Entries by Kate Simpson

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How do we know that Systems Change is working?

How do we know that Systems Change is working?

Carolin Schramm &
Kate Simpson

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At Wasafiri, we spend a lot of time wrestling with big, messy questions. One of the big challenges with systems approaches to change is how do we learn about what is happening? How do we measure change in complex systems?

Traditional monitoring and evaluation (MEL) tools can feel like trying to catch smoke in your hands when you’re dealing with complexity and uncertainty.

We have done a lot of work with partners developing approaches to systems based MEL across systems in food, climate, peace, and livelihoods. We are very much in a learning phase.

To push our practice and share what might be useful to others, we’ve pulled together a work in progress discussion paper: “MEL for Systems Change”.

As a next step, we would love to hear from practitioners:

  • What resonates, what have we missed?
  • What are others learning in their practice?
  • What should we look at next?

We’d love to hear what you think. Whether this sparks new ideas or challenges your own approaches to MEL, drop Carolin a line at carolin@wasafirihub.com.



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May 14, 2025 by
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Monitoring, learning and evaluation for a complex world

Monitoring, learning and evaluation for a complex world

Kate Simpson

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Complex problems need dynamic MEL approaches

Systemic approaches to complex change offer the opportunity to tackle our most persistent challenges at scale – like creating climate-resilient food systems, ending child marriage or generating the millions of jobs that Africa’s growing youth population needs.

However, how do we monitor and evaluate the impact of our change efforts? Without ways to do so, we cannot learn what is working (and what is not). And without a true understanding of impact, it is difficult to galvanise the resources of time, effort enthusiasm and money that change at scale will require.

Traditional monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) practices in development have predominantly been built to serve funders keen to ‘prove’ the efficacy of their work and hold partners accountable. They have rarely been designed to serve those who live within the complex world to be changed.

Often, they have been designed for a mythical static and linear world where impact can be attributed to isolated specific activities. Such approaches pay scant regard to the activity (intentional or otherwise) of other actors, and don’t adapt well to the characteristics of complex problems such as emergence, uncertainty and interdependency.

Systems MEL uses traditional tools; but uses them in different ways with different objectives

Learning about the ways systems are changing is not determined by the data collection tools we use, but by the things we pay attention to, the questions we ask how and when, and who we want the learning to serve.

There are several core principles that underpin systems MEL approaches:

  • Serve the problem – MEL approaches designed primarily in service of funders and accountability can be extractive in nature, focused on holding partners accountable and producing learning in forms that are either private or difficult to access. In contrast, MEL-orientated systems change should be useful to a wide audience of people, both those who live with, and those who work on, the issue. It should help people better understand what is going on, how change is happening and where and why efforts are getting stuck.
  • Integrate MEL in strategy and implementation – traditional MEL approaches are often structured around specific reporting milestones, evaluations tend to happen upon completion of program activities or milestones, and M&E managers may operate in isolation from strategy and implementation. One key objective of systems MEL is to produce data and learnings that support real-time decision-making. To achieve this, we need a close and ongoing relationship between strategy, learning and implementation roles and responsibilities.
  • Pay attention to activity and context beyond a single intervention – traditional MEL is often focused on trying to isolate and measure the (expected) impact of a single project or intervention. But when an intervention environment is complex, it means straightforward cause-and-effect relationships are uncommon. Systems change is never the result of a single intervention by a single actor. Therefore, systems-based MEL looks at the context beyond the parameters, trying to capture what is emerging with a focus on both expected and unexpected changes as well as looking at specific interventions and the wider systems context.
  • Reduce asymmetries of information and knowledge – systems that are working poorly for some and well for others typically have strong asymmetries of information. With the most marginalised often having the least access to knowledge about the issues that affect them the most. A MEL approach that compares the efficacy of early flood warning systems across a number of communities may share that information with the providers or funders of those systems but not necessarily the affected communities. Whom, if they had access to that insight, may be able to make their own adjustments to how they use and engage with the early warning systems available to them. Systems MEL holds an open mind to who is a producer and who is a consumer of learning, and therefore intentionally puts learning back into the systems in ways that are accessible to all affected actors and redress rather than exacerbate asymmetries.

