Innovation as ethical practice

What does it mean to have an ethical practice as practitioners of evaluation and co-design, in the context of innovation?

The origin of this section is the large number of questions that we received about formal ethics processes and the implications for the highly adaptive work of co-design and developmental evaluation as they relate to formal ethics. As we started to explore this topic, more questions and dimensions to the notion of ethics and the complexity of co-design and developmental evaluation emerged.

What became more clear for us is that ethics as a term is inherently cumbersome. Formal ethics in research is seen as a process, a committee, a set of standards, and an academic requirement, among others. It is off-putting in some contexts, seen to represent decisions about risk made by others in isolation from some stakeholders.

Essentially ethics are a code of morals about keeping people safe, thinking about the consequences of our decisions and practice, and conducting our work with respect and a sense of justice. For researchers ethical practice is about protecting the interests of those involved in the research, with specific attention to those who may be more at risk in the process, for example, children. It is also driven by the desire to publish, and by organisational and institutional risk management. Many professional associations also have ethical guidelines or a code of practice which sets out expected and appropriate behaviour for their members, for example, social workers in respect to the interests of their clients.

In understanding that all ethics frameworks are underpinned by a set of values and beliefs, this took us to focus on what it means to have an ethical practice as practitioners working in developmental, participatory, systems spaces, and what some of the gaps are that we need to think about to successfully navigate the complexity in this space. As well as keeping people safe, it is also about reciprocity, relationships, respect and creating space for bravery and courage. The assumption in this work is that we are working with community, families and frontline staff on something they care about, and in a way that helps them to achieve the things they are wanting to achieve.

This is an action agenda rather than a research agenda. And the process around how we do this is participatory and explorative. There is a purpose distinction between developing knowledge through research, the process, and the solutions and benefits intended in a co-design.

Exploring ethical practice through four lenses

In working in this space we have come to understand that action involves risk and at the same time inaction also involves risk. Consideration of ethical practice in this context extends to design, prototyping and implementation which involves change for families, communities and organisations.

It involves shining a light on current practice and working to shift into new patterns and behaviours between people and organisations. The complexity of this leads us to considerations of ethics in multiple and diverse ways.

With that in mind, we will explore these various dimensions and bring examples from our own practice through the following lenses:

1. The role of institutional structures and processes in supporting ethical practice

2. Practitioner readiness for ethics in innovation

3. Ethics and implications for prototyping

4. Ethics in the context of systems and capital

The role of institutional structures and processes in supporting ethical practice

This section explores some of the limitations of our conventional institutional ethics structures as well as how things are evolving.

Engagement with formal research ethics systems and processes in the context of evaluation is largely driven by funder requirements and industry standards and is common when operating within an academic or clinical setting.

In Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia a number of options have emerged to support and provide ethical oversight to research projects for those working outside of academic or clinical settings, such as the New Zealand Ethics Committee – Te Roopu Rapu I Te Tika. Some government agencies and more recently local governments have also started to operate their own Ethics Committees. These structures were predominantly intended to support applications for social research and evaluation, and often include a focus on data privacy.

More and more there is a need to extend such ethical oversight and support to developmental and design-led work which encounters a myriad of ethical considerations as part of involving people in research, design and change processes. This work is neither research nor quality improvement; developmental and design processes are often ongoing, have several stages and include aspects of implementation. They involve generating and testing things out and working with people to identify their definition and framing of issues and their priorities for change. This makes it harder to prescribe in advance what exact outcomes will be produced or what methods or questions might be applied as these may be developed in tandem with those participating.

The framing around and emphasis on ‘risk’ and ‘vulnerability’ often reflected by conventional ethics committees can also sit awkwardly with strengths-based developmental and participatory change practices. These processes often work at a faster pace than traditional academic research cycles and responses to service or system challenges may need to be addressed within days, weeks or months. While it is imperative that we keep safety and our duty of care at the center of practice, we also need to ensure our processes are reflective of what is needed to develop more family-centred and empowering culture. Bravery and courage are needed alongside a focus on safety.

We also want to avoid processes that inadvertently ‘design out’ the capacity for authentic engagement and better outcomes and capability building for families and communities in the process of risk management. We need the ability to think through a range of perspectives on this and balance legitimate concerns with other factors such as the capacity and agency that can manifest through participation. If the “co” of co-design is being honoured, the focus is on building relationships and relational practice, rather than positioning people as informants. Doing “with” rather than “to” people places a focus on capacity building and mutual benefit. This can raise different types of questions and challenges around, for example, confidentiality and how people might be involved over time than might be expected in traditional clinical trials for example.

While in some cases, teams may follow the conventional path of submitting an ethics application, other forms of support and oversight may be more suitable. Formal committees may be appropriate in some contexts, while others would do better with ethical practice guidelines and protocols. Such guidelines for design and developmental initiatives remain underdeveloped in the design and developmental evaluation space.

Ethical processes in practice

In response, formal ethics processes are evolving. Some are adapting to accommodate prototyping and emergent design. Some public service ethics committees are extending their functions in response to the growing needs and practice of design and translating how traditional ethics processes intersect, to support more collaborative, and ongoing design-led processes. This includes for example consulting and formalised support in advance of or outside the submission process. Providing advice early on and throughout the design initiative to help teams identify ethical issues in early framing and engagement as well as the prototyping and trialling process.

Some ethics committees are also extending their remit to include capability building, training and practice development of design practitioners to support ethical mindsets and awareness, and the appointment of Ethics Committee members with design expertise. In their efforts to explore what ‘fit for purpose’ ethical supports and structures might need to look like the Auckland Co-design Lab[1], in collaboration with other agencies and organisations, has identified the need for:

• development of appropriate tools, processes and opportunities to support design teams to build awareness, skills and capability in principle and in practice – an “ethical heart and mind”

• extending the remit of ethics committees to support in different ways including oversight and review processes that are responsive to the role and timing of teams working in this space

• building awareness and shared understanding across design practitioners, those convening ethics and research committees and public service commissioning agents about design ethics and what support is needed and appropriate.

In a recent review of the concepts, materials and tools currently in use by several government agencies working in the design space in New Zealand, patterns emerged around the types of ethical tools and supports that were available. Mainstream ethics materials often included principles and guidelines, but the emphasis in practice tended to be on forms, templates and documentation derived from traditional research ethics. While there are values that underpin these materials they were generally implicit, with the exception of those developed specifically for or by Māori practitioners and communities.

Ethics materials developed from design contexts tended to be more visual, with a focus on tools and prompts that could be used for discussions within teams to explore ethical issues. One international example is for example theEthics Toolkit which endeavours to bridge the gap between philosophical and applied ethics for modern researchers, designers and developers’.

Consent forms in particular raise a range of issues. As initiatives become more complex in relation to data use, re-use and privacy, standard approaches adopted from research may not make sense in an evolving context.  When participants consent to participating in a process, or to the use of their personal information, do they really know what they are consenting to? The conventional research single point of consent at the outset – like the consent forms designed for single research studies. This is problematic for participatory processes like design or developmental evaluation, because it is difficult to communicate to participants in advance what they are going to experience because we don’t always know. It’s often not clearly understood, by anyone, what participants are – practically – consenting to.

In reality, this emerges as the process unfolds. In light of this, consent forms may prove inappropriate to highly emergent processes. Instead, a more community development approach to consent may suit, whereby consent is discussed, negotiated and documented in an ongoing, transparent way.

In addition, because practitioners become immersed and intertwined in the everyday lives of the people they are working with, the boundaries between participants and practitioners and everyday life can become blurred in deeply participative processes – so the notion of consent also becomes blurred, particularly when there is an expectation that participants will be deeply involved in determining the direction of the process.

There can also be tensions between an action or change agenda and the kind of protection that consent is framed around, such as confidentiality and anonymity. Who gets to decide how to weigh up these things, especially if there is conflict or disagreement about either or both of these things?  Consent processes, although they are ostensibly about respect and protection for participants, are also part of a process that often feels legalistic and designed to protect the researcher and the institutions with ‘real ethics’ being lost in procedures and bureaucracy.

There is room for different approaches or forms of community and professional ethics to oversee ethical issues in place. The principles of kaupapa Māori research are a leading light in this space for practitioners in Aotearoa New Zealand. Starting with values and principles from the outset, the issues they forefront for research also provide a framework for co-design and developmental evaluation. In conversations about ethics in co-design with Māori practitioners terms such as aroha (love), manaakitanga (kindness, hospitality, showing respect), reciprocity and tika (true, right, fair) are considered to guide practice. The integral nature of ethics and values in practice is demonstrated through this view of both research and design. For example a core principle of Māori research is to uplift the mana of Māori, and this is true also for design [2].

This discussion suggests a range of opportunities for how we might further develop our formal institutions and structures to better respond to the ethics of innovation practice.

Practitioner readiness for ethics in innovation

There is a lot already written about professional codes of conduct and many of the evaluation societies have formal codes of conduct for their members. These cover a wide range of expected issues, such as informed consent, individual autonomy, confidentiality, or how evaluators represent their skills.

In contrast, the social design community, in Australia and New Zealand at least, lack similar guidelines and development or alignment to particular ethical principles and guidelines is still nascent[3]. Mainstream design education hasn’t – for the most part – come with well-established ethics processes and there is not yet a professional body of designers to assist with standards or competencies [4]. There are some emerging efforts to respond to this, including the Ethics Toolkit mentioned above, and the RMIT design and ethics services. A number of communities and agencies are also developing their own guidelines[5].

Professional practice in this context requires high self-awareness of one’s own skills and capacities as an evaluator or designer, and a readiness to respond to possible emergent situations. For example, if you are engaged in interviewing, in some contexts, this process could be triggering and/or result in someone sharing something traumatic.

Professional ethical practice – especially in complexity – also requires that we pay attention to the nature of our relationships with all those we work with, including our responsibilities to each other. We need to find practical and tangible ways to value each person and their particular lives, hopes and aspirations. The most ethical we can be is in how we model good character and relational understanding in our own practice.

We can never assume our practice is neutral; we have to be extremely mindful of our motivations and assumptions, as well as the positions, values and perspectives of those who we are doing the work with. Inevitably, there will be multiple choices to make, all with consequences – good and bad – and the stakes will be different for different stakeholders in different situations.

For evaluators, the grounding for becoming a professional tends to focus on the technical and practical aspects, such as skills, competencies and the disciplinary knowledge to practice effectively. We tend not to emphasize the ethical and relational preparation we need to operate in complex, developmental or design spaces. How we demonstrate an ethics of responsibility to our fields – to prepare and support evaluation and design professionals with the realities of situated practice, amidst the uncertainties and dilemmas and the daily exercise of professional judgement requires that we pay attention to the following:

• how to negotiate boundary decisions about evaluation design with multiple stakeholders, in ways that ensure equity and justice

• how to ensure the relevant and important values are surfaced and embedded in our evaluation criteria

• how to honour and access community wisdom and expertise

• how to collaborate well, maintain trust, and balance power relations

• how to productively manage conflict

• how to bring our authentic, whole selves to the work we do in communities,

• how to care for people in the process, and

• how to be reflexive and sensitive to emergent ethical issues as projects unfold.

We cannot provide the answers to the ethical dilemmas of professionalism and professional practice with technique or lists of competencies alone. It is critical that we support professionals to cultivate their daily ethical professional judgement and build practice support to help professionals work through how they should act for the situated ‘good’ of those in each situation and context.

This means we need the capacity to think critically about a given situation—whether a situation is what it appears to be—and then to think practically about what should be done under the circumstances. To become experienced, we have to practice, learn and reflect on our experience, over and over if we are to develop the capacity to deal well with uncertainty.

Ethics and implications for prototyping 

Innovation tells us to go fast and learn by failure. Rapid cycles of trying new things can enable new solutions, and can even be empowering to those involved. At the same time, rapid-cycle learning and the language of failing fast could also wind up being cover for doing things that might be harmful. There is a growing critique of prototyping such as that noted here by Cameron Norman on his systems changes and design blog:

 A fair criticism of design is that it too often focuses on possibility without responsibility. Even on social issues we see design jams, hackathons, and ideation sessions that produce more ‘stuff’ (too often an ‘app’, as if the only solution to the worlds’ problems originate from a handheld electronic device) that is cool, sexy and disruptive without paying attention to what kind of disruption comes with that ‘solution’ [6] .

Prototyping in complex settings and with a focus on systems change tends to be just as much about changes in practice, complexities of relationships, revealing underlying behaviours and assumptions and grappling with perceptions and incentives in the system. Live prototyping and testing new responses in complex and sensitive settings introduce a wider set of ethical issues and considerations. Prototyping in this context, means working with families and other systems stakeholders to test things out in real-world contexts. Trying new things or testing changes in current processes to see what happens, experimenting with different approaches to getting the desired outcomes, identifying what does and does work on the ground and why, and evolving things in response.

