Rebecca: Kia ora koutou, and welcome to today's session, which is called “When well-run agencies aren't enough: designing for the whole system.” To those of you joining from Aotearoa, ngā mihi nui ki a koutou katoa. And to those of you joining from across Australia, and from anywhere else in the world, we wish you a warm welcome to today's discussion.
Rebecca: I'm Rebecca Gray. I'm a senior consultant in Allen + Clarke's Evaluation and Research area, and today I'm joined by our main presenter, Jodie O'Neill, who is Allen + Clarke's Strategy and Planning lead. And for those of you joining us for the first time, Allen + Clarke is a consultancy. It helps organisations make complex, high-stakes decisions with evidence, defend them with confidence, and build them to work for the people and the communities affected. We specialise in strategy, change management, evaluation and policy, and increasingly, in helping senior leaders see the wider systems that their decisions sit inside, and design with system outcomes in mind.
Rebecca: So, Jodie, what are we going to cover today?
Jodie: Yeah, thanks, Rebecca. Today we're here to talk about systems thinking. We're going to cover what systems thinking is, how we use it at Allen + Clarke in our four-lens operating model approach, and talk through systems thinking on a live piece of research about the home energy advice system.
Rebecca: Cool. So also, just so you know, we were going to have Jodie talking with Anton Davis here — he's one of the actual architects of this four-lens approach. But he's busy, which is to say we kicked him out because he's too tall for the cameraman. So you have us instead. I'll be popping in, asking questions, and later on I can ask Jodie some of yours if you want to send them through in the chat.
Rebecca: I think I actually have a similar take to some of you in the audience. I know systems thinking has been around for a while, and from some of my previous work I'm familiar with several ways of investigating and framing how systems can change. I also saw some of your comments on the registration forms, which showed that people in the audience are already quite aware of why it's a good idea to consider system effects and impacts — but that it can be quite hard to get buy-in for taking a systems approach. I'd just like to say to you in the audience, we might come back to this later in the discussion at the end — if you have ideas about how you've got leaders in your organisation to consider taking more of a systems approach, we might have a little chat about that then.
Rebecca: But Jodie, in this case, what do we mean by systems thinking?
What is systems thinking?
Jodie: Yeah, so as you said, there are quite a few different models or frameworks that exist, but today we're going to talk about systems thinking as a discipline — a way of approaching problems, certain types of principles you might want to think about. We're going to use Allen + Clarke's four-lens approach to operating models as the framework through which we talk about it.
Jodie: Systems thinking is a critical way of thinking about large structural, essentially system problems. These are problems that sit across interconnected structures — so some examples might be homelessness, energy poverty, or ageing water infrastructure. These problems aren't easily solved because there's not one single cause, and the solution to address them doesn't sit inside one programme or area of responsibility.
Jodie: So the problem is the public sector isn't really set up to effectively manage system problems — and I know a few people made comments about this in their registration questions. If we think of an example of homelessness, the causes of that are as wide as mental health provision, benefit policy, housing policy, workforce opportunities — so many different areas that they cross.
Rebecca: Yeah, absolutely. And we often end up showing in our evaluation work that there are good things going on, but in a way that's too siloed, right? This was one of the major challenges audience members raised in those registration comments too. One person put it quite nicely, I thought: “The government's problems are systemic, but the system itself is still largely organised in silos.” This person also mentioned that this means policy, delivery and technology can evolve at different speeds, so it's quite hard to pull that all together into a system that meets everyone's needs, right?
Rebecca: And so where do we get to, beyond just “oh, let's coordinate better”?
Jodie: Yeah. So coordination is definitely part of it — that's the thing people naturally gravitate to — but it's not the whole story. Systems thinking gives us a way of conceptualising a system in a meaningful way, to think about the outcomes, coordination and capability.
Rebecca: Right, okay. And now, I know we have some other webinars about this — I haven't actually personally used the four-lens approach — but for people who haven't seen them, what are these four lenses?
Jodie: Yeah, so the other webinars are available on our website. But the four lenses are value, governance, culture, and capability. Value asks what a system is trying to achieve as a whole — not what each agency might think it's contributing. Governance is about how a system is organised to bring about that value, who's accountable and who's responsible for things. Culture is about the norms and incentives that shape how people behave inside the system, and capability covers the normal capability things — skills, workforce, tools to deliver.
