Centering lived experience leadership for equitable systems change

In this article, Senior Associate Yannick Wassmer offers a reflection on power dynamics within systems change initiatives and stimulates a conversation on the notion of equity in relation to systems change.

Over the last two years, I’ve had the honor of working on a project called the Black Systemic Safety Fund in partnership with The Ubele Initiative and Impact on Urban Health. In many ways, this project has fundamentally (re)shaped my thinking about systems change and, more specifically, my thinking about equitable systems change. I am aware of the big, buzzy words in the title and how they may need a bit of context and explanation to make sense (1). My intention with this article is to offer a reflection on power dynamics within systems change initiatives and stimulate a conversation on the notion of equity in relation to systems change.

A theory of systems change

In order to get there, it is helpful to understand a little bit more about my work. Because, in many ways, the work we did in the Black Systemic Safety Fund is similar to what I’ve been doing for the past decade. For lack of a better job title, I am a facilitator of collaboration to enable systemic change. In practice, this means that I help people—often from very diverse backgrounds— collaborate across their differences and find ways to move forward on issues that matter most to them. Me and my colleagues at Reos Partners and The Ubele Initiative help people to think and act systemically, learn how to befriend complexity, prototype new ways forward, and be in relationship while doing this. 

There’s an underlying theory of change that we, and I guess many other systems change practitioners, work towards. It roughly goes like this: 

• Many of the social and ecological challenges we face are complex. This means that they are fundamentally unknowable and unsolvable. They are unpredictable in nature due to the interaction of many agents within the system and the emergent behavior that follows from that. This fundamentally differs from complicated, ‘ordered’ challenges that are predictable and interventions will lead to repeatable and replicable outcomes. It’s the difference between raising a child and sending a rocket to the moon, the difference between wicked and tame problems, between adaptive challenges and technological problems. A lot about this has been said and written by brilliant people already. I still find Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework (2) one of the most helpful frameworks in this respect.

Image 1: Cynefin Framework, image from The Cynefin Co. 

• The dominant Cartesian, Newtonian, and Taylorian mental model focused on separation, specialization, and efficiency, which still underpins to a great extent how we organize ourselves and do our work is not helpful in complexity. On the contrary, it is one of the main reasons that we’re collectively creating results that nobody wants (3). 
• We, therefore, need to address the challenges of our times from a complexity-informed mindset. Senge (4) offers a helpful articulation of complexity where he distinguishes between 3 different types of complexity: dynamic (cause and effect are far away in space and time), social (actors have different views and interests), and emergent (solutions from the past don’t apply anymore).

• As a response, we need a whole systems (systemic) approach that invites the collective intelligence of a diverse group of stakeholders (participatory) to innovate and prototype new ways of thinking, being, and doing (experimental). Again, a lot has already been said and written about this approach, amongst others by Zaid Hassan in the Social Labs Revolution (5) and the ongoing articulation of the Reos Partners Theory of Change.

Image 3: An illustration of the Reos Theory of Change.

The work in the Black Systemic Safety Fund ticked all of these boxes in many ways. The massively wicked issue of safety in the historically Black boroughs of Lambeth and Southwark in South London was the main starting point of the exploration (hello complexity!). A group of 20 community leaders gathered over a series of 7 multi-day workshops from July 2022 to December 2023 to develop a portfolio of innovations to remove systemic barriers to safety—focusing on racial justice in education, the development of Black-owned assets and radically reimagining the relationship between funder and fundees. The process, initiated by Impact on Urban Health, was also an exploration of whether a Social Lab approach could be an interesting methodology for Participatory Grantmaking as they had set out a fund of £500k for participants to distribute amongst the different innovations they had developed in support of their exploration of safety.  

Like other multi-stakeholder systems change initiatives I’ve been part of, it became a rich and meaningful journey together. People explored the thorny issue of safety from a multiplicity of angles, discovered systemic obstacles to forward movement, went on learning journeys to meet people and places of inspiration, found inner stillness in nature and themselves, and explored what the adjacent possible could become by experimenting their way forward. All along the road, they learned, unlearned, and stayed in relationship even when things got difficult.

“I love how there were different types of activities. Sometimes it was writing, sometimes we were modeling, sometimes we were creating things with resources. It was nice, it was almost very therapeutic. They did really well in making me present. And I committed to myself, If I'm here, I'm going to be present. It was very joyful.” - Participant Reflection

But there was something special, something different about this specific piece of work. As is often the case when you’re working in complexity, the importance of the difference only made sense in hindsight to me. I realized that this insight also addresses something that has been nagging me ever since I entered the field of systems change, specifically as a color-ful facilitator (a facilitator of color).

Image 4: The 6 blind men and the elephant 

A microcosm of the system?