Here at Wasafiri we work with a range of clients and partners on systems-based monitoring, evaluation and learning such as the World Economic Forum’s Platform of Global Public Goods (PGPG). We created theories of change and metrics to track progress across various initiatives, from improving ocean health to preventing violent extremism in East Africa.

We also worked with Jobtech Alliance who employed a systems change framework focusing on collaborative behaviours, practical interventions supporting digital platforms, and ecosystem-level influence to create quality jobs in Africa.

We are developing an open-access approach to MEL for systems change based on our own practice. Currently, we are seeking an initial round of feedback from partners and friends. If you would be curious to learn more and offer some friendly advice, please reach out to stella@wasafirihub.com. Once we have further iteration, we will be sharing publicly and running a number of live discussion sessions. So follow us on LinkedIn to sign up when we go live.

Here are some links to other good folks doing good work in this space:



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January 29, 2025 by
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Return of the hero: Systems leadership needs individuals willing to step up

Return of the hero: Systems leadership needs individuals willing to step up

The idea of leadership as an activity for a heroic few has been well critiqued. But as we confront a climate crisis and growing social polarisation is it time for a rethink?

Kate Simpson

Kate Simpson

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For the last decade or so leadership thinking has encouraged us to see ‘leadership as a team sport’.  Collaboration, distributed action, innovation, participation are the sources of power that leadership draws on and unleashes in the many, not the few. And this is undoubtedly a good thing.

However, as we confront a climate and biodiversity crisis; as we wrestle with growing inequality and polarisation; and as we search for new forms of economy, new forms of national and global governance, and if we are to create private firms capable of more than just maximising share holder profit –  maybe we are going to need a few more heroes to show up? 

We will never deal with the complex and ambiguous challenges we face if we just wait for some sort of heroic leader to show up. That is, someone who seems to have more courage, more certainty, more insight, more knowledge, more passion, more hair, just more… than we have. They are not coming. Mostly because they don’t exist. But also because no one person, however brilliant, and well intentioned can tackle complex problems alone. Collective action is the only form of action. 

However, the sort of challenges we face are going to require significant disruption of the status quo. They are going to require businesses to internalise things that they have long externalised – like their impact on their environment, or on the health and wellbeing of staff. Government departments  need to change how they relate to citizens; academic institutions need to take responsibility for both who they educate and who (and why) they exclude. International NGOs will need to let go of some of the resources they control and let others control them if decolonisation and localisation are to be realised. What ever sector you sit in there are deep changes to make in who has power, who is served, who is excluded. And as with all systems level change, there will be resistance. 

Significant shifts in power have never come through consensus. They have been pushed for and demanded and alternatives built to prove what’s possible. And people have taken risks to do these things. Personal risks – with their own careers, assets, popularity, credibility and even their bodies. And this is the sort of heroic leadership we are going to need. The sort where individuals are willing to risk things that matter to them; and to be seen to do so. 

But it is not an either or. We are going to need both heroic leadership acts and mass unleashed, collaborative, participatory, experimental, unstoppable, relentless leadership. So there are a few caveats in my call for a little more heroism: 

 

All heroes need (a lot) of friends

For change to happen a lot of people need to take a lot of actions. When Rosa Parks decided to claim her right to sit on the bus she put her body on the line. She risked her freedom, her physical safety.  The year long Alabama bus protest which followed saw hundreds of people wear their shoes out as they walked to and from work. 

The ensuing dismantlement of the racist Jim Crow Laws was an outcome both of the action of heroes (of which Rosa Parks was one) and of a legion of people who did the long slow personal work of following. Systems change needs both – the individual heroes who stand out and the masses who stand up. Most of us won’t have what it takes, or the opportunity, to be heroes but we can respond to them when they shown up.