Jodie: Today we're going to talk about value and governance, in relation to a piece of research I've been part of over the past year. Our Chief Delivery Officer, Anton Davis, sat down with the lead researcher, Sally Blackwell from Beacon Pathway, to understand what the research was about and discuss the key findings. So let's hear from them directly.
Interview clip 1 — Anton Davis with Sally Blackwell
Anton: I'm really excited to be joined by our guest, Sally Blackwell from Beacon Pathway. Kia ora, Sally. Thanks for joining us, and welcome to today's webinar. Really looking forward to getting your insights and learning a little bit more about the research. But before we start, perhaps you could just introduce yourself for the benefit of the audience and tell us a little bit about yourself.
Sally: Sure. So, my name is Sally Blackwell, and I'm a senior research consultant for Beacon Pathway. Beacon is a not-for-profit research organisation that does research into improving New Zealand homes and neighbourhoods, so they do a better job for the people who live in them.
Anton: Fantastic, thank you. So the research you've undertaken recently is to do with home energy advice. I wonder if you could just share with us a little bit about what that is.
Sally: Sure. So for our research, we defined home energy advice as personalised advice provided to people who live in homes, designed to help them make their homes healthier, cheaper to run, more energy efficient, or have a lower environmental impact. The key things are that it's personalised, it's tailored, it's provided by a practitioner of some sort, and it includes advice provided to people living in existing homes and building new homes — and it includes landlords, owner-occupiers, and renters.
Anton: Okay, so relevant, I guess, to a number of different people across the country. What were the drivers or the reasons that got you interested and led to you undertaking this piece of research in the first place?
Sally: I guess home energy advice services have evolved over the last 20 or 30 years in Aotearoa. A lot of it has been in response to particular programmes or initiatives, but what we've observed is that it's evolved in a sort of ad hoc way. Advice is being delivered by a range of different people, in a range of different ways, to a range of different households, with varying levels of training from those practitioners. And we're aware of some concerns around the consistency of messaging that's going to households, duplication, and fragmentation — and we're concerned about how that might be affecting the effectiveness of that advice and the sustainability of it as a service.
Anton: What were the key findings that you found through the research?
Sally: It was pretty clear from the work we did, and from looking at the literature, that home energy advice is an established practice, both here and overseas, backed up by research about why it's valuable. There's a workforce here in New Zealand that has quite a degree of capability, but there are no minimum training requirements across the system, and that capability is a bit uneven.
Sally: Effective home energy advice — the relational aspect is really important; that came out really strongly. As well as this core group who identify as home energy advisors, there's a much more diffuse group of people who interact with households and provide advice as part of what they do, who don't necessarily identify that they're providing home energy advice — which raises some questions around consistency and capability.
Sally: As our energy system transitions, and we move to more electrification and lots of other changes, advice is becoming more complex, or the needs around advice will be more complex. And another one is that for some stakeholders we spoke with, climate adaptation and resilience is a really strong focus. So the system within which advice is being provided is changing, and so the advice provided to households needs to change in response to that.
Anton: Yeah, fantastic. Really interested in the comments you were making around the relational elements of the advice, and in particular around trust — I'm curious about what the research found about trust in relation to digital tools and other online guidance that might be provided.
Sally: I think the trust thing came through really strongly in our research, especially in the interviews. It's also very clear from the literature around the importance of trust. So in some instances it's about literally who you will open your door to, or let into your home to come and provide you with advice. And in others it's around having the confidence to act — so advice coming from a trusted source is really critical to actually get people to take that step and take action.
Sally: It was interesting — we did see that the information landscape is evolving rapidly as well, and there's an increasing number of online tools you can use yourself. And with increasing use of AI, some of those tools are quite sophisticated and may become more sophisticated. So I think trust is still going to be a really important aspect of that — firstly, trusting that tool. But I also think for many people — and the research backs this up — those tools may take you to a certain point. For certain people, it may be enough to take them all the way to making a decision, but I think for many people, information alone is not going to get you to the point where you're able to take action. So it'll be interesting to see how effective AI tools actually are in getting people to the point where they can take action. I think there's always going to be a role for personalised advice from a trusted practitioner.
Rebecca: So, Sally covered a lot of ground there. I found her discussion about trust really key — it's an enabler for people to both take advice from someone they trust, but also to feel able to do something about it. We've also got issues coming up about uneven capability — that much bigger informal workforce than perhaps anyone tracks — and a sector that's about to get more complicated as AI enters the mix. As mentioned before, technology often evolves faster than regulation can catch up with, and that includes things like AI, and also solar in a situation like this. What's that got to do with systems thinking?
