Summarized highlights from Investing in the Root System of Change | Anna Birney

Many change processes prioritize tangible outcomes and solutions while neglecting the relational aspects: “a lot of the processes focus on the tangible, the outcomes, the seeking of *the* solutions and innovations that can be scaled and replicated, trying to find proof, tools and evidence of what we should do.”

These approaches “hide the complexity within them, the highly social and relational process and dynamic learning elements of the change process.”

The article poses a critical question: “How might we pay more attention to how we bring people together, convene, connect, learn and work with the differences and nuances of people and their relationships as the deeper work that is required for transformation to happen?”

At its core, “systems change is the emergence of new structures and ways of organising, it is about the reshaping and reconfiguring the patterns of our relationships and ways of relating.”

Practitioners often struggle “to value and thus allocate the resources to the processes and the learning and practice development required” for effective change.

The focus needs to shift to “HOW we constellate for change, from relational practices, to facilitation, structures and forms of governance.”

A systemic approach requires reframing outcomes: “When we take a systemic, regenerative and living systems view of change, this invites us to articulate our outcomes as process outcomes.”

The ultimate goal becomes developing “the capacity to continually change” rather than achieving fixed endpoints.

This perspective challenges traditional approaches to measurement: “How might this change what we seek to monitor, evaluation and how we come to see impact?”

The School of System Change offers support in “the HOW of constellating, leading, facilitating and learning of change.”

They help “organisations and initiatives navigate what methods and approaches to use, building capabilities and accompany them as the uncover the roots systems for themselves.”

As noted in the generated summary, they provide “tailored learning journeys that build capacity for long-term, relational change” with the goal of “supporting communities in owning their change process and working with power and diversity effectively.”