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Webinar Invite: Booklaunch of “The Age of Sustainability” (Wednesday Nov 4th)

Mark Swillingis Distinguished Professor of Sustainable Development in the School of Public Leadership, University of Stellenbosch and Co-Director of the Centre for Complex Systems in Transition (http://www0.sun.ac.za/cst/). He is the author of The Age of Sustainability: Just Transitions in a Complex World (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), co-author with Eve Annecke of Just Transitions: Explorations of Sustainability in an Unfair World (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2012), co-editor with Adriana Allen and Andreas Lampis of Untamed Urbanism (New York and London: Routledge, 2016), co-editor with Josephine Musango and Jeremy Wakeford Greening the South African Economy (Cape Town: Juta, 2016) and was the lead author with Ivor Chipkin et. al. of Shadow State: Politics of State Capture (Johannesburg: WITS Press, 2018). He is a member of UNEP’s International Resource Panel acting as Coordinator of the Cities Working Group (http://www.unep.org/resourcepanel/) and is the Deputy Chair of the Board of the Development Bank of Southern Africa. He is co-lead author of The Weight of Cities: Resource Requirements of Future Urbanization, published in 2018 by the International Resource Panel. He has been a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Sheffield and Utrecht, and in 2018 was the Edward P. Bass Visiting Environmental Scholar at Yale University

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Webinar Invite: Booklaunch of “The Age of Sustainability” (Wednesday Nov 4th)

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The Project

The Project

• The UNESCO Chair in Anticipatory Systems
• Objectives
• Futures Studies and the Discipline of Anticipation
  • Table summarizing major distinctions
  • Selected excerpts from two recent papers by two highly regarded professional futurists, Peter Bishop and Riel Miller
  • The paper laying down the basics of the Discipline of Anticipation

The UNESCO Chair in Anticipatory Systems

The purpose of the Chair in Anticipatory Systems is to both develop and promote the Discipline of Anticipation, thereby bringing a critical idea to life. To this end, we have a two pronged strategy consisting of knowledge development and communication. The two are equally important. While many academic projects naturally emphasize knowledge development, we must also reach a large and disparate audience, and open minds locked within the longstanding legacy of reactive science. Thus, from a practical standpoint, how we conceptualize and communicate the Discipline of Anticipation is as important as the Discipline of Anticipation itself.

While anticipation has been widely studied within a number of different disciplines – including biology, anthropology, cognitive and social sciences – to date nobody has collected and systematically compared the results. For a preliminary survey see, however, R. Poli, The Many Aspects of Anticipation, Foresight, 2010, 12, p. 7-17, and the bibliography M. Nadin, Annotated Bibliography: Anticipation, International Journal of General Systems, 2010, 39(1), p. 35-133. Two figures stand as central contributors to the discipline of anticipation: the mathematical biologist Robert Rosen (see his Anticipatory Systems. Philosophical, Mathematical and Methodological Foundations, New York, Springer, 2nd ed. 2012, and Life Itself. A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life, New York, Columbia University Press, 1991) and the anthropologist John W. Bennett (see his Human Ecology as Human Behavior: Essays in Environmental and Development Anthropology, New Brunswick and London, Transaction Publishers, 2nd ed. 2002). The former established the theory of anticipatory systems; the latter the connection between anticipation and resilience. 

We propose to centralize the study of anticipation for the first time, and to define the Discipline of Anticipation as a cohesive body of knowledge. To this end, the chair will address a number of key questions, such as:

• What is anticipation? Are anticipations imposed by the mind, or are they aspects of reality, or does anticipation involves a relation with both?
• Are there different kinds of anticipation? What distinguishes them?
• Which are the connections between the Discipline of Anticipation and Futures Studies?
• What are the qualitative and quantitative aspects of anticipations? Can anticipation be described mathematically?
• Are there hierarchies of anticipations? How do they define their hierarchy?
• What visual phenomena are associated with anticipations, including magnification, scaling, zooming, expansion, detail, depth, and apparent size?
• How do anticipations relate to emergence and the budding science of qualities?
• What are the social applications of the Discipline of Anticipation?
• Can we relate anticipation to current interests in sustainability and resilience?