Jodie: Yeah, thanks, Rebecca. So this is a classic example of a problem where systems thinking has a lot to contribute. What we have is a wide range of agencies that are essentially funding advice services — you've got the Ministry of Health funding health-related services, you've got EECA, the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority, funding advice services, and then a whole range of other organisations that have some sort of interest in the sector. That's from things like energy distribution businesses — Meridian or Contact — through to organisations like Rewiring Aotearoa, who want us all to rewire our homes. And then you've got community interest and local council interest, often thinking about things like distributed energy generation and community resilience planning.
Jodie: That system is going to face so many challenges over the next decade — how do we improve the quality of our homes, electrify our homes to generate environmental benefits, and reduce our dependency on natural gas in the short term?
Rebecca: Yeah. And you've described a lot of players becoming involved here, and those players have multiple objectives. So do we need to look at how this whole situation developed?
Jodie: Yeah. So one of the key principles from systems thinking is that of emergence — the idea that systems often aren't designed, they emerge. And even where you do try to design a system, as soon as it interacts with reality, it's a different system than what you had on paper. So in this example, the home energy advice sector, the system has emerged over the last 20 years — one programme at a time. But it's important to understand that system as it exists today. As Sally said in the clip, the system's also changing constantly — resilience is climbing the agenda, which could have a really significant impact on what the sector is and what emerges over the next few years.
Rebecca: Right, yeah — that emergence, that constant change, not just of the system itself but the impacts within it. Really important concept. And if the system itself develops overall goals over time, would those goals align with the goals of all the agencies involved, or all the people who stand to benefit from some of the things we're looking at?
Jodie: Yeah, so that's why we use value as the first lens we look at. We want to define the value the system is intending to create. But because there are so many actors involved, there are a few techniques for doing that. The first is to look at the system from your own perspective, and everything that touches on the outcomes your agency cares about. Then you think about what's the value or change the system is trying to make in a broader sense, not just from your organisation's perspective. And thirdly, and most importantly, you look at it from the perspective of the person the value is meant to accrue to.
Rebecca: Right — so this is the people in the households that'll be…
Jodie: Yeah, so that means not just people in the advice programmes, but people who are in the households — what's the value we're trying to create for them? And if you think about it from that perspective, the household wants warmer, drier, cheaper homes. Once you think about it that way, you can see advice is just one small element of that overall system — but it is a crucial part of that system, and that's what we heard from Sally. It's not just any advice or information — it's tailored advice from a trusted source. That's a crucial part of a bigger system, a bigger system in which they actually feel able to act.
Rebecca: But if we start looking at all the different influences — the finance, the trades, the building rules, the insurer — it gets quite massive, doesn't it? Boundaries are important with this kind of consideration, right? What Sally discussed also reminded me of previous work in health promotion — if you step back, you see individual advice is real, but it's one of the smaller levers to push in terms of affecting change. People are only able to change if the structures around them actually enable them to. So how do we look at all the different possible influences, but focus on the most relevant bits?
Jodie: Yeah, so you're not looking for anything that's vaguely related. You're looking for places where parts of the system materially change what happens in another part, from the point of view of the household. So it's really important to make sure you're not just going wider for going wider's sake.
Jodie: They don't experience an advice sector, right? They go in because they want improvements in their home — they want it to be better. So along that journey, the finance available to them, the tradespeople who do the work, the building rules that govern it — those are all really relevant, because they're one experience, and any failure or gap in that whole system is going to be really material.
Rebecca: Yeah, absolutely. So you're looking for those players, those structures that can make stuff happen, and looking at where you can intervene to have the most impact — because that's part of that thinking. Look at the upstream changes, or the bigger levers, however you want to put it. So what does that mean for this research, if you're rethinking the system in this way?
Jodie: Yeah, so if you rethink advice as a means and not an end, then thinking about it as a home energy advice system isn't actually very helpful. It's really more about home wellness, or home improvement, or housing quality — and advice is one input into that. So when you organise your system around that, it starts to become a lot clearer who the natural owners and interested parties are in that system, and the people who are funding the broader system and benefit from that become a lot clearer.
Rebecca: Yeah. So what do we call it, if it's not the home energy advice system?