Prototyping in this setting may include, for example, testing ways to get a poorly insulated houses upgraded, working with employees on prototyping pathways to transition into new jobs, or exploring new peer to peer capability models. One ethical consideration is being prepared to respond to what is revealed about the system, about people, about organisational practices and policy through this process. Unpacking interactions in a service system, first through research and discovery phases, and then through prototyping, often reveals things like duplication of effort, poor (or even illegal) practice by organisations, conflicts between the intent of policies and how they play out and interact in people’s lives. It reveals funding tensions between providers, distrust of and within organisations, and structural racism. It makes visible how services designed to support people are often actually making things worse and policies that are failing to deliver.

Ethical considerations in prototyping

This is true of research too and becomes even more significant when we are also trying to enable or influence change in that setting. Surfacing these things appropriately, working with these complexities and negotiating the potential dilemmas or conflicts that arise in ways that can ultimately be constructive and part of change, is part of the prototyping process. This requires careful and considered practice, including skills and resources on the side of the practitioners, as well as a willingness to get into and support working with the deep aspects of change on the side of the organisations and sponsors.

Another ethical consideration of prototyping in this context is the potential disruption to the lives of families and people participating. The new concept or outcome we are trying to learn how to create is unlikely to be immediately realised – yet the process of testing something may mean the status quo will be destabilised in the process. An example of this is in the Healthy Homes Co-design initiative in Auckland [7], a co-design process to work with families to develop interventions that would create warmer, drier homes. Rather than reduce risk by not trying things that had the potential for negative outcomes (such as loss of tenancy), they actively engaged with the complexity of the context taking considered action in partnership with families and other service providers.

Together, legitimate concerns of negative consequences were balanced with other factors such as the capacity and agency that can manifest through participation. When there was risk of negative outcomes, they worked with families to support them in whatever was needed to achieve the outcome the family was seeking. Managing this uncertainty and potential for negative outcomes required a high level of skills, networks and resources. Also critical was the flexibility to be able to respond as needed, and the shared commitment to do what it takes to achieve outcomes for families[8].

In a developmental space, the how is a critical aspect of the doing. The ethics of prototyping also involves the value that can be gained through the mutual learning and knowledge building process that occurs. As noted in earlier sections, many current mainstream ethics processes don’t assume there are benefits in the methodology (rather the benefits are largely anticipated to be from the research). Indigenous research and participatory action research differ in that such reciprocity is assumed. Formal mainstream ethics tends to weigh the benefits of the output or outcome against the possible risks of the methodology or process.

An ethical consideration of prototyping which involves trying, testing and building new knowledge together about what might work (and what success looks like), assumes the process itself should be a source of benefit. We have seen the potential for young people and families to build social capital, confidence and apply new wellbeing knowledge into their daily life as a result of being involved in design and prototyping processes. Through the design process, people can build their capacity for problem solving, knowledge translation, self-regulation and executive functioning as well as gain access to new opportunities. In a co-design, complexity space we must ask if there are ways that we can approach the work that optimizes the ethical considerations of the process and there is an inherent responsibility for capability building in prototyping. This may mean going slower or other costs.

Conventional perspectives on risk, and ‘avoiding harm’ can inadvertently act against the interests of families and close the space for trying new things. In complex and sensitive settings risk from taking action also needs to be weighed against the risks families face should their situation remain unchanged, for example living in unsafe housing. We need to rethink risk, as the status quo of many complex problems is not without risk. This is the space of both safety and bravery. If we are truly embracing the co in co-design, then we are talking about the possible risks of prototyping, we are building shared trust and understanding that lets us watch carefully what is unfolding and most importantly, make decisions together around if (and how) we might proceed.

Ethics in the context of systems and capital

The discussions above start to point to the kinds of structures, skills, resources and networks that are being drawn upon in participatory, community and systems work. It is well established that research in sensitive settings requires having in place the preparations and support needed to respond to what might surface, for example where people are triggered or need additional support as a result of engaging in the research process. Or where action needs to be taken in response to what is surfaced, for example if there is a risk of immediate harm. This is a form of social and human capital that researchers and organisations supporting such work know and build up over time, knowing what to do, who to call, how to ensure the right support is in place. Building on this we have been developing the idea of types of ‘capital’ needed for being prepared for innovation in complex and sensitive settings.

The kinds of networks, resources and courage that are critical to have in order to effectively mitigate ethical risks that might emerge in a prototyping process can, for example, be considered capital.  If you are going to destabilize something, you need to be able to marshall resources creatively in response to situations that in some cases only become apparent in the process of change and experimentation. There is a need to expand the concept of prototyping and consider improving the overall safety net of resources and networks needed for working with families in complex settings when the stakes are high, and be ready with matching levels of skills and resources.

The resources and agility to respond, carry risk, manage, and at times ride out the implications of when things start to get unpacked, revealed or challenged in a system – even prior to prototyping can also be considered a form of capital. Design processes often reveal poor and bad behaviour, putting the spotlight on issues that may have been hidden or ignored. Teams are making in practice decisions about when to push hard into conversations or escalate things, and when to stay back, when to call people out and when not to. Practitioners and organisations need to feel they have the skills, resources and know-how and the backing of their organisations to work in these spaces.

In addition to needing the capital to operate in complex and sensitive settings, there are other ethical considerations raised when working in a ‘systems change’ setting. For example there is also the ethical considerations of starting something through a prototype that is not continued. The transfer of prototypes from within a collaborative, values and principles based co-design process, back into the ‘business as usual’ context also raises its own ethical issues. Prototyping happens through the creation of temporary spaces where we have permission and resources to try new things and work collaboratively.

This same environment, commitment, flexibility, and the underlying values and principles that enabled the prototype – don’t necessarily exist in the mainstream setting where we hope for things to be adopted. Efforts to scale often translate into taking parts of an intervention – not necessarily the values, essence or relational approach that might have been making the difference.

In seeking to shift the benefits or learning from prototypes into embedded and adopted responses and ways of working, we need to consider: what relationships and principles are integral to the initial success and what of these should continue to govern the future prototype/service development? And; is there readiness, structures, and capacity in the system for supporting new models?

Undertaking design and developmental work with families and communities that are experiencing cumulative stress and disparity will always require a powerful safety net to be in place. All engagements have the potential, or are likely to unearth experiences of trauma and strong emotional responses. Working with and being skilled and prepared for this is a starting point, and it is inevitable that other skills and resources – and capital – will need to be marshalled. In the complexity of a developmental process, it is impossible to predict exactly what this will be, thus, it is essential that we have strong networks with social capital, and contingency within our resources to be able to adapt and respond.

This includes organisational flexibility to commit resources to support emergent needs, and draw down on all the available resources and networks organisationally and at community level to respond as things unfold. Individual researchers or design teams don’t necessarily have this kind of capital. It needs to be built up over time. It requires networks and relationships in and across organisations and community, and individuals within organisations who are willing to be responsible in this way. To succeed, they must also have an appetite for risk and entrepreneurship within their own organisation’s structures and procedures.

In this work, we hold a bigger picture of learning new things and identifying new possibilities because we are seeking to intervene, understand and provoke responses and changes in the system. This creates another ethical tension that is the tension that comes from working at both immediate family and community level and aiming to influence bigger system shifts to achieve impact at greater scale through structural change. By their nature design-led approaches can help make visible the policy and system conditions that contribute to the challenges we are trying to address at service level. But traditional design (and other project management approaches) often identify bigger systems issues or levers as “out of scope”. This can’t be the case in social innovation work. Bigger systems issues can’t be out of scope, but at the same time we can’t only be looking for the bigger shifts and not addressing the immediate needs.

Destiny involves risk

We started this blog series at the beginning of 2019 with observations about the need to shift from assumptions and ways of working that are no longer working for us. We noted that if we’re serious about being able to create transformative change, we have to transform ourselves; transform our ways of thinking, acting and relating. The ethical lens is essential for guiding our stance as designers and evaluators, and the ethics of how we pursue change. It also means that our institutions and organisations must also evolve in step with changing notions of ethical practice in a developmental space.

Ethics in developmental and design processes is much more situated, contextual and embedded in everyday practice than it is about making rational decisions using abstract guidelines or principles, or following rules. it is about questioning and challenging, feeling and acting.  Ethical practice is a process of constantly negotiating and working out what roles to take, questioning what we are doing and why, and building the necessary capital within a system to support those involved.  It is a relational process, involving an ongoing ethic of care.

References

[1] See Discussion note Ethical Design Practice: Auckland Co-design Lab 2018.

[2] Pipi et al. A Research Ethic for Studying Māori and Iwi Provider Success(2004) Social Policy Journal, New Zealand, Issue 23, 141-153 See also Te Ara Tika.

[3] There is for traditional design fields like Communications, Interior Design, Landscape Design etc – but not so much for those working in the public and social sector, though some recent and emerging communities of practice are seeking to address this. Historically the focus on ethics has come in the form of “what” is designed i.e is the product ethical, not so much the process.

[4] A similar more international critique is also reflected here: https://censemaking.com/2016/07/05/ethics-and-systemic-change/    Ideo, for example, only recently published a book addressing design ethics in design research, https://lbodre.ideo.com/ long after most of their tools encouraging people into the field.

[5] See for example Ethical framework for Design from DMA and Ethical framework for Design from Paper Giant and Draft Ethical Standards for ICTD.

[6] https://censemaking.com/2016/07/05/ethics-and-systemic-change/

[7] https://www.health.govt.nz/publication/healthy-homes-initiative-auckland-codesign-stage2

[8] It’s not about fixing things for whānau, it’s about bringing the right resources around them so they can make an informed decision, and move towards their desired goal. Enablement.

This post was originally published on Dec. 17th, 2019 by the Centre for Community Child Health at The Royal Children’s Hospital (Melbourne) and the Murdoch Children's Research Institute.

Opportunities in place

“A sense of place matters” [1]   

“Place has a significant impact on individual wellbeing” [2]

As a means for addressing complex and entrenched issues for families and communities, we are increasingly seeing a shift to place-based approaches which focus on improving outcomes of particular communities in place. Responses are intended to address the specific needs and underlying causes in each location.

While evidence is still emerging about the effectiveness of place-based work, there is growing interest globally in such approaches [3]. This is in part because services framed in orthodox ways are struggling to respond effectively to meet the needs of families and children experiencing the impacts of racism, inequity and disadvantage.

Many of the program and policy issues we have highlighted in previous blogs are exacerbated by the distance between policy and practice and a “one size fits all” population-level approach. Decision-making and planning becomes divorced from the effects it has on people’s lives. As an approach that offers collaborative, participative, developmental forms of working to address unique local issues and needs, place-based approaches offer an alternative.

The purpose and features of place-based approaches can vary greatly:

“Over the years in Australia, place-based approaches have been used to improve program or service delivery, build citizen engagement and participation in governance, decentralise government decision-making, and address complex issues such as concentrated disadvantage in a community. Place-based approaches vary in: the extent of citizen involvement and ownership; breadth of local stakeholder involvement; focus on people versus place; and the number, type and complexity of issues being addressed.” [4]

Within a systems change context, a key challenge we see is that a focus on place can just mean a focus on better coordination of services within a geographic boundary, or on change and action within local communities without means for shifting the systems that hold community conditions in place. These interpretations of place-based are not enough to meaningfully shift system conditions and outcomes for child and family wellbeing.

Rather than replicate the extensive material that already exists on place-based work, this blog highlights three opportunities offered by working in place that we have observed through practice and that engage the dynamics of community, place and systems. These are

• A holistic view of wellbeing

• Connections between people and place

• Localisation of policy in place.

While the examples used are not all from large or ongoing place-based initiatives we believe they each provide learning about engaging deeply in aspects and potential of working in place. We also reflect on some of the challenges to realising these opportunities and ways in which the practices of co-design and developmental evaluation are evolving to support work in place.

Opportunities of working in place

A holistic view of wellbeing

A key challenge with conventional models of service delivery is that people’s lives become siloed in ways that are not reflective of how people and families experience things in the real world. Agencies are organised around issues and responses, for example, education, health, justice and employment are dealt with by different departments. Within each, there are many programs, targets and funding streams that are costed and measured, often with little connection built between them.

In addition, responses to child, youth or family wellbeing issues typically come in the form of funding for interventions, services and programs, aimed at populations of young people and families, and delivered at an individual level. While many of these services deliver important support, as we noted in our second blog – Moving away from just programs and services, services with an expert and “delivery” mindset may do little to build up the capacity or capability of families or communities receiving services. Relying on services and programs can also perpetuate a focus on interventions and treatment rather than investment in prevention or attention to the broader systemic environments and structures that hold the current conditions in place. So many conditions and influences for child and family wellbeing outcomes are set at structural and environmental levels.

For example, the ways that policies are shaped, or streets and neighbourhoods are designed promotes protective factors to a greater or lesser degree, and reinforces inequity, privilege and structural racism. While a health provider might be engaged to deliver a health service for young people to address a particular aspect or issue, there are many other local, commercial, and government institutions within a community that also play a significant role in shaping wellbeing outcomes for children and young people.

