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Blog Post
Personal and organisational observations about Systems Changers 2018
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As we enter month four of the third Systems Changers programme, a couple of pieces of received wisdom that were passed on to me when I started are playing out and beginning to make sense. The first is that doing an action inquiry requires the...
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Blog Post
Learning new ways of thinking… when your brain hurts, but in a good way
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This is a bit of a brain dump after an exciting week of work, following the second two-day workshop as part of the System Changers programme. I’m on the programme with a dozen other staff members from the Children’s Society (and a great...
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Blog Post
All Change: Why Systems Change is more than just a fad
Read morePeter Grigg, The Children's Society A few years ago, when The Children’s Society determined a strategic focus on systems change, it ran the risk of sounding faddish. Was it just describing what we’ve always done using new jargon...
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Blog Post
Lankelly Chase’s Governance Action Inquiry
Read moreMy acid test for any would-be solution to a social problem is whether it reproduces or disrupts the dynamics that created the problem in the first place. For example, if you are attempting to tackle inequality, is there inequality built into your...
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Blog Post
Losing Control is back and bigger than ever!
Read moreEsther Foreman, The Social Change Agency Since Losing Control, 2017, we have witnessed a massive increase in organisations and leaders asking how they can accelerate social change by adopting more inclusive ways of making decisions. We have...
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Blog Post
Knowledge Action Inquiry: Paradigm shift
Read moreEarlier this week we flagged that one of the elements of our Knowledge Action Inquiry is ‘examining the basis of our collective knowledge system’. By this, we mean that we want to explore the underlying values, assumptions and judgments we...
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Blog Post
Knowledge Action Inquiry: Knowledge Democracy
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As a major theme of our Knowledge Action Inquiry, we’ll be examining ‘knowledge democracy’ and its relevance to our work on severe and multiple disadvantage. We’re in the early stages of discovering and engaging with quite a...
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Blog Post
Knowledge Action Inquiry: What do we know about severe and multiple disadvantage?
Read moreWe all try to make sense of the world we live in: it’s part of the natural state of things to assemble information and act on what we (think or feel) we know. Similarly, the idea of knowledge underpins our whole discourse on severe and multiple...
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Blog Post
Place based working – what have we learned so far?
Read moreEighteen months ago we set out to work alongside a few partners in places to explore how we can support people and institutions nurture the conditions for change to flourish locally. This followed 18 months of seeking advice and input from as...
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Blog Post
What does the world of tech and big data have to do with us?
Read moreWe’ve had two brushes with big data in the last couple of weeks. Cathy’s been talking to other foundations about it…. On my first day back in the office after returning from a meeting of international foundations on big data, The...