Objectives

The project’s main objective is the development of the Discipline of Anticipation, including the development of a system of anticipatory strategies and techniques. The more the culture of anticipation spreads, the easier it will be to develop socially acceptable anticipatory strategies. It will then be possible to accumulate relevant experience on how to think about the future and to use anticipatory methods. It will also be possible to try and develop a language and a body of practices that are more adapted for thinking about the future and for developing new ways to address threads and opportunities. 

The following outcomes are envisaged:

• Futures Literacy: Development of a set of protocols for the appropriate implementation on the ground of the different kinds of anticipation (under the rubric of futures literacy), together with syllabi and teaching materials on the Discipline of Anticipation.
• Anticipatory Capability Profile: Development of a Anticipatory Capability Profile for communities and institutions, together with a set of recommendations on how a community, organization or institution may raise its anticipatory performance.
• Resilience Profile: Setting of a resilience index and analysis of the resilience level of selected communities and regions, including a set of recommendations on how to raise their resilience level.

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The Project

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A Conversation with Kim Sterelny about the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis – This View Of Life

A Conversation with Kim Sterelny about the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis

By Kim Sterelny, David Sloan WilsonOne Comment

TVOL’s coverage of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) continues with an interview with Kim Sterelny, one of the world’s most prominent philosophers of biology. Sterelny has served as editor of the journal Biology & Philosophy since 2000 and his books include Sex and Death: An Introduction to Philosophy of Biology, Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition, Dawkins vs. Gould: Survival of the Fittest, and The Evolved Apprentice: How Evolution Made Humans Unique. Sterelny was central in the development of the EES project funded by the John Templeton foundation, which recently launched its own website. He was a participant in the Nature exchange “Does evolutionary biology need a rethink?”¹ (answering “yes”) as well as a coauthor of the major 2015 review article on the EES published in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B.²

David Sloan Wilson: Welcome Kim. I recall many fine conversations with you. Let me begin by asking you to explain in general terms how philosophers contribute to the study of evolutionary biology. What do you bring to the table?

Kim Sterelny: A couple of things. For one, a lot of foundational questions in evolutionary biology are curious hybrids of conceptual, formal and empirical issues. Think for example of the history of gene selectionism or multi-level selection. It took a lot of hammering and tinkering to get clear which claims about selection were genuinely empirically and causally distinct; which were empirically equivalent but perhaps heuristically distinct, and which really were just verbal disputes. It is also true that philosophers bring both the time and the skills to do integrative and synthetic work across different research traditions. Biologists are with few exceptions almost forced to specialise quite narrowly; they have to produce data; philosophers only have to think about it.

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A Conversation with Kim Sterelny about the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis – This View Of Life

It is a pleasure for us to launch our first Metaphorum webinar series with a confirmed program of speakers for the next four months. Our intention with this Webinar Series is to share innovations in theory and practice in organizational cybernetics and related systems approaches. We aim to develop as an active community of learning by sharing in these online conversations,  recent innovations in theory and methodology, critical reflections and insightful experiences. The webinar series aims at  creating a space for collective learning with other fellow cyberneticians, systems researchers and practitioners.

Once or twice a month we will have a Zoom webinar with selected speakers. All sessions are on Wednesdays from 5 to 6 pm (UK time).  The speaker will present in the first 30 min and then there will be 30 minutes for the participants to engage with the speaker. If the speaker agrees, we will also make all presentations available on the Metaphorum website.

If you want to participate in any of the webinars, please respond to this email by following the link and confirming in which webinars you’d like to participate.  We will send you links to forthcoming webinars – you can include as many webinars as you’d like in the form. There is no cost to attend the webinars for Metaphorum members.

Looking forward to have you with us in this webinars’ series.

Angela Espinosa, Allenna Leonard and Jon Walker

METAPHORUM WEBINAR SERIES 2020-2021 –
AGENDA October 2020- February 2021

See below for information on the first webinar, by Steve Morlidge, and the link to the session, for those who want to attend.