Working in place offers the potential to be more holistic, bringing together the broader ecosystem of existing networks and resources that are already in place or close to communities around a shared wellbeing goal and exploring how they can be better aligned, connected or strengthened to address the issues at hand.

Place-based example: Lifehack

A small scale example of this approach was demonstrated by Lifehack, a four-year systems-level prevention project funded by the New Zealand Government to reduce mild to moderate mental health issues in young people aged 12 to 19. [5]

Between 2013 and 2017, Lifehack experimented with various kinds of interventions to determine which approaches were most effective at creating wellbeing impact.

Overtime Lifehack’s focus moved from national capability programs and individual youth ventures to cross-sector initiatives that helped build up capability and connection in a specific geographic community. Lifehack found that while it was possible to connect and catalyse a national youth workforce around different ways of working, in order for that potential to be realised as significant changes for young people at scale, it needed to go beyond individual practitioners, organisations or interventions, and be grounded in place and the influencing structures, relationships, entities and culture that were already embedded in a community.

“Lifehack’s place-based interventions engaged individual practitioners, organisations, local young people and other community members at the same time. This created a collective group with significant influence over conditions for wellbeing of young people in that community. Such groups were able to identify and respond to issues that were important and relevant to young people, in ways that were appropriate to the local context. And they could act together relatively quickly to make change [because of their local connections].” [6]

Place-based example: Oro

A small-scale example of this was Oro, an intergenerational place-based community collaboration focused on youth wellbeing. [7] The core of the collaboration was shaped around a six week co-design program which identified and responded to issues that were important and relevant to young people in that community. It resulted in three youth-led prototypes (which gained access to funding) as well as significant changes in practice and motivation for those involved.

This included new partnerships between local organisations, an outcome of which was the continuation of more co-design events lead by community. There was a significant shift in thinking in local council around the potential and role of youth programming and decision-making, leading to the development of ongoing peer-led youth initiatives. New local connections lead to better use of existing or latent resources already available within the community, such as asset sharing between groups and support to access funding pools.

There was also a shift for participating organisations in how young people were perceived. They were invited into the role of experts in shaping and leading responses with local organisations, enabling the promotion and prioritisation of youth and family wellbeing in policy development and decision-making.[8]

Other place-based examples

The holistic view offered by place is also demonstrated in a different way through the place-based approaches used by The Southern Initiative and Healthy Families South Auckland. Both initiatives have taken an integrated economic, health and social view and approach to change. They are seeking to deliver multiple kinds and levels of outcomes connected to broader wellbeing, beyond the focus of a particular program or delivery domain such as health or education. Both are also examples of where efforts to respond to complex health, social and economic challenges are underpinned by a connection to and focus on cultural, ecological, environmental and spiritual restoration and wellbeing. This rightly reflects the inseparable role of the environment and culture to health, wealth and wellbeing of people. Notably, a holistic understanding of wellbeing that incorporates all these dimensions is inherent within many indigenous world views and central to indigenous-led design and innovation practices.

This is illustrated in the example of Healthy Families South Auckland which has moved beyond a human centred design or co-design approach which starts with people, to practice a wairua [9] centred approach which takes a broader view of wellbeing that includes listening to the needs of the whenua (land) as a starting point.

 “A strong aspect of this approach is connecting with the environment, with maunga (mountains), moana (oceans), whenua (land), awa (rivers)…A wairua-centred approach is about developing a wider, inclusive eco-system for health, using the knowledge of past generations to support the generations to come.” [10]

For example, in one local community, community members chose to start a revitalisation of community spaces and places with stream restoration, rather than the usual planning response, which was to start with a playground. A holistic view of people and place is not just then the services in location, but the understanding of the local ecosystems as part of a greater whole, connected to both history and future. It is possible that such a holistic view offered by working in place could also inform more holistic ways of thinking and doing across other parts of government.

Connections between people and place

The history of place and people’s connection to it is also an important part of understanding, healing, and preparing for new directions.  “Ka mua, ka muri” is a Māori whakatauki (proverb) that can be translated as ‘walking backwards into the future’. An interpretation is that it acknowledges that we must look to the past to inform how and where we go next. The lens of place grounds us, literally, in the history and stories of whenua (land) and people.

Many efforts of social innovation and change are targeted at communities with brutal histories, marked by separation from land facilitated by past and present government policy. Many such communities remain dispersed and disconnected from whenua. In places such as Australia and New Zealand that have experienced colonisation, a place-based approach is a means to recognise and acknowledge that history and its ongoing effects on the challenges and structural disparity families experience today. These stories deeply shape our response to current issues.

The Southern Initiative, mentioned above, draws on co-design, indigenous knowledge systems, tikanga Māori (Māori protocol and principles) and ecological place practices such as regenesis [11] as part of working in place. Different groups come together to work on a shared goal, with family and community members playing a key role or leading the co-design process.

Early work within a community to build connections, trust and readiness for working together in ways that might be unfamiliar often involves creating or engaging in ‘story of place’.[12]

Such engagement involves creating ways for people to tell their story and see themselves reflected in the space, in a way that people have some ownership of that story telling. Such processes can connect people to each other and to the place, contributing to a sense of belonging. It is also a poutama (symbolising levels of learning) – a collective space for creative and cultural practice and learning.  How it happens is flexible and can be applied in different ways in different communities. It might mean just using a map to let people talk into their relationship to the space or place as part of whakawhanaungatanga (creating relationships and connections). It could involve creating a temporary wall of stories where community tell about their relationship to place or the history of a place. In some cases, it has meant working together to develop a physical representation of that story, such as through art work or murals that can be installed in place. When captured visually it produces physical changes in a space that reflects and connects the people of that community, as well as revealing aspects of the history and the underlying story of what is going on for people and place.

Even when the stories of place are very tough stories, owning and creating these with and as community can become a connecting and strengthening thread. It can help to build a collective understanding of the history of a place and what must be addressed or acknowledged in any change process, as well as where communities want to head together.

In reflecting on their experience of exploring story of place in work with a community with a particularly complex history, one team shared: “people want to tell their stories, communities remember them, and retell them their own way. Enabling local artists and storytellers to visualize their experiences of place changes the wairua and the perception of place and thus community participation in events and activations”.

Localisation of policy in place

As noted a challenge with working at national and population levels is that tracked outcomes can be disconnected from what matters or what leads to differences on the ground. As discussed in blog post Evidence for Innovation, we know that in order to be more meaningful evidence needs to be localised to, as well as developed in, context. For example, how do measures of stress or executive functioning – critical to both adult and child wellbeing and development – translate into the everyday lives of parents in different communities and cultures? How do actions that we believe are important to children’s language development translate from one cultural context to the next? What can we learn from traditional knowledge or indigenous cultures about language development that may not be understood in ‘western’ science?

Working in place provides an opportunity to connect local practices, context and culture to broader policy goals, measures, models and outcomes – localising evidence in ways that help us build a more sophisticated understanding of what matters for families, and how this translates into supporting conditions for wellbeing.

A version of this was trialled in the Wellbeing in Waitematā initiative which sought to co-design and prototype community-led primary prevention of family violence [13]

Stakeholders from central and local government collaborated with regional family violence networks who worked within their specific local communities.  A key aspect of this initiative was to understand how a generic and draft Primary Prevention framework developed at central government level could be operationalised at a local community level and to test and improve the framework as a result. Practitioners from the local networks worked with people from their community including schools, young people, parents groups and community groups to identify what protective factors (identified in the model) looked like in context, how they already showed up in that particular community, as well as how they might be amplified (e.g., visiting a neighbour, being there for a friend, creating a safe space to connect).

The core concept, learning and support for the initiative was provided through central and local government, with local providers holding the relationship with their communities to localise, activate and feedback on the model. The prototype showed how different protective factors manifest in different communities, as well as ways in which change could potentially be measured. The framework was developed into a set of tools and protective factors that were more accessible for use within the community. A localised evidence base began to develop to support the generic model including a local interpretation of what would be required to support and enable the community-led model to work in practice and in place.

Challenges and potential in practice

Above we have explored three opportunities for supporting and catalysing wellbeing that are made possible by working in place. The examples have shown promise in their ability to build connection and capacity in community and organisations to work differently and to utilise and bring together resources that already exist in ways that better serve community wellbeing needs and aspirations. They also suggest opportunities for better connections between high-level policy and how it is connected to action in different communities.

However, such approaches require skills in working collectively. They ask us to re-organise current work practices and rethink our perspectives and strategies for accountability and outcomes. A direct implication is that a relational approach is required. This means getting to know and working responsively and reciprocally with specific people, families, places, networks and institutions rather than generalised groups populations or geographies. They ask for a learning dialogue between different parts of the system. Below we explore some of these challenges and how co-design and developmental evaluation can contribute to place-based work.

Expertise, capability and the power to configure

Recognising the strength and expertise of communities as equal to that of government and other experts means a shift in power around who leads and where and how decisions are made. Done well, co-design processes can help create the space for this to happen, offering a framework and practice for bringing together different organisations and entities to work in a culturally situated place-based way with and for the benefit of a particular community. Such processes recognise and can help to bring forward the expertise and role of young people, families, community members and frontline workers in identifying and responding to the challenges they experience. They facilitate the surfacing of community strengths and aspirations and provide room for organisations to recognise the support they can offer a community and test out ways they can configure their assets in more collective ways towards a shared goal. This might mean new services, but more likely it will mean the reconfiguration of existing assets, services, practices, resources and funding flows in ways that better address the needs and unlock the potential in place. This might include developing alternative models such as peer-to-peer or informal, community-led models. While it does not mean shifting the responsibility (solely) to the community, it does require working together in partnership with young people, community members and frontline practitioners and finding ways to better support aspirations and provide and grow the capability of community over time.

While this sounds like common sense in many ways, it necessarily involves challenging traditional power structures and relationships, how resources are governed and decisions made. Government’s role is to work in enabling ways to support communities to achieve their aspirations and amplify or grow the potential that already exists there – working alongside, with and in, communities providing support for them to lead or play a key part in their own change and innovation. This more relational and responsive approach challenges the conventional mode and role of government as service deliverer, power holder and decision-maker. It requires us to adopt a learning stance – so that we can learn with communities about what is needed for better outcomes and participation in the learning process.

Multi-level efforts that are focused on outcomes at a local level with local communities and stakeholders must also strive to work with and seek to influence and broker new kinds of power-sharing with municipal, state, regional or national policy systems and structures that set the conditions for communities on the ground. This requires collaboration, shared learning and sharing of decision-making between citizens, service providers, governments, philanthropy and the private sector. Current structures that have governments and funders holding power and control around assets. How these assets are configured and how value is attributed are deeply ingrained through structural mechanisms and behaviours. Facilitating genuine power-sharing beyond design and discovery and into policy and implementation faces many challenges and raises interesting questions and challenges for the role of government. How might the holistic view offered by working in place inform a more holistic way of working across government? What does it look like to have an enabling government that supports where needed, that shares power with communities and builds capacity through each engagement? How can we support and be responsive to learning in and with our communities?

One way is building capacity in government around participatory and evaluative practices and mindsets that are responsive and developmental. Working together through a well facilitated design and discovery process helps build capacity and capability as well as readiness. Developmental evaluation also has a strong emphasis on capacity building and built into the approach is an intentional process of learning and embedding knowledge in place that can increase the stickiness and longevity of learning by communities.

Building localised evaluative capacity also plays a role in nudging the accountability tensions that exist in place-based work towards the community holding more of the decision making and learning cards in their hands – holding a mirror up to teams and the system about what patterns and behaviours are in play. It can also help to highlight gaps between stated intentions to “co-design” and share power, and how actual behaviours and decision-making plays out on the ground that may reflect something different.

Transfer of learning – wider systems influence and change

The transfer of learning from local prototypes and initiatives to broader policy and systems change is one of the biggest challenges for this work. Inherent in place-based work are cycles of learning – building know-how (practice-based evidence) about what works, and what skills and structures are needed to sustain new ways of working – those on the ground are working to grow the capacity to achieve this at the same time (connections, skills etc). Such local learning is critical; however, we need the skills and mechanisms to ensure that such learning is connected back into central policy and funding cycles.

For any meaningful impact the relationships between local and higher-level systems must also be fostered. Currently the relationships between learning on the ground and the policy systems landscape are still relatively ad hoc. Exchanges between and local learning about change and outcomes and policy are loose and opportunistic. Creating a two-way line of sight between high-level policy and practices and experience on the ground requires that place-based initiatives find ways to first understand what the structural and relational enablers and barriers across system boundaries are. Approaches that can leverage system influence in relational and organisational terms, as well as structural and technical ways,  need to be intentionally built in. Different layers of the system, including government, need to be engaged in a two-way dialogue. This includes the various policy jurisdictions that govern assets, resources and laws from local, state, regional and national levels mobilising their knowledge about what is working and why. This is no simple task and the challenges of influencing change further up the system have been noted in international studies, such as the Aspen Institute review. Yet place-based work can only have a truly transformative effect if it connects into broader systems change and addresses the conditions set beyond the community – else its stays localised and forever constrained by the system.

