This talk was presented at Chesterfield College for The Big Hive Event 12.6.24
Hello and I am delighted to be invited to speak at your event. I love the whole concept of The Big Hive (and its companion day at Kirklees in a fortnight). It speaks to me on so many levels. And I love that there are so many old and new friends here. I’ll just say a few words to introduce myself. I work with Changemakers in FE, I’m a Changemaker myself and I’m also a governor here at Chesterfield College. I tell you that, not to bring role, rank and ego into the room - we don’t do that in Thinking Environments - but because I want you to know how invested I am in the work here.
Today I’m going to revisit some concepts that will be familiar to some and not to others, so I will take care to define them - I need you to wave your arms about if I’m going too fast.
Right, let’s begin. I’ve put all of this on my blog - you can pick up the QR code here - so that you can go back over it if you wish.
What do you think when someone asks you about the impact of your work? Or, more importantly, what do you feel?
Impact is important, of course it is. There’s no point in keeping doing the same things in the hope that they’ll work. But it’s definitely more complex than we are led to believe.
Impact as a word carries a sigh within it, a slight rolling of the eyes. It’s energy-sapping. We are required to say what the impact of a thing will be before we’ve even made a start and when we come to the end of something we are asked what the impact has been before we’ve had time to take a breath.
Impact as a word carries shame within it, we never feel we’ve done enough, never believe we’ve got it right. The way it’s weaponised makes us feel our work is worthless.
Impact as a word is yet another example of how capitalism has reterritorialised something that ought to be a good thing, colonising it into systems which are about hierarchy and control, rendering its true meaning unusable.
In this talk, I want to think about how we can reclaim ‘impact’ as a concept and use it to help us do the long-term work which is vital, but which so often gets nudged out by the day-to-day. Thinking for the long now.
Those long-term issues facing the world are the environmental crisis, AI - and not just AI but the manipulation of social media - and a political/economic system that leads to war, dispossession, migration and inequality. Everything that we face falls out of one of these crises - mental ill-health, bullying, poor behaviour in class, teacher recruitment and retention, impossible qualifications, the pressures of workload. It’s tempting to go back under the duvet and it’s true that we can’t fix that big stuff on our own, but we can do better by taking a different approach - a collective, changemaker approach.
Over the past 18 months I’ve been involved in a piece of work with ETF and others, which sought to understand how FE can take back some of its own power. The research took a systems thinking approach - I’ll say more about that later - and the findings were published recently. I know that Kirklees colleagues have been reading the research together. When they came to write up the report, the authors - Harvey Maylor from Oxford Business School, Vikki Smith and Paul Tully from ETF - didn’t shy away from FE’s fundamental problem. A schism at the very heart of our system.
Is FE about social purpose, creating a fairer and more equitable society? Or is it about meeting the requirements of qualifications, auditors, inspection? The truth is we are trying to do both and that’s just how it is. And when it comes to thinking about FE’s North Star, its purpose, it feels like we are straddling two huge icebergs that are slowly floating apart.
This is the tension that we feel when we come to work every day. Trying to do a good job (which for most of us is social purpose) within the constraints of scarcity. When I sit on the governing body of this organisation, almost everything we try to do is ultimately a sticking plaster - and I mean that with absolutely no disrespect to the staff here who are, by and large, phenomenal.
Here’s an example. The staff here at Chesterfield College have poured wisdom, insight and energy into transforming our approach to GCSE maths and English resits. It’s been awe-inspiring to watch. We - the royal ‘we’ - have transformed curriculum staffing, introduced excellent digital support, made invigilation a practice of care, created a mentoring culture, amongst many other initiatives. It’s creative, innovative, collaborative work and it has shifted the dial. Our results will be better this year than last year. We’ll probably be above the national benchmark. But that’s set so low. Imagine all the energy that has gone into this transformation, for so many students to fail. Again.
That’s because we are in an impossible situation. We know that the qualification is just plain wrong for many of FE’s students. We know that being forced - through the funding formula - to sideline functional skills qualifications is ultimately thankless. But the system we’re in requires that we do it.