Jodie: Yeah, great question.
Rebecca: Cool. We're going to pop back now to our interview with Sally, to hear more about some of the challenges facing that system.
Interview clip 2 — Anton Davis with Sally Blackwell
Anton: So Sally, you mentioned electrification earlier on. I'm curious about what sort of challenges you're expecting electrification will bring to the sector.
Sally: Well, I think they're already bringing challenges for the sector — the research showed that. I think it introduces a whole other range of topics, skills and competencies that advisors will need, to be able to respond to those questions and provide advice to people around electrification. So there are some questions around capability.
Sally: The other thing that came out of our research was that quite a number of the stakeholders we spoke to had concerns around equity in relation to electrification. So a lot of the households that are traditionally receiving home energy advice may be in some of the least well-equipped homes in the country. So where advice around electrification — how that's traded off against advice around other aspects of improving their home — I think there are some questions around that, and how there's a coordinated and consistent approach to advice around electrification, taking equity into account.
Anton: I was interested as well in your comments about the number of different drivers and actors, and the changing nature of the system — and you mentioned climate resilience earlier on. Does that mean that banks and insurers potentially have an interest in the sorts of advice that's being offered?
Sally: Yeah, I think so. There were two aspects to the climate adaptation — a big one is flood mitigation, and another aspect is resilience. With resilience there's kind of a clear line to home energy advice, in terms of maybe making energy decisions to make your home more resilient. The flood adaptation is sort of a new strand, but I think potentially there's a link there — when you've got a skilled practitioner working in a home, providing advice to households about a range of things, there's potentially an opportunity to link advice around adaptation and resilience into that picture as well, which potentially brings in a range of others. There's a range of stakeholders who have an interest in advice in a home.
Anton: Hey, look, I really want to thank you for your time today — appreciate you being with us, and sharing the findings from the research and your insights. So, kia ora e hoa.
Sally: Great, thank you very much.
Anton: That's it from Sally and I — back to you in the studio.
Rebecca: So Sally raised a real equity concern there. Jodie, what do you think about that?
Jodie: Yeah, so what she's saying is the households who've traditionally received home energy advice are often the least well-equipped, lowest-quality homes in the country. And you can easily see how an interest in electrification could divert money away from the types of programmes that help those people, and leave them behind in favour of funding programmes for people to get solar panels on their houses. But when we think about the whole system, instead of just an electrification programme, we can reframe what looks like a competing priority into a collaborative, coordinated one. We can start to think about questions like: how can we use the push for electrification to improve the quality of all our homes, not just the ones that are already electrification-ready? Or what role could advice play in making sure no one is left behind in an electric future?
Rebecca: Yeah, okay, that sounds great. So what does it mean for who's actually in charge of this?
Jodie: Yeah, so that's when we move on to the governance lens — because the benefits of this type of system don't land in one place. So better health, affordability, housing quality, greater resilience — all of these occur across a whole lot of different agencies, energy networks, housing providers, the climate system. And obviously then there's the household benefits. But the organisations funding advice are often able to capture or record almost none of that value directly.
Rebecca: Yeah, so I think what you're saying is the benefits can actually spread so widely, but in a way that's not necessarily captured as caused by a specific intervention in a really obvious, linear sort of way, right? Which is where sometimes that linear thinking breaks down. This is something our audience are clued up on too — we had some comments about wanting to understand how design choices impact the dynamics between actors in the system, for instance. It's more complex than just “push this and that'll happen.” So, back to governance?
Jodie: Yeah, it would be great if it was that simple, wouldn't it? So what this means for these types of systems is that they're essentially at the whims of different funders, who generally recognise that there's good being created in the system, but it's often really difficult for them to articulate exactly what that benefit is — and, really importantly, why they're the ones who should be funding that benefit. And that's what we saw in this research: every funder is supporting their own slice of the pie, for really good reasons. Health wants fewer people admitted to hospital for cold and flu-related illnesses, EECA wants people to have lower power bills and better information. These are all really sensible things, but ultimately what you get is agencies funding programmes because they want to, but not getting the best benefit out of the system as a whole — because no one is funding a home energy improvement system.