Please register by clicking on the following link, for links to forthcoming webinars and /or updates on the webinar series.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScakl5g41fH-6KTl9CYnfPQjJzycDy5uzGp7MuNwFpX6m5zXA/viewform?usp=sf_link

November the 4^th, 2020
Dr. Steve Morlidge
‘The VSM in 2020 – more relevant than ever?’

It has been said that Stafford Beer was 50 years ahead of his time. In this webinar Steve Morlidge will reflect on the relevance of the VSM from the perspective of someone dedicated to helping finance practitioners half a century distant after the first edition of Brain of The Firm was published.

Steve Morlidge 2020 Bio

General Management Thinker, Author, Speaker.

Steve Morlidge has 30 years of practical experience in designing and running performance management systems in Unilever, including three years as the lead of a global change project. He is a former chairman of the European Beyond Budgeting Round Table and now works as a management thinker, writer and speaker, drawing on his years of experience at the leading edge of performance management thought and practice. Steve Morlidge published Future Ready: How to Master Business Forecasting, John Wiley, 2010, ‘The Little Book of Beyond Budgeting’ and ‘The Little Book of Operational Forecasting’ through Matador in 2017 and 2018 respectively. His latest book ‘Present Sense: A practical guide to the science of measuring performance and the art of communicating it, with the brain in mind’ was published in November 2019.
He is on the editorial board of Foresight, a forecasting practitioner’s journal published by the International Institute of Forecasting to which he regularly contributes. He is also a cofounder of CatchBull, a supplier of forecasting performance management software and sits on the non-executive Board of the Beyond Budgeting Institute. Steve Morlidge is a visiting fellow at Cranfield University, Bedfordshire, UK and has a PhD from Hull Business School in Yorkshire, UK focusing on the application of systems concepts to the design of complex organizations. He completed his BA with honors, and he is a qualified management accountant (CIMA).

He can be reached at steve.morlidge@satoripartners.co.uk or steve.morlidge@catchbull.com

Metaphorum is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: Dr. Steve Morlidge ‘The VSM in 2020 – more relevant than ever?’
Time: Nov 4, 2020 05:00 PM London
Join Zoom Meeting

https://us05web.zoom.us/j/84453800098?pwd=bGIxVlFNR21vNFlvMldJQlZjYUlMZz09

Meeting ID: 844 5380 0098
Passcode: 588408

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Methodology of Transdisciplinarity–Levels of Reality, Logic of the Included Middle and Complexity

Methodology of Transdisciplinarity–Levels of Reality, Logic of the Included Middle and Complexity

• January 2010
• Transdisciplinary Journal of Engineering & Science 1(1)

DOI: 10.22545/2010/0009Authors:

Basarab Nicolescu

(Full pdf at: http://www.basarab-nicolescu.ciret-transdisciplinarity.org/Docs_Notice/TJESNo_1_12_2010.pdf)

To read the article of this research, you can request a copy directly from the author.Download citationCopy linkCitations (180)References (35)

Abstract

The concept of levels of Reality, formulated in 1982, is the key concept of transdisciplinar-ity 1 . The introduction of the levels of Reality induces a multidimensional and multi-ref-erential structure of Reality, signifying the coexistence between complex plurality and open unity. Every level is characterized by its incompleteness; the laws governing this level are just a part of the totality of laws governing all levels. And even the totality of laws does not exhaust the entire Reality; we have also to consider the interaction between Subject and Object. The zone between two different levels and beyond all levels is a zone of non-resistance to our experiences, representations, descriptions, images, and mathematical formulations. The Gödelian structure of levels of Reality implies the impossibility of a self-enclosed complete theory. Knowledge is forever open. The unity of levels of Reality of the Object and its complementary zone of non-resis-tance defines the transdisciplinary Object. The unity of levels of Reality of the Subject and this complementary zone of non-resistance defines the transdisciplinary Subject. The zone of non-resistance plays the role of a third between the Subject and the Object, an interac-tion term which allows the unification of the transdisciplinary Subject and the transdis-ciplinary Object. This interaction term is called the Hidden Third. The ternary partition (Subject, Object, Hidden Third) is, of course, radically different from the binary partition (Subject vs. Object) of classical realism.

