HCT Stepping Stones
Partnership and programme mode
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Learning is the work: frameworks that have helped us learn
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For HCT Gloucestershire, Stepping Stone 2 was initially characterised by rejection and “not that” language. A desire to rip up the rulebook and reinvent from the ground up. But certainty doesn’t rush in to fill the void, and in the absence of answers it is all too easy to fall back into old habits. The Stewardship Group knew that it didn’t want to replicate the problem it was trying to solve, but much of our first 18 months looked like slightly different versions of what came before.
Moving forwards requires acceptance that you don’t know the answer, and that having an answer might be the wrong way of thinking about the work. A significant moment for us was a shift from a negative framing of what we were doing - “not business as usual, not linear, not a programme” - to a positive frame: learning is the work.
This didn’t happen overnight, or on our own. It was the result of a lot of struggling with discomfort, and collaboration, learning and reflection with brilliant people including Hannah Hesselgreaves at Northumbria University, Dawn Plimmer at Collaborate CIC, Myron E. Rogers, and Toby Lindsay who was our embedded learning partner from the Kings Fund. We also learned from Bill Sharpe’s 3 Horizons thinking, and Nora Bateson’s ideas around warm data. Connecting with the work and ideas of others has given us a way of talking about what we are doing, what matters, and where we might be heading off the path. We have held these lightly, taking what we needed rather than buying into them wholesale. But some have become our touchstones, and we hope by sharing these here you can find something that resonates, and can be a welcome companion on your path.
Myron’s Maxims
Somewhere around our transition to Stepping Stone 3 we were introduced to systems change consultant Myron E. Rogers. Myron gently challenged some assumptions we were making: we were planning a gathering around the theme of leadership, but came to realise the interest underpinning it was really about different ways of being together. Since that point Myron’s six maxims for the leadership of change have become guiding principles, and ways of reflecting on the dynamics of how we work together across our systems.
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We learnt that HCT wasn’t about making the change, it was about being the change. The practice of seeing each other regularly, holding a space for questions and answers, learning and unlearning, discomfort and inquiry, was unusual in system life, and for us to make that change we needed to show up together.
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For us this means that building relationships isn’t an end in itself - it is the work. It’s what we do in our day-to-day, and how it is different as a result of our time together, that matters.
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It can be easy to get stuck because you want to have everything perfectly planned before you start. Recognising we don’t have the answers freed us up to think differently, and follow our curiosity and energy.
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The people involved in planning an experience will create it for people who look like them. The way it feels to create something is how the end product will feel. If we want a future built on trusting relationships, then how we get there has to model that future.
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Collaboration, co-production, co-creation - these have become our watchwords for how we imagine a different future that everyone has a stake in.
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From HCT’s earliest days gathering has been a fundamental practice, and the thing people value most is always the relationships and connections they come away with.
Three Horizons
Bill Sharpe’s Three Horizons framework is a way of thinking about and planning for a vision of the future, and recognising how every system has different phases happening at the same time. We have used it to examine the tensions between different ways of working, to name the difficulty of moving out of ‘business as usual’, and to notice ‘pockets of the future in the present’: glimpses of Horizon 3 that give us hope and inspiration.
Horizon 1 (H1) represents the current system, or the paradigm of ‘business as usual’.
Horizon 2 (H2) represents innovations which, if appropriately developed, can help bring about a different system. Often it shows up as ‘glimpses’ of the future in the here-and-now.
Horizon 3 (H3) represents the desired future system.
Referring back to Three Horizons helps us focus on learning, discovery, not knowing. It gives us language for recognising the gap between how things are described compared to how they function, or “H1 posing as H3”. And it helps us call out behaviours without shaming the person, e.g. ‘should’ is probably H1, and if you are being prescriptive you are not in H3. Most importantly perhaps it reminds us that all horizons are part of innovation, and that we should recognise what is valuable in H1 and H2 while reaching for H3.
Human Learning Systems
About 18 months in we encountered Human Learning Systems (HLS) through our work with Northumbria University and Collaborate CIC, and it gave us a new framework for thinking about our purpose and process, as well as inspiration from other places that are committed to an HLS approach.
HLS is an approach to public management, I.e. how public service is organised, governed and funded. An alternative to the traditional New Public Management paradigm, HLS is designed to support human flourishing, and to work effectively in complexity. You can find many ways in to learning about HLS on the Human Learning Systems website.
The lightbulb moment came from the gentle prompt: have you thought about learning being the work, rather than working and then learning? This principle, which is at the heart of HLS, gave us a positive language to replace the negative lexicon described above, moving from ‘counter-cultural’ and ‘not outputs based’ to ‘learning as our core strategy’.
While we wouldn’t describe ourselves as an HLS programme, in engaging with it we have discovered a different way of thinking about our relationship to the systems - and the humans - around us. It enabled us to value the questions and the process of not knowing instead of always reaching for answers and action. And it helped us recognise that the problems we are grappling with are complex in nature and therefore can’t be solved or controlled as a Theory of Change might assume. Instead they need to be approached with both/and thinking that embraces complexity, and works with opposing dynamics, or ‘polarities’. Translating this into practice became a building block of Stepping Stone 3.
You can deep dive into our HLS Case Study on the Human Learning Systems website.
Check out our resources page to find out who else we’ve learned from…