The unsung heroes matter

One of the big problems with ‘hero leadership’ is that it tends to just focus on the internal story of the person and not the wider context they were in. Sometimes the same action done by a different person or in a different moment has much less impact. A few months before Rosa Parks there was Collette Colvin – who also claimed her right to sit where she chose on a bus. Her action was the same, her impact was not. 

Perhaps because of who she was (younger, less well connected) perhaps the moment wasn’t quite right. Likewise, Greta Thunberg was not the first person to mount a school strike for the climate. Systems change is a dynamic thing. There are windows of opportunity that are hard to predict till after someone has charged through them. So if we need heroes then we need a lot of them, and only a few will get their stories told. 

Heroic acts not heroic people

The problem with people who do heroic things is that they always turn out to be flawed. If we are going to ask more of ourselves and each other in terms of visibility and boldness then we also have to accept individuals’ abilities to be both wonderfully right and good and also wrong and flawed. This is not some sort of offset scheme where the good and bad are tallied and an average found. Rather it is an acceptance that both will exist in all of us.  

Ultimately, we can not leave the climate crisis, social justice and the building of a more peaceful and equitable world in the hands of the few. It is going to need collective action. But nor can we expect to make a difference without being seen, without being willing to spend some of the things many of us have carefully built – our careers, our popularity, our security, our networks, our perceived competence, our invisibility.



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November 11, 2024 by
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The imperative of radical collaboration in complex times

The imperative of radical collaboration in complex times

Kate Simpson

Kate Simpson

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Collective problems need collective action. Collaborations are not accidents of timing and serendipity. They need careful crafting to address the challenges we face today.

In our era of complexity we need ways of working together that span traditional boundaries.

Ehrlichman

Human history is punctuated by the tension between collaboration and competition. The historian Niall Ferguson argues that while competition drives innovation and efficiency it is collaboration that enables us to exponentially accelerate knowledge, exchange ideas, pool resources and tackle shared goals.

And yet collaboration is often hard to do. The competitive desire to protect knowledge, control activities, get ahead and go fast all favour ‘going it alone’. But some problems simply cannot be solved alone; they will only give in to the collective action and collective creativity that is unleashed when we collaborate. Whether it is a food and drink company trying to manage its waste responsibly; the need to offer banking services to the unbanked, the battle to bring down greenhouse gas emissions, the future of work in an AI powered world or any other of a myriad sustainability challenges, we can only solve these if we collaborate.

Often collaboration can seem like an accidental by-product of timing and serendipity. But scratch below the surface and there was often pain staking and intentional work to build the conditions that allowed for the eruption of creativity and action that we see.

Know what you are collaborating for

Collaborating takes commitment and effort. None of us will sustain this just because we think we ought to, or because it is a good thing to be seen to do.

Collaboration happens when we know we cannot go it alone (probably because we have already tried and failed). It happens when we know, be it individually or institutionally, that our ability to succeed is locked with the choices, actions and success of others.

So, for a collaboration to sustain we must know what we are together acting upon. We may disagree on the causes of the problem, and almost certainly on how to tackle it and we may have different reasons for addressing it, but we need to have a shared problem to solve or opportunity to grasp.

For example, as we have seen in our work, when national governments, agri-business and civil society collaborate to tackle poverty amongst smallholder famer incomes there are different agendas at work. Corporate interests may be well-meaning but they are also concerned about vulnerable supply chains as young people move away from farming and seek better incomes elsewhere.

Government wants to tackle poverty, drive economic growth and perhaps has concerns about civil unrest. Meanwhile, civil society groups seek to advocate for the rights of often the most marginalised. These different agendas do not make for comfortable or aligned action, but all parties know they cannot progress their agenda alone, they know they are interdependent.

Different agendas and needs will be at work, be explicit about these, and know that progress will depend on everyone meeting just enough of their own agenda.