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Methodology of Transdisciplinarity–Levels of Reality, Logic of the Included Middle and Complexity

Full pdf at: http://www.basarab-nicolescu.ciret-transdisciplinarity.org/Docs_Notice/TJESNo_1_12_2010.pdf

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Sustainability | Free Full-Text | Transformability as a Wicked Problem: A Cautionary Tale?

Transformability as a Wicked Problem: A Cautionary Tale?

by Samia Sediri ^1,2,3,*,Michel Trommetter ¹,Nathalie Frascaria-Lacoste ² andJuan Fernandez-Manjarrés ²¹Université Grenoble Alpes, INRAE, National Centre for Scientific Research CNRS, Grenoble INP, GAEL, 38000 Grenoble, France²Université Paris-Saclay, National Centre for Scientific Research CNRS, AgroParisTech, Laboratory of Ecology Systematics and Evolution ESE, 91405 Orsay, France³Association ORÉE, 42 Rue du Faubourg Poissonnière, 75010 Paris, France^*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.Sustainability2020, 12(15), 5895; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12155895Received: 15 June 2020 / Revised: 14 July 2020 / Accepted: 15 July 2020 / Published: 22 July 2020(This article belongs to the Special Issue Socio-Ecological Systems Sustainability)View Full-TextDownload PDFBrowse FiguresCite This Paper

Abstract

Transformability is increasingly promoted as a way of moving societies toward more sustainable futures in the era of the Anthropocene, mostly because the concept of resilience has fallen short in many instances where impacts on social-ecological systems are continuous, varied, and usually unknown. While such transformations can play a crucial role in improving the sustainability of social-ecological systems, they may lead to unexpected and undesirable outcomes. This literature review on social-ecological transformability and wicked problems seeks to shed light on and acknowledge some of the limitations of transformability regarding unforeseen conditions. We argue that wicked problems arise in transformation initiatives in the presence of high complexity, deep uncertainty, deep conflicts, and divergence among stakeholders, as well as scale mismatches concerning spatial, temporal, and institutional processes. Our findings may explain why some transformation initiatives fail to generate expected changes on the ground, mainly in two cases: (a) a polarized configuration that maintains the status quo of the system to be transformed and (b) an unforeseen transformation that causes the system to lurch from crisis to crisis. To conclude, we recommend using diagnostic questions to prevent wicked problems in social-ecological transformations. View Full-TextKeywords: social-ecological system; resilience; transformability; sustainability; wicked problems; social complexity; uncertainty▼ Show Figures

Figure 1This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

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Sustainability | Free Full-Text | Transformability as a Wicked Problem: A Cautionary Tale?

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New Foundations of Platforms-Ecosystems Thinking by Platform Design Toolkit

New Foundations of Platform – Ecosystem Thinking

Designing Products and Organizations for a changing worldBENEFIT BEING AN EARLY ADOPTER KIT BUYERREGISTER FOR THE PUBLIC RELEASE

Sign up to receive the link to the release webinar and all the news about the Whitepaper launch directly in your inbox

JOIN

Stay Tuned.

Public Release on November 20^th

Do you want to know what will be the new foundations of platform-ecosystem thinking in a context of constant change?

Be the first to discover the results and gain awareness.

GET EARLY ADOPTER KIT

With your kit you will be the first to receive:

149 €

One fine printed copy of the White Paper shipped to your address

• A personal mention in the whitepaper credits
• Early access to digital releases of the White Paper in Beta on November 12th
• Exclusive Q&A with the lead author, Simone Cicero, on November 19th before the public launch
• Special interactive access to the Whitepaper sensemaking Webinar on  December 18th
• A lifetime 20% discount to all Boundaryless events

The context

It was in 2013 when we released our first version of Platform Design Toolkit.

