Many of the most pressing societal challenges we face today are complex. This means they are made up of lots of interconnected parts, and that changing individual parts doesn’t necessarily lead to the results you’d expect or want. Because of this public impact organisations are increasingly looking to effect systemic change through delivering portfolios of activity that intervene at multiple points and levels. Orchestrating these portfolios of activity, which often span multiple organisations, sectors and types of work, is messy and challenging.

We’re sharing some of the practical approaches we’ve been trying to steward systemic change, which include:

1. co-developing a tangible whole-system vision
2. deliberately combining different types of work, and
3. facilitating a system-wide test-and-learn portfolio.

Using our work on clean heat neighbourhoods as a case study, we’ll highlight how these techniques were applied and share our practice in the spirit of learning. Our approach is always evolving and inspired by the work of others, such as the Designing Missions Playbook by Dan Hill and Vinnova, so we welcome feedback.

We’ve found that using design skills like co-design, system mapping, and prototyping has been helpful in bringing stakeholders together from across the system to co-develop a shared future vision. Importantly, this shared future vision goes beyond a list of aspirational goals and policy reports but is about bridging the ‘implementation gap’ and getting hands-on to work through the practical details, together with those affected, of how to make the vision a reality, and then taking our first steps. 

Convening the system early facilitates multi-level discussions, fostering crucial insights when individuals facing diverse barriers come together, and helps address risks and unintended consequences. This approach allows the system to influence how future changes are implemented, with open and collaborative work helping to cultivate cross-sector and local networks able to act on shared challenges that are identified.

In our clean heat neighbourhoods work we did this in two main ways: 

1. We published a speculative concept of how the system could operate to deliver area-based low-carbon heat. This may not seem like a radical future, but it requires a change at almost every level of the system. From households through to the supply chain, and up to layers of governance. Working in the open, we published this as a ‘prototype’, asking those working in the low-carbon heat space to tell us where we were wrong.
2. We convened people from across multiple levels of the system to gain an understanding of how a future delivery model may work in practice, where the current barriers lay and which stakeholders were best placed to drive change.  

As a result, we engaged close to 100 stakeholders from across the system, surfacing their critiques and suggestions, and mapping the interactions and activities of different stakeholders at different levels of the system. The resulting ‘policy blueprint’ represented a co-developed future operating model for the system that people could get behind.

What we’re wrestling with

How to manage and work with diverse cross-sector collaborators. It's been incredibly valuable to draw on the expertise, insight and feedback from across the system, but it can be difficult to navigate and understand whom within the system may be best placed to move insight into action. A lot of this knowledge about the network is held tacitly by individuals, so it can be hard to keep track of insights and join up learning in a systematic way. This is something we’re working on and are interested in hearing about approaches that others have tried.

Systemic change requires intervening at different points and levels in a system - sometimes referred to as leverage points - which can mean doing very different types of work at the same time. We’ve found that defining a shared vocabulary for the different types of roles we’re playing and activities we’re undertaking can help with collaboration by allowing people and partners to identify where their skills can contribute, as well as conveying the current strategic focus. For instance, early on in the clean heat neighbourhoods work, the emphasis was on system definition - as described above - whereas the focus has now shifted to a mix of testing, demonstration and capacity-building work.

In our clean heat neighbourhoods work, we use the model in the diagram below to deliberately combine different types of work to support systemic change. The purpose of the model isn’t to create silos between activities, but instead to build shared understanding and alignment around the intent of a given activity, experiment or project. For example, learnings from our prototyping work contribute directly to our ‘capacity-building’ work, but in the service of building the skills in the system to deliver the desired change.

Conversely, the intent of ‘prototyping and evidence building’ is to build confidence, inform decisions, and reduce risk in a safe, quick and ethical way, which should build on insights and evidence gleaned from the system via hands-on capacity building. The diagram below populates the roles we play with the work streams within clean heat neighbourhoods.

The types of work we’re deliberately combining include:

System definition

Described in more detail above, we brought together cross-sector stakeholders and multiple perspectives - from end user, through to delivery and policy - to understand the system, envision a tangible future vision, and begin practically charting a path towards it.

Prototyping and demonstrating

These processes are happening in two parallel streams, complementary but at very different paces.

Leveraging our internal expertise, we can work quickly to build evidence and insight about key uncertainties related to clean heat neighbourhoods. We have:

• worked with BIT on an online experiment to build confidence on whether it would actually appeal to households and the offers that would most resonate with consumers
• conducted testing directly with households to understand how they may react to a coordinated switch to low-carbon heat.

Alongside this, we are delivering projects with willing partners to test and pilot aspects of clean heat neighbourhoods in as realistic a way as possible. This work, by its nature, took slightly longer and includes:

• working with local authorities to co-design coordinated approaches and understand the barriers currently faced
• simulating an aspect of the clean heat neighbourhoods proposal with Plymouth City Council in order to understand how our original proposal would work in practice.

Underpinning this work again is the ability to share insights and replicable learnings quickly through our ‘normalising and influencing’ work - ensuring that others in the system are able to build on it.