I’d like you to pause for a moment and imagine all the energy that has been poured into GCSE resits across the country in the past few weeks - staff, students, parents. It’s a huge and hugely dispiriting system. Quite rightly, we celebrate every win. We do what we can to create the conditions for everyone to thrive. We try to support each individual, students and staff, to be their whole and flourishing selves.
Imagine what that energy could do, if we weren’t holding that tension? Of course we have to do it. But when we start thinking in terms of energy - rather than actions - it transforms the possibilities.
My current work is with a programme called Green Changemakers, a project of the West Midlands Combined Authority. I’d love to bring it here, to our new combined authority in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. In fact, I’d love to take it everywhere! It’s a new approach. The clue is in the title - Green Changemakers.
It began as a Green Skills programme but we quickly realised that it was ridiculous to imagine that I could generically teach educators how to develop green skills in their subject area. I’m not a plumber, or a graphic designer, or a childcare professional! Not just ridiculous, but wrong. In FE, we employ teachers as subject specialists and we have to trust them. We’ve all been infantilised for so long by the FE system that this is not an easy ask, but it’s a point of leverage (remember that word, it’s a systems word) that our changemaking work can use to push for change.
Green Changemakers are trained not in specific green skills but in changemaking. That’s the pivot. They go back to their organisations equipped with the potentia, confidence and skills to influence culture, systems and strategy. I talked about these three concepts when I was here last year. Think rock, paper, scissors. We need all three to align, because having one out of place trips up all the others.
Let me return now to that word, potentia. I’ve been talking about this for a few years now, so you may have heard this story before but it’s a good one, so I’m not going to apologise for that. A few hundred years ago, in what we now call The Netherlands, the philosopher Baruch Spinoza was writing in Latin about power. In English, we just have the one word. In Latin, Spinoza had two.
Potestas is what we mean in English by power - power-as-usual, hierarchy, chains of command and control.
Potentia is a different kind of energy, it’s our will to live, our desire to be joyful. It’s a changemaking power and it works best when we share our potentia with others and are energised in return.
We need both. We need the clout of potestas to shift stubborn systems. But we need the influence of potentia to bring about change.
A good career in a traditional sense is two-thirds potestas and one third potentia. We wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing at Chesterfield if our principal Julie didn’t have a changemaking heart. We need her not to get in the way of our potentia. And we need her potestas to open the doors to systems change.
A good changemaking career is one-third potestas and two thirds potentia. And that’s us.
I’ve talked potentia to hundreds of people this year - two people even contacted me after different events to say they were going to have it tattooed! I might get around to doing that myself one day. So it’s a powerful concept which resonates deeply. And I believe that’s because there is a shift in the public mood. Globally, people are waking up to the problems in the world. Nationally, we are about to have a general election which will change things, even if we don’t know how. And in our organisations we’re tuning in again to that social purpose. Many organisations are making decisions and changes which are genuinely based on values. I see that in my work. We would never have got funding for the Green Changemakers even two years ago. You would never have been doing the things you are doing in your organisations. Two years ago, people in power wanted change, but didn’t want to do anything differently. But now, FE is resisting.
We lost that word potentia for nearly 400 hundred years, because it does not translate directly into English. Imagine the lost energy! But we are where we are and there is still a lot that we can do.
The Green Changemakers programme had three framings:
AimHi Earth’s 15 Green Skills
There are other framings - the Unesco’s Sustainable Development Goals, for example, or various Education for Sustainable Development frameworks. It doesn’t matter what you use in your organisation to drive the work forward. Green Changemakers chose the 15 Green Skills because they are expansive. The work of changemaking is to influence the people - and ultimately the systems and strategy - around you, so the job of Green Changemakers is to convince everyone (and themselves) that they embody some aspect of green skills already, whether that’s around technical, nature, systems or people thinking. Knowing that you already have the skills to serve and protect our planet is empowering. You’ll hear more about the green skills later today.
