Blog: Embedding systems thinking into strategy

Written by Raji Hunjan, CEO

As we have stepped up the communication about our transformation, the question I am often asked about is the launch date of Tudor’s new grants strategy. We are conscious of the need to work at pace, but we are also mindful that the level of internal and external change we are planning raises a very important question: what kind of strategy framework do we apply to an ambitious systems thinking approach, particularly one that has justice and equity at its core?

For us at Tudor, we have been thinking about the power of systems to resist meaningful change, and what this tells us about the actions we need to take. We have taken on the challenge of building a strategy that is able to flex and evolve, particularly in the global social and economic context in which we are operating. Our ambition for systems change is to move us closer to the transformation of systems to build strong, thriving communities.

In our reimagining of the world as it should be, communities are determining their own futures, with the resources, knowledge and capacity to achieve their goals in line with justice and equity. To help us lock this into a long-term strategic mission, we have identified a set of learning questions:

• How will we know when we are creating an eco-system where money and resources flow to meet the ambitions of our communities?
• How will we know when we are operating in a way that centres racial justice in our systems thinking?
• How will we know when communities are interconnected and owning their ability to thrive?
• How will we know when we are absorbing risk on behalf of the field building new systems?
• How will we know when we are enabling good endings alongside renewal?

These learning questions were developed collaboratively with trustees and staff and refined over a period of a few months. Our new staff who joined us in June were presented with an unusual induction process, as we took time to get to know each other through the challenge of developing a strategy for systems change. We are grateful to @HelenSanson for facilitating this work for us.

Recently, with @LouiseMousseau as our facilitator, we began working on developing a new grant-making process to enable us to begin to address these learning questions. Our first set of grants this year will be by invitation only, so that we can work out how to continue to operationalise our learning questions. This, in turn, puts the responsibility on us to research and identify organisations that will enable us to start moving in the direction of our mission.

We are working on being more transparent about how we will identify partners. We want to turn our attention to where ideas are generated by those who have been most impacted; some of this work has been developed over years but may not have received the level of investment it needs. We are listening to the evidence and engaging with the conversations about the different groups in our society who are least likely to receive large-scale funding. We have really appreciated that a growing number of organisations are getting in touch with us, and as we are still working out how to step up our level of engagement, we ask for a little more patience. Often, the most compelling work that shows how new systems could operate, is in the hands of those groups who are less known to funders.

Our first set of grants will set us on the path towards developing further funding rounds as we continue to build our new models of operating. Using our learning approach, we want our first set of grants to test our understanding of how systems could be reimagined in their entirety. We will create different opportunities for engagement and partnerships as we continue to develop our long-term approach.