Rebecca: Home energy improvement system — that's what we want to talk about. Not a home energy advice system. Good, okay, great. But this kind of sounds like coordination, right? Every agency does their bit and…
Jodie: Yeah, and I'm not saying there isn't any coordination across the system — but when we think about it from a structural point of view, systems thinking tells us that structures often drive behaviours, right? So in the structure where Health funds health outcomes and EECA funds broader advice, each to their own mandate, it makes fragmented behaviour a rational choice. But what you need to do, in order to change those incentives, is to change the structure of the system — and that will naturally change the way people behave.
Rebecca: Yeah, okay. So back to what I thought I asked before — who's actually owning this? Who owns the structure? Who's governing it?
Jodie: Yeah, so nobody owns it. There's nobody regulating home energy advisors, as Sally talked about, and at the moment there's nobody really coordinating electrification at a bigger scale. You'll recall Sally talked about fragmentation, a lack of minimum standards, and a risk of inconsistent advice — and on the workforce side, she described a much more diffuse group of people who influence what a household does. So even if you wanted to lift standards across that system, or increase capability, it's really hard to clearly draw the edges of who it would apply to.
Rebecca: Right, okay. So how do you govern something like that?
Jodie: Yeah, there are a couple of options people jump to. The first, and kind of obvious one, is self-regulation — the sector members might agree amongst themselves what good looks like, with a voluntary certification scheme. The other is government regulation — government sets out who can provide advice, what training they need, and how they can do it. But both of these introduce costs, which is a barrier to people receiving advice, and government regulation depends on somebody being willing to regulate the sector, which isn't guaranteed. But there's a more interesting question from a systems point of view — because you don't necessarily need a system owner — which is: which of these changes would actually move the system, and which would just tinker around at the edges?
Rebecca: Yeah, and we're talking about that systems concept of leverage, right — some changes are more effective than others, they matter more than others?
Jodie: Yeah, exactly. So in systems thinking there's an idea about leverage — a place where a small change produces a disproportionately larger effect on how the system behaves. Earlier, Sally talked about the potential for resilience advice, and that's one thing we found in the research — that banks and insurers are really thinking about changing the way they do things for their own purposes, ensuring homes are more resilient. But effectively, those would function as governance over parts of the system.
Jodie: For example, if banks introduce lending criteria that reward certain home types or retrofit choices over others, that's going to shape what houses people buy, and at what price. The same for insurers setting conditions on what houses they'll insure, and at what price. So on the face of it, that might look like a pretty small, technical, commercial decision — but it isn't actually that small. It's pretty high leverage. It can rewrite the rules the entire system responds to — every household, every advisor suddenly has something fundamentally different they have to respond to. And what's really interesting is that it's a kind of governance nobody designs, but functionally that's what it ends up being. And if nobody is willing to take ownership of that as a whole, effectively those commercial appetites, or commercial risk thinking, end up shaping the sector. Right now, that's aligned with what the public good is — more resilient homes — but it's also a risk that needs to be considered.
Rebecca: Yeah, and it's a risk that'll be borne unevenly by certain households, right? And, yeah, that's interesting — it makes sense. The structure in which people are making some of these decisions is, in some cases, being driven by settings changes due to commercial imperatives. It's understandable, it's not always predictable.
Rebecca: So what about — now, you've mentioned two main lenses we're talking about, but the other ones were capability and culture. Did you want to say anything about that?
Jodie: Yeah, so I've been pretty deliberate today in not talking too much about capability and culture. The research had a lot to say about capability, and it was very interesting, but the issue is, until you can really pin down the value a system is trying to create, and for whom, and how you're going to govern that system, it's really difficult to plan for capability. What capability does your workforce actually need, and who is that going to be accountable to — that's really difficult when you don't know what the value is. So that's why we've chosen not to talk about this today.
Rebecca: Okay, first things first. So we've been applying these ideas to what we started calling the home energy advice system — but now we're not calling it that, we're calling it the home energy improvement system, or something like that. Scare quotes, because when you think about a system you do have to define it first, right — you've got to define where the boundaries are, what's in it. So what ideas might the people watching want to take away, and perhaps apply to the systems they're working with?
Jodie: Yeah, so we've put together four short questions, one per lens, to take back to whatever system you're responsible for. And hopefully, talking through this example today has given people a bit of an idea of how they might apply them in their own system.
Jodie: So, for value: what change is your system actually trying to create, and for whom? For governance: how is the system organised to give effect to that value? For culture: what behaviours does your system depend on to work, and are there pressures eroding them right now? And for capability: what does your system actually need, and can your current funding model sustain it? It's really important to have that value defined before you move into those other lenses.
