Becoming learning partners

Lankelly showed that funding for learning was a possibility, but held their truths too lightly

 

A Lankelly Legacy Interview. Hosted by Generative Journalism Alliance

 

Toby, I would like to know a little bit about your work and how you came into contact with Lankelly Chase initially.

 

I can’t exactly remember how the connection was made, but someone made a connection for me with Alice Evans, who was Deputy Chief Executive at the time, maybe Programme Leader. Anyway, there seemed to be some resonance with what I was experiencing. 

 

 

The root of it seemed to be that our current way of doing project management had to pretend that everything was simple and linear. I was interested in finding people who wanted to talk about complexity. 

 

If the outcomes that we desire in the world are complex – if they are created by complex systems – what does that look like in terms of how funding works? Because you can’t then specify the outcomes that you want. What does that look like in terms of management? Lankelly Chase were one of the few funders at that point interested in having that conversation.

 

Brilliant. Thank you, Toby. Since coming into contact, can you tell me a little bit about your relationship with them? How did that evolve?

 

Yeah, so the first piece of work we did together was a tiny piece of work. They were interested in what the characteristics of healthy systems were. We developed a perspective that the outcomes that social interventions seek – people being happier, or having a job, or their wellbeing increasing – those outcomes aren’t created by specific interventions, delivered by programmes or organisations. Instead, those are created by whole systems. So lots of different people and causal drivers, interacting all together. The idea was healthy systems would produce these desired outcomes more often. 

 

They asked me to help them do a bunch of discovery work with a range of the organisations that they funded in that space. This is part of their transition from being a quite old-school grant giver to being an agent of systems change. 

 

I referred to the Lankelly Chase System Behaviours work for years afterwards. When people asked, ‘What does a healthy system look like?’, I would point people in the direction of that. Lankelly had a weird relationship with it. They were always slightly hesitant to use this thing that they had created because they didn’t want to appear too directive. I think one of my reflections for them will be that they were overly hesitant in valuing their own material. 

 

Okay, really interesting. Yeah, we might pick that back up. First of all though, I want to get more of a sense of what you think they were trying to do. How would you describe that? 

 

Just prior to all of that work, they had made the decision that they wanted to be a systems change agent. I think the way that they were framing it at the time was: We want to support system change for people who have multiple and complex needs. They did a bunch of work to explore what that meant, because they recognised that they didn’t have competency or expertise in that, but they recognised that a bunch of the people they supported did. 

 

So they then came back to me and said, “Would you be our learning partner in this system change work?” That’s the first time I’d heard the expression ‘learning partner’. There’s a reasonable case to be made that Lankelly were instrumental in creating the idea of learning partnering as a different type of relationship. Up until then, people would have only ever asked for ‘evaluators’ or ‘consultants’. 

 

The other thing that was really interesting about what they were doing is they were framing their work as ‘inquiries’. They weren’t trying to say, ‘We’ve got a systems change programme and we’ve got this programme and that programme.’ We have inquiries. We want to think about our work as a programme of learning for us. Again, I was like, ‘That’s the first time I’ve ever heard something like that. That’s amazing. Count me in.’ 

 

I was their learning partner for three years, maybe four years. They said, “We’re doing these inquiries. We want to be able to answer these questions.” They had four questions, initially. 

 

About 18 months in, we thought, ‘Oh, here’s a bunch of stuff we think we found together, let’s try and make sense of all of this material.’ One of the questions that we asked them – we were all gathered together in their offices – was, “Okay, you’ve been thinking about your work as the inquiries, how have you organised your work in respect to those inquiries? What are the actions that you’ve been doing?”

 

They all kind of looked at each other. They were a bit perplexed for a while. Then Julian, the Chief Executive, spoke up and said, “Oh, no, we haven’t organised ourselves around those questions. We haven’t organised ourselves around the inquiries. They’re just kind of touch points for our work”. I was like, “What?” 

 

They gave themselves a framing to the work, an orientation in the world – ‘we would like to find out answers to these questions’ – but they didn’t follow that through with any kind of structural stuff. They didn’t have a plan, which confuses me to this day. They didn’t seem to be thinking about how they organised themselves in order to answer the questions.

 

During your time in relationship with them, how did your perceptions change? 

 

The relationship with Lankelly was really formative for me in doing the work that I do. It was really powerful because it demonstrated that a set of people with resources were interested in really digging deeply into the question, ‘How might we do this differently?’ Their interest in all of this was really powerful in showing that another way was possible. 

 

The Lankelly folk were really brilliant at developing a set of behaviours around criticality and reflection. One of the things that I learned with them was to take what we know lightly – not to hold too dear the truths we think we have learned – which is a really valuable perspective in developing curiosity. 

 

One of the things that I think I learned over time is also that it is possible to hold those truths too lightly. I think Lankelly held their own truths too lightly. 

 

They had an almost visceral, negative reaction to the idea of trying to codify what they had learned in terms of their own systems and processes. I think that their resistance to creating structure around what they learned meant that the changes that they could have made were less sustainable. It was a bit more ephemeral.

 

How did it feel for you to be on that journey with them?

 

The quality of personal learning relationships that they nurtured was amazing. It felt really positive. It was a set of relationships where people were genuinely curious about what different could look like and committed to changing their own behaviours and patterns. 

 

They were particularly interested in the idea that systems change is personal change, which is an aspect of systems change that can easily be neglected. Being with people who had such a commitment to deep change in their own practice and beliefs was inspiring.

 

It was also maddening at times. Their resistance to codifying and structuring made me occasionally go, “I don’t understand why you don’t want to enact what you have learned.” But the really nice thing about that is that they created an environment where we could say those things to each other. That was my first experience of a working environment where you could say hard truths to each other, and that was okay. 

 

On that, how might your experience with Lankelly affect the direction of your work going forward, or how has it already? 

 

There is zero chance that I would be doing the work that I’m doing now if I hadn’t had that relationship with Lankelly. Their exploration of systems both provided some really amazing learning material. I continue to reference this and point people out their System Behaviours work. Whilst it’s flawed in some ways, it’s still a really useful thing to do to this day. 

 

Thank you, Toby. Is there anything that you feel is unsaid that you want to elaborate on, or that we only scratched the surface of?

 

I absolutely get Lankelly’s decision to distribute its capital as part of a broader commitment to creating equity and justice in the world. That is brilliant – and it is also a real shame that they have taken themselves out of the funding landscape, because they were one of the few funders who were prepared to show other funders how to fund differently. They were a really helpful exemplar of the catalytic role that funders could play in thinking differently about how social change happens.

 

Where else do you see that in the funding landscape, and what is it about them that you feel has potential?

 

They showed that funding for learning was a possibility. A lot of the work I’m doing now is around supporting funders to switch from the idea of ‘you fund specific activity’ to ‘you fund organisations to learn collaboratively’. So that was a really important bit of inspiration. By doing it, they showed it was possible.

 

They asked some really, really important questions about governance. They were one of the first people to realise that changing all of this, changing the way that they funded, meant doing governance differently. They recognised that switching to a ‘funding for learning’ approach required rethinking how they did governance. Their governance inquiry was really significant, I think. 

 

I want to check, are there other areas of work or experiences you had with Lankelly that we haven’t touched on? 

 

One of the things that I think they did brilliantly was convening. Again, I think that’s one of the things that will be missed in the role that they played. They recognise that one of the systems change roles that they could play was to convene people, to ask different questions and to then be together differently. 

 

 

Hosted by Jack Becher. Edited by Sam Walby

 

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