Design Lab Retrospective Session
Earlier this year, we held a retrospective session with the Design Lab Cohort from Emerging Infrastructure Fund, at the midpoint of our programme. The session was facilitated by Gemma Drake.
The aim of the session was to create a moment to pause and reflect on the individual and collective learnings so far. Holding space to look back to the start of the programme, travel to where we are now and look forward to where we hope to be at the end of the programme.
Part of making a “space to pause” more comfortable and useful to our group involved enabling the group to recognise patterns over time and cultivating mindsets to spot “connections” and changes in behaviour or thinking. We asked Gemma to support this– having an objective perspective on the programme journey for participants.
This enabled us to surface changing perceptions and emerging skills and confidence within the group– helping them to make sense of where they are going as individuals or as organisations.
Finally, as part of our thinking around Infrastructure, we wanted to acknowledge the group as a “learning system”-- and help the group to see their knowledge, wisdom, power and influence which are essential parts of their assets to define and work towards the sustainability of their infrastructure organisations.
Below is what we heard or observed in the session, and our reflections on facilitating a session like this for Emerging Infrastructure organisations. Where we think it helped and what we might do differently in future iterations.
TL;DR
The session provoked lots of feedback from the group on the different types of challenges, opportunities and contextual factors Emerging Infrastructure organisations work through on a regular basis.
It’s clear that the landscape in which social enterprises and charities grow is a pressurised environment– and how they develop, learn, are funded and supported are all influenced by a complex set of interactions.
Having a dedicated space to reflect on this, and the learning journey through the programme they have been on gives us a glimpse of the things we all might need to do or consider to help cultivate more “impactful change”. These include:
Enabling Emerging Infrastructure organisations to get out of “business as usual” ways of doing things allows for more impactful opportunities for change to emerge. Including spaces to share and practice different approaches and mindsets.
Resourcing and supporting organisations to make more connections between different stakeholders and develop more pluralistic strategies for organisational futures supports the possibility of more transformative innovation.
Acknowledging, and accounting for, complexity in design can provide more robust and sustainable platforms for innovation.
Community organisations need support with capacity, as much as with any gaps in skills, to “figure out” how to make themselves a more resilient and sustainable organisation.
From a facilitator perspective, what has changed has been a shift in linear thinking towards growth and change within organisations. There is now a greater recognition and confidence with “growth” seen through a lens of complexity and a greater appetite and skill for considering their intentional steps to transformative change through a more systemic lens.
With this comes a responsibility on the part of other stakeholders to resource and support this approach with more patience and sensitivity towards complexity– moving, where possible, to thinking about alternative ways to value resilience in organisations working on innovation programmes.
In cultivating these conditions, there is more space to reconcile both the pragmatic and possible futures for Infrastructure organisations.
How Gemma facilitated the session
Gemma facilitated three different activities followed up by group discussions during an online workshop with participants from each of the organisations involved with the Design Lab programme.
Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow. Gemma took the group on a guided individual journey through three points in time, the past, present and future. With camera’s off the group was encouraged to embody, draw and dream out these points in time. The aim was to reflect on their thoughts, behaviours and mindsets at the start of the programme, the past, to where they are in the present and travel forward where they think they are heading into the future.
Future Scenarios. Gemma asked the group to think about their Organisational stories and journeys, five years into the future, to identify where the opportunities to reach this exist in the present. Explored through two possible futures, the ‘possible’, where there are no constraints, and a ‘pragmatic’ logical sense of a planned future.
Redefining ‘Growth’ and what it means to the organisations now, through these enquiry questions:
What have you learnt about what is needed to grow an ‘infrastructure organisation?
What, if anything, has changed about how you define growth?
What needs to be let go of in order to grow?
What we did
We had observed that the group doesn't often get the chance to step back and to be in a different point of time outside of the present– to connect mindsets or experiences in the recent past to where they are now. This is mainly due to the pressures of maintaining service delivery to communities in the present.
For Emerging Infrastructure organisations, the group describe often being in a state of ‘survival’– working to ensure that the services they provide can continue to support the communities and beneficiaries they work with.
At a point earlier in the programme, we had tried to facilitate a similar session on identifying shared challenges across the different organisations. However, at the time we didn’t have the necessary qualities present to adequately explore these types of questions.