As practitioners, supporting innovation and place-based work we can see opportunities to use developmental evaluation as a part of the learning system. There is no right way to do evaluation in place-based work, and it’s contribution to supporting breakthrough change is imperfect and variable. However, developmental evaluation is one approach that has developed to support innovation and respond to the challenges of working in complexity in participative and relational ways. It can be tailored to the context and place and designed to accompany people on the messy, long term journey of place-based change, adapting the methods, approaches and reporting to suit particular circumstances and audiences.

‘Strategic learning’ approaches emphasise the value of embedding developmental evaluation as a key part of the design process. Rapid feedback cycles of relevant data and evidence can help people to learn quickly and adapt their strategies accordingly. At the same time, systematic and targeted use of evaluative approaches to learning synthesis and communication can strengthen the robustness of judgements and broaden the reach of this learning to other system actors.

Principles-focused developmental evaluation can also help to cohere collective efforts around shared values and principles guiding the change process. These principles can also provide a high-level framework for learning, tracking change and evaluating the overall value of initiatives in the short and longer-term.

Reframing accountability and outcomes

Most systems of accountability are designed top-down, with measurement, indicators and targets designed and set to account upwards. There are usually only nominal formal feedback loops back to communities built into the system, and iteration of the design, collection and analysis of data and measures is almost never possible.

When working in place, accountability is more complex than the one-way system orthodoxy of current accountability systems and structures. Learning outcomes need to be considered as critical to the process as much as changes in the system and outcomes for families and whānau. We need to have our eye on all the outcomes across the systems as well as on the barriers and challenges that surface as the initiatives progress. Lifehack’s outcome model, for example, accounted for outcomes for young people as well as change at sector and system levels [14].

Outcomes are also emergent as we collectively probe to understand and untangle relationships of place, history and system that give the context for the current state, and then collectively move to respond. Community must lead in defining what is of value and have the capacity to help identify what outcomes matter. The Wellbeing in Waitematā initiative showed the potential of communities being involved in identifying what outcomes work for them and how they can be enacted in context. Accountability back to the community takes priority, especially for those teams working within their own communities. And the evidence for any outcomes achieved will be multifaceted – it will be empirical, practical and experiential.

This approach challenges traditional notions of measurement – as we have discussed in our earlier blog. We are conditioned to thinking about measurement as providing us with answers and assurance. In place-based work, the answers are not in the data, the data doesn’t speak for itself. Rather we – all of us engaged in place-based work –  have to use the range of evidence we have, and make sense of it, in place. If evidence is to be meaningful it needs to be interpreted in context.

One of the new accountabilities for the higher levels of the system in place-based work should be to support those on the ground to build streams of useful data and evidence that can be layered over time, with each source balancing out the limitations of other sources. Then collectively, with participants from across the system, collaborative sense-making and deliberation can become a key strategic learning capability. This collective expertise must be developed in place. It takes time and must be underpinned by trusted relationships.

Because the system is always adapting, and our evidence base is continually changing, it’s far more important to be accountable for ongoing adaptation and learning than being locked into a pre-set list of indicators that can easily become redundant over time.

In closing

As practitioners working in these spaces, we are confronted by a range of challenges when the intent is to support transformative change, yet the structures and behaviours remain the same. The blog that follows this is the final in the series and will look at innovation as ethical practice. This addresses the responsibilities of supporting rigorous innovation alongside communities and the kinds of skills, practices and structures needed to support learning in complex and sensitive contexts. This includes the challenges and opportunities of working in place, and in new ways with communities where we prototype both to address immediate needs and challenges as well as to build learning with the intent to contribute to longer-term shifts in the system.

References

[1] Community Leader, in Hancock, F. (2018). A relational approach to community and social innovation: Practices that make a difference. Auckland, New Zealand: Auckland Council.

[2] Place-based Initiatives Transforming Communities, 2012, Centre for Community and Child Health

[3] The evidence: what we know about place-based approaches to support children’s wellbeing, 2014, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute

[4] Place-based collective impact: an Australian response to childhood Vulnerability, 2018, Policy Brief, Centre for Community Child Health

[5] Further details can be found in the Lifehack Report. For full transparency the report was co-authored by Penny Hagen who was involved in the initiative. Excerpts of the report have been used here in the description of the initiatives.

[6] https://lifehackhq.co/lifehack-resources/2013-2017-final-impact-report/

[7] See also https://lifehackhq.co/?s=oro and Mike Ryan from the local council sharing his perspective on the Oro collaboration at the Co-design for YouthWellbeing event https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziQQNojGeoA in 2017

[8] Similar outcomes were demonstrated through Lifehack’s place-based collaboration with a school, local government and community health providers

[9] Definition: Wairua  – spirit. Access a fuller exploration of the definition of Wairua

[10]  https://healthyfamiliessouthauckland.nz/strengthen-your-wellbeing-let-nature-in/

[11]  https://regenesisgroup.com/

[12] The term is borrowed from Rengensis

[13] https://library.nzfvc.org.nz/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=5246

[14] https://lifehackhq.co/lifehack-resources/2013-2017-final-impact-report/

This post was originally published on October 21st, 2019 by the Centre for Community Child Health at The Royal Children’s Hospital (Melbourne) and the Murdoch Children's Research Institute.

Procurement for innovation

The work we describe in the previous blog posts involves an organic – often messy – relationship between community members, professionals, and anyone who engages in the work. With many pressing challenges, communities face high stakes and a sense of urgency. At the same time, transforming the way we work in community requires sustained efforts, with room to explore, adapt and adjust.

Co-design and Developmental Evaluation (DE) are based on a principle of co-creation, which includes invitation, reciprocity, and openness, and tends to be dynamic and fluid. This approach will inevitably rub up against some of the structures and processes that guide how work is resourced and contracted. The interaction within co-creation is not a transaction, with citizens as clients, consumers or beneficiaries. The interaction is based on mutuality and relationships, and as the previous post explored, a change in what constitutes knowledge. The impetus for co-creation is reframing who gets to define what is needed, and what constitutes success.

This blog explores some of the challenges of this, as well as new approaches emerging in the context of funding and procurement.

Conventional funding arrangements

Conventional funding and project management approaches are geared towards specific outcomes and milestones, and there is an expectation to show results quickly. Co-design and DE work differently as the process is not linear, teams need to be able to respond and adjust to what they discover in the early phases.  Outcomes of changes in relationships, new learning, and a better shared understanding of issues proceed tangible changes on the ground. This initial period of learning, upskilling and alignment between partners contributes to the success of the collaboration and cohesive nature of the future interventions and prototypes. When working with complexity; time and care needs to be given to understanding and unpacking what is creating the barriers to outcomes, and then new approaches to be tested and tried. Immediate outcomes and benefits of prototypes can’t be predicted in advance.

The resourcing of work in communities is dominated by the problem-solution frame, and tends to be organized around specific programs and services. Traditional funding arrangements and contracting mechanisms, such as requests for proposals (RFPs), assume pre-ordinate clarity about goals, processes and activities. How work is commissioned and authorized faces pressures for efficiency, risk aversion, and a “value-for-money” mindset. Conventional funding structures are not set up to support collaborative ‘learning systems’ [1].

Innovation is inherently messy, and in the short-term, inefficient. Classic funding and contracting mechanisms were not developed to effectively contend with complex problems.

The evolution of public management systems has increasingly driven towards a preference for efficiency. The system has responded by becoming more prescriptive, and we have developed a system of contracting specified by outputs. In highly complex situations, the cost of efficiency is diminished effectiveness. For example, in New Zealand, it is the case that NGOs might only be funded for contact hours with ‘clients’, with no investment in time and resources to build capability, collaborate, or think critically and engage in the strategic learning that could lead to improvements in the effects of these contact hours.

The report by Collaborate for Social Change, A Whole New World: Funding and Commissioning in Complexity observed:  “We are in a world of fictional ‘transformations’ that start with a problem, deliver a service and expect a result.” [2]

RFPs have a built in assumption that we can engineer solutions, that there is a singular answer to a problem. Requirements for short-term implementation constrain innovation by pushing for early convergence rather than an exploration of novel options, which tends to result in historical framing of a problem and business as usual solutions.

Creating the space for innovation

There are signs of change. Some initiatives have successfully created a “workaround” to enable special circumstances that are more suitable to co-creation. The workaround is nothing new. In the early days of research and development (R&D) in private sector companies, skunkworks were created as an “under the radar” organisational strategy to develop highly disruptive innovations. Everett Rogers, best known for his diffusion of innovation theory, defined skunkworks as an “enriched environment that is intended to help a small group of individuals design a new idea by escaping routine organisational procedures.”

We see a similar phenomenon occurring in a community change context. For example, He Oranga Poutama is a New Zealand program aimed at the revitalization of traditional Maori sport and recreation. Community organisations were funded as part of a revitalization of sport initiative.

For the initiative to receive support, clearly defined “deliverables” were necessary as part of the tendering process. The workaround for He Oranga Poutama was to define year-one deliverables as engagement in and contribution to a framework for action, instead of the usual service delivery or reporting. From this framework, the model for services was developed, and in the following year the contracting deliverables adjusted accordingly.

This required some creativity in the contracting process, and perhaps more importantly, it required a creative and interested public service manager and director who were willing to take a risk. This is common in these workaround situations. It often takes individuals within the system who champion getting something done despite the systemic barriers. These intrapreneurs are skilled at negotiating special permissions within existing structures and can get rules to be bent. Creative approaches to funding are a form of legitimized co-conspiracy between the funder and recipient.

This can be beneficial. Special circumstances help to insulate innovators from pressures that can curtail innovation, and set boundaries around risk. The challenge of workarounds in the context of transforming communities is that they tend to be temporal, and reliant on the will and interest of key supporters on either side of the granting or contracting equation. We might gain ‘concessions’ for working in particular ways with particular partners, but this doesn’t necessarily translate into actual or sustained change in the system.

As skunkworks played out in the private sector over time, the sequestering that was pivotal for the development of the innovation ultimately limited the potential scaling of the innovations that were created.

Innovation labs 

One development is the creation of a new kind of space that has growing legitimacy within the public and not-for-profit sectors. Innovation Labs – of which there are many varieties – have emerged as a way to name, and secure support for the space for collaboration and joint exploration.

An effect of the emergence of labs is that they have become a mechanism to collectively purchase the space to engage, develop and test ideas that examine ways to redistribute assets differently.

Some organisations have the development and facilitation of lab processes as one of their primary purposes and offerings – MaRS Solutions Lab in Canada, or NESTA in the UK, for example. Governments have created labs to help drive innovation on public policy challenges – Auckland Co-design Lab or the Impact and Innovation Unit in Canada, for example.

Co-design spaces can also emerge from larger initiatives. In New Zealand, the Ministry of Social Development worked with more than 500 people involved in budgeting services and those experiencing financial hardship to redesign what a spectrum of support should look like as part of the Building Financial Capability (BFC) initiative. One of the responses identified was a preventive community action initiative that aimed to support community-led economic and non-economic resource generating opportunities- called Generator.

The initial scope of the initiative was co-designed and tested with a range of stakeholders but, knowing the initiative needed to be grounded in place and co-developed with communities, what was procured was only partially developed. A container for further development was supported by an investment in a backbone organisation who will work with ten communities across New Zealand to adapt the responses so that they are optimal for the local context.

Alternative ways of procuring 

One way to start building a more systematic shift that can support DE and co-design is to think about alternative ways of procuring.  If a solution is going to be co-designed, then it is difficult to tender an RFP with specifications for something that is yet to be created. Within the public sector there are experiments with innovation partnerships as an alternative to traditional RFP processes.

Another example from New Zealand’s Ministry of Social Development is the Whānau Resilience initiative, which is part of an additional 15.4 million allocated to address family violence in New Zealand.

Like other forms of social procurement, the contracting process for these funds is being approached as an opportunity for change that delivers social outcomes in and of itself [3].

The process is attempting to address challenges of traditional partial and short term funding models that focus on client volume and tend to reinforce inequity that comes from a “one size fits all” model.

Typically tenders are fast-paced and competitive, and as a result, bigger (often national) providers with resources and experience in the RFP process are advantaged. Smaller, often Māori and Pacific providers, who might be best placed to serve their communities in culturally grounded ways can continue to miss out on the opportunity to participate and grow.

A multi-stage procurement process is being used as a way to strengthen the conditions for collaborative, place-based, culturally grounded approaches and build capacity of community and local providers for change in the long term.

Rather than internally defining the problem and solution, the first phase of procurement included a discovery process working with current providers to better understand the issues on the ground and where the spend would have the most impact.

This engagement led to an understanding of how previous procurement rounds have negatively impacted the sector and identified the opportunity to put new money into long term, place-based, whānau led recovery.

A two stage RFP process was designed to bring forward the providers best placed to respond to the opportunity and to community need. It put emphasis on provider’s connection to culture and community, and required providers to have, or commit to establishing a local base. Initial paper applications were followed up with face to face presentations, doubling as an opportunity for relationship building between different providers in the region.