Capacity building

Following the co-development of a tangible whole-system vision, our capacity-building role has been to solidify the organisations and people we’d previously engaged into a community of practice. Forming a group that could help with continual development and scaling. This involved understanding our role within the system and identifying how we could add value for stakeholders. 

Our work to build capacity within the system currently looks like:

• Amplifying existing or emerging approaches related to clean heat neighbourhoods by compiling and sharing a bank of practical case studies for the system to use.  
• Ensuring that evidence, guidance and tools are shared widely and freely to those who may use them. Backed by our testing, evidence building and partnership work.
• Convening interested parties, looking to form partnerships around some of the more challenging aspects of delivering clean heat neighbourhoods. We used open calls for collaboration, briefs for the kind of work and partnerships we wanted to form, to kick start this approach.

Normalising and influencing

Through prototyping we look to develop a more effective and feasible policy rooted in real-world feedback and results. Our capacity building and convening is about acting as a bridge between local delivery and decision-makers. And our system definition work involves revising the design of the clean heat neighbourhoods approach based on continual learning. 

To bring this all together we also undertake normalising and influencing work, which includes engaging with industry and government, sharing our learning and making recommendations through reports and more creative mediums, and are currently working on a clean heat neighbourhoods playbook to help the approach be more broadly understood and adopted.

What we’re wrestling with

It can be a challenge to communicate complexity to different audiences, framing proposals that land and engage with different levels of the system while not alienating others. To address this, we have leaned into communicating shared outcomes and principles over pre-defined solutions that might not work in every local context ie, “ensure potential suppliers have the chance to engage and inform an area-based scheme design before procurement” instead of “local areas must consult with suppliers using our digital platform”. This can lead to ambiguity, so finding a balance between giving certainty on the needs of the system while not closing down possibilities at an early stage is tricky.

For clean heat neighbourhoods, our current strategy is to: 

1. use a test-and-learn approach to develop incisive policy asks and de-risk a co-developed vision of a policy
2. build the capacity for change by sharing learning, tools and playbooks
3. catalyse a collaborative cross-sector movement to make progress. 

Given this strategy spans multiple organisations, sectors and types of work, we’ve been experimenting with practical ways to plan and manage systemic change activities, like the ‘test-and-learn portfolio map’ in the example below.

We have an internal strategy that is stewarded by a dedicated delivery team and is continually updated based on feedback from diverse cross-sector collaborators and real-world research and testing. We use this to guide and deliberately combine a diverse portfolio of activities (as described above) to help create systemic change.

To track our work across the system, and the different streams mentioned previously, we have developed a portfolio map open to multiple teams and stakeholders contributing to clean heat neighbourhoods. The map allows us to monitor the work we’re doing but also make visible how it ties to the strategic assumptions and outcomes we’re collectively working towards.

Key to the value of the map is the input of multiple teams and stakeholders.  While only a recent development, we’ve started to hold a quarterly workshop where we collectively log our confidence across open questions and critical uncertainties. For example, one of our key assumptions is that by “proving sustainable delivery models and creating a portfolio of clean heat neighbourhood schemes will de-risk investment and stimulate new markets, ultimately lowering [heating] costs for households.” Through recent work, the team's confidence that this is an assumption we should prioritise has risen. This reflective process has allowed the team to consider why this has changed, what evidence has caused this change, and also who within the existing network we should work with to test this assumption.

Contributors to these learning and progress reviews bring insights and evidence based on formal work they are undertaking, but also the informal conversations and projects we’re hearing about across the system. The hope is that this allows us to track progress across the system in a more holistic way and be more focused and additive with the practical work we do. In essence, this is how we bring together learning and results from multiple related projects and initiatives to update our strategic plans. For us, this is pushing test and learn beyond individual projects and services - this is test and learn for systemic change.

We’ll soon be developing a playbook which aims to be an open source resource for clean heat neighbourhoods, and in the meantime, we’ve produced a Miro template for mapping ‘test-and-learn portfolios’ to influence systemic change.

What we’re wrestling with

We’re still iterating on the best way to map system-wide portfolios of test-and-learn work, as well as how to collectively review learning and progress. Due to the diversity of activities we’re undertaking, as well as the sometimes indirect nature of systemic change (i.e. changing individual parts doesn’t necessarily lead to the results you’d expect or want), it can be hard to find the best way to present or show progress to stakeholders (e.g. we are 10% closer to systemic change because of these activities). Something we’d like to explore in the future is how we could better make the diversity of work as visible as possible, potentially mapping the work of other system actors (perhaps even making it public) and engaging them in learning and progress reviews to help shape strategy.

Our test, learn and grow approach to systemic change is continuously evolving. We welcome any feedback and invite you to engage with our work, share your insights, and collaborate on future initiatives. We are particularly interested in hearing about your experiences with managing cross-sector test-and-learn portfolios with diverse communities and communicating nuanced proposals to them. Your feedback and input are invaluable as we continue to refine our approach to stewarding systemic change. Get in touch with us at [email protected]

If you’re interested in our case study, clean heat neighbourhoods, you can visit our project hub to learn more about our current work and how you can contribute.