HCT Stepping Stones
Collaborative Architecture
5 Min Read
3 Min Read
3 Min Read
Back to all
Changing the story, holding the questions
10 Min Read
“We can’t solve the challenges we face from within the story that created them.”
Jon Alexander, Co-Founder of the New Citizenship project
What stories do we need to change in order to face the challenges ahead?
One is about certainty. At a time when the speed of the river around us feels overwhelming, people are desperate for safety and certainty about the steps ahead. What if instead we could tell a story about safe uncertainty - a way of being together grounded in trust, where people have the space and support to sit with questions until the answers emerge?
Another is about our systems. With health and social care, or civil society, we often think of systems as groups of organisations trying to work together to achieve some shared goals, though often with very different agendas and objectives. Another common story is that those systems are broken. But what if we think of a system as a set of living, shifting, interdependent relationships between people, processes and planet? Ones that constantly change in response to each other, and understand learning as something valuable and alive?
These are some of the stories that have changed for us over the last four years. It has involved letting go of some deep habits, having awkward conversations, trying, failing and trying again. But it has led to a profound change in how we think about what we are here to do, and how we can work and learn together.
As this chapter comes to an end we are looking ahead with the belief that the people and connections we have invested in will generate elegant new solutions to address health inequalities, and that these in turn will be a stimulus for others. We are continuing to lean in to sitting in discomfort, not-knowing, and asking the questions that will be part of building the next step. So for everyone who is interested in co-creating ‘what next?’, we leave you with some of the questions we are holding, and invite you get started with your own enquiry:
| How do we create dynamic structures with distributed power? We leaned away from traditional programme frameworks in an attempt not to replicate the problem we were trying to overcome, but we need to recognise that structures are both resisted and needed. |
| How do we manage the both/and of doing the urgent work, and creating space to come out of crisis response mode? |
| How else can we seed new collectives in a way that foregrounds equity and justice, while not trying to replicate something that was specific to us? |
| What else could collaborative architecture look like? |
| How can we ensure learning sustains when people move on? |
| What happens to momentum when the structure - the capacity, the resource, the convenor - steps away? |
| How can we all get better at nourishing the conditions for change rather than trying to control outcomes? |
| Who else? |
