A three-part series into the School of System Change’s journey of cultivating systemic practice and facilitative capacity alongside partners. Sean Andrew shares his experience as Learning and Practice Partner Lead at the School, as he now transitions to a collaborative partner role.
Beckoning toward a relational, learning, and systemic way of partnering
Attending to lineage is an ongoing inquiry at the School of System Change. Tracking origins rarely reveals a single line of influence but rather an entanglement of positionalities, experiences, and perspectives. This piece offers one woven bundle of how Learning and Practice Partnerships (LPPs) came to take shape at the School of System Change.
Here I trace my own thread of what has informed the evolution of our work, from Forum for the Future's (Forum) 'Cultivate' function, to Systems Change Coaching, to Learning and Practice Partnerships as the paradigm we're living, playing, and working into today, while acknowledging others will trace their own threads through this same landscape.
The Cultivate Function (2017 – 2022)
I'll begin with when I joined Forum in 2019. At the time, there was a team called ‘Cultivate’, inspired by Anna Birney's book Cultivating System Change: A Practitioner’s Companion. This team worked to bring systems approaches into the organization, focusing on learning and nurturing the capabilities and practices needed for change, while also supporting the development of the field.
From here, The School of System Change emerged from the Forum's Leadership for Sustainability masters program, along with experiments within Cultivate. Over time, the School and Forum became mutually reinforcing spaces—where ideas from School learning environments could be tested and deepened through Forum's real-world projects, and vice versa.
Cultivate served as a seedbed, with a small group weaving learning across the organization, introducing systems concepts and supporting experimentation with different ways of working.
Systems Change Coaching (2019 – 2022)
When I joined the organization, Cultivate was already underway. I was hired with the novel title of Systems Change Coach. Georgia Rubenstein, who had been at Forum for some time, stepped into a Global Systems Change Coach Lead role, and together we had the task of shaping a new area of work that focused on supporting organizations to learn and apply systems change methods in their work.
Our work took shape across two main strands:
- To support internal systemic practice – working with colleagues across Forum to build internal capabilities and integrate systemic approaches so we could walk the talk as a systems change organization.
- To shift how we worked with partners – moving from a posture of ‘we will do the thing for you’ toward a more enabling approach of ‘we will provide a process through which you learn while doing the thing.’
While this work was already emerging, Georgia and I turned to tending the soil, internally and externally. Internally, this included hosting systems change coaching info sessions, peer case clinics, systems 101 intros, and drafting a white paper to articulate and legitimize the approach. Externally, we began experimenting more explicitly with partners to center learning and more relational ways of working together.
Importantly, this work did not start from scratch. Many colleagues at Forum were already working in a relational, learning-oriented way with partners. Our role became one of making visible what was already present, while supporting its further evolution and bringing it into clearer form.
Accompaniment as a paradigm
We found ourselves grappling with a core polarity: a learning orientation focused on cultivating practice and an outcome orientation focused on supporting organizations in moving toward their systems change goals (more on this in the next article).
Rather than choosing between these poles, we attempted to dance between them in ways that met our partners’ contexts, needs, and intentions. We were drawn to the posture of accompaniment as a way to embody and express this stance. This concept originates in liberation theology and was popularized in social justice work by Dr. Paul Farmer, with further development by John Paul Lederach. However, it was through my engagement with Organization Unbound’s Accompanied Learning approach that I personally experienced and was deeply inspired by how it could be applied to systems change work. For us, this brought the question of how we might walk alongside people and organizations on their systems change learning, doing, and being journey in a meaningful way.
We saw this as an alternative to the dominant consulting paradigm, which often assumes a linear transfer of knowledge from expert consultant to client. We wanted to work with partners in a more adult-to-adult, power-with relationship, being with them as they navigated their learning and change journeys. From this perspective, we felt organizations didn't simply need answers delivered to them, but rather the conditions to cultivate their unique practice as they moved in the direction of their goals.
Systems change work can feel messy, uncertain, and even lonely. So how could we be a critical friend for those forging this path? Offering guidance, resources, reflection space, and ultimately encouragement.
This shift meant supporting people to cultivate capabilities while trusting that individuals and organizations already held significant innate capacity to contribute to change. Our role, therefore, became less about delivering solutions and more about accompanying them in practice, through process, and towards outcomes.
Over time, we began to articulate how we worked with others, such as co-learning, shared ownership, feedback, and attending to wholeness across the I, We, and World of the work. We'll explore what this looked and felt like in practice in the next piece.
Early experiments with partners
This work was preceded by experiments within the Marine Colab from 2014 to 2021, in which we began accompanying practitioners in the marine sector to build their systems-change capabilities through collaborative processes, systems mapping, and action-learning approaches. These early experiences helped shape our understanding of how to work alongside change practitioners in a relational way
As this thinking continued to develop, we began trying this approach out with additional partners. One early and formative partnership was with the Small Foundation in 2019, an organization equally focused on learning and contributing to change, and up for finding ways to work together that mirrored their change efforts in practice. What began as support to develop a systems change practice framework became an opportunity to explore how we might partner differently, not only in what we were working on but how we worked together.
Together with the Small Foundation, we developed a Learning Partnership Agreement, a shared manifesto for the relationship that named an approach less about consulting and more about inquiring and experimenting together.
As the 2020 document described at the time:
“Working with systems change requires us to not only consider how it applies to our work but also how we work together in a new learning partner paradigm. This is different from more known consulting, advising and transferring of knowledge approaches. It allows us to work and learn together in an adaptive and emergent way so that the approach thrives off the relationship.”
Rather than following a fixed process or timeline, the partnership was framed as an ongoing social learning process grounded in acting, learning, and adapting together. Looking back, this was one of the first moments when the ideas behind this approach were made explicit, giving structure and language to a way of working that was already coming into being.
Naming Learning and Practice Partnerships
While the term systems change coaching was useful, it never felt quite right – nor did my job title! Coaching captured part of the work, but not the full range of roles we were playing: advising, designing, facilitating, mediating, mentoring, and training. We knew accompaniment was our approach, but we wanted a name to hold the breadth, depth, and nuance of the work.
At the same time, we were noticing signals from the wider field. Organizations such as Lankelly Chase were beginning to seek ‘learning partners’ rather than consultants.
This reflected a growing recognition that many organizations desired support that helped them get work done, reflect, and build sustained capabilities.
Through many conversations, rounds of sense-making, and even some emoji voting, the term Learning and Practice Partnerships (LPPs) eventually crystallized. The name felt closer to what we were actually doing: forming relational partnerships where learning and practice lived together.
Looking ahead
Over time, Learning and Practice Partnerships have become one of the ways the School of System Change works and walks alongside organizations navigating complex change. This piece has focused on where it came from, what it responded to, and what it beckoned toward. The next piece turns toward our approach, exploring what Learning and Practice Partnerships actually look and feel like in the everydayness of the work.
