This piece was written with support from Rachel Taylor.
Throughout the last year, we have been deep in stewarding stories of systems change from the field, creating case studies from the sectors of health and climate that illustrate the 'how' of systems change practice. Storytelling has always been a thread running through our work at the School, helping us to connect with what's possible, see ourselves within a wider ecosystem and recognise that change is something we do together, in relationship with others.
For us, creating case studies has felt like a long time coming. We are often asked for stories of systems change in practice, yet they are not the easiest to tell. And perhaps this is because of what we have come to expect of stories: The hero stories. The glory stories. The stories of triumphant overcoming. The straight-as-an-arrow stories, with tidy beginnings, middles and ends. But these are not systemic stories. They do not arise from systemic worldviews because they fail to hold the complexity, relationality and non-linearity of all things, and notably, of how change actually happens.
We went into the case study project with multiple ambitions: to contribute to shifting the narrative of how change happens; to create stories that are human, real, accessible and and honour the messiness and interconnectness of how change unfolds; and to nurture our own systemic storytelling practice. This feels simple enough when written out like this, but in reality, it required us to examine our own beliefs (about story and change), and it asked us to learn an incredible amount along the way. Here we are sharing some of our learnings and our emerging process of systemic storytelling.
*We’ve been very inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin, in general, but particularly her essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.
Our learnings along the way
Stories need boundaries. Some of the most challenging questions we faced in the process of creating the case studies were related to story boundaries: How do we tell a story of change that is still unfolding? That is always, by its nature, part of a much bigger picture? That has many different actors and perspectives?
Systems work requires us to make boundary choices, and this too is true of storytelling. One of our first and most important learnings is that drawing the boundary of a story across relationships and time requires shared agreement with story holders, mutually determining which part of the story we are telling, from where and through whose eyes. This is an iterative and discerning process, and one that asks us to recognise our role as story stewards. In this sense, we must recognise that stories are not truths able to show the entire picture. They are always nested in much bigger stories that are, and have been, unfolding.
Stewarding stories is an immense responsibility. Every time a story is told, it is shaped through whoever tells it and whoever hears it, and their worldviews, beliefs and assumptions. There is no objective telling. We are not sharing the truth of something. We are sharing a set of relationships, a set of learnings, what is emerging through the particular boundary we have drawn through our own understandings.
This is why the role of story steward felt more honest to us than story teller. We tried to hold this role gently – iterating with our storyholders, staying in relationship with the story across its development and staying aware of whose perspective and whose contribution was being seen. There will always be shortcomings. There will always be parts of the story that don’t get told. There will always be a million and more ways to tell the same story. This is the responsibility: to be discerning, caring, careful and honest.
There is value in offering a container for storyholders to reflect on their systemic work. We didn’t fully grasp this until towards the end of last year’s case study project: the value of looking in on a story and the perspective that offers the storyholders on the change processes they were involved with. Our questions – and the space and time the process of storying required – offered storyholders the opportunity for a fresh round of sense-making. Of course, this value has a lot to do with the intention and lens we are bringing to the stories themselves – as we sought to hold a systemic perspective and uncover the 'how' of change in the stories.
Navigating power is sticky. As in all systems work, we found ourselves amid relational dynamics woven through dominant beliefs about power, control, authority and influence, and who has it and who doesn’t. Often, these reared themselves subtly, almost invisibly. Other times, less so. For example, we originally had six stories, and now we have five – one got caught in the stickiness and was cut. Navigating this asked us, the story stewards, to observe these dynamics and how they may be influencing the story itself, who is heard and who has voice, and ultimately what gets told.
Embracing the messiness to find where the rich learnings reside. We know the hero story all too well: This person or organisation did this, achieved this and then this change happened. Hurray. Or the story that follows a tidy timeline, encouraging us to believe that systems change is predictable or predetermined. It is not. It is messy. It is unpredictable. It is undeniably human, in all the texture that our relationality brings. But this messiness, this murkiness, can feel like uncomfortable terrain, yet it is also where rich learnings reside. To venture there asks the story holders to be open and, often, vulnerable in what they share. As we learnt, this requires navigating power dynamics and building trust so that storyholders feel safe to share parts of the story that often go unsaid.
Telling non-linear stories does not mean ignoring time as a throughline. It means not using it as the primary structure and resisting it as the only logic. But what do we mean by 'non-linear stories', we questioned. For us, it didn’t mean rejecting the emerging and evolving nature of events over time, but instead adopting a practice and position of constant zooming in and out, making connections between what was happening at the level of the individual, the organisation and the wider system. Time is one throughline, but not the only one. Multiple linearities are always unfolding, weaving and intertwining like a braid or the tributaries of a watershed.