Qualities like communication and feedback fostered trust between us as a group to “open up” more, which has developed over time . Running a session like this we needed time to travel the distance, to then be able to reflect on a shared experience.
After spending the time being guided through the three different points of time by Gemma, through a process of relational coaching – Gemma introduced a question, asking “What is possible in the future that is not possible in the present?” and “what needs to be let go of in order to grow?”. Allowing the group to acknowledge what needs to enter their system and what needs to leave it in the present.
What needed to leave? Involved letting go of assumptions of set ways of doing things, “scarcity mindsets”, a sense of over-reliance on individuals’, “leading systems” and to an extent “control” of those systems.
What needed to enter this system? A sense of calmness and purpose in their mission or ambitions for organisations, the means or confidence for more connectivity or collaboration across local systems and more acknowledgement and appreciation of the wisdom and experience within the group.
The group, and facilitator, used the term “system” interchangeably throughout the session. A ‘system’ could refer to the networks or communities of stakeholders within which they work and operate, or could refer to the collections of individuals or teams that make up their organisations.
In our workshop checkout, Gemma reflected on the level of honesty and candour around what needed to change at a personal level for participants and the context around them all.
What stood out to us was the acknowledgement that the process of “breaking free” from the present formations, constraints and orthodoxies can be disempowering. However, this was also a rallying call, providing energy to the group to look ahead to a future picture of sustainability– one call being “to create tomorrow we have to be bold”.
In contrast to being constrained by the acknowledgement of change, there was a sense of necessity and even comfort in first acknowledging its presence as a collective. By doing so, the group shifted their thinking to the opportunities, the elements they identify as needing to enter the systems, to bring the sustainability they and their communities need.
Our assumptions prior to the “retrospective” were that we expected to hear about a more “work-focused” journey from participants. However, we heard more about the personal and the systemic, how things connect and what the people involved in these journeys need in terms of resources and support.
The session uncovered motivations and forces that are not visible in a “dominant paradigm” of what infrastructure largely operates in. In other areas of the programme we have looked at the question of how to resource and support Emerging Infrastructure organisations to “figure out” what it means to become a more sustainable and a present force in their communities and the wider sector. The opportunities for enabling this lie in more human-focused, relational and holistic approaches in the view of the group.
What we observed
We observed two futures being reconciled by the group– the possible and the pragmatic. A balance of what they hope to be and what they feel they need to be . The Design Lab is a programme for these infrastructure organisations to be given the means to think about the opportunities for sustainability and their role in achieving “more significant” change for their communities.
The pragmatic vision was described by the group as organisations that provide “strong intersectional practice”, drive transformative change for beneficiaries, have space and process for new ideas and knowledge sharing and have different and devolved forms of leadership and organisational cultures.
The possible vision was described as networked, communal working between organisations in this space. Making “open source” approaches to collaboration, changing the makeup of their organisations to be led more by those with experience from the communities they support and seeing themselves in partnership and connected to stakeholders around them (including those who need to be influenced around the structural challenges their organisations have been established in response to.)
From these visions, we heard from the group that, whilst there is often ambition and ideas to transform Infrastructure in a community context, there are also significant structural challenges at play– influencing the type of culture and ways of working that are permitted, valued or regarded as resilient.
What does this entail?
Reflecting on this tension– the programme is also exploring the question of how to resource and support this journey, and what factors stakeholders should regard as evidence of resilience within infrastructure organisations for different communities.
The group reflected on three questions related to the programme about what has changed for them in how they perceive “Infrastructural growth” and what needs to be “let go of” to move towards this future.
“Some situations will retain [a level of] complexity that needs a human intervention”
At the start of the programme, many in the group had initially been looking to digital skills, automation or more sophisticated technological processes to “elevate” in some way the resilience or efficacy of what their organisation does– reflecting that these processes limit opportunities to find a way through complexity to build sustainability.
Over the course of the Lab, an important and necessary aspect to Infrastructural sustainability and resilience focuses on the ability to resource learning across teams, and more mechanisms for bringing others impacted by the work on a journey of change.
“We were looking at expansion, now we’re asking have we improved what we’re doing?”
The group feel that, being an Infrastructure organisation that’s accountable to and working with communities (many of which are experiencing the sharp end of disproportionate impacts of rapid technological or societal change)-- that their resilience to support these communities comes from the strength of its internal structure, not new digital tools.