Be ready to compromise

We love the idea of collaboration – often because we assume it means other people or organisations will support our agenda. But complex problems are experienced differently by different people. And organisations have different agendas and constituents they need to serve. And so, with complex problems agreement and alignment can be hard to find.

It is a myth to think that with enough data and enough talking a single understanding and a single solution can be found. Rather collaborations need to find ways to work together despite differences of view and even disagreement. And this is only possible with sometimes uncomfortable compromises.

Of course, for all of us there are compromises that ask us to go too far, those we cannot make – and so there will be people and organisations with whom we cannot collaborate. But any collaboration will require some form of compromise, you may need to hold a long-term justice goal more lightly in order to achieve a short-term improvement, or perhaps there are additional costs your business will need to internalise or scrutiny you will need to open up to.

Maybe you will have to organise yourselves in ways that feel unfamiliar or learn to value different things as you seek to combine social impact goals with commercial pressures.

Collaborations allow us to achieve different things but that demands, whoever we are, that we work in different ways.

Embrace systems leadership

Inter-organisational collaborations are not like running a project team. There is often no clear ‘boss’, there is a lot of discretionary effort at work, there are explicitly different agendas and parties will ‘own’ resources that everyone needs access to. Working together in these conditions cannot be driven by traditional command and control leadership. The normal modes for assigning accountability are unlikely to work.

Instead, there needs to be leadership focused on relentlessly creating the conditions for collaboration. These include: building the network of relationships between parties, a focus on the collective vision that holds people and institutions together, shared credit for what is achieved and a valuing of the diverse agendas and landscapes inside the collaboration.

Collaboration may be hard; at times it may feel slow; it may ask us to imagine new ways of leading and working together (or resurrect much older ones), but if we are going to tackle the climate and biodiversity crisis, meet the challenges of an AI-driven future of work, navigate accelerating polarisations then we cannot work alone.

Photo by Francesco Ungaro



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June 27, 2024 by
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Could Girls on Bikes replace GDP?

Could Girls on Bikes replace GDP?

Kate Simpson

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The joy of the internet is that amongst all the rubbish and all the scary stuff, there are flashes of brilliance to be found, the sort that makes you see new and joyful possibilities. And the idea of girls riding bikes as an alternative to GDP is one of those flashes.

I tripped over this idea on a wander down the back allies of LinkedIn (generally a rather uncool place of self-promoters) – but here was someone promoting someone else’s idea (always a good sign).

The idea (from economist Katherine Trebeck) goes something like this. If girls ride bikes to school then that means:

  • they are going to school
  • people (parents) perceive roads as safe enough
  • people have enough money to afford bikes
  • people don’t have to drive cars just to get their kids to school
  • better air quality in cities, and better connectivity in rural areas
  • girls feel safe to be out and about on their own
  • there is enough gender equity for girls to be riding bikes
  • if girls ride bikes, then it also means boys will be riding bikes too

Personally, as a girl who grew up in London and for whom riding bikes to school (and everywhere else) was a pathway to staying safe, to getting out in the world and to expanding my horizons, there is something joyful in this as a measure of a whole economy’s wellbeing.

The idea is, of course, just a glimpse of a much bigger set of ideas around what is an economy for? And how do we know if the economy is getting better or worse? What is an economy that is delivering increasing wellbeing for all?

The point of the girls-on-bike metric is not about the bikes or even just the girls, but about what they indicate.

GDP (Gross Domestic Product) was created as an indicator (not an end in self) – it contained the assumption that if a country had a growing GDP then people would be experiencing an increasing quality of life. And for a time in post-World War 2 Europe, that was largely true. And it remains true for some places.

But as we outstrip the planetary boundaries, as wealth inequality grows and as mental health challenges rise, GDP seems a less and less relevant indicator and a growing GDP may even indicate a decrease in wellbeing.