Jodie: So, to bring it all together — well-run agencies and failing systems aren't a contradiction. They're often what happens when a system emerges, or hasn't been designed for as a whole. And it's not a coordination problem — people can always coordinate better, but that's still not going to fix the fundamental problem. We've also walked through value and governance using the BRANZ-funded research led by Beacon Pathway — what that looked like on the ground — and left you with some questions to take away for your own system.
Rebecca: Great, thanks so much, Jodie. And thanks to Sally Blackwell for her generosity in taking part in this research, and for the interview, which we've used clips from. Now, if you do want to see the full interview with more information about this research, it will be available on our website after the session.
Rebecca: Now, let's get onto your questions.
Rebecca: I mentioned before, one of the issues people have raised is wanting advice on getting buy-in from others, especially leaders, to take a system-level approach. There's an awareness that there's sometimes a lack of capability or a lack of willingness to consider this, and that can be caused by some of those constraints and incentives that keep things siloed.
Rebecca: It's a big question — I'd actually love to put it back to the floor. I was wondering if anyone in our chat had themselves found any approaches particularly useful for getting people on board with systems thinking.
Rebecca: Fine if you didn't, but — Jodie, do you have any ideas?
Jodie: Yeah, it can be difficult, because it is a big idea, and it can sound complicated. But often it can be really useful, and exactly what you need to resolve a problem you might have been working on for a really long time, or been very frustrated about, or need to see from a different perspective — and that can be when it's really useful, when it breaks the way you've been thinking about things before that.
Jodie: I think part of it is just talking about why it's so useful — to acknowledge the interconnection of all these factors and outcomes we're seeing, and to be realistic about what we can claim about our impact, acknowledging that some of these emergent and interconnected changes might not always be predictable. It's not just “push this and that'll happen,” because there's more going on — and that's okay.
Jodie: As I said, I hadn't used the four lenses before, and I think it's an example — it's reasonably straightforward, one of the more simple frameworks you could use, which might be a good starting point, actually. But there are others out there.
Rebecca: Did we have any other comments here? No? Moving on to something connected — another great comment we had was about deliberate consideration of Māori and Indigenous perspectives and priorities in the system.
Jodie: Yeah. Totally agree with that — that's a great question, and it's something we haven't talked about today. Even though it didn't come up in this project, I'll say there are some really good examples where systems thinking and mātauranga Māori can be really well-aligned. Thinking of things in a connected, ecological way is not at all new — if anything, it's going back to what indigenous knowledge systems have always been about.
Jodie: I'd like to shout out to a couple of examples I'm aware of, where Western systems frameworks, like the six conditions of systems change, have been reframed in Aotearoa by Healthy Families NZ and others to include te ao Māori concepts. There's also fully kaupapa Māori frameworks, such as the He Pikinga Waiora implementation framework, which was developed by kaupapa Māori researchers looking at health interventions — and it explicitly includes systems thinking. So, check them out — there's some good stuff out there.
Rebecca: Yeah, definitely. Back to the original topic, though — what other questions do we have? We've got a question from Jennifer: “Given where New Zealand is heading with digital government, AI and shared services, if you were asked to assess the new Government Digital Delivery Agency using the four-lens framework, what evidence would you gather first? Also, how long does a meaningful four-lens diagnostic typically take, and what level of engagement across agencies is required?”
Jodie: I'm going to start at the end of that — which is, how long does it typically take? It kind of depends on the size of what you're trying to assess. Something like the Government Digital Delivery Agency would be quite large, and you'd want to be talking to a lot of different agencies as part of that — and that's the kind of thing that takes time, right? Trying to understand what all those different organisations are hoping to achieve, and how the agency is going to help them coordinate better, to create value. So you do have to engage quite widely, generally — that doesn't mean it necessarily takes months or years.
Rebecca: Is there like a range of how long it tends to take?
Jodie: For smaller systems, we can do them as fast as two or three months, but for larger ones it can take longer — it depends on how quickly you can get people in the room to talk about it. If I was to think about assessing the Government Digital Delivery Agency — I don't know a whole heap about it, but what I'd essentially be doing is asking the people involved: really, what's the value they're trying to create, and for whom, and what are the important barriers in place, and what are the levers different people have that can affect that? The agency itself is going to have particular things it's responsible for, or able to move, but then it's going to have things it can only influence, or can only try to make other people do — and having a really good understanding of where its role is to act, and where its role is to influence, is going to be really important. That's where you go through those value lenses — what's the value you're trying to create, and then how is the system best organised so you can use all those levers most effectively.