First year funding is not for delivery; instead, providers are funded for a regional design phase to build their own local knowledge of the region and co-design with their community what is needed. If both partners choose to move forward, the contracts are extended for four more years, recognising the need for security and a long term view on change.

The process is experimental as the team seeks to learn what a more collaborative, transparent and community strengthening procurement processes looks like. The ability to adapt and refine the service and contract over time is built in, with roundtable reflection processes supporting ongoing learning across providers.

Innovation partnerships 

Innovation partnerships is another approach that can help address the difficulties of navigating both the complex network of stakeholders and decision makers involved in the development and implementation of innovation, and the purchasing process.

There are emerging models where organisations put forward a challenge statement and then select an innovation partner based on a pitch from prospective vendors on how they would go about solving the challenge. Vendor selection is based on a track record for innovation, the proposed approach, and in some cases, existing assets or resources that are thought to be beneficial towards a possible solution. The procurement is not based on a highly specified solution; instead there is an agreement to work together on a solution, and a commitment to procure something if certain outcomes can be met.

In 2016-2018, MaRS Solutions Lab helped healthcare providers such as hospitals and long-term care facilities to implement an innovation partnership. The program – Innovation Partnership: Procurement by Co-Design (IPPCD) helped selected healthcare providers and vendors to apply user-centred design principles and other rapid prototyping methods to deal with the risks of introducing innovation in a complex healthcare setting.

Teams were supported with hands-on co-design workshops and grants to help scope and evaluate minimal viable product and business model which would then be used to make a final decision whether to move forward with procurement.

Within the public sector, other procurement tools and instruments are emerging as well. For example, in the UK, Public Contracts Regulations have evolved to, “achieve broader and better social benefits for our communities. They are a licence to collaborate.”[4]

In addition to Innovation Partnerships, the authors of Exploring the New World identify mechanisms already within the UK’s contracting rules that support collaborative and exploratory efforts:

• pre-tender market consultation

• reserved Contracts to engage with voluntary and civil society

• embed social value considerations in the marking scheme

• get external inputs from providers and users on what social value looks and feels like; and how it should be evaluated.

Resourcing Developmental Evaluation

Contracting for DE is also difficult. The up-front specificity needed to scope out a traditional evaluation framework is challenging when the initiative, and as a result, the evaluation is expected to adapt and evolve. The challenge of accurately scoping a developmental evaluation and the long and uncertain duration can make them potentially costly to resource.

The evaluation framework tends not to be fixed and as a result the scope can change as new questions emerge. The pace of the DE can accelerate and slow down, in sync with how the initiative is developing. In a blog post on budgeting for DE [5], Michael Quinn Patton identifies some different contracting strategies can be used to guide to some of ways we might build flexibility into the contracting process:

1. Retainer fee contracts: The scope of work is open-ended, and the evaluator and contracting organisation agree on total amount. The evaluator draws on the retainer pool as required, and if needed, new funds added to the pool over time.

2. Stepwise funding: The evaluation design and funds are negotiated in steps or phases.

3. Plan and adjust: The evaluator and contracting organisation speculate on the DE design and budget based on a best-guess, but with a substantial contingency (e.g. 25-50%).

Michael describes, “Under optimal circumstances, my work with clients is characterized by a long-term relationship, regular interaction and responsive deliverables. DE requires a transparent process of identifying the available resources and then iteratively discussing how best to apply them. It’s more like a consulting contract than a pre-specified evaluation design contract. Trust and communication are essential.”

What then does it take to make this transition to a different kind of contracting and funding relationship with community? 

Genuine co-design and collaboration between stakeholders requires time for building trust, relationships and alignment. Time and care needs to be given to understanding and unpacking what is creating the barriers to outcomes, and then new approaches to be identified, tried and tested.

Conventional funding structures and contracts with a focus on service delivery do not naturally encourage conditions for collaboration, innovation and learning. As we work to shift how we effectively contract and commission for experimentation and learning at practice and systems level, there are several areas we think should guide this shift:

• Include the time it takes to build alignment between partners that allows them to collaborate, and most importantly reconfigure skills, assets, resources and eventually structures and policies towards outcomes-focused delivery.

• Build in resources and time for learning and ongoing reflection over the long-term.

• Trying to support collaboration between potential partners and those working in communities rather than a competitive approach.

• Set up the conditions for success (including space, knowledge, relationships, trust, time) not the specifications, set up relationships but not prescribe them.

• Build a new measurement vocabulary that helps the procurement and granting process move away from more conventional measures and expectations about outputs, throughput and activities.

• Commit to addressing inequity through procurement conditions and deliberately challenging bias that privileges those that can follow the RFP process and the bias within the process. This includes things like diversifying the pool of who is invited to respond to tender requests, how people respond and the phasing and timing of payments, who is on the panel for decision-making and emphasizing criteria like connection to community and cultural connectedness.

• Strengthening local capability and connections of community and providers through the procurement process.

• Fund networks and peer-to-peer relationship building and recognize its value as a stand-alone outcome.

In shifting the way contracting and funding is done, we contribute to the shifting of decision-making to the community for deciding what is needed to proceed. This is disruptive to existing authority and resource flows, and changing the funding and contracting systems is a major shift for public systems.

These systems are not as rigid and inflexible as we sometimes imagine them to be, and there are many pockets where there is a keen interest to move from business as usual approaches.

Not surprisingly, the same advice that applies to any change in large organizations applies here: build shared understanding, genuine relationships and gain support from senior leadership. It also involves engaging parts of the system that we historically might not be looking to as we attempt to shift a complex system – legal, finance, audit, and procurement.

The possibilities of place-based approaches, and the role of co-design and developmental evaluation in these will be further explored in our upcoming post – Opportunities in Place.

 [1] Developing an ‘effective learning systems’ was a key part of the New Zealand Productivity Commission’s 2015 Report into more effective social services which looked at ways to improve how government agencies commission and purchase social services and what is needed to better serve families experiencing greatest disadvantage.

[2] Knight, Lowe, Brossard and Wilson. A Whole New World: Funding and Commissioning in Complexity. Newcastle University, Kite Centre for Knowledge Innovation, Technology and Enterprise, and Digital Civics.

[3] Social procurement is the inclusion of social and economic objectives in the procurement process in order to create additional socio-economic value above and beyond the primary purpose of what you are buying. See for example https://www.csp.nz and https://www.fwd.org.nz in New Zealand and https://supplynation.org.au in Australia – enabled in part through Indigenous Procurement Policy

[4] Lowe,T and Plimmer, D. Exploring the New World: practical insights for funding, commissioning and managing in complexity. Collaboration for Social Change and Northumbria University.

[5] Michael Quinn Patton. Budgeting for Developmental Evaluation. https://www.betterevaluation.org/en/resources/overview/mqp_de_budget_eval_interview

This post was originally published on May 21st, 2019 by the Centre for Community Child Health at The Royal Children’s Hospital (Melbourne) and the Murdoch Children's Research Institute.

Evidence for innovation

In earlier themes, we explored the challenges in the current ability of service systems to meet the needs of families and young people. We have discussed the need to shift to genuinely, developmental and participatory ways of working, which recognise local and community expertise and engage with rather than seek to reduce complexity.  These processes involve bringing together evidence and wisdom from non-traditional sources to support innovation.

This post explores our relationship to evidence and rigour.  It proposes different evidence gathering practices needed to support learning, experimentation and decision-making in complex settings. It also advocates for a better understanding of the role of practice-based evidence, and the potential of prototyping as a means to both develop new responses and ‘innovations’ as well as produce learning and evidence to inform decision-making in sensitive settings.

Such practices require us to be more critical and more open about what we mean by evidence and rigour and to build our collective capacity and understanding of how rigour is established in the face of dynamic and emerging challenges.

They also require us to challenge or question assumptions and norms about evidence, how it is constituted, who validates knowledge, what knowledge systems are privileged and who gets to decide.

This post explores:

• How might we identify our own relationship to data and evidence?

• Where is the current evidence bias in policy and service settings?

• What is the value of prototyping to build practice-based evidence?

• How do we better understand and establish rigour?

• What does this mean for the skills and roles of researchers?

The thinking, practice and definitions shared here are also still developing and exploratory. This post draws on ideas and work that will be presented in more depth in a forthcoming paper co-authored by Penny Hagen (Auckland Co-Design Lab), Ingrid Burkett (Griffith University), Chris Vanstone (TACSI), and Carolyn Curtis (TACSI). It also draws on ideas in development by the Centre for Community Child Health about the relationship between evidence and practice.

How might we identify our own relationship to data and evidence?

A place to start the conversation is in exploring some of the relationships we have to data and evidence. The sketch above is an extension of one initially developed by Dr Ingrid Burkett. It’s not intended as definitive, just a tool for us to consider how we think about data and evidence. The diagram illustrates the role of evidence-based practice on the left with practice-based evidence on the right. It is intended to suggest these different types of practice can have complementary roles, and that both are necessary when seeking to understand what will meet the needs of families and young people.

Evidence-based practice refers to the development and application of (usually) interventions that have been shown to be effective elsewhere through specific and consistent forms of trials and testing such as randomised control trials (RCT). Relying on or drawing from the existing and established evidence about what works, or applying ‘evidence-based interventions’ is, for example, a typical approach to identifying interventions, programs or services in health contexts.

Practice-based evidence draws upon the existing evidence-base, creates new knowledge through working together with communities, on the ground testing and prototyping to find what is needed and what works in a local context. Practice-based approaches recognise that expertise sits with practitioners as well as with communities and families, and that effective definition of issues and responses need to take into account local context, history (including history of whenua), place, culture, values, resources and assets.

The different types of data or sources of evidence described in the middle include:

Big Data (and other forms of quantitative data). Big Data refers to large sets of quantitative data that can provide a view or identify patterns of what is going on from a numerical or statistical point of view e.g. how much, how many, when, where, what kind. It relies on large numbers of people or data sets.

Qualitative Data or Thick Data [1], which goes deeper into behaviours, social context, motivations and underlying reasons. It reveals why and how, involves smaller numbers of people and is often produced through ethnographic methods. Thick Data and Big Data provide different kinds of insights at different scales.

Expertise, which involves drawing upon the understanding, lived experience, know-how, values, perspectives, culture and beliefs of those involved, impacted, and implementing the change process, including practitioners, whānau, children, young people and community members.

Traditional knowledge, which refers to indigenous knowledge – or systems of knowledge developed over centuries by communities from a particular culture or place [2]. Mātauranga Māori for example is “the body of knowledge originating from Māori ancestors, including the Māori world view and perspectives, Māori creativity and cultural practices” [3].

The approaches and types of data included in the image represent different perspectives about knowledge, data, evidence and rigour, some of which are more dominant in the current policy and service system. Our willingness to accept all of these as legitimate forms of data or evidence and the extent to which we are familiar with employing them as a way to respond to issues depends on our background, training and epistemological viewpoints and world view. Here we argue that the ability to draw upon a plurality of data sources and ways of seeing and knowing in the world will be critical to our ability to work collaboratively and in complexity-informed ways. However, if we have been trained to value certain things as evidence or ‘legitimate’ (and not others), moving to a different view can require a significant shift in mindset.

Where is the current evidence bias in policy and service settings?

Other work has identified that in policy and service settings there are ‘unwritten rules’ which can include narrow ideas about evidence and rigour. While there is increasing recognition in mainstream or Western science settings of indigenous knowledge systems as legitimate in their own right, references to evidence or evidence-based practices and programmes in policy and service settings still rarely include this type of knowledge or evidence. While policy-makers may draw upon both qualitative and quantitative evidence, as the quote below suggests, quantitative evidence in particular is favoured for decision-making and reporting as it is perceived as being definitive or providing certainty in decision-making.

“Different research approaches do different things and offer different kinds of validity, to allow policy officials and ministers to reach decisions. But in the culture of policy making, the deductive logic has the allure of offering definitive evidence.” [4]

It is also often default practice in government to advocate for evidence-based interventions or evidence-based practice which appears as a way of arguing for investing in approaches that are proven – quantitatively – to be effective. Most commonly this involves evaluation of the quality and strength of evidence in accordance with a hierarchy which generally ranks experimental designs using Randomised Control Trials (RCTs) at the top [5].

This means that the demonstration of efficacy has been achieved through experimental methods that rely on targeted, tightly focused selection of a few specified variables. As suggested by Robert Chambers in his book ‘Can we know better?’, such approaches might lend themselves to controlled or controllable scientific or medical research where there is a linear logic, and where phenomena is measurable and can be standardised. But these approaches are less applicable for complex social issues and contexts dominated by people and processes that are emergent, political, dynamic and harder to control [6].

Also, the standardised testing of interventions to establish impact or efficacy in controlled settings usually involves limited or little focus on the processes of implementation. The limitations of this approach are articulated in a Centre for Community Child Health Policy Brief on using evidence in policy and programs:

“Real-world implementation of interventions are infinitely more complex (and unpredictable) than a research study in which multiple variables have been controlled or corrected for.” 

