Creating Conditions for Systems Change in Australia: Leadership Art and Practice

Registration

Liz Skelton, CoFounder & Director, Collaboration for Impact Inequality in Australia is increasing, most notably showing up as persistent locational disadvantage where communities experience little change in issues such as unemployment, poverty, contact with the justice system, homelessness and child maltreatment, despite decades of investment. Locational disadvantage is a complex challenge. Addressing complex problems requires behaviour change to happen concurrently in many parts of the system. The nature of complex problems requires co-creation of solutions, with citizens, leaders and organisations agreeing to a common agenda and then aligning their efforts and resources to achieve measurable, large-scale change. There is growing acceptance that well-designed and effective systemic collaboration and systems leadership is at the heart of initiatives that bring about deep, lasting, large-scale social change. This way of working is counter to most institutions’ cultures, processes and what they incentivise. Without increased capacity and learning, most collaborative efforts revert back to status quo. Liz Skelton from Collaboration for Impact (CFI) will share learnings on the practice and methodology for building capacity in systemic thinking and leadership practice. This approach will be discussed in the presentation of Australian case studies where CFI is providing embedded capacity-building support to communities and multi sector stakeholders from community, government, service providers and business. From international evidence and our work to date, we know that investment needs to be made into building capacity to think and work systemically. There is potential and opportunity to accelerate the rate and quality of learning, capacity building and curation of the thinking, skills and structures required to achieve systems change. CFI is building the foundations for the development and application of Australian systems leadership practice, collaborative change practice and systemic impact measurement.