The picture above is an often-used image to visualize a key aspect of the general theory of systems change. The parable (6), which originated from the ancient Indian subcontinent and took many different shapes and forms afterward, tells the story of 6 blind men who have never seen an elephant and are discovering what it is by touching it. The person who is holding the elephant’s trunk describes it as a snake, the person who’s touching the ear says that it feels like a fan, the person who’s pulling the tail thinks it’s a rope, and so forth. The key takeaway is that individual perceptions are limited, others’ perceptions are equally valuable as our own, and in order to see the whole picture, we need to adopt different perspectives.

In systems change efforts, this means that we often try to bring together a wide variety of perspectives on a given challenge, and we try to gather a so-called microcosm of the system. When working, for example, on drug criminality in the south of the Netherlands, this would mean that we would bring together high-level politicians and civil servants, union representatives, police officers, business people, housing corporations, religious leaders, and youth workers, (retired) drug dealers, and motorcycle outlaw gang members. On many occasions, I’ve witnessed the deep personal and collective transformation that can take place when a group of people like this finds ways of collaborating against all odds. 

Seeds or soil

However, over the years, I’ve also noticed a different pattern—a potential pitfall in (multi-stakeholder) systems change efforts. What I’ve seen happening on different occasions—including in the project on drug criminality mentioned above—is that voices most oppressed by the system under investigation often stay minority voices within a group process. This is due to a lack of representation in numbers and a dominant group culture. This dominant group culture is often informed by a shared positionality and privileged experience of a system. One where the system either works in your favor or at least has not explicitly been designed against you. What, at best, tends to happen is that minority voices will be heard in the process and are seen as equal members of the team. However, often the group process becomes a fractal of the system of investigation, including historical and societal injustices and power imbalances. In practice, this means that dominant power structures (often imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal structures, following bell hooks seminal articulation of intersecting oppressive systems)(7) that exist within the group are often not or insufficiently challenged. As a result, marginalized voices often hold back from fully speaking their truth or, even worse, disengage from the process. 

Outcomes from systems change initiatives, whether those are stories of the future, innovative projects or policy recommendations, tend to rely heavily on a dominant, privileged positionality of how a system works and where high-leverage intervention areas for change might be. This means that we often miss out on a lot of wisdom on how a system actually works instead of how it is supposed to work. Newness tends to arise at the edges of a system, and it is exactly at this periphery where the excluded and minoritized voices are most needed to help imagine the unimaginable. Unfortunately, far too often, we end up staying within the boundaries of what’s possible and comfortable instead of radically challenging the foundations that keep the status quo alive. 

This point about the importance of your positionality within a system was beautifully illustrated in another recent project I was part of, which focused on co-creating the conditions for Black elderly to age with dignity in the city of London. During one of many co-creative conversations, one of the main questions was about where people could already see the seeds of the future being planted. A key insight arose that for Black communities, it is often not about planting new seeds but actually having to work on improving the quality of the soil before any new initiative can really take root. 

The point I’m trying to make is that your lived experience of a system matters. How you think about a system and about changing a system is greatly informed by your lived experience of a system. As a result, some questions have been accompanying me as we continue to develop this work: What if the people who are most oppressed by a system know best how to change that system? What are the conditions that are needed to center their voices? Would 6 blind women describe an elephant differently? What would this do to our understanding of our relationships with elephants? What if too many systems change efforts are focused on planting new seeds instead of cultivating a healthy, nutrient-rich soil for all?

From Margin to Center

I think what made the work in the Black Systemic Safety Fund different from other systems change initiatives I’ve been part of is that we were actually able to move lived experience leadership(8) from margin to center. We were not trying to create a seat at the table; we were actually capable of creating a whole new table. At this table, 90 percent of the people were Black and Brown and had a lived experience of structural racism. In addition, almost all of them were working on addressing barriers to safety on the ground and in communities. People’s direct encounters with systemic injustices and proximity to the challenge at hand provided a deep and nuanced understanding of the complexities of living the system. This specific positionality allowed for an invaluable perspective on how the system of exploration works and how it should be changed. 

For example, conversations about how to move forward on the topic of safety almost instantly moved away from the obvious, in-your-face, safety-related issues such as gang violence and knife crimes. Because of people's work in the heart of their communities these stories became part of the collective container as a constant reminder of the importance of the work, but they never became the focus for change. It was almost as if right from the start of the process, there was a collective understanding that when working in systems, the best way to treat a problem is seldom where the problem appears because of the interaction of parts(9). 

In addition, a key principle emerged early in the process about the importance of shifting narratives. It was evident to the group that there was a strong need and opportunity for this project to challenge the dominant narrative about Black people and safety—that they wanted to focus their story on addressing the underlying systemic structures instead of the behaviors that emerge as a result of those structures as the visible outcomes. Having lived with dominant narratives of race, slavery, and colonialism, Black leaders often know far too well how important it is to shape your own narrative or reimagine an existing narrative that has been around for centuries. As an ancient Surinamese saying goes, as long as the tiger isn’t heard, the hunter will always be the hero(10). 