The “plug and play” approach of taking interventions demonstrated in one context or region into another also often ignores what other conditions, infrastructure or implementation contexts may have been at play in the original context. They may also be selected oblivious to the context into which they are being “plugged”, or how and who success was judged by—often not those whom the intervention was meant to benefit. While an “evidence-based approach” that relies on experimental designs appears like a strategy for reducing risk and guaranteeing effective outcomes—this is not always the case.

As outlined in the previous post “Moving away from just programs and services” conventional Western approaches to intervention development have consistently reinforced the notion that expertise in how change might be achieved is held only by experts and professionals, rather than recognising the role, resources, capacity or agency of families and local communities in determining their responses to the things that matter to them. Other voices have often been absent in the identification of issues as well as responses, including and in particular the voices of indigenous communities often ‘targeted’ by such interventions [7]. In Aotearoa New Zealand, for example, adherence to evidence-based approaches consistently presents problems given that no internationally trialled interventions have been developed in the context of the Treaty of Waitangi or for the sort of cultural contexts present in Aotearoa.

The RCT design and other quantitative approaches have numerous strengths when applied in the right circumstances. However, their preeminent status in what is considered to be evidence-based is not optimal—or even feasible—for generating knowledge and learning needed to address complex issues. Narrow definitions of evidence and knowledge risk holding us in the patterns of the status quo, which often reinforces particular kinds of western world views and value systems.

Researchers from the Brookfield Institute note:

“There are “phantom rules” or orthodoxies in government around what is allowable and qualifies as valid evidence that may inhibit policy professionals from innovating.” [8]

While a critical lens does need to be applied to the “existing evidence-base” in innovation, we aren’t arguing for this to be disregarded. Drawing upon existing evidence can help us avoid practices that are harmful or practices that have been shown to be ineffective. They can also help to provide strong arguments for direction or demonstrate how behaviours may at times run counter to what we might intuitively assume. They constitute a knowledge base that we can draw upon to avoid making mistakes and to ensure we further knowledge rather than operate in a vacuum or waste resources trying something that’s already been tested.

A criticism of some design practices is that ideas or prototypes have at times been developed largely disconnected from this existing evidence base and therefore lack credibility or opportunity to build on existing knowledge. Yet, practice-based approaches help us to engage in the complexity of people, place and policy interacting together. Such approaches can be used to inform us about how things actually work on the ground in context, as well as what is relevant and meaningful to understand and support change in a particular setting or locality. They help to identify and build upon local knowledge and strengths, and are particularly relevant to complex settings when other efforts have failed in the past and novel or new approaches are needed.

The reality is we don’t know what will work to address the complex challenges families and young people are currently facing. With complex issues we argue that a rigorous approach is to harness evidence-based practice and practice-based evidence, bringing both into how we work alongside communities to inform practice and policy design that works for those communities.

What is the value of prototyping to build practice-based evidence?

In an effort to move beyond evidence based practice, the Centre for Community Child Health advanced the concept of evidence-informed practice, which brings together three components: evidence-based programs/strategies, evidence-based processes, and client and professional values and beliefs [9]. Such practice recognises different forms of evidence (i.e. that of previous research as well as expertise and lived experience of professionals and families or ‘clients’) and puts equal emphasis on both the program design and the processes for implementation.

In this interdisciplinary approach different forms of evidence and expertise come together to inform an approach that is best practice in context. This is an important advance on evidence-based practice and one that recognises different forms of expertise and local knowledge.

The development of practice-based evidence goes further than this in the creation of new knowledge through collaborative cycles of innovation: rigorous prototyping, experimentation and testing, working together with communities to learn what works in their context. Cycles of prototyping for example can produce new insights and knowledge about what might work, where and why, as well as new responses, capabilities and capacities in the teams and communities involved in the work.

More and more, co-design approaches that involve live prototyping in situ (sometimes described as field prototypes or live prototyping) with families, stakeholders and service providers are becoming a way for understanding and trying to catalyse change in complex and dynamic settings.

Prototyping as a concept has been embraced because of its emphasis on testing assumptions, ideas and concepts quickly and early. Prototypes make potential ideas tangible, allowing us to test things out in practice with those impacted, get fast feedback on potential approaches and how proposals might actually work (or not) in the real world.

Prototyping is a collaborative learning process that involves cycles of trying things out and then iterating in response. They help to reveal the gaps and barriers between policy intent and outcomes in practice. Prototyping reduces risk by exposing issues early on, significant effort and money might be saved by demonstrating the implications of options or directions that may turn out to be infeasible before significant investment has been made. Prototyping can also reveal opportunities for different approaches that may have remained otherwise hidden.  The prototype or concepts evolves over time as we learn more both about the context and issue and
the best ways to respond.

In complex settings prototypes serve the role of provoking the system in ways that tell us more about the system and where we should focus for greatest impact. For example, trying to prototype a new intervention for improving housing conditions may quickly reveal issues at an implementation level that prevent what might seem on the surface to be a straightforward intervention to better heat a home. However they can just as easily reveal policy and contract conditions that prevent a proposed solution from ever being possible to implement. Such ‘strategic learning’ might mean that the focus for change would be better targeted, for example, at funding and contract structures rather than implementation issues or new intervention ideas.

Historically the purpose of prototypes in innovation settings has often been positioned as a process to find successful ideas or solutions that can ‘scale’ for impact. When trying to address complex issues and catalyse change in policy and service settings, the primary role of prototypes – ‘successful’ or not – is to produce learning that can support decision-making about plausible directions and ways of working prior to significant commitment in investment, resource or decision-making.  The role of prototypes to expose the nature of the system, and the behaviours that underpin current activities and outcomes is especially important when seeking systems-level changes which go beyond any single intervention, organisation or issue. It matters less whether a prototype has been successful as an intervention or idea. It matters more what the prototype has made visible, helped to activate in the system, and the learning or ‘evidence’ for which direction to head.

In the context of innovation in policy and service systems change prototyping can help us to:

1. Test out and localise aspects of the existing evidence-base in particular contexts or communities: Does this thing work here in practice? How does this thing work here in practice?

2. Develop an understanding of what responses are needed in a particular context – “how” things will work, or need to work, and how different factors play out in practice including how policies interacton the ground.

3. Reduce risk by testing out approaches and quickly identifying issues or barriers to implementation as well as some of the unintended consequences.

4. Explore and generate and test new plausible approaches – when existing evidence is not sufficient or doesn’t yet exist.

5. Enable local input and leadership into the development and understanding of what is needed in particular settings.

6. Develop new knowledge through collaborative action and mutual learning between different groups working together.

Prototyping and other forms of learning orientated experimentation offer the opportunity for forms of practice-based evidence to emerge that directly engages in the complexity of how things work on the ground and enables the drawing and building of local knowledge. But we are still building our capacity to understand and leverage this potential.

To support the use of prototyping to produce practice-based evidence we need a better understanding of what rigour looks like in this setting. We need to develop our practice to ensure rigorous approaches that can legitimately claim to contribute to the broader evidence base. We also need to ensure that the value of the kinds of evidence that can be produced through practice-based efforts such as live prototyping are understood in the context of what they offer.

Understanding and establishing rigour

Although rigour is often associated with particular types of methods, it is not fixed. Rigour, like research design, or method, is contextual – defined by what is needed and appropriate to the situation we are working in and the questions we are asking. In testing evidence-based interventions, rigour is normally established in relation to adherence (usually without deviation) to the intervention model and the prescribed and standardised evaluation framework. What determines success and rigour is the model applied as intended with a positive result that can be correlated to the intervention. In different contexts rigour is established in other ways.

In discussing rigour in design research, Biggs & Büchler argue that the obligations of rigour in all forms of research are, at their most basic, met by the practitioners’ ability to demonstrate the validity of their selected method to deliver the research solution [10]. They suggest that establishing rigour in research is based upon making explicit the necessity of a particular method, and that is what legitimises the whole process.

Rigor in research is the strength of the chain of reasoning and that has to be judged in the context of the question and the answer, for example, in the context of social innovation as opposed to some other context.
Therefore, when innovating with whānau or families using participatory paradigms, ensuring that whānau or family voice is driving and governing decision-making is part of the rigour.

Adhering to the values and principles agreed with our partners and being responsive and adaptive to whānau needs might also represent rigour. Following tikanga [11] may be an important aspect of rigour. In inclusive practice rigour is more likely to be principles rather than rules based, concerned with participation, methodological pluralism, reflexivity and relevance.

Establishing rigour in the context of prototyping as a source of evidence-building begins by recognising its role as a participatory learning process. The question of rigour is then focused on the rigour of the learning and
decision-making process, and the rigour of the guides, heuristics or tools we are using to support the cycles of inclusive data capture, reflection and analysis. The following image by Ingrid Burkett [12] helps to highlight differences between prototyping and other more established forms of experimentation – emphasising the role of learning and feedback loops integral to prototyping. We’ve added some further definitions below to each of the approaches. The image is not intended to suggest a sequence between these three approaches, but rather how they differ in their purpose. In practice these different approaches are combined in different ways.

Prototyping as a method for producing practice-based evidence for innovation, isn’t seen as having value or rigour in the same way as other more established approaches such as pilots or RCT’s. To achieve this we need to increase the ability of teams to make sure that the practice is rigorous.  We also need to improve the understanding amongst policy and service practitioners about how and when such evidence has value.

Design and innovation processes are inherently reflective practices – orientated to learning through action. Such activities frequently produce new initiatives, ideas capacities and knowledge in the locations in which they are developed. In order that they also contribute back into the broader evidence base and are seen as legitimate sources for insight and evidence for policy, they also need to be supported by strong research and evaluation practices.

Development evaluation plays an important role here in helping to put rigour around decision-making and judgements that are made about what is ‘good’, ‘worthwhile’ or ‘good enough’ to base decision-making on. It can help to ensure and enhancing the rigour of the evaluative reasoning process by producing timely feedback loops and evidence that helps to challenge updates and update and inform the prototyping process. Researchers also have an important role to play, though one that differs somewhat from traditional research practice.

Original image by Dr Ingrid Burkett

Prototyping

Purpose is building towards the right answer and gain understanding about the nature of a particular context.

A hypothesis to be refined, changed or dropped.

Plausible but provisional.

Orientated towards learning, testing assumptions, reducing risk around decision-making.

Pilots

Purpose is to ‘iron out creases’ or demonstrate viability, ideally in preparation for scaling.

Solution largely already identified & refined.

Less about research and evidence and more about feasibility and viability before further funding or commitment.

Randomised Control Trials

Purpose is to test if an intervention achieves intended outcomes when implemented with fidelity.

Intervention is already designed, the controlled experiment is to test and provide evidence of cause and effect.

Measures outcome of intervention with little attention to context or implementation.

What this means for skills and roles of researchers

This interdisciplinary way of working is still relatively new and the teams and skills required to support innovation cycles that bring together different forms of evidence are still developing. For researchers, this provides an important opportunity to work alongside, actively supporting the innovation process to inform policy and systems change.  Research skills are needed to pull together the evidence in a way that is contextual and applicable to the issues of concern and for this evidence to be drawn from a range of knowledge sources. A good understanding of relevant tools and data is needed and strong reasoning skills help challenge assumptions along the way. For the outcomes and insights produced through innovation to be considered legitimate policy inputs research skills are also needed to support the rigour of evidence development underpinned by ethical practice and data sovereignty.

But it requires researchers to rethink and reframe evidence, foster real-time relationships, and act as critical friends not as experts, building knowledge in situ with community. Teamwork is essential and researchers must have the ability to work shoulder to shoulder rather than operate from a distance.  This is a different role for researchers and different skills, processes and relationships are needed.

For organisations such as the Centre for Community Child Health this raises a number of questions about how we best prepare for supporting innovation in this space.

Questions we are grappling with include:

• What is the researchers role in supporting innovation?

  1. How does the position of the researcher change in these innovation settings? For example, how do we ensure the voice of the researcher doesn’t drown out other voices?

  2. How might notions of evidence standards be rethought in this context?

  3. How can we ensure ethical standards are maintained?

  4. How do we ensure evidence is an output of innovation in a way that supports learning, improvement, scaling and sustaining?

One reflection is that traditional research strategies don’t keep pace with the speed of innovation. As a result, The Centre for Community Child Health has begun exploring different types of research contributions such as the following inputs to innovation cycles:

• Data literacy capability building. Researchers support design teams to access and understand available data and how to use it in the innovation process.

  1. Pragmatic rapid reviews. This involves a scan of seminal grey literature and peer reviewed meta-analysis. The output is a guidance paper based on the evidence, produced in a short period of time that can be used in the design process.

  2. Evidence informed tools. For example, one tool, currently in development, will provide an evidence informed framework for considering what community level factors could be considered when a team is co-designing improvements to the conditions under which families are raising young children. Rather than innovation occurring in a vacuum, the tool will help the team to understand the range of factors we know will make a difference such as housing instability. It won’t tell the team which of these is a local priority or what to do about it but will ensure that attention is given to the factors that can be most impactful.