But it is not enough to know what is wrong with our old ideas we need some new ideas to replace them. We need glimpses of a possible future. And this is where girls-on-bikes comes in.

It’s not a single ‘answer’, no one is suggesting it holds an entire universal economic story in this indicator – but then neither does GDP. What it really offers is a different mental model for even thinking about what a ‘good’ economy looks like.

Part of the power of existing systems is that we absorb them into the mental models that frame how we understand the world around us. The way things can seem so inevitable, so pervasive as simple to be the only way that things could be.

It becomes hard to imagine other ways of seeing and thinking. GDP growth has become such a dominant mental model for what a ‘good’ economy is, that it smothers all other possibilities.

So some of the elegance of the girls-on-bikes metric is not that it is necessarily right, but that it gives us a picture of alternative possibilities. It doesn’t just say what is wrong with GDP (which is a well-rehearsed argument even by some very conventional economists) but it suggests a glimpse of possible future – and that makes all sorts of other things imaginable.

Note

Katherine Trebeck is part of The Wellbeing Economy Alliance, a collective of economists offering new ideas on how we can understand progress and wellbeing and growth. And they have a lot of other ideas to share – check them out, including a great conversation with Katherine herself.



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March 20, 2024 by
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System Change in Action: The Wigan Deal

System Change in Action: The Wigan Deal

Kate Simpson

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We are often asked for stories and examples of when system change has happened. And examples can be hard to spot. But they are out there. And so we try and share them; those we have been involved in and those that have been the work of others.

We won’t all agree on what is or is not system change. That is because complex problems don’t have a fixed end state where the work is done. And so there is always more work to do.

It is also because complex problems are contested – there will be different views on what needs to change and what ‘better’ means and for whom. And complex problems are produced by systems that are (in some way) working, and so there will almost always be some form of loss for someone somewhere.

What makes something system change anyway?

So I use four rules of thumb to help judge if something feels like ‘system-y’ change:

  1. Is there more equity? (e.g. do the less powerful have more control of decisions and resources?).
  2. Has there been a shift in the mindset or paradigm that shapes this issue?
    (e.g. have different assumptions about who are agents of change, who should control resources or what ‘better’ means driven this change?).
  3. Is there some sort of ‘scale’? (e.g. can we reasonably expect that people or nature not directly involved in this intervention at this time will experience that change? – this ‘scale’ might be over space or time).
  4. Has something structural shifted? This too is part of scale. That something has shifted that will outlast the protagonists involved, that changes the conditions in which this complex issue blossoms (e.g. a change in national or organisational policy, a permanent shift in the locus of control of resources, etc).

Welcome to Wigan

Wigan, a former mill town in the North West of England, is often over shadowed by its bigger more famous neighbours – the city of Manchester to the East and Liverpool to the West. But in this story it gets to take centre stage. For, since 2011, Wigan Council and its partners have been working to change the very relationship between the Council and the people that live and work there. Known as The Wigan Deal, this a story that challenges the dynamic that ‘the state knows best and will fix everything’ and that citizens are passive recipients.

What happened?

In 2011 Wigan Council, like many in the UK, found themselves facing significant financial pressures. The wider political climate of ‘austerity‘ (a package of policies that limited public sector funding) meant no more money from central government. And so the Council decided it needed to find a new way to relate to and work with citizens in order to deliver services. It was time to try something radically different.

The provision of public services is complex. Traditionally in the UK, there is a fairly paternalistic relationship between the state and citizens. In practice, this means the state controls the money and gets to decide what sorts of services are needed and citizens, while they may lobby and campaign for certain things, are not decision-makers or seen as creators of solutions.

A non-paternalistic model would require that the role of communities be taken seriously with a genuine commitment to collaboration and co-creation of solutions.

Wigan Council decided that if they were going to create a better town and do so with shrinking budgets, then they had to change this underlying paternalistic dynamic. They had to truly and deeply work in partnership, sharing power with local communities.

