THE STAMFORD FORUM

MANIFESTO

1. Who We Are

Background to The Stamford Forum

The origins of the Stamford Forum lie in Whole Systems Development, a small network of organisational consultants and writers founded in 1996. WSD has been a nexus for learning and writing about whole systems development and change and, in 2003, the book, Leading Change, A Guide to Whole Systems Working, was published with the aim of expressing the principles underpinning this field of work.

In July 2006, the partners convened a wider gathering of colleagues with shared values but from different backgrounds and experiences. At this event in Stamford, we discovered a significant energy to work together. We explored the mutual benefits of an expanded network to support our work and to assist our further collective and individual learning. The Stamford Forum seeks to take further some of the emergent ideas of whole systems development, particularly on learning architectures, networks and middle ground frameworks. It seeks to develop these in the context of the complex challenges affecting organisations and communities, and move towards a completely new model of partnership working for individual, community, organisational, and social development.

2. Our Purpose

To lead a good life, you have to live in a great city

This modification of an ancient Greek aphorism captures our determination both to contribute significantly to the creation and sustenance of healthy organisations and communities and to develop creative ways in which people in those organisations and communities can be engaged and work together to achieve their purposes.

In the Stamford Forum, we share a sense of frustration about the current state of organisations, particularly those whose focus is on the provision of public services to local communities. Most of us have a long experience of seeking to square the circle of implementing government policies in ways that better serve the purposes of local people. But, despite the growing understanding of what works in these circumstances, there is still an overriding organisational tendency to default back to top-down and centrally-driven change, implemented through machine-like delivery mechanisms. How this is experienced by local people at the point of implementation and delivery is often very different from what was intended. The continuing pressure for performance and targets generates anxiety at all levels and drives out the very creativity needed to improve things locally. This leads to failure, which in its turn creates more fear and pressure from policy makers - and the wheel turns.

We believe that the real difficulties of public policy and service are not expressed in simple action plans, but present themselves as