The From Community Health Workers to Community Health Systems story is a good example: rather than organised by time, it was organised around the relationships between actors in the field, and it was the hardest story to write. The art, and the challenge, we found, is in holding that multiplicity without losing the reader and without ourselves succumbing to oversimplification for the sake of a 'good', clean story.
Being emergent without losing the thread. There is a balance to be found between staying adaptive – following the story that unfolds rather than fitting it to something predetermined – and losing the thread altogether. Because emergence without some underlying structure can unravel. And a few times, it did. We learnt the hard way what happens when you don't map the actors, the nested stories, the tangents early on – new voices and new material can destabilise the story itself before you've found its shape.
Our emerging process of storytelling
1. The invitation: Storyholders are invited into the storying process with us. Sometimes they come forward wanting support to tell their story; sometimes we see the potential in a story and reach out. Either way, the invitation opens a space for curiosity, possibility, messiness and tensions, valuing thoughts-in-progress and lived experience over fixed positions or polished accounts. Conversations are held with care and reciprocity, and people are invited to speak honestly, imperfectly and without judgement.
2. An exploration: A short dialogue with the storyholders to orientate in the story and begin creating the relational trust that the rest of the process depends on. Who are the actors in this story? Who else might need to be involved or consulted? And then mapping that constellation.
3. Orientation: Once there’s a working sense of what the story is, we begin to sense into which systems capability might be our entry point and what format the story-gathering might take. This is not fixed – it will shift as the story develops – but having a shared starting point makes everything that follows lighter.
4. Story gathering process, decided case by case. Sometimes individual interviews work well, and other times, a round table with multiple storyholders creates something richer. Particular care is needed where there are existing power dynamics or sensitivities between actors and storyholders. This process is also a container for the storyholders to reflect on their work and role in the systems and spaces they are present in.
5. Sensemaking, writing, refinement: After story gathering but before writing begins, there is a dedicated sensemaking step: a debrief to ask what is emerging, what is the arc of the story, what are we hearing beneath what was said? The process then moves between sensemaking, writing and refinement in cycles, in collaboration with stewards and holders. We stay adaptive, while not losing the movement through the storying process.
6. Visualisation & production as learning resources. During production, our focus is on finding forms that honour the integrity of the story while making it accessible, engaging and useful across different audiences. We develop diagrams that distill the essence of each case study revealing patterns, dynamics and shifts within the system – making complex change processes easier to grasp. The complete story is then presented as a downloadable PDF and supporting slide deck, enabling facilitators to bring the case study into their different contexts.
7. Out into the world, reflection and dialogue. When the story and resources are ready, they go out into the field through our network and that of the story holder, and further afield. We stay open and curious about what conversations emerge, what it surfaces, and stay open to learn as it travels through the field. The learning doesn't stop when the resources are shared and we continue to engage, reflect and learn.
And throughout the process we are weaving
Action inquiry: Our own process of continual learning, through listening, noticing, reflecting, sense-making, iterating, bringing awareness to our own worldviews, assumptions and biases and discerning what the story is showing us about how change actually happens. This learning feeds back into the story itself.
Care: Consistently asking, Are we being careful and caring here? What harm could this story do and to whom? We also hold a mindfulness around extraction throughout the process: we recognise that we are taking people’s experiences and processing them through our own sense-making and meaning-making. We try to do this with honesty about our own positionality, iterating with storyholders.
Equity: We believe in loosening the Western grip on what is considered systems practice, and yet we, an organisation positioned as a learning provider in the Global North, recognise that this ambition is expressed through our own worldviews, tools and assumptions, many of which are rooted in Western lineages. We are cultivating a practice of noticing where we might be reproducing the very patterns we are working to shift. This is a quality of attention we want to carry throughout and a practice we will continue to nurture and learn from.
You can learn more about the School's understanding of Action Inquiry through our recent publication.
Final thoughts
We hold an immense amount of gratitude to the storyholders from our first cycle of Stories of Systems Change in Practice. We learnt alongside you and in the process, this enabled us to lean into the living process of finding our own storytelling approach, which equips us to bring more of these important stories to the field. This reminds us that change is something we do together.
If you are holding a story of systems change in practice that wants to be told, or if you'd like to explore what systemic storytelling could look like together, please get in touch with Saskia at [email protected].