And so, together the council, citizens, community groups and businesses of Wigan created a series of ‘pledges’, covering everything from creating a ‘vibrant town’ to ‘care for adults with disabilities’. These pledges committed everyone to play their part – they required specific commitments from the council but also from businesses and from residents.

For example, under the ‘Vibrant Town Centre’ pledge the council committed to providing free city centre parking and residents committed to using it to visit local shops, businesses and leisure facilities rather than using it to travel out of town. Pledges were formed across a host of different areas and together they formed ‘The Wigan Deal.’

In 2019, ‘The Kings Fund’ – an independent health think tank did an evaluation asking ‘Is the Deal Real?‘ They concluded there had been a ‘genuine transformation’. The scale and consistency with which ideas have been applied significantly trumped other attempts, illustrating ‘the kind of work that is needed to shift to a new model of public service delivery’.

How did system change happen?

As system change practitioners, The Wigan Deal is intriguing. We have evidence of transformational change in a complex system driven through collaboration across institutional boundaries. And whilst the Kings Fund pointed to ‘bold leadership’ and ‘a long-term strategic commitment to working differently with local people and communities’ we want to go a bit further and unpick the approach through a systems lens. Does the approach differ from the linear approaches that we know complex systems resist?

Work to wire the system together

At the outset, there was a recognition that no single institution could tackle this alone. Change was going to require a shift in mindset. It was going to require disparate parties to come together, build relationships, build understanding, share ambitions, share challenges and commit resources for doing work together.

This ‘wiring of the system together’ is fundamentally important in system change – and – goes beyond just bringing people together. It requires the patient work to really get to know and understand different agendas and perspectives. It requires the willingness to share resources and power.

The “Be Wigan Experience” attended by people from different parts of the system was one tool which helped build collaboration and shift mindsets regarding how residents, citizens and others viewed each other. And it took time.

Donna Hall (former CEO of Wigan Borough Council) described how everyone danced around each other for 2 years before getting on with the real work. But through that dancing the ambition for the work was reframed as “it doesn’t belong to any one of us – it belongs between us”.

Get practical

“The Deal” – the pledges between the council, citizens, community groups and businesses to create a better borough – represents a shared, but big and abstract ambition. In system change work we also have to work on concrete goals to create a focus that mobilises resources and pulls you towards the big ambition.

Below the headline Deal are “deals” for adult social care, “your street”, communities, children and young people, health and wellbeing and businesses. There are co-created pledges in specific contexts such as housing in which the provision of council homes for people with disabilities was supported by private landlords willing to let their properties through the council.

This is a tangible, measurable goal that moves towards the bigger, more abstract, ambition.

No single story

Another aspect of the approach that speaks to systems change is the diversity of storytelling. For example, “Rekindling hope: the story of the Wigan Deal” is told by young people, NHS, community groups, council employees, and businesses.

It is not the Council, ‘the state’, telling one story. It is different parts of the system expressing what matters to them.

In systems change, there is no single story and the Kings Fund research highlighted this. Focus groups found that people’s concerns about issues such as crime and antisocial behaviour were overshadowing incredible progress being made in social care and public health.

Build on what's working

Social care is providing help with day-to-day living because of illness or disability. And it is one of the fastest-growing areas of need and cost in the UK.

People’s social care needs vary significantly depending on their circumstances so providing services that meet needs is highly complex and not well suited to a centralised, paternalistic, one-size-fits-all approach to public service delivery.

Because The Wigan Deal was a collaborative effort it had access to an incredible body of collective intelligence, both about people’s needs and also about the varied way these needs could and were being met.

One of the central successes of the Deal was the closure of expensive Council-run day care centres – predicated on a mindset of ‘come to us, use our services’. Instead, investment was channelled into a network of existing community organisations and neighbourhood groups already connected to people with care needs in their community and better able to understand and provide tailored and localised support to those who needed it.

