You can’t build a bridge out of fettuccine
And other lessons
A few months ago I decided that after 5 good years it was time to move on from States of Change — a global learning collective initiated out of Nesta. I joined the team in London in 2017 as a Learning Services Manager and have since been part of the journey of spinning out and establishing States of Change as a separate entity — through a global pandemic. Leaving my role as Head of Learning I wanted to share two top of mind reflections on what I myself have learnt and a belated farewell.
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On fettuccini. Or, how I came to understand an experimental mindset
February 2018: it’s late, I’m jet lagged having flown into Melbourne from London. Tomorrow we’re beginning a learning program which has been months in the design and set-up. I bring in the final supplies for the workshop and head out to collapse asleep. Only to hear the lilting dutch accent of my colleague Bas (and now dear friend)
“oh Nicole no, you can’t build a bridge out of fettuccine!”
In preparation for the holy grail innovation exercise — The Marshmallow Challenge — I had grabbed whatever was on special in the pasta aisle thinking it was already a waste of food. As I was immediately informed, the flatness of fettuccine can’t structurally support a marshmallow. Teeth clenched, I went back to the shops muttering what exactly I thought of all this experimental mindset rah rah.
It seems like a small silly thing but this always reminds me how bewildering — and sometimes frustrating — it felt to enter the world of innovation and experimentation.
Not only the language and the use of marshmallows as teaching tools, but the different habits, behaviours and ways of asking questions you embody when seeking to generate partial knowledge in spaces of uncertainty. Over the years I’ve learnt a version of this language, I’ve found a style of inclusive and collaborative facilitation as a way to surface different knowledge systems and my habits and orientations to ‘problems’ have changed.
But it wasn’t always a pleasant learning process.
“If you don’t think you can do it well, don’t do it at all” was a motto drilled into me at my previous job. Entering a culture organised around learning rather than execution was a far bigger culture shock than any I experienced from moving 17,000kms abroad. It took me a lot of time and courage to trust that not knowing something wasn’t wrong. My risk perception had to be recalibrated
The things that I now had to do ‘well’ was to pose questions and share the assumptions that went into my work. The work itself was no less rigorous, in fact far more, but that rigour was being applied to setting up learning cycles when in spaces of uncertainty rather than shiny solutions. And boy was that exhausting and confusing.
In many ways, I had the optimal conditions to move risk from a wrong answer and to an unasked question. I had a permissive environment and a team that spoke the language and used the tools. And yet, I was recalibrating risk while navigating a new environment as a young female on a team with predominantly male leadership in an organisation which prided itself on expertise and edge practice. I had ,and have whiteness, a good tertiary education and middle-class privileges as capital. And I still don’t have a neat way to detangle my ‘innovation learning journey’ from the environment and my positionality in it. Recalibrating risk as I adopted an experimental mindset in my work, couldn’t ever be separated out from the power navigation required in the team and organisational environment.
As I was undergoing my own version of unlearning we were designing and running long-form training programs to support government teams to take an experimental approach to policy challenges. During this first program and the many after, I found that if nothing else, talking about my own experience was a bridge for others to reflect on the emotional process they were experiencing.
I’ve witnessed individuals and teams grow immensely in their sense of self-efficacy and agency — their confidence and ability to enact change in their environments. I’ve witnessed that in myself. AND I always get a bit nervous when we narrow in on the language of the ‘courage to break the rules and take risks’ when advocating for more innovation in the public sector because it can individualise what is also a structural and cultural issue. And often, when we individualise a systemic issue it is those with the least amount of power or capital that then stand with the most amount to lose. Something I am invested in learning more about, because my own experience has still been one of considerable privilege and access to power.
So since this fettuccine incident I’ve become more comfortable with an experimental mindset, as well as more comfortable with creating spaces for others to rehearse and embody what organising around learning looks and feels like. I’ve learnt that ‘going into the unknown’ requires rigour, it requires an attentiveness to the emotional process to create productive reflection and it requires attention to structures that reward and punish risk differently for different people at different times.
How we work is how we think change happens
In 2019 we invited Penny Hagen from the Auckland Co-Design lab to join us for a portion of the learning program and she spoke about “how we work is how we think change happens” as a way to get project teams to interrogate their day to day practices. I think about this a lot and have decided it’s my most energising ‘theory of change’.
I’ve lost count of the conversations I’ve had about how you measure culture change and how you measure innovation learning. We made some attempts in our 2018 and 2019 programs and States of Change has an on-going question around what an impact framework for culture change could look like, learning alongside many others in this space.