The Thinking Environment
The second framing is the Thinking Environment. Many of you are already very familiar with this set of processes that enable us to think more independently, and think better together. The energy of potentia brings an incredible momentum, when we are an ‘Adventure Ready Squad’ working on changemaking initiatives together (this is a green skill). But we can’t ride that wave of energy without taking time to pause. We all know this, right? We know that we need time to think, and to rest, and many of us are working on this already (I’m thinking about Kirsty’s TeacherMatic work at Kirklees here, and much more).
Building Thinking Environments into our systems releases potentia, and it also compels us to pause. When we pause, we notice more and we reach deeper into our thinking. We get beyond assumptions and move together into new ideas. We rest. And if you still need to be convinced of the power of the Thinking Environment to transform cultures and systems, please read Kathryn Pogson’s article in ‘Staying with the Troublemakers: A Celebration of Research in FE’, published by AoC, to find out about what’s been happening at Kirklees.
Four Seasons of Changemaking
The Four Seasons of Changemaking is my own work, with Joss Kang, as part of our social enterprise FE Constellations. Just over a month from now, we will be training all of ETF’s staff in the Four Seasons, so we’ve got an opportunity to get it into the mainstream of FE professional development.
The Four Seasons implement those concepts of potentia and pause which are so essential to keep momentum, to prevent things fizzling out. We begin by getting unstuck, taking a clear look at where we’re at, identifying the values in our practice, the things we have to do and the things we do for the sake of it. We move into releasing potentia throughout the organisation. Changemakers figure out their patterns of influence and use this to wake up the potentia in others, leaning on the clout of potestas where they need it.
‘Influence’ and ‘clout’ are two good words that help you remember the difference between potestas and potentia. An ex-colleague and friend used to say ‘potatoes’ and ‘polenta’, which is less helpful.
We call this, ‘waking up the Golden Unicorns’. You may have heard me use that term before, but in case you haven’t, when a golden unicorn awakes - maybe after many years of feeling discounted in the organisation, they step into their own potentia.
The third season is gaining clarity and this is the work that you have to do for yourselves. With ETF, we are bowing out at lunchtime so that they can continue the work of gaining clarity, using the four pillars of their new strategy. Here at Chesterfield, we cycled through the seasons when we were developing our new three-year strategy (not five years, because who the hell knows what the world will look like in five years’ time?) We had a strategy away day which began with getting unstuck, then worked on releasing potentia. The team then entered a long and fruitful consultation period with students, employers, governors and staff. Together, we co-created a hitherto unimagined future for Chesterfield College, with clearer values and a new strategic pillar of Planet. We can’t know what the unimagined future will be, until we clear a path to collectively imagine it. And that’s where we come back to impact.
At the end of the first phase of the Green Changemakers programme, in March this year, we had to send in an impact report to the DfE, who funded us through the Local Skills Improvement Fund. Fair dos, we could tell them what we’d done and how many people we’d trained. But the deadline was five weeks after the end of our time together, two of which had been (the important reflection time of) Easter. It was another impossible ask. Luckily, we had stuff to tell them, but the real work is only just beginning to happen now, in pockets, as Green Changemakers begin to work their magic in staff development, curriculum planning, strategic working groups. We were not prepared to leave it there. Together, we are co-researching the programme and its impact, over a year. Research that nobody has asked for, or is paying for. But there’s that tension again. Is FE about social purpose or is it about meeting the requirements of the funding? We are where we are and we have found a way to do both.
And there’s that word again. Together. Community. The Adventure Ready Squad. We can only do this as part of a Big Hive. And not just within our organisations - where we’ll soon get stale - but through coming together to share our thinking - to share our potentia - to be an Adventure Ready Squad. Nobody has asked us to run today’s event, or the one in two weeks at Kirklees. But here we all are.
You can work on any of the big issues using this framework. Maybe AoC’s Mental Health Toolkit + Thinking Environment + Four Seasons of Change. Maybe JISC’s AI in Tertiary Education report + Thinking Environment + Four Seasons of Change. Maybe ETF’s Changing Systems of Change research, which I mentioned earlier (+ Thinking Environment + Four Seasons of Change).