Moving Forward: Three Ingredients

The question then becomes: How to do this? How do you create a space where lived experience leadership can move from margin to center? Especially in times of a polycrisis where the need for systems change is more evident than ever, it becomes even more important that we center equity in systems transformation. One of the great risks we face is that due to the urgency of the societal problems we’re facing and the pressure of finding scalable solutions to societal issues quickly, equity and justice are easily traded off. 

Without assuming that we know any answers to the question above, we discovered three ingredients that we think are crucial to explore in different contexts to learn more. 

1. Lived experience throughout

A key enabling factor in the process was the fact that lived experience leadership was found in every element of the project, not just only in the group of participants. From the team of organizers, facilitators, and participating funders, everybody had a plethora of lived experiences of racism and oppression. This collective perspective allowed for a different starting point in almost every conversation. There was no need to convince anybody of the real, harmful, and dangerous impact of coloniality in contemporary societies as each individual involved in the project has a lifetime of experience and examples to draw from first-hand. As a result, the group operated from a shared starting point that allowed for conversations to be way more radical in challenging the status quo than I have witnessed in other spaces. 

Based on the learning from this process, we offer the hypothesis that establishing lived experience leadership throughout the systems change initiative is a key enabler for trustworthy relationships and a group's capacity to explore the edges of what is possible. 

2. Move with the Speed of Trust

Another essential insight that emerged from the process is that participatory grantmaking is deeply relational. Participatory grantmaking as a concept has gained a lot of traction over recent years, especially for funders working with minoritized communities and/or those who are trying to reconcile with the sources their wealth originated from. Handing over power and decision-making to community-led groups can seem like the right thing to do; however, when not done well and without tending to relationships within the group, it has the potential to do more harm than good.

In the Black Systemic Safety Fund, the conversation about the actual allocation of the fund only took place in the final workshop. The group had been meeting for more than a year by then. In that time, we purposefully nurtured relationships between participants and invited differences and dissent at each stage of the process. In hindsight, we can say we learned how to move with the speed of trust (11) and only invited the conversation about the distribution of the fund when trustworthy relationships were built—not only between participants but between participants, funders and the facilitation team as well. 

Based on the learning from this process, the hypothesis that we offer is that when working with lived experience leaders, trust is something that is hard to earn and easy to lose. Growing and weaving trustworthy relationships might well be the single most important outcome to design for, even more than the actual innovations or scalability of the work. In that sense, critical connections are indeed more important than critical mass, as Grace Lee Boggs articulated (12). 

3. Building the Cultural Container

Throughout the process, we consistently elevated our collective cultures. We intentionally practiced plurality in celebrating and honoring our diverse cultures. This meant that we sang Yoruba songs, ate jollof, and danced like capoeira warriors every time we met. By doing so, our collective cultures became a force for good, a source of pride, joy, and hope. It became our little antidote to modernity's single story of progress with ‘Western culture’ as the highest form of achievement. We were able to find unity in our diversity, honoring the beauty of our Caribbean, African, Latin, and Southeast Asian sources. 

Based on our learning from this process, we offer the hypothesis that collectively spending time shaping the cultural container is not a nice-to-have but a fundamental enabler of learning and co-creation, especially when working with lived experience leaders. 

The invitation

As said, the purpose of offering these reflections is to open a conversation among folx who are involved in either leading, designing, inviting, or facilitating systems change processes. Now more than ever, the world requires us as a field to critically reflect on our collective practice and help steward it to its next edge. This cannot be done without thoroughly investigating to what extent we might be reproducing the very same injustices and power imbalances within our well-intended attempts to dismantle them.

Footnotes:

1. My Sunday league football mates would probably kick me in the shins if I uttered these words to them, but there you go.
2.  Snowden D. and E. Boone (2007). A leader's framework for decision making. Harvard Business Review. 
3.  Scharmer, O. (2007) Theory U: leading from the future as it emerges. Society for Organizational Learning. 
4.  Senge, P. (1990) The Fifth Discipline: the art and practice of the learning organization. 
5. Hassan, Z. (2014) The Social Labs Revolution: A new approach to solving our toughest challenges. Berrett-Koehler Publishers
6. The parable of the blind men and the elephant:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant
7.  Hooks, b. 2004 Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge. 
8.  Lived experience leaders connect their personal, professional and socio-political worlds in unique ways to lead change, linking local experience with organizational and systems change endeavors. It operates both within and outside of roles, organizations and settings.
   
   Hodges, E, Loughhead, M, McIntyre, H, and Procter, NG (2021) The Model of Lived Experience Leadership. SA Lived Experience Leadership and Advocacy Network and University of South Australia, Adelaide
   
   
9.  Meadows, D. (2007) Thinking in Systems: A primer. 
10. A similar, often-cited version of this is attributed to Nigerian author Chinua Achebe: “Until the lions of their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.
11.  Brown, a. (2017) Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Ak Press. 
12.  Boggs, G.L. (2011) The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the 21st Century. University of California Press.