What they need support with, is not predetermined formulas for growth, but a greater recognition of a sustainable core. They are changing their interpretation of what growth means for their organisations– to “improve practice”, having more mindfulness on the impact of their growth and more flexibility internally to work in complexity.
“...Understand our limitations, or be more comfortable that there are limitations on what we can get to”
The group also discussed their view on what defines a sustainable Infrastructure in comparison to the dominant paradigms that exist around them. How they are measured or viewed as resilient, or a valuable investment, or what a “wider system” might need to let go of in order to properly resource and support Emerging Infrastructure in the future.
There is a pressure, within access to funding, for organisations to do “too much” in order to meet the demand, prove themselves as “infrastructurally” sound or measure themselves based solely on the outputs of their services. Other measures of resilience and acknowledgement of the limitations on their “growth” are also necessary reflections for organisations figuring out how to be sustainable in today’s world.
Demonstrating internal “sustainability” Being able to demonstrate to stakeholders how collaborative, or show sustainable internal structures to attract investment were seen as ideal ways to resource and support them to become sustainable Infrastructures.
This involves putting boundaries around all areas of operation and being in a position to be able to say ‘no’ to things as much as ‘yes’. The system of organisations, funders and stakeholders requires setting more guiding stars for change which can be measured over longer periods of times to support transformational outcomes.
Being able to identify, in terms of reporting and evaluation, what “we don’t need to collect” as much as “what we do need to collect”, and acknowledgement (both individually and collectively) that we can’t do everything. The change here for the group came in a renewed emphasis of working to demonstrate what it is they do really well as opposed to demonstrating an ability to do everything.
Collective Action
Reflecting on these challenges, opportunities and contextual factors– there are some areas in which we can all start to address systemically how Infrastructure organisations can be more sustainable and lead transformative outcomes for communities in the view of the group.
Organisations need to identify the opportunities for more pluralistic and longer-term influence on organisational strategy. Many in the group are using the Lab resources to experiment with how sustainability is enabled through team cultures, organisational behaviours, communication and feedback loops.
Facilitators of innovative programmes such as the Design Lab need to allow space for trust and communication, connection and cooperation to emerge across groups of Infrastructure organisations to provide the right resource and capacity to “figure out” the opportunities for sustainability– without overprescribing a direction that undermines the pre-existing skills, ideas and capacities across participating organisations.
Funders and external stakeholders need to think about and learn from Emerging Infrastructure organisations, alternative measures of “sustainability” and “growth” outside of skills and scale. The group have reflected on other means by which their “Infrastructure” could be judged and subsequently enabled or supported to grow in a different way.
What emerges from these conditions are supported organisations, with the platform and capacity to work towards more sustainable change. Combined with resilience to work more intentionally within complexity and ambiguity. Which in the outlook of the group is a more realistic representation of the challenges they are addressing.
Illustrated in Berkana Two Loops Model these organisations are collectively working in the ‘emergent system’ space, the Lab work seeks to build momentum, connect opportunities by building networks, and bridge this transition to new infrastructure models or outlooks.
Similar to the Berkana Two Loops Model of change– the group are experiencing and acknowledging the transition out of a dominant system to an emergent system that can grow in influence https://www.themoment.is/how-change-happens/
What else?
The intention behind the workshop was to try to move the group away from project management type statements to more bold visions or intentional visions of future states. One of the most significant examples of this is one leader actively designing themselves out and letting go of "founder control". This helped to let us imagine the qualities of those future organisations outside of a more linear or traditional outlook of change– for example, thinking of the future in terms of audience growth, organisational reach, and leading with multiple perspectives including beneficiaries.
Traditional hallmarks of “growth” still exist in the group. At times some reverted to orthodoxical measurements even in a space where they were allowed to imagine an unconstrained future. What’s clear is that these factors are still important when operating in a context that still values these indicators over all else. A system-level challenge is that we all still need the fallback to simple indicators to tell a story of impact in a complex landscape– it will need a more collective effect to resource how we navigate out of this and find the opportunities to support change.
Even when given the space, due to the diversity of thought and experience across the group, there is always a possibility of a pragmatic and possible future colliding. Given this, it feels important to resource the space to hold the tension between the two to support the opportunities for sustainable and transformative innovation.
