [redacted charity]. I need to get back to Wasafiri on how things went (oops, sorry Kate and Scott!). And I can be bullish about a 'practice advisor' offer.
Designing a 5-day residential innovation retreat for systems innovation in Net Zero Heat
Steps: 2/DISCOVER & 3/DEFINE & 4/DEVELOP. Themes: Transformations Practices; Net Zero.
The second big thing this week has been doing the 'first cut' design of the upcoming Net Zero Heat Innovation Lab (NZHIL). This is a 5-day residential which ends with new proposals on how to accelerate the UK Heat provision to Net Zero greenhouse gas emissions. Those proposals will come from 40ish people, drawn from across the sector, who will go from sorta knowing each other to being new teams making significant bids (going for £1-2m funding).
In this I am working for Carbon Limiting Technologies, a consultancy that specialises in commercialising clean growth technologies. My process and facilitation skills compliment their deep expertise in the industry and start-ups. We, in turn, are supporting Innovate UK, the UK's innovation agency. As it happens, I am working for Mike Pitts, who i interviewed for my 'Innovation for Sustainability' podcast here.
Lots going on in this which at some frontier:
Heat in the Net Zero transition. The path to decarbonising lots of the economic is clear: electrify. That works for lots of transport, lots of energy use in the and commercial property. But heating buildings -- whether homes or commercial property -- is much harder. The end-use market is fragmented. The supply chains are also fragmented, and have few opportunities for economies of scale. There is a limited track record for the product offers, and people are risk averse. And so on.How to urgently decarbonise heat is both hugely needed and difficult.
Industrial strategy. The UK has a strong legal framework for our climate goals (the Climate Act, and the Climate Change Commission). Our current government is good on announcements, but weaker on policy and funding follow up, to put it mildly (a common theme across many areas, to put it mildly again). The Innovate UK programme on Net Zero Heat is a leading edge intervention as part of forming the industrial strategy that supports the 'industrial revolutions on a deadline' needed to get close to asafe climate.
Innovation Lab. Innovate UK has run Innovation Labs before, but not 5 days long. This is new territory.
Me with the rest of the CLT team. We've never worked together before. They are great, and we have different working styles. That's a good thing overall, but can lead to bumps. Our instinct is that we will need to be able to improvise during the 5 days. So, we're going to have to learn how to do that along the way, as part of the preparation.
This week was about getting together a good-enough starting design that we can work on it together. So, I've spent a lot of the week imagining myself being from an engineering company, or from a social housing association, or from an architects firms, and going: it's day 3. How am I feeling now? What do I want now? What would help me truat the other 40 people in this retreat now? And so on.
As mentioned back in WeekNotes w/c 13 Mar, I used the RSA’s seminal ‘Think like a system, Act like an entrepreneur’ as the core concept. After much head-scratching, I've turned that into a 5 day flow, with the major 'beats' in each day. The main metaphor I've been using is 'journey', but equally you could use 'narrative'. This is now shared with the rest of the team for them to improve and add to (including sharing a 5 minute video overview, so they have a greater chance of understanding what I am getting at). We'll see how they react next week.
The hypothesis at the moment is: the transformation practices that lead to the 'industrial revolutions on a deadline' we need have to play out in the micro: this team, this group of participants, this sector, this national policy context.
WHAT NEXT. Building the design with the team. Rehearsing and testing. Creating a holding document to put stuff that can become a 'fieldbook' (ready for next time).
0/ DETECTING: Changing Course on how we manage fresh water
Theme: Transformation policy; Futures.
During the week I went to an exhibition which used speculative design methods to explore a future where we manage water courses differently -- especially by not assuming that decisions should by made by people, for people. Perhaps they will be made for the ecosystem, and/or by AI machines. More details on 'Changing Course Forum' here.
I attended wearing my 0/DETECTING hat ('sensing what is going on to better identify possible What Next's'). (Note that this is not a real hat.) My jumble of reflections:
'Eco-centric' is out and about. Since at least the Enlightenment, European culture has been dominated by being human-centric (even individual-centric). For many people, that is why we have the climate and ecological crises. And therefore, for those people, we will move beyond our egos to eco-centric, putting the natural world at the centre (with us as one of many organisms that are part of the natural world).
That was the consistent them of the speculations. So, the idea of eco-centric is out in the wild. As Andrew Curry in Just Two Things is fond of saying, useful ideas of the future have to look ridiculous now (as it implies they are novel compared to the status quo). So, yes, eco-centric decision-making looks ridiculous now. But that doesn't mean it won't happen. Though, I suspect it will be very slooooow.
It is hard to exhibit when the process is more important than the artefact. My second exhibition in 3 weeks where I was significantly less excited about the outputs than everyone else. I suspect because the value is in the process, which those invovled have got, but me, as an outsider, do not.
Maintaining space for difference in this policy context. It felt very strongly that new ideas were not welcome in this government. It is easy to say the current Ministers must be distracted by the Conservative Party machinations. But I think there is something deeper.
Will Davies has an amazing essay (£) in the London Review of Books which gives my view [emphasis added]:
"The picture painted by [Resolution Foundation report] Stagnation Nation is familiar from the work of many political economists, such as Brett Christophers and Jodi Dean, who have tracked the drift of contemporary capitalism towards ‘rentierism’ and even ‘neo-feudalism’. What these terms suggest is that economies like Britain’s have effectively abandoned the pursuit of prosperity through the traditional capitalist practices of investment in technology, R&D, skills and entrepreneurship (all of which offer a reason and a means for businesses to increase wages), and descended instead into passive speculation on unproductive assets, above all housing, but extending to such Ponzi schemes as NFTs and other cryptocurrencies.
"This tendency can be dated back to the explosion of financial services in the late 1980s, but has become acute in the years since the 2008 financial crisis, when – for reasons that aren’t entirely clear – an abundance of very cheap credit, which could have been used for the creation of new firms, new production methods, whole new business models, was instead used to inflate the value of existing assets even further.
"One reason that highly unequal, low-productivity economies tend towards stagnation is that wealth management strategies of the sort pursued by the super-rich become largely defensive, aimed at preserving and exploiting existing assets, rather than risk-taking. The Resolution Foundation is quite praising of recent government efforts to increase the rate of investment in the public sector, but despairs at the extraordinarily low investment in the private sector.
"To put it bluntly, Britain’s capitalist class has effectively given up on the future."
In this context, policies are about protecting the rentier class, and doing nothing which builds for a different future. Must be hard to maintain any ecology of difference, in that context.
Plus, there is the famous Milton Friedman quote:
“Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”
Keeping that ecology of difference is very important to having a country that can adapt as stuff happens. I wonder how much might be ready, if/when we get a Labour government in the UK?