Rebecca: Right, okay, cool. We have another question from Jane: “How do I convince people the syst—” oh, I love this question — this was on the spreadsheet and I was like, this is so good. Ngā mihi, Jane. “How do I convince people that the symptom is often felt in a different place to the thing that's causing it? And that iteration is critical, since it's impossible to predict how complex systems will respond to interventions.”
Jodie: This is an excellent question, and I don't have a full answer, but I think it's a good question. So, I guess part of systems thinking is often helping people to reframe those problems, and understand what all those different levers are. But I guess that leads me to the next point — and I know it's not typically an answer to this — but in systems thinking, iteration and experimentation is kind of crucial to the principles that are there, and it fits in with that whole idea of emergence, right? You can draw something on paper, and then what actually happens in reality, when people come and do the things people do, is not always what was planned for. The system that emerges is more complex, and isn't exactly what you planned for in the first place. So in systems thinking, it's often encouraged to innovate, to iterate, to keep moving and assessing all of those things — to prototype, sort of.
Jodie: I think it's partly a funding question too, because it's about how funders approach whoever's delivering something, and say, “Look, you can actually be a bit flexible here — you can experiment, you can iterate and change your delivery model if you realise there are unexpected impacts happening, or unexpected changes in the system.” So in some ways it's about encouraging a little bit more flexibility, I suppose — which, again, good luck with it. No, I mean, we can — but it's just raising awareness that that's often the most effective way to go about things.
Rebecca: “Where should one even start with systems design?” says Claire.
Jodie: So I think probably the best place to start is always going to be defining the system, looking at that value. And that doesn't mean you need a fancy name for it — when you pushed back on me earlier about what we should call the system, naming can be helpful, and important for people to understand what they're talking about and see themselves in a system. But don't worry if you can't think of a catchy name for your system. Trying to define it, where the boundaries are, where that value is — that's a really good place to start.
Jodie: And also, if you're going to start with a system design, it can be useful to start with a framework. So obviously, we use the four lenses, which is a deliberate way of looking at different pieces of it, but there are lots of other frameworks out there — academic frameworks, or frameworks used by other consultants or advisors. That can always be useful, because it gives you a structured way to do your thinking, rather than just being like, “whoa, I've got a system I've got to think about.” If you're working with things like theories of change as well, all of that can work in, because that's a theory about how one thing might lead to another — but then you've got to build in the awareness that other stuff is always going on.
Rebecca: Do we have time for one more question? So, we had another one from Diane, and we sort of alluded to this earlier, I think — tips for understanding the impact that design choices have on the underlying dynamics between key system actors. This is a great question, because some systems change frameworks do absolutely look at those interactions — the sort of power dynamics, who influences who. How do we understand how design choices influence those dynamics?
Jodie: Yeah, so when you're thinking about designing things, you should definitely be considering that. You need to think about who all the different actors are, and make sure you're actually recognising who all of them are — it's a classic thing that government does, to not think about how some of its changes might affect suppliers, or NGOs, or others. And then I'd say the next thing is, after you've mapped out all of those things, being aware that once you design it on paper, that doesn't mean it's set. So you might think, “here's how we thought all those actors were going to react to this and coordinate on this” — and then, in twelve months' time or whenever, here's how they've actually reacted to it. And then you start to see where those differences are, and interrogate why those differences have come about.
Rebecca: Yeah, and recalibrate a bit.
Jodie: I reckon it's really important to look at incentives too, because sometimes it's the incentives — maybe not even the most overt ones — that actually drive some of those difficulties in relationships, when some people's incentives don't line up with others.
Rebecca: Yeah, a common thing with the way our accountability frameworks often work. So just being aware of that, eh?
Rebecca: Okay, I think we are going to be — time to wrap up. Well, thank you, thank you everyone for staying on, for your thoughtful questions. This is the kind of discussion that makes these sessions valuable, so we really appreciate it. And remember, if any of today's discussion has sparked ideas for your own work, we're always happy to continue the conversation — you can just reach out.
Rebecca: Thanks again for joining us. We really appreciate it, and we hope to see you at our next webinar. So, have a great rest of your day, everyone. Ka kite.