On October 2016, we published the Platform Design Toolkit 2.0 and the companion White Paper “From business modeling to platform design” becoming real pioneers of a new way of thinking organizations and products. The Toolkit and the White Paper have been fundamental since then in instigating and shaping the practice of Platform Design with a community that today counts more than sixty thousand adopters worldwide.

We’ve been active in research and consulting with an impressive range of stakeholders: from Fortune 500s to startups, from organizational transformation pioneers such as Chinese Haier group to United Nations. Such experience puts Boundaryless among the leaders of Platform-Ecosystems thinking worldwide.

After more than three years we’re now aware that the context and scope of platform-ecosystem thinking have changed and have grown widely: New Foundations of Platform-Ecosystem Thinking are now needed.

This is what this white paper is all about: we plan to release this fundamental piece of content in Creative Commons over the summer of 2020.

Join us in the process.

The Boundaryless Team

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New Foundations of Platforms-Ecosystems Thinking by Platform Design Toolkit

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(1) Ivo Velitchkov on Twitter: “The ESSENTIAL BALANCES eBook is now available for pre-order in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Spain, UK, and the US. Coming soon. Release date: 27 Nov 2020 Pre-order your copy. Country links in the thread below 👇 https://t.co/45gkHDU8e3” / Twitter

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(1) Ivo Velitchkov on Twitter: “The ESSENTIAL BALANCES eBook is now available for pre-order in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Spain, UK, and the US. Coming soon. Release date: 27 Nov 2020 Pre-order your copy. Country links in the thread below 👇 https://t.co/45gkHDU8e3” / Twitter

The ESSENTIAL BALANCES eBook is now available for pre-order in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Spain, UK, and the US. Coming soon. Release date: 27 Nov 2020 Pre-order your copy. Country links in the thread below

(1) Ivo Velitchkov on Twitter: “The ESSENTIAL BALANCES eBook is now available for pre-order in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Spain, UK, and the US. Coming soon. Release date: 27 Nov 2020 Pre-order your copy. Country links in the thread below 👇 https://t.co/45gkHDU8e3” / Twitter

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Jeremy England: Low rattling: a principle for understanding emergent computing behavior in driven many-body collectives : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Jeremy England: Low rattling: a principle for understanding emergent computing behavior in driven many-body collectives

Publication date 2020-10-21Topics self-organizationTalk by Jeremy England of the Department of Physics, Georgia Institute of Technology.  Given to the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at UC Berkeley, via Zoom.
Abstract:Self-organization is frequently observed in active collectives, from ant rafts to molecular motor assemblies. General principles describing self-organization away from equilibrium have been challenging to identify. We offer a unifying framework that models the behavior of complex systems as largely random, while capturing their driven response properties. Such a “low-rattling principle” enables prediction and control of fine-tuned emergent properties in disordered mechanical networks, random spin glasses, and robot swarms.
Jeremy England is a Principal Research Scientist in the Department of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He serves as a Senior Director in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at GlaxoSmithKline. From 2011 to 2019, he was Assistant and then Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at MIT, where he led a research group in studying the nonequilibrium statistical mechanics of life-like self-organization.

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Jeremy England: Low rattling: a principle for understanding emergent computing behavior in driven many-body collectives : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

…I can’t pretend I understand this, though I haven’t taken the time yet to study, but seems to relate to:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-new-physics-theory-of-life/

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Edge of chaos – Wikipedia

Edge of chaos

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to navigationJump to searchFor the computer game, see Independence War 2: Edge of Chaos.“The truly creative changes and the big shifts occur right at the edge of chaos,” said Dr. Robert Bilder, a psychiatry and psychology professor at UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.^[1]

The edge of chaos is a transition space between order and disorder that is hypothesized to exist within a wide variety of systems. This transition zone is a region of bounded instability that engenders a constant dynamic interplay between order and disorder.^[2]