Currently though for me, the most energising observable shift in behaviour is when teams begin to align their day to day practices with the outcome they are trying to create. Perhaps it’s the team we worked with who invited regional school kids to a program showcase to hear from the voices at the center of the project, embodying a community partnership approach. Attending to the day to day behaviours and habits as a mechanism of culture change is what the States of Change programs were designed to do. And yet, reflecting on the last 5 years we didn’t always explicitly state a value set behind these practices or organising frameworks. And what I’ve been observing, and been motivated by, is that these practices are, more often than not, privileging relationships between people and working to flatten or step outside hierchachires and default decision-making processes within public sector structures. This change in “how” we are working is more power-literate, both resistant to, and enacting alternatives to, the status-quo.
It’s political and it reminds me of Sara Ahmed talking about how to live a feminist life “we enact the world we are aiming for; nothing less will do”. And I’m looking forward to seeing how this type of feminist praxis can become more centered in the work that I do.
Reflecting on change initiatives I’ve been part of I do recognise the need for big structural change between sectors, for funding to be distributed differently and for new people and culture systems etc. And I want to pay the most attention to is those day to day spaces where practice is aligned with a value set you want to bring about in the world.
As adrienne maree brown says — “what you pay attention to grows”.
A belated farewell
I left the UK at the end of 2018 when my 2 year youth mobility visa expired. I was, and still sometimes am, quite sad about leaving. One part of this was the joy I had at Nesta as part of the Skills Team.
The time I was there was a whirlwind of learning about social innovation and design from some incredibly experienced practitioners and thinkers. I never take for granted the access and rigorous overview of the field of public sector innovation I had in those early years. It was here, and before my time, that the origin stories of what would become States of Change were hatched.
But my experience, and the story that I don’t tell enough is a group of 20 somethings trying to figure out what the heck a ‘Learning Service Manager’ actually meant as a job function, what infrastructure was needed for an ‘experiential-team-based-project-based-learning-program’, how to mediate battles between powerpoint and google slide fonts, putting stationary orders in for bulk sharpies — and having the best time of it. As States of Change became more and more it’s own independent entity there was rarely a day that went by that I didn’t draw on the vast array of knowledge and assets we as a whole team created, whether it be templates, content slides, design guides, worksheets or program logics.
The way States of Change transitioned out of Nesta there was no one moment where I’d left, yet that time has well and truly ended. The Skills Team as part of Nesta no longer exists and the people have dispersed into other areas of Nesta, we got James to come over to States of Change, others went off to Deloitte, Snook, FutureGov, UNDP, UK Department of Justice and the British Council.
And even though it’s been 3.5 years and I’ve said different versions of goodbyes, I wanted to on-the-record thank the people who were part of my origin story into this wild world of marshmallows and experimentation. I’m so grateful to you and all the sensemaking we did over the exorbitantly expensive coffee that as an antipodean abroad I insisted we get.
On next steps
Moving on from States of Change has been both hard and easy. Easy because after working in a very small remote team across an 11 hour time zone since 2018 I want to work with a bigger team, closer to home, with an office to work from thereby forcing me to get dressed (…at least some of the time).
Hard because turning away from a global role in an organisation that I have helped shape which has a network of expert practitioners prompted fears about what success looks like from here.
It’s been so satisfying and enriching for me to tell the story of international practice and global learning networks. And I have grappled with where that satisfaction comes from — is the desire for global scale just capitalism talking, is the desire to stay deeply inter-connected to the UK as a white settler in Australia a neo-colonialist ideology or do I miss Charles Bakery on Lower Clapton Road?
To cut an angsty millennial story short the decision was ultimately made one morning in a yoga class (yes, I am that much of an inner-city cliche). I learn Ashtanga yoga, where its taught that before you even begin the abdominal warm-ups to wake up the diaphragm you have to pass your morning bowels; clear your digestive tracts; aka take your morning 💩.
To which one morning my teacher said
if you always wait for the perfect conditions your practice will never start — just get on the mat.
And so I am very excited to get on the mat to explore my and others practice at Paper Giant. An organisation with a critical approach and a wonderful (in-person!) team which is closer to home. For me right now, that home is on the land, near the waterways and under the skies of the Wurundjeri people.
I’m staying on as a Fellow at States of Change and look forward to paying the lessons of fettuccine on.