  3. Positive deviance case studies. Positive deviance approaches assume that in ‘every group or community, a few individuals will use uncommon practices and behaviours to achieve better solutions to problems than their peers who face the same challenges and barriers.’ Researchers could bring rigour and richness to case studies for use within innovation cycles.

These are an initial handful of ideas and we recognize there is still much to learn about the role of researchers in innovation and we welcome the opportunity to explore this alongside others in the co-design process.

The realignment and re-organisation of our skills, expertise and ways of working described here must be similarly reflected in the wider systems and structures that organise and direct our work. Our roles and how we work together need to be different and so do our processes for funding, procurement and contracting. Monitoring what and how new approaches are being developed and their contribution to changing outcomes also need to be understood. Some of these shifts are explored in the blog that follows: Theme 5 Innovation in procurement.

Acknowledgements

We’d like to thank Lee Ryan for helping to wrangle some of the longer sentences.

[1] Thick Data is a term coined by ethnographer Tricia Wang. In doing so she was drawing on the notion of thick descriptions (descriptions of behaviour) developed in ethnographic terms by influential anthropologist Clifford Geertz.  

[2] In referring to Indigenous Knowledge systems, particular terms and definitions differ between different communities, here we have referenced terminology used within The Southern Initiative in Tāmaki, Aotearoa.

[3] Definition from https://maoridictionary.co.nz

[4] Applying Design Approaches to Policy Making: Discovering Policy Lab, Lucy Kimbell 2016.

[5] Policy Brief | Edition no. 21, 2011 |  Evidence-based practice and practice-based evidence, Centre for Community Child Health, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute

[6] Chambers, R. (2017). Can We Know Better? Reflections for Development, Rugby, UK: Practical Action Publishing.

[7]  Bartgis, J., & Bigfoot, D. (2010). Evidence-based practices and practice-based evidence, National Indian Health Board Edition, Healthy Indian Country Initiative Promising Prevention Practices Resource Guide.

[8] Exploring Policy Innovation: Tools, Techniques + Approaches. (2018) Brookfield Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship

[9] Policy Brief | Edition no. 27, November 2017 | Using Evidence in Policy and Programs. Centre for Community Child Health, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute

[10] Biggs, M.,& Buchler, D. (2007). Rigour and practice-based research. Design Issues, 23 (3), 62-69.

[11] Tikanga: procedure, custom, practice, convention or protocol

[12] Image from Dr Ingrid Burket’s presentation: Evaluation Systems Change presented at the ‘Making a Difference’ event at AUT which explored how evaluative practices can increase impact in social innovation. 2017, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland

This post was originally published on May 6th, 2019 by the Centre for Community Child Health at The Royal Children’s Hospital (Melbourne) and the Murdoch Children's Research Institute.

On Power, Privilege and Possibilities

This theme was written before the terrible events of March 15, in Christchurch, New Zealand, when 50 Muslims attending Friday prayers at two Christchurch mosques were gunned down whilst at prayer, with many others wounded.

These events have surfaced tensions that exist between espoused societal values of tolerance and inclusion and the lived experiences of those who experience every day racism, because of their ethnicity, religion or difference to the dominant culture in our societies.

In the days that have followed the attacks, countless commentators of colour including Muslims, Māori and migrants have been calling for the connection to be made between this act of white supremacist terror and colonization. Early colonizers believed white people were superior to people of colour, so much so they killed and subjugated them.

The person who killed 50 Muslims did so because he believes white people are superior to people of colour. Māori lawyer Moana Jackson points out, “In many ways, today’s white supremacists are the most recent and most extreme colonizers.” A painful bridge we will have to cross if we really want to stop this kind of violence is to recognise that this is not the first time we’ve seen this scale of white supremacist violence. In fact, many of our modern nations are built on the exercise of subjugation and violence towards people of colour.

As commentators Marianne Elliott, Brannavan Gnanalingam, Laura O’Connell-Rapira, Lamia Imam, and Jess Berentson-Shaw asked recently, do we have the courage to look beyond the surface to face the fuller, more complex story of our colonial history and its remnants, which continue to shape our countries today?

How does all this link to social innovation?

In the world of wicked problems and constrained resources, our focus quite naturally tends to be on those that bear the burden of inequity and sustained disadvantage – because it is where the patterns of disadvantage are playing out in the most obvious ways. And so there is an enormous amount of work that is being done in these communities globally, everyday. Work in which someone that doesn’t look, sound, live, nor understand these communities are sent to make judgments, assess their conditions and progress, and render decisions about what the treatment or solution should be to solve their problems.

The distance between those with authority to make decisions and those bearing the consequences of those decisions has resulted in an extraordinary and continuing record of policy failure. The imposition of a way of thinking, a way of being, on another hasn’t served humanity or the planet well.

This approach has never worked, and our communities have been telling us for a long time that this is not what they want or need, yet those with power and privilege in our funding systems haven’t been listening to their voices. The systems we have for funding and delivering services and programmes continues to be lead by people with substantial advantages, making assumptions and decisions about people they know very little about.

What might we do about this?

In the aftermath of Christchurch, there is much talk about the power of love, with many referring to Martin Luther King’s quote “Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that.” But as Moana Jackson reminds us, Martin Luther King also said that while love might prompt a desire for change, the change itself could not occur without the practical exertion “of weary feet and sharp minds.” It involves active toil and an honest analysis of historic cause and consequence, as well as the willingness to dream different dreams.

We live in a time where Indigenous populations across the world – are exploring ways to decolonise, indigenise and re-imagine knowledge theory and practice in every academic discipline and practice that is informed by their world views, including evaluation and design (Chilisa, 2012). Many of the worlds colonized and marginalized peoples are working to claim back lost identities and as evaluator and author Bagelle Chillisa says they are working to “…create spaces for significant self-hoods as well as writing back and talking back to the West in modes couched in the histories, cultures, linguistic and life experiences of their cultures” (Chilisa, 2012).

Begin by acknowledging our own power and privilege

For those of us who are non-indigenous, or not from the communities we work in, if we are to have any hope of engaging authentically in a trusted relationship, we have to begin by acknowledging our own power and privilege and our own history, in relation to those we work among and with.

We have always been ‘in relationship’ with these communities, we just rarely acknowledge this. And many of us are poorly equipped to act well in relationship with many of the communities we find ourselves in. Many of these communities, particularly indigenous communities, were literally dehumanised by colonisation.

So, our relationship has not been a healthy one, it’s been brutal, and the abusive nature of that relationship continues when we don’t accept our own position and power. Often we work with the best of intentions, trying hard to work in participatory, or collaborative ways. But even when (and perhaps because) there are good intentions to do the right thing, there often are no fundamental shifts in power imbalances between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples or the systems within which we operate. Unwittingly, our attempts to do the right thing may actually serve to further displace, overshadow and mask indigenous efforts, causing more harm.

In New Zealand, there has been recent vigorous criticism of co-design and evaluation processes and methodologies that are intended to change systems for indigenous communities, but are not led by, or done authentically with indigenous communities. A colleague, Nan Wehipeihana, argues some of our so called participatory processes and methodologies, in evaluation and co-design, have been about providing “the trappings of permission” and space for non-indigenous to work in indigenous spaces. If we are to be useful allies of community and indigenous aspirations for transformation – we have to have more than good intentions.

Transformative change relies on quality relationships

Having the power to craft our futures is a genuine human desire, so only when we are truly prepared to fundamentally shift the power of who gets to decide, then we are in a place to begin a new kind of relationship, where shared values can be explored, and different ways of knowing can be embedded, privileged, centred and integrated. The quality and validity of what can emerge from an authentic culturally grounded relationship and process will be infallibly superior to what can be generated by an imposed process run by a small group of outside ‘experts’. With control in the hands of an outside expert, we simply cannot be transformative.

The potential for transformative change that is needed lies in the quality of our interactions and relationships in the first instance. Unfortunately for hundreds of years, there have been ongoing examples of trust breaking and betraying behaviours and actions on the part of dominant, non-indigenous cultures towards indigenous peoples and other communities. For those of us working in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the USA, and other nations founded through processes and systems of colonisation, trust is in short supply among our indigenous communities of non-indigenous folks who come in as experts.

So, before we can reconcile our differences and past hurts, so that we can begin to work constructively with each other, we have to find ways to rebuild centuries of broken trust.

Alex Hotere Barnes – a NZ Pakeha writer and activist has said

“a singular formula for building indigenous and non-indigenous relationships is at best imaginary, yet full with possibilities”. “Relationship building is an ongoing process that is fluid and unfolding. It requires commitment, attention, awareness and communication. There are ‘ups’ and ‘downs’ but through it all there are tremendous opportunities to work in solidarity and to make changes that will result in a more just world for present and future generations (p14, 2013)”.

Brené Brown (Rising Strong, 2015) has developed an ‘Anatomy of Trust’ that has seven elements that have been used in the development of relationships, repairing years of broken trust between indigenous and non-indigenous communities in Canada.

Be open to new ways of thinking

Cultural and community differences are more than surface variations in style, preference, and behaviour; “and reflect fundamental differences about how people experience social life, evaluate information, decide what is true, attribute causes to social phenomena, and understand their place in the world (Hopson, 2007, p8).

And in the contemporary world, as we wrestle with ever more wicked social, scientific and ecological problems, at local and global scales, the interconnectedness of things is becoming more evident to many Western thinkers and scientists, including evaluators and co-designers (Williams & Hummelbrunner, 2011).

There seems to be a pressing need for us to open our eyes, ears, minds and spirits to the possibilities that exist for other ways of thinking and knowing because as Māori academic and scientist Kepa Morgan (2015) has recently argued, our ability to modify and understand our environments with current scientific thinking is exceeded by our ignorance of the implications.

We still live in a colonising society – where institutional racism and culturally unsafe practices are the normal way to do things. A prerequisite to being a functional and effective ally to the aspirations of indigenous communities and others who bear the burden of inequity, is to first, do no harm.

Learning to listen well, pay respectful attention, share power and sustain relationships over the long term will unlock powerful learning opportunities and fill your whole self, heart, head, soul and spirit. And hopefully this ‘way of working’ will also make a contribution to all our future wellbeing.

Insights from He Oranga Poutama

One example where a government agency opted to be more open to sharing power in an effort to sustain relationships with indigenous communities, is the developmental evaluation of He Oranga Poutama (an initiative that supports Māori wellbeing through sport and recreation).

Sport New Zealand has a long term relationship with a number of Māori communities and providers, and has taken steps towards genuine power sharing at times. Over this time, there have been some fairly major shifts and positive changes for traditional Māori sport and recreation. The evaluation of He Oranga Poutama was funded by Sport NZ, a government organisation. The programme had evolved from a focus on increasing the participation by Māori in sport to one of participating and leading as Māori in sport and traditional physical recreation at community level.

Sport NZ recognised the need for Māori concepts and principles to define as Māori participation in sport and recreation, in the He Oranga Poutama programming context. The resulting framework – Te Whetu Rēhua – acknowledges the cultural distinctiveness of He Oranga Poutama; it is based on five key values important for Māori cultural and social development. The framework became the foundation on which He Oranga Poutama’s program management, delivery, monitoring and evaluation were based.

It was a framework that came from the Māori world, to be used with and by Māori communities, as well as for the evaluation. The developmental evaluation was also grounded in Māori ways of doing things or tikanga. This process reaffirmed what Māori have been saying for a long time, that privileging Māori values and Māori ways of doing things, and holding to this in the face of time pressures, budgets, data and evidence demands, Māori models, Māori values and Māori processes work for Māori.

Reflections on shifting power, privilege and possibilities

We reflected that through the processes of entering and being welcomed into Māori spaces and places, and through the use of Māori cultural practices, our normative frames of reasoning, as evaluators, shifted. We came to see that consideration of multi-generational impacts, and the consequences for our spirits as well as the environment and the more mundane physical assets/aspects of our everyday life, were all important considerations.

They all featured in the decisions we collectively made about what value means, where our conceptions of value come from, and the legitimacy of these claims as decisions were made about what was worth doing and what was not.

Unfortunately, our experience of power sharing with indigenous communities in evaluation work, or in co-design are few. Often acceptance of different ways of doing this is only at a surface level, or at the margins. As we have noted in other work, it is far more common place that the knowledge systems of those in power are not disrupted, they hold sway and indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing are misunderstood, not heard, and even dismissed[1].

A central challenge for this work is finding spaces and ways to ‘decentre’ the cultural authority of western knowledge and practice so the opportunities that exist in the creative and transformative potential of other knowledge systems can be realised. There is an ethical imperative to uphold other cultural ways of doing things, especially when it directly affects or impacts our communities. There are many more opportunities for change, for meeting the aspirations of our communities, if we apply their own knowledge systems and processes, not those of the distantly powerful and privileged.

