Facilitating Systems change
By Anna Birney from the School of System Change
Facilitation is a creative process of bringing awareness to the world. It is about sensing and working with people, interactions, relationships and other dimensions. A lot of this is about following the emerging process and helping to find the potential and the unfolding direction. This all sounds very well but for those who are seeking to learn about facilitation or to deepen their practice are there any guides to how you might do this, be it if we are facilitating a conversation, a one off session or a whole learning journey or complex multi-stakeholder process? What patterns of process might we pay attention to as we are designing processes and facilitating groups within them?
What structures and patterns might we use?
At the School of System Change we bring together different contributors and their frameworks and approaches with learners to help navigate and build capacity towards a field of systems change practice.
Frameworks are ways to visualise the relational dynamics between the different elements in a system and as such help us navigate complexity as part of our systems change practice. Humans are visual beings, and we like structure. However many of our structures do not reflect the systemic nature of reality, that we are dynamically relating, moving and changing. So by applying systemic frameworks it helps us work with greater levels of complexity, patterns and interconnectedness.
“ All models are wrong some are just more useful than others” George Box
The patterning of systems frameworks, that is the way they dynamically relate and flow together, can help you with designing and facilitating processes and thus help us navigate our change work.
A word on structure. A structure in a system is what you see when you look at a system and is something that is more rigid, whilst when we look at patterns we seek to look at the movement and flow. The common structure of systems is that of nested levels or wholes (see image). What this means is that before we start with any process we might seek to understand at what levels or boundaries we are working with — from the self, group, wider system or a different formulation of these.
If we look at the different systemic and systems change frameworks we can see a number of archetypes of how movement, relationships and therefore how change is happening in the world
These include:
Cycles
Waves
Depth
Divergence and convergence
This article outlines some of the frameworks (it is not an exhaustive list!) that follow these archetypes and how they may be used for the practice of facilitation. Inevitably many of the frameworks overlap each other and might not sit within just one category.
Cycles
Systems frameworks:
Panarchy adaptive cycle
Action inquiry and learning cycles
Systems change process Journey — usually represented as a cycle
Seasonal cycles
What is the pattern
That there are different states of being and learning that happen in any pattern, so that we need to consider how we are also taking people through these different stages of the cycle balancing and flowing between the conceptual and the experience, the action and the reflection.
Design prompt questions
What different ways of knowing are being used in the process to fit different ways of learning?
What is the balance and flow of ways of being — such as reflecting, acting, observing and conceptualising?
Waves
Systems frameworks
Past, present and future
Sustainability transition X-curve and multi-level perspective
What is the pattern
That change happens over time, at multiple levels. Where some things grow, something die. When we work with groups how are we noticing both what is emerging but also what we need to let go of, how we are paying attention both to the past, present but also the future.
Design prompt questions
What has come before?
Where are you and the group now?
What are the seeds trying to emerge and bring forth?
What is the outcome or purpose you are heading towards?
What do we need to let go of? What needs to die?
Depth
Systems frameworks
Iceberg — and story to illustrate it
The pattern
That there are different depths that we operate at. That most of what we see in the world is above the surface, the events or our consensus reality, whilst there is also much that is under the surface, our patterns of behaviour, our polarities and conflicts and our deeper shared essences, wisdom and potential. A process that works with depth will look at how you can access all levels to both process what is there and inform what comes next.
Design prompt questions
What can you see happening in the process?
What are the relational patterns that are in the process? Including the tensions and polarities.
What is the deeper subconscious, feelings and potential that is seeking to emerge?
How can you go through the different levels to find a way forward?
Diverge and converge
Systems frameworks
Systemic design — converge and diverge — an example of how it has been used
Deep democracy — finding the polarities, views and roles
Regenerative law of three — activating, resisting and reconciling
Integral facilitation — sameness and difference
What is the pattern
That in order for change to occur we need to both tap into what we want to happen together and converge on what the problem is or the question. However for change we also need to access and work with what is different, brings in divergent thinking, ideas and experiences that support creativity and movement.
Design prompt questions
How do you work with sameness and difference and get a flow of each?
How do you design a process to seek difference and how do we find resolution or points of convergence?
What are the points of tension (hot spots) and points of resolution (cool spots)?
Emergence — a reflection on process
Many of these frameworks help to give a way to both design and to follow the dynamics of a process you are facilitating. However critical to any systems work is to also pay deep attention to the emerging process, what is trying to unfold and bring forth in the process that might follow its own pattern. There are also some approaches that help to work with the emergence and seeing what is there and what needs to unfold to help the pattern find itself.
Examples of approaches include
Design prompt questions
What is the emerging pattern, that is the relational dynamics, in the process?
How might you notice and frame what is emerging?