In system change, this is an example of investing in and building collective and adaptive capacity. Day Care Centres focused on ‘the problem’ (e.g. an isolated elderly person) – a very expensive endeavour. Investing in community organisations focused instead on creating the conditions in which the existing organisations who know and represent local people were better able to thrive and adapt to local needs.

Demand was stripped out of the Council’s social care system and there was an improvement in health and wellbeing metrics.

What next?

What makes the Wigan Deal distinctive and an example of system change in action is the focus on building collective and adaptive capacity. The work of ‘wiring the system together’ better has been fundamental in the co-creation of solutions.

It successfully drew on what already existed in the spaces between different stakeholders, addressing unmet needs in a highly resource-constrained context. The Wigan Deal mobilised resources across organisational boundaries, changed the narrative and amplified the visibility of under-utilised strengths, delivering change at scale.

The Wigan Deal is by no means a panacea and it is now four years on from the Kings Fund analysis during which the Pandemic and UK Cost of Living Crisis has hit. Undoubtedly Wigan was better able to adapt to those shocks having adopted aspects of a systems-based approach.

We hope the people of Wigan have managed to hold their nerve and not relapse, under significant pressure, to a fallacy that the Council can solve these challenges on its own.

Image courtesy of Rept0n1x, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons



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December 22, 2023 by
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Systems leadership: What is it? What is it for?

Systems leadership: What is it? What is it for?

Kate Simpson

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As we look to step up to today’s ecological and social challenges and help our organisations and communities navigate these complex times – we are reaching for leadership approaches that speak to our interconnected and shifting world.

Systems leadership is one such approach. But what does it actually mean? And how do we do it?

Systems leadership has come to refer to two different (though potentially reinforcing) things.

Some advocate for it as a way to do leadership that recognises the nature of organisations but is agnostic to their purpose. Others advocate for systems leadership as a way to achieve positive outcomes from our leadership, driven by a sense of purpose to address social or environmental challenges.

A way to do leadership

The agnostic version of systems leadership is about seeing our organisations as ecosystems – alive with relationships, history, hopes for the future, beliefs, values, culture, personalities, and flows of resources. It is also about recognising that our organisations are subject to events beyond our control.

Systems leadership asks us to see our organisations less like machines and more like gardens, and ourselves as gardeners, not mechanics. In this context, leadership is about building collective efforts, it’s about seeking perspectives and voices from the margins. It is about tending to the enabling conditions and not just today’s presenting problems.

We can do all this stuff and still (mostly) do it in service of the current ‘system’ – that is the outcomes that our organisation, civic society, national politics and so on currently serve.

An outcome of our leadership

The purpose-driven version of systems leadership is about the pursuit of systemic change. Here we refer to the work to change the structures, rules of the game, relationships, beliefs, values, and so on that create the current state.

Let’s take as an example – food systems. At most national scales, and certainly, at a global level, the current dominant food system is wired to produce as much food as possible, as cheaply as possible.

To do this, it is built on a value set that talks of ‘natural resources to be extracted’, it measures land by productive value, prioritises private ownership and seeks efficiency. As such, our food systems have stimulated amazing advances in technology that improve the productive quality of land, increase the size of animals, and speed up the process of harvest.

This is a system that produces large quantities of food (though not equally distributed) and has allowed people in many parts of the world, such as the UK, to move their labour away from farming and towards other jobs.

It is also a system that has degenerated nature and promoted diets that damage our health.

By some estimates, we only pay a third of the true cost of our food – the remaining costs are externalised upon our environment and health care systems.

Food systems leadership is not just about changing how we do leadership inside our ‘food-producing’ organisations but also addresses the nature of the very system that produces food. It is about shifting the mindsets that determine the way we relate to nature, the relationships between producers and consumers of food, the policy and legal frameworks that shape who can own land, the incentives that determine subsidies and ultimately the purpose of food systems.

This sort of systems leadership is going on all over the place and at all scales. It is happening at the level of individual farms that adopt more regenerative practices (such as Ghyll Bank Farm here where I live in Cumbria, Northern England), all the way through to the global level efforts such as the UN Food Systems Summit.