Even though the idea of the edge of chaos is an abstract one, it has many applications in such fields as ecology,^[3] business management,^[4] psychology,^[5] political science, and other domains of the social science. Physicists have shown that adaptation to the edge of chaos occurs in almost all systems with feedback.^[6]

Contents

• 1History
• 2Adaptation
• 3See also
• 4References
• 5External links

History[edit]

The phrase edge of chaos was coined by mathematician Doyne Farmer to describe the transition phenomenon discovered by computer scientist Christopher Langton. The phrase originally refers to an area in the range of a variable, λ (lambda), which was varied while examining the behavior of a cellular automaton (CA). As λ varied, the behavior of the CA went through a phase transition of behaviors. Langton found a small area conducive to produce CAs capable of universal computation. At around the same time physicist James P. Crutchfield and others used the phrase onset of chaos to describe more or less the same concept.

In the sciences in general, the phrase has come to refer to a metaphor that some physical, biological, economic and social systems operate in a region between order and either complete randomness or chaos, where the complexity is maximal. The generality and significance of the idea, however, has since been called into question by Melanie Mitchell and others. The phrase has also been borrowed by the business community and is sometimes used inappropriately and in contexts that are far from the original scope of the meaning of the term.

Stuart Kauffman has studied mathematical models of evolving systems in which the rate of evolution is maximized near the edge of chaos.

Adaptation[edit]

Adaptation plays a vital role for all living organisms and systems. All of them are constantly changing their inner properties to better fit in the current environment.^[7] The most important instruments for the adaptation are the self-adjusting parameters inherent for many natural systems. The prominent feature of systems with self-adjusting parameters is an ability to avoid chaos. The name for this phenomenon is “Adaptation to the edge of chaos”.

Adaptation to the edge of chaos refers to the idea that many complex adaptive systems seem to intuitively evolve toward a regime near the boundary between chaos and order.^[8] Physics has shown that edge of chaos is the optimal settings for control of a system.^[9] It is also an optional setting that can influence the ability of a physical system to perform primitive functions for computation.^[10]

Because of the importance of adaptation in many natural systems, adaptation to the edge of the chaos takes a prominent position in many scientific researches. Physicists demonstrated that adaptation to state at the boundary of chaos and order occurs in population of cellular automata rules which optimize the performance evolving with a genetic algorithm.^[11][12] Another example of this phenomenon is the self-organized criticality in avalanche and earthquake models.^[13]

The simplest model for chaotic dynamics is the logistic map. Self-adjusting logistic map dynamics exhibit adaptation to the edge of chaos.^[14] Theoretical analysis allowed prediction of the location of the narrow parameter regime near the boundary to which the system evolves.^[15]

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Edge of chaos – Wikipedia

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Funders invited to test practical tools for place-based systemic change | Renaisi

Funders invited to test practical tools for place-based systemic change

John Hitchin describes the scenarios and issues that move people to begin to work differently and invites funders to test some practical tools to help places and organisations move towards systemic change in a place.

At Renaisi we talk and write about place a lot. We have worked in neighbourhoods and places for years, we have tried to define it, categorise it, and support lots of places and organisations to learn within it.

Recently we led an enquiry into ‘place-based systemic change’ with support from Save the Children UK and a steering group of charities and funders. We created a framework for thinking, acting and funding in a way that uses place as the vehicle for social change, with long-term, systemic change being the outcome.

John Hitchin will be presenting the learning from the Funding Place-Based Systemic Change project with the chair of the project steering group, Natsayi Sithole of Save the Children UK and Stephen Skeet from Volunteering Matters online at 12.30-2pm on 4th November. Register here.

What is place-based systemic change?

We define place-based systemic change as an approach to social change, rather than an outcome of it, that is defined by focus, time horizon, approach, scale and intentionality.

What’s interesting when you start to look across the areas where work of this kind is happening, is that there tends to be a set of issues which encourage them to start a new or different way of working. These triggers include, but are not limited to, things like siloed local bureaucracies, good things slipping through the gaps, valuing process over relationships and an inequity of outcomes.