Thinking about “probing and enquiry” helped us to flex new muscles or modes of interacting from a systemic perspective– helping us to take a more pluralistic outlook on how we might define Infrastructure, provide support, or identify opportunities for change. Many in the group reflected that their ideas for where “leverage” exists internally or in the environment around them has changed the more they have taken the time to, or been exposed to, the different perspectives around them.
The group reflected back to us that an additional step in making this sustainable involves not just articulating strategy, but reflecting on how we do things like strategy in the first place.
“A perfect system is not within our grasp”
So, what are the right questions to ask about Infrastructure?
Overall, what the group reflected and what we observed creates sustainability and resilience for the group, comes from understanding how the “things” (services, process, tools) work together rather than from these elements alone.
The ability to create more connections between inter-dependent structures, processes and teams gives organisations a more resilient platform from which to demonstrate the value and impact of their work.
Synonyms for Infrastructure, such as “armour” and “armature” made us think of resilience as being how well an organisation equips itself for the task of working in complexity. What the group sees in their “sustainable futures” is more “social infrastructure” internally to give them a better chance of working towards transformative outcomes.
Feeling “armoured” means being supported, and in some sense allowed to:
Take more patient steps towards growth and impact.
Resource supporting multiple stakeholders to influence an organisation's strategy, vision and purpose.
Talk about the value of their organisation’s role in communities outside of traditional measurements and success metrics.
Demonstrate how work has improved rather than grown in scale.
On Infrastructure & Growth
There are some assumptions we may be making about Infrastructure when we assume that this necessitates “scale and growth” to be able to categorise an Emerging Infrastructure as established.
It’s clear from the group's reflections, that there is something more important about “stability” and demonstrating or being supported to this place– than there is about what size or how fast that organisation can grow or change.
As one participant noted, it’s clear to them now that there isn’t a “perfect system” which they can duplicate into their own Infrastructural blueprint to transform them or outcomes for their community.
To frame the challenge more accurately, there is an emergent conceptual challenge within the programme for how we frame the challenges these organisations face. They can be framed, due to being classed as “Emerging” as something in need of development, change or teaching– however, in reality, the group of organisations see the landscape as different and frame themselves as stretched, challenged or experiencing an imbalance of power in how they can innovate, change or even grow.
A final reflection– coming out of the session we reflected that perhaps the challenge is in being more “honest about what growth entails”-- and how there is a need to acknowledge what it takes, to change the wider system constraints to support this.
Overly constraining the parameters of growth for Emerging Infrastructure organisations, the group reflected, will not bring about the types of innovation that stakeholders wish to see. A question for a system of funders, organisations and stakeholders in future is how we can build space for more imagination and learning?
Either in the form of new programmes or initiatives or even internally within developing Emerging Infrastructure teams or organisations– where is the space for imagination and learning - and what does the resource and support for this look like in practice?
Why grow?
Growth is human and multifaceted. We have learnt that there is a need to be more honest about growth and what it means in the context of building momentum to transition to new infrastructure models. Do we assume “scale is growth” by calling it Infrastructure in the first place? If so then, there needs to be a greater emphasis on the conditions for change in the organisations themselves to bridge a ‘transition in the greater system’, and this needs to focus on contributions to creating change rather than attribution.
A question for a system of funders, organisations and stakeholders in future is how we can build space for more imagination and learning to support this transition away from the dominant ways of seeing and supporting growth. What does the resource and support for this look like in practice? And how can we continue to grow this "network"? As opposed to centralising and controlling an asset of our communities.
A challenge in working with complexity— is that in talking about it and our ideas we can make it more complicated. What is clear, from the group’s reflections and learning shared with us in the session, is that before these Infrastructure organisations start something new, they recognise the need to stop doing something old.
In the context of supporting Emerging Infrastructure organisations to “figure out” how to become stronger, more resilient entities, the inclusion and focus on digital skills can obfuscate the simpler yet sustainable processes that support sustainability. That being the people and the cultures of learning and imagination that create alternatives. This should be the first consideration within any change programme, and for Infrastructures, are the ingredients to creating internal resilience and a feeling of “sustainability”.
Where else is this happening? Have a look at the Relationship Project Blog where you find out more about how relationships can improve the quality of different entities, and how this introduces resilience in complexity.
“More than ever, the big questions in 2021 are all about relationships. Their substance and character will determine the direction and quality of our lives.”
You can connect with Gemma here to learn more about co-creating systems.