How we (plan to) use systemic enquiries

One of the suggestions I brought into Fondation Botnar is to think of our work as a set of systemic enquiries through different, thematic portfolios. What is a systemic enquiry, though?

In simple words, I see it as a kind of 'learning by doing' approach, others simply call it adaptive management. Some might also call it action research. Each systemic enquiry would start with three simple questions:

• What do we need to better understand now in order to know what to do next? (What are our learning questions?)
• What types of shifts would we like to see in the conditions that shape young people's wellbeing through our activities? (What are our change hypotheses?)
• What data do we need to collect to see whether these shifts happen and to answer the learning questions? (What is our monitoring and evaluation plan?)

The same questions can be asked on different levels, from the whole of the foundation to individual thematic portfolios, down to individual projects, in collaboration with partners.

If we pair these questions with Dave Snowden's three questions that guide engagements in complex human systems, we have all we need to start our systemic enquiries:

• What aspects of the complex system can we manage or change?
• Out of these, which ones can we monitor so we know whether a shift is happening?
• Out of these, which ones can we amplify if the shift is favourable or dampen if it is not?

Dave and his?Cynefin Company?have developed a whole?set of tools and methodsaround these questions, including the?Cynefin framework?or the more recent?Estuarine framework.

So far so good. Now we need to tie these things up into a set of processes that honour our working principle of adopting a relational approach. I imagine this could happen in the following way.

Once we have defined the thematic priorities we want to focus on (which is indeed a task we are working on, making sure that our thematic priorities reflect real needs of young people), we can start engaging with organisations who have similar thematic priorities and are working in the contexts we are interested in (in secondary cities in low- and middle-income countries, or on topics like adolescent mental health or education). We sometimes call these organisations our intermediaries, who then convene various stakeholders in these contexts or on these themes to run processes to co-create possible activities around the thematic priority with the aim to improve young people's wellbeing. The idea is to build a diverse portfolio for each thematic priority, rooted in the realities of young people.

Once these activities are under way, a number of sense-making and learning processes are going to be organised with a regular cadence on different levels - the closer to 'the ground,' the more often they would happen. At Fondation Botnar, we are already piloting an approach to sense-making and learning in our cities portfolio. We call it?Evidence to Action?(E2A) and we co-developed it with the Melbourne Center for Cities. The approach works on different levels, starting with individual cities, where activities are co-developed by coalitions of actors, who are then brought together to learn what works and how. The next level up is bringing together cities in one country, and finally, the top-layer is at a global level, facilitating learning across our cities portfolio, which will then feed into our Strategic Learning and Evaluation system (which is obviously still under construction).

I also like the?results, sense-making and learning (RSL)?approach of the BuildingLife initiative (described here), which is quite similar to the above. They also run sense-making and learning processes on three levels: (1) in an individual location (they call it 'juristicion'), (2) between localities, and (3) across the whole initiative. In the latter, they connect the sense-making and learning to the results framework of the funder, Laudes Foundation.

I'm currently trying to figure out how to build an effective interface between the learning that is going on in the portfolios and the organisational level to be able to learn across our portfolios, answer our organisational learning questions and see what difference we make as a whole organisation.

Originally posted in the Gaining Systemic Insight Weekly Email