When organisations or individuals repeatedly butt up against these issues it can lead to a malaise, or it can ignite a desire for a different way of working and thinking about social change. What then happens is funders, commissioners, providers, and communities need to get together to think differently about how to make change happen in their area.

Why is place-based systemic change hard to fund?

In the second learning paper we highlighted the sorts of issues that can make it hard to fund in a place based and systemic way. You can find that paper here, but a short list of questions for funders to think about is:

• Strategy – how does place fit with your ambitions and strategy?
• Place – which places are you thinking about and why?
• Role – what role do you want to take on?
• Partnership – who are you going to work with and how? (there should be no heroes here)

Once you’ve started to explore these questions, then we believe our framework can really help with both the language of change, and the thinking about the needs of the place, and how it can move on.

In our research we found that funders were taking on different roles (the convenor, the instigator the holder of ambition), but our work on developing the framework highlighted types or changes in practice that could be invested in and are important to consider. These ‘step-changes’ moved places and organisations towards more systemic practice.

Get involved

We think this is an important conversation and we’re interested in talking to funders about testing some practical tools that help places and organisations move through the steps in the framework.

John Hitchin will be presenting the learning from the Funding Place-Based Systemic Change project with the chair of the project steering group, Natsayi Sithole of Save the Children UK and Stephen Skeet from Volunteering Matters online at 12.30-2pm on 4th November.Register to attend the Funding Place-Based Systemic Change event.

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Funders invited to test practical tools for place-based systemic change | Renaisi

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Get involved in the place-based systemic change project | Renaisi

Get involved in the place-based systemic change project

Find out how you can get involved in a community of places and organisations thinking and working differently to achieve systemic social change.

In the Funding Place-based Systemic Change project, we built a framework for thinking, acting and funding in a way that focusses on using place as the vehicle for social change with long-term, systemic change being the intended outcome.

We’ll be sharing the learning from that work, and our plans for next steps, in a webinar at 12.30-2pm on 4th November.Register to attend the Funding Place-Based Systemic Change event.

What is place-based systemic change?

We see place-based systemic change as an approach to social change, rather than an outcome of it, that is defined by focus, time horizon, approach, scale and intentionality.

This working definition doesn’t refer to any one type of organisation or approach. Through our research we saw lots of examples – from large national charities to small community organisations and our framework is approach agnostic.

We grouped the approaches but what is more important are the stages that the different organisations and approaches shared:

Intention – an awareness that place-based working may be relevant

Established – focus on the provision of a defined programme

Connection – making sense of the interconnectedness of multiple interventions

Mutuality – sharing space and assets to engage with

Systemic – a long-term, place-wide approach to social change

What was interesting is how organisations move through the framework to do more systemic work. Sometimes they do it with support, sometimes it was individual or organisational effort and resources.

The really interesting place-based practice is in the movement from ‘connected’ to ‘mutuality’. This is the point at which organisations are trying to push the boundaries of their approach into systemic work collaborating with partners.

Find out more and get involved

We think this is an important conversation and the Funding Place-Based Systemic Change learning papers are just the start of how we understand and improve the way in which place-based systemic work is resourced and supported in the UK.

While there are examples of impact, the project showed that no organisation is currently working systemically because it requires all funders, commissioners and stakeholders in the place and the system to work together.

In the next phase of this work we’re inviting:

1. Places and organisations that are moving towards systemic change to join a community of practice.

2. Funders who are interested in the steps towards systemic change to test some practical tools to help places and organisations move through the steps in the framework.

Register below if you’d like to be involved.

Register for the event

John Hitchin will be presenting the learning from the Funding Place-Based Systemic Change project with the chair of the project steering group, Natsayi Sithole of Save the Children UK, and Stephen Skeet from Volunteering Matters online at 12.30-2pm on 4th November.Register to attend the Funding Place-Based Systemic Change event.

PBSC case studies

Funding place-based systemic change: Corra Foundation case studyFunding place-based systemic change: Southmead Development Trust case studyFunding place-based systemic change: Bore Place case study

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Get involved in the place-based systemic change project | Renaisi