At Wasafiri we have contributed to a number of these systems leadership efforts including the Food Systems Summit, the African Food Fellowship, and the Climate Change COPs which are finally recognising that food systems must account for a third of our net emissions reductions.

A way to lead AND a reason to lead

Leading system change does require we show up as ‘systems leaders’. We must be committed to elevating the voices and power of the marginalised (including the natural world and even future generations), be willing to operate without certainty; knowing that what has gone before won’t hold the answer to what we need to do next; accepting that traditional hierarchical power and control modes of leadership are simply inadequate.

However, just showing up in these ways is not, in itself, a guarantee of system change.

One could use a ‘systems leadership’ approach to run a large agricultural business (or a single farm) – and do so in the pursuit of the same outcomes as it has always produced.

Leadership for system change needs us to both operate differently as leaders and pursue different sorts of outcomes from our leadership – the sorts of outcomes that will create a more equitable, peaceful, and sustainable world.



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July 28, 2023 by
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Leading Beyond Our Organisational Boundaries

Leading Beyond Our Organisational Boundaries

Kate Simpson

Kate Simpson

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Responsible leadership requires meaningful engagement with system level change

By Kate Simpson, Wasafiri & Mark Larmour, Forward Institute

When Fellows from the Forward Institute met recently in York, they came together to explore how best to understand and experiment with systemic change in complex organisations.

The Forward Institute teamed up with Wasafiri, and their Systemcraft model, to help their Fellows work out ‘so, what do I do next?’.

Leading change in complex organisations to create responsible, sustainable, or even regenerative outcomes requires leaders who are willing and skilled up to take a systems-based approach to making change happen. And here is why.

Responsible and sustainable leadership in any organisation demands that we consider the impact our organisations have on people, communities, society and the environment. All the impacts. All the people. Not just the impact that we might desire. And not just the people – employees, shareholders, customers – that we set out to serve. It requires us to consider all the impacts and all the people.

Often, this requires responsible and sustainable organisations to absorb the additional burden of the impacts that lie well beyond their perceived organisational boundary. This, for instance, might mean taking responsibility for the impact on the environment through the waste produced, transportation used, or the natural resources required in their processes.

It could mean taking responsibility for the (sometimes hidden) impact on the communities that they serve or are located within. It should also include taking responsibility for the impact of what the organisation does, and how it does it, on the well-being and health of its people.

Taking responsibility as leaders for these wider impacts, across the complex systems in which we operate, requires more than just good intentions.

Often our business models work more efficiently, and more profitably, by externalising certain environmental or social costs.

Sustainable, responsible shifts within organisations are not about doing current things better, but about doing current things differently. And that ‘different’ is systemic change.

This is not a shallow, woolly or abstract call for things to just ‘be different’. It requires specific attention to the incentives that drive current choices within our organisation.

It is the need for better collaboration between organisations, across all sectors, and with wider society – we can only make a responsible and sustainable change when we work collectively.

While there often aren’t quick fixes or easy wins, there are still many things that we can change for the better, and for the long term.

The Forward Institute is focused on encouraging organisations to consider the wider impacts that they are having on society, and encouraging senior leaders to think for the long term. Wasafiri has created the Systemcraft model through reverse engineering their extensive experience of working with organisations and communities on leading complex, systemic change.

Working together as thought partners, we are collectively committed to helping senior leaders and their organisations to make good change happen.

It is only when we look outside our organisational boundaries that we are able to identify the opportunities to make positive change in the complex systems in which we operate which can benefit everyone.



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July 7, 2023 by
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It’s been 25 years since the Good Friday Peace Agreement was signed and brought an almost end to the violence in Northern Ireland. What have we learnt from The Peace Process? How ready and willing are we to let go of being right and accept the truth of vastly different perspectives?



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April 30, 2023 by