[1] Wehipeihana, N., & McKegg, K. (2018). Values and culture in evaluative thinking: Insights from Aotearoa New Zealand. In A. T. Vo & T. Archibald (Eds.), Evaluative Thinking. New Directions for Evaluation. 158, 93–107.

This post was originally published on April 12th, 2019 by the Centre for Community Child Health at The Royal Children’s Hospital (Melbourne) and the Murdoch Children's Research Institute.

Moving Away From Just Programs and Services

In his keynote at the 2018 Innovate for Impact Symposium Professor Frank Oberklaid emphasized that while a response to the complex social and health challenges we now face is much needed, the solution can’t be the creation of more program and services.

The current programs and services landscape

Many of our current governance and service models are not serving those most at need, and in some cases, outcomes for families experiencing the most disadvantage are getting worse. This is despite large scale investment in programs and services intended to assist those families. Some of the reasons for this include:

• Much of the current service system was designed and introduced decades ago to address problems of that time, and are not adequate to address the increasingly complex needs of families or the range of challenges now facing children and young people.

• Many of the service responses are not culturally grounded and have been designed using Western, white or Pākehā[1] models of health or for the ‘nuclear family’. These models miss opportunities for different responses and reinforce inappropriate or irrelevant models of health.

• Current service delivery models are often based on an expert model that can reduce rather than build the capability of families.

• Traditionally services and policy responses have not been developed with enough understanding of the specific context, issues and opportunities in which they operate, and most often do not involve or leverage the know-how and motivation of local community in their development.

• Those most in need of support are also experiencing high and prolonged cumulative stress as a result of inequity, sustained disadvantage and systemic racism. Interactions with current services and programs (often designed to ‘help’ families) can make it worse, increasing stress through punitive policies, lack of flexibility or overwhelming requirements. This can add to feelings of shame and judgement[2]

• The accumulation of toxic stress has further negative effects on health and wellbeing outcomes for families and reduces their ability to take up or engage with future potential services.

• Service system interventions are most often shaped as individual interventions focused on particular aspects of people’s life creating silo’s around an issue or around an individual rather than a family as whole.

• The ongoing focus on individuals and individual interventions is often done at the expense of attention paid to systemic issues or conditions that create or reinforce the situation in the first place.

Shifting to new approaches

Shifting away from a programmatic approach is not easy. The notion of a program or service is well understood, tangible and relatively easy to fund. Programs and services are our default way of responding—almost inadvertently the path of least resistance when wanting to appear to be addressing or ‘fixing’ an issue. And many benefit from and are invested in this status quo.

In addition the program and service model conceptualises and ties up skills, resources and expertise in particular ways that can be hard to dismantle, reconfigure or redistribute.

Decommissioning or defunding services is unpopular. And while current funds and resources are allocated to existing services and practices there is very little, if any, resource, structural support or time left for experimenting with different, more collaborative or holistic approaches.

There is a need to be experimental and learn as we go about different ways government and community resources can be configured to better address the issues that matter to community.

Testing new approaches raises a number of questions and challenges about capacity, readiness (and willingness), capability, administration and oversight for innovation.

Currently, labs and innovation platforms are playing a key role in creating places for experimentation and for new models that are developed, tried and tested with communities. For example at The Southern Initiative in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, co-design approaches have been used to create a temporary structure where multiple people, views, stakeholders, voices and forms of expertise from across different parts of the system can come together and try new approaches [3].

Similarly the Tāmaki Wellbeing Lab is dedicated to co-designing solutions that are relevant to communities, a key part of which is working alongside and enabling community to take a lead role in cultivating and maintaining their and their families and whanau’s wellbeing [4].

Such approaches are most successful when families and stakeholders from across the system work together to understand and engage with how the complex interactions of health, housing, social and economic needs at local and systems level impacts on current experiences.

This can result in a more holistic and connected framing of the issue and in turn can create the space for more collaborative, innovative and systemic responses.

There is increasing interest internationally in responses that recognise and re-distribute knowledge, assets and expertise differently. This includes reconfiguring government and community assets and resources outside traditional service models. For example there are growing examples of peer to peer, family to family or youth-led models that are strengths-based and culturally grounded.

What do new approaches offer?

Such approaches offer the opportunity to enhance and build upon existing resources within the community, and empower community to be involved in and lead their own responses. Examples include Empowering Parents, Empowering Communities (CCCH, Australia), Family by Family (TACSI – Australia), Talking Matters (Tāmaki – Aotearoa New Zealand), Ko Huiamano (Papakura, Aotearoa New Zealand), Winnipeg Boldness Project (Canada).

These models differ to traditional service models in that there is a redistribution of power and resource to support families to build capacity rather than receive a service. They are shaped and informed more by a kaupapa (purpose) or campaign rather than a service delivery structure. Knowledge, expertise, resource and governance of such is shared with, embedded in, recognised and grown in families and communities rather than (or complementary to) that held and exercised by service delivery teams or professionals.

Scale is more likely to come through changes in practices, attitudes, narratives and sharing of learning and knowledge transfer between families, than from service replication.

Considerations for community-led responses

As these kind of peer to peer approaches emerge so do questions about how they are best supported. Some of the questions we are currently grappling with include:

• What is the value of peer-led responses for families and communities?

• What is needed to support ongoing sustainability of peer to peer models?

• How might we go about identifying the most appropriate financial and models and funding flows to support community-led responses— for example how are families compensated? Where does it come from? What governance models might accompany this?

• What systems changes are needed to enable and implement new models? For example how does this interact with the policies in place for those accessing benefit support? What changes, skills, policy and infrastructure might be needed across the service system?

• What kinds of scaling are appropriate and how do we determine and track value and impact?

• What are the primary goals and outcomes of the peer-led responses? For example a sustained and scaled peer to peer model or a capacity building process for that acts as a springboard for other outcomes including formal employment?

While the co-design process can support whānau-led development of models and responses, the learning process inherent in developmental evaluation can assist in answering questions such as those above, helping communities identify and look at what existing barriers are, and helping providers from snapping back into the business-as-usual (BAU) approach.

It is significant that such emerging models challenge and disrupt conventional positions of power and privilege. They flip the model of expertise, diagnosing and treating. They also significantly challenge mainstream practice, practitioners and organisations.

The challenge and the need for such shifts in how we work, think and feel will be further explored in our next upcoming post ‘On power, privilege and possibilities’.

This post was originally published on March 27th, 2019 by the Centre for Community Child Health at The Royal Children’s Hospital (Melbourne) and the Murdoch Children's Research Institute.

Converging Practices

Boosting innovation

We came together to explore the similarities and the differences in co-design and Developmental Evaluation (DE). And what we found were two fields of practice that are in service to the innovation efforts of others: a community, an organisation, a network, a syndicate, a tribe, for example.

Both fields share similar values and orientations to learning, innovation, and transformation. We also found that many of our practices overlap and align.

Examples include creating space for collaboration and mutual learning, the importance of being able to challenge assumptions and reframe opportunities, a commitment to seeking validation through participative processes, a focus on iterative development through prototyping, galvanizing support of multiple stakeholders, and engagement in collaborative forms of sense-making.

We acknowledge that whilst both fields are often represented as western constructs, they are both recognised and inherent within indigenous cultures.

Through sharing our experiences, we realised that both co-design and DE can offer a boost to those of us engaging in the journey of innovation amidst complexity. Both fields seem to share a lot of common activity. As Jamie noted in his keynote at the Innovate for Impact symposium, they are “kindred spirits”.

What is co-design?

Co-design is often represented as the design process with the expectation of collaboration inferred through the ‘co’. It draws upon conventional design processes or phases to support moving from exploration to new understanding of issues to testing and prototyping responses in context.

Most importantly, it should also be underpinned by participatory principles and practices. The ’co’ part of co-design, as we practice it, should put emphasis on community and collaboration across different kinds of people, perspectives and expertise, the sharing of power and the generation of mutual learning and new knowledge through trying things out together.

This requires engaging in questions of politics, reciprocity, power and control. Learning about what is needed, as well as building the capacities and capabilities we need to make change possible happens through doing things together.

What is Developmental Evaluation?

Developmental evaluation supports designers and innovators to think and practice evaluatively, bringing evidence and evaluative reasoning to inform adaptive development of innovative initiatives in complex, dynamic settings and contexts, in real time.

DE brings to innovation the processes of evaluative questioning, thinking and practice so that the change process is informed with rigorous and critical reasoning. DE is not a method, nor a technique, it is an approach that is informed by principles of practice that are demanding of practitioners, requiring of them constant reflection and adaptation to meet the changing needs of innovators.

DE is also a collaborative and relational endeavour, it does not stand apart from the innovation. Rather, it is done with and alongside innovators and their communities.

Connecting the approaches

There is increasing interest in the connection between DE and co-design. It has become clear to us that many thinking and analytical tools could be part of both DE and co-design. Questions being asked are:

• What is distinct and defining about each of these concepts?

• How do they or could they support one another?

• How together can they support transformative practice, systems change and better community outcomes?

A co-design is a process in development. So, to us, the distinction lies in what a DE might offer to co-design. How might the processes, thinking and reasoning of DE benefit co-design?

Given there is an ever increasing call to help understand the merits, limitations and principles of co-design, we believe DE can be in service to co-design in a number of ways. For example, in our experience, DE brings a form of intentional rigour to the reasoning and learning processes inside a co-design.

It can help support the development and maintenance of systematic systems of learning throughout a co-design, ensuring that evidence is brought to bear on questions about what is valued and valuable about the design process, as well as the outcomes of the co-design.

Ultimately, the distinctions and commonalities are helpful in the way that they benefit practitioners, and those who support their work, to be more effective.

Like any ideas that gain traction, setting boundaries of what is – and what is not – a DE and a co-design can be helpful.

They are both practices that serve a particular purpose and neither is suitable for one size fits all solutions. Both support the development of perspectives and understandings that can be brought to complex challenges, and both support learning about change practice.

This post was originally published on March 20th, 2019 by the Centre for Community Child Health at The Royal Children’s Hospital (Melbourne) and the Murdoch Children's Research Institute.

Risk is Not Destiny

by Jamie Gamble, Penny Hagen, Kate McKegg and Sue West.

This blog is the first post within the Innovate for Impact blog series. “Risk is not destiny” discusses why we need to radically ‘change our thinking and operating’ if we are to address the complex issues facing children and families.

The challenges ahead of us

We have known for a long time, quite a bit about the factors that lead to negative outcomes for our vulnerable populations, such as children. This is not the challenge we are facing. The challenge ahead of us is what we should do about it.

Communities have a plethora of programmes and services and the last thing they need is a new program or service. Despite the investment and effort we are making, we’re not making much headway at a population level.

In societies of abundance, where wealth generation has been spectacular in recent decades, the health and wellbeing of our children is worsening. Change, disruption, and uncertainty are frequent in society – we’re seeing a kind of social climate change unfold before our very eyes. And the ability for our communities to adapt and respond in the face of this uncertainty is not even.

The problems we now face are ‘wicked.’ These highly entangled messes involve many diverse stakeholders, perspectives and values. As a result, there is very little certainty about the way forward. We cannot predict the results of our actions in this complexity, we can only learn our way through them.

Business as usual is no longer working for us

Amidst this complexity, we simply cannot continue using approaches that used to work for us. Business as usual is no longer working for us. Our old ways of thinking and working are grounded in assumptions about change that no longer hold.

Our traditional planning and decision-making models mostly assume static forms of change, and they have a linear logic that works when we have an agreement about what the problem is, and certainty about what the solutions might be. But in complex change, these assumptions and models don’t serve us well.

Transformative change

Top down, expert models of planning and execution are not well suited to managing and operating when responding to complex issues. “We need to move away from diagnosing and treating to listening and responding.” 

If we’re serious about being able to create transformative change, we have to transform ourselves; transform our ways of thinking, acting and relating. We have to see our communities as collaborators, and co-designers, authentic partners and decision makers in creating change.

In complex change we have to be creative and passionate if we are to be truly innovative – and it is imperative that we shed the boundaries in our minds that keep us snapping back to old ways of thinking and operating.  Shifting power is imperative if we are to address equity in meaningful and authentic ways.

This kind of shift is going to challenge all parts of current system. This disruption and shift may be welcome in principle but not always in practice when the changes start to be required.

This post was originally published on March 14th, 2019 by the Centre for Community Child Health at The Royal Children’s Hospital (Melbourne) and the Murdoch Children's Research Institute.

Innovate for Impact Blog Series

The blog series is co-authored by Jamie Gamble (Imprint Consulting), Penny Hagen (Auckland Co-design Lab) and Kate McKegg (The Kinnect Group) in collaboration with Sue West from the Centre for Community Child Health. These blog posts were originally published by the Centre for Community Child Health at The Royal Children’s Hospital (Melbourne) and the Murdoch Children's Research Institute. The series shares insights on how we can collectively problem solve and effect community and service system change to benefit children and families.

The blog series reflects seven themes touched upon across a learning program - Innovate for Impact - hosted by the Centre for Community Child Health in Melbourne in September 2018.