Ian Burbidge

In my last article I suggested that we need to look at impact across three levels or scales, and that this task becomes progressively more challenging the less direct control we have over the situation we are trying to impact. I started with the environment where we have most control, the organisation (scale 1), then discussed some challenges around evaluating the work that the organisation does to impact the world through its programmes (scale 2). Next is the crucial third scale, the level of the system. 

First we must start by identifying system-level measures that might offer us insights into the system and a reasonable indication of what’s changing. This isn’t just relevant for those socially-purposed organisations that exist to change the system; to a greater or lesser extent, all our organisations are trying to shift the system to a more favourable state in line with their mission – whether to improve mental health in young people, shine a light on corruption or simply to make more profit. Once we’ve done that, we need to find ways of aligning our organisation’s work programmes with those aspects of the system we most want to address. 

System-level measures are not in our control at all, but they are indicators of change at the scale of the system. It’s important to track those that most closely align with our vision of the future system and the changes we seek. In this way we can assure ourselves that these remain the right aspects of the system to focus on as well as enabling us to track trends. This is vital contextual information about the emergence of the system over time. As we explored in the previous article, it’s important to recognise that we can’t be held accountable for the stories these measures tell. For example my organisation, Start Network, is just one within the multi-billion pound humanitarian industry and we can’t create change at the scale of the system by working on our own. However by tracking change at the level of the system we gain a valuable contextual perspective on our work.

Aligning our organisation’s work programmes to the changes that we want to see in the system requires some humility. We know that in a complex system we can’t attribute causality. Just because a work programme was successful in terms of the processes we followed and the impact that resulted for the target population it does not follow that it also shifted the system in any way. There is a ravine to be crossed intellectually here: on one side we have our programmes, on the other is the system we want to change. How do we create a bridge that can link these two sides together? 

We cross the ravine by aligning these three scales. First of all we ensure the purpose of the organisation is embedded in its operations (scale 1); all too often this is not the case. Next we must have clear alignment between the programmatic work (scale 2) and the wider system-level challenges we seek to address (scale 3). It’s too easy to deliver quality and impactful programmes that ultimately fail to change the system – indeed, they are likely to be co-opted by it and thereby help sustain the status quo. We need ways of knowing that our programmes are both successful and impacting the system.

At Start Network we have been working with the idea of keys to systems change, proposed by Charlie Leadbetter and Jennie Winhall.^⁠1 They identified four largely invisible aspects of systems that need to be understood and shifted to create change: the system’s purpose, power, relationships and resources. To this we added, for our context, the more visible practice: the things we actually do (products, processes, activities) and the way we do them (behaviours and norms) as part of the way the humanitarian system operates. 

We can focus on those aspects of the five keys that we believe are most likely to help shift the conditions that hold the system in place. We do this in two ways. They form the learning and monitoring framework which helps fulfil our need to track the changes in the system at the third scale. But perhaps more importantly they are a set of principles, questions and tools that help ensure we design our work programmes in such a way that they address critical issues in the system. This is how we make that intellectual leap over the ravine. Without it we may have great programmes that are effective and represent value for money to the donor, yet have no account of how they will help change the system. The five keys therefore form a critical link between the work programmes (scale 2) and the system itself (scale 3). This is how we can ensure our organisational purpose of changing the system in embedded in all our work.  

Ultimately we’re after alignment of all three scales: a strong an well-run organisation that provides the foundation for impactful programmes, that are in turn aligned with the points within the system that we believe have the greatest likelihood of creating systems change. It’s also how we can create impact at scale, as we’ll see in a later article. It sounds straightforward, but the reality is usually anything but. 

¹ “Building Better Systems” Charles Leadbeater and Jennie Winhall, October 2020. Rockwool Foundation.