Patterns Across Places (1)
Lankelly Chase Place Action Inquiry and COVID-19: What patterns are we spotting across the different places?
March — April 2020
Max French & Habiba Nabatu
Context
Lankelly Chase’s mission is to change the systems that perpetuate severe and multiple disadvantage. Severe and multiple disadvantage is a complex problem. It involves everything from the psychology of the individual facing it through the relationships in their family, the actions of statutory services, right up to the global economic system and the inequality it generates (with these things all being interconnected). No one person has the answers for how to change systems or full control over them. We think change only emerges through the action of whole systems.
In trying to engage with the full complexity of severe and multiple disadvantage, Lankelly Chase have focussed on six places: Barking and Dagenham, Barrow-in-Furness, Gateshead, Greater Manchester, Oxford and York. In these places, groups of people — associates, partners and wider networks — take an action inquiry approach, learning and adapting as they tackle a shared question: ‘how can we change the systems that perpetuate severe and multiple disadvantage in (place)’? They do not have a predetermined agenda for how to do this. Instead, they are guided by the pursuit of nine system behaviours as our best collective guess about the characteristics of healthy systems.
Learning and our role as learning partner
Lankelly Chase recognises that changing complex systems requires adaptation to adapt to a changing context. Northumbria University’s role as the learning partner to the place inquiry is to:
1. Support people in the six places to develop effective learning infrastructures and methods suitable to their local context.
2. Gather information and analyse patterns of activity from across these places.
3. Facilitate Lankelly Chase’s own learning based on both of the above
In these briefings we focus on spotting patterns across the different places. We have developed an Action Inquiry-wide ‘noticing framework’ as a common template for reporting and information gathering across the six places, and use both formalised research methods (such as regular interviews and surveys) and informal methods (like conversations and reflective observation). Our analysis is not intended to be taken as hard truth, rather it represents our perspective on the patterns and significant themes emerging across the different places.
What we noticed — March & April 2020
Context
By coincidence, our noticing framework was first trialled in the immediate aftermath of lockdown and the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the lead up to lockdown on 23rd March, our partners who engaged in service delivery and public-facing work saw their work completely upended. This created opportunities and challenges for each of the places, though the distribution of each did not fall equally across these areas. In this first month, across our six areas, we noted four key themes.
Themes
1. Vindication and relevance for (some) Place Action Inquiry structures
Some of our partners took a sense of vindication from the immediate crisis response. The open-ended and learning-focussed spaces some of us worked hard to create, sometimes over years, took on a renewed relevancy as local actors sought out collaborative networks and reflective spaces to discuss and arrange their responses. Similarly, our partners working individually as associates described being drawn into strategic response initiatives emerging locally, often themselves in a learning partner-type role. These individuals described their unconstrained agenda and relative independence as being useful assets. Important to note however, is that some of the more established collaborative networks were seen to lose relevance. Structures that had established a local standing and solidified around a purpose or workplan found their memberships drawn elsewhere into crisis response actions.
2. The importance of creating new learning spaces
A clear commonality in the early weeks following lockdown was the usefulness of new spaces for learning which our partners created. Our partners took on a convening role, bringing together their contacts into new cross-sectoral groupings. Some of these spaces in the immediate aftermath were concerned with the instrumental factor of rapid coordination of crisis response efforts. Emerging more strongly however was the desire for spaces to step out of response mode and engage with looser agendas and opportunities for peer learning, open-ended discussion and mutual support. Our partners felt this work contributed to a greater sense of connection and interdependency beyond traditional organisational/sectoral boundaries. The design of collaborative spaces for learning rather than action, which in the past often surfaced accusations of wooliness or futility, took on an increased sense of value.
3. Disconnecting and reconnecting with people and purpose
The lockdown brought an abrupt end to many areas of our work. Organisational partners involved in direct provision had to innovate not just new working practices, but new relationships with families, communities and individuals. Close, boundary-cross relationships between ‘users’ and ‘deliverers’ of services is a theme of many of our partners’ practice, so how to maintain these relationships when human contact was removed became a significant open question. The significance of maintaining these relationships became a driving force for how services were revamped, and for some resulted in a revitalised sense of mission and purpose.
4. Mobilising lived experience to shape crisis response
Some of our partners held many strategic connections locally and could relay a good sense of how service systems were adapting. These individuals flagged a worry that severe and multiple disadvantage was not being considered in any strategic sense within the crisis response. This was a concern because if the voice of lived experience was not heard and did not shape how services were adapted, we would miss the opportunity to make a post-COVID-19 service landscape more relevant to this group. Across several areas therefore was a renewed sense of urgency in involving lived experience in co-production work. Facing substantial barriers to this without the option of physical meetings, they began exploring innovative approaches to story gathering, peer research and remote engagement.
What’s new and what’s significant for the Place Action Inquiry?
The first time we trialled a systematic information gathering framework (our ‘noticing framework’), it came into contact with the most uncertain and tumultuous month in the Place Action Inquiry’s two-and-a-half year history. Notable in this round of reporting was that each of the four themes came with its own yin and yang, coupling challenge with opportunity. We think these lead us toward some open questions, for ourselves and interested others, and describe some ways we might address them.
- If people with lived experience do not shape how places adapt, our new services and systems will still exclude them.
Our purpose in the Place Action Inquiry has been pro-active — changing the systems which perpetuate severe and multiple disadvantage. That has been done for us, and in one sense our focus has changed toward making the most of current opportunities and in some cases holding off a ‘snapping back’ of the system. The meaningful engagement of lived experience of severe and multiple disadvantage is seen as crucial by our partners, and we have collectively been experimenting with a range of tools and methods — from community reporting, storytelling, peer research and creating peer reflection spaces. A first question, as the system begins to convalesce, is how should we gather and communicate our collective experience in meaningful dialogue and co-production?
- Being able to communicate the value of our work and roles is important.
Our Associates and partners, trusted to work toward a collective mission without a pre-ordained workplan, found their autonomy, independence and adaptability extremely valuable in the immediate crisis response. Given that crisis is something faced continually by the most excluded and disadvantaged among us, clarifying and communicating this purpose more strongly and perhaps more consistently feels important. A question for us is how can we communicate our purpose, process and role in a way which does not lead back to rigidity?
- Gathering tools, methods and approaches may help to refine our common systemic practice
We are starting to see some domains of common practice emerge in our work. We have collectively developed expertise in developing inclusive learning spaces to prompt systemic action, gathering perspectives across systems and using these to prompt critical reflection, in innovatively re-centring on lived experience, and in documenting change and capturing learning. A question for us is how should we go about capturing and sharing this emerging systemic practice?
Possessing no claims to clear answers, we invite thoughts and support from others on this, and particularly our three questions here.