I said I would return to systems thinking, before the end of this talk. It’s really the glue that brings us all together. Let’s go back to rock, paper, scissors. Because culturally we are wedded to a quote from business analyst Peter Drucker 30-odd years ago - in a very different and in some ways more hopeful world - we tend to think that ‘culture’ and ‘strategy’ are the only players, and that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’. It’s true that if the culture isn’t right, the strategy will fail, because people will fail to align to it. It’s also true - though less so - that a rubbish strategy will impact negatively on culture. Actually, there are many more factors that need to come into play. But the invisible player here is ‘systems’. Outdated systems - and I’m not just talking IT systems, I’m talking all the processes of bureaucracy we use everyday - will stop both culture and strategy in their tracks. We can have all the potentia in the world, but when we keep butting up against needing seven signatures to get someone through the door, we are going to get exhausted.
What’s been missing - and ETF, AoC and the Oxford Business School know this - is a systems thinking approach. It’s been tough to get any traction around this, because there is so much smoke and mirrors around systems thinking. The concept, which comes from the work of a female environmentalist Donella Meadows at the end of the last century, was co-opted into business schools after her death and became mysterious (and owned by academics). Renegade economist Kate Raworth remembers being at university and being told that “undergraduates didn’t study systems thinking” because it was “too hard”. If we’re told something is too hard, many of us won’t attempt it - impostor syndrome. In Covid, Kate’s 11 year old twins produced a systems map of the pandemic which is simplicity itself.
Yes, it lacks nuance, but it nails what was happening at the time. I was privileged to be invited to create a systems map of FE as part of the ETF work, along with some of the brightest thinkers in our sector (those that had enough potestas to be known, there’s plenty of people here today that I would have included). But it’s that potestas/potentia blend again. I had enough clout to get through the door and enough influence to make it crack when I got in there. What ended up at those sessions as a complicated but reliable systems map of FE, became the straightforward analysis you see in the report. Complicated is not complex, though of course everything on there is impacted by complex forces. It is possible to gain clarity - the third season of changemaking - by getting everything down on a map.
I’m not suggesting that you have to do that, though you can if you wish and although it’s messy, it’s not difficult. You know your stuff. What I am recommending that you do is wrap your head around the fact that your organisation is a system, nested in a bigger FE system, nested in a bigger political and economic system. You can use any metaphor you like. The academics mystified it with engineering metaphors. I like to think about the body. The heart does what it does. But if something happens with the kidneys, the heart begins to falter, because the blood that’s getting to it isn’t clean. Then the brain starts to struggle with irregular pumping of the blood…you get the picture.
But - together - lift up your heads and start to notice. First, look for the feedback loops. Where are the joy loops - where things are ticking along beautifully, everyone is playing their part, no-one is excluded or overwhelmed. And where are the doom loops - the heart arrhythmia, the places where the organisation keeps sticking. In the season of getting unstuck, start tinkering with what’s not working, all the while keeping noticing what’s happening in other places. While you’re busy treating the kidneys, the stomach is getting overwhelmed. Look for the levers where you can push for change. The pacemaker. The vitamin infusions. The tonsillectomy.
You cannot do this alone. Michaela Greaves is a world-class noticer - and a world-class appreciator, which is like a big spoon of something good. But she can’t see everything. Through her potentia, she has taught people like Jamie and Bridget and Hollie and Mark to notice too. Through her potestas, she can shift the systems when the soundings are reported back to her. She’s a natural systems thinker and we can retro-engineer her practice to all that academic thinking. And many of you will be too. You don’t need to go to Oxford Business School - except for those few days I certainly didn’t. You just need to start noticing, appreciating, mentoring and communicating with each other on a systems level.
Which is exactly what bees do.
Donella Meadows loved bees. Back in 1989 before many people had really thought about the damage humans were doing to the earth, she wrote,
“To provide their priceless service to us the honeybees ask only that we stop saturating the landscape with poisons, stop paving the meadows and verges where bee-food grows, and leave them enough honey to get through the winter.”
That’s our work as changemakers in the Big Hive. We resist the poisons, we rewild the meadows and verges of our practice and we share enough honey - enough potentia - to get us all through this metaphorical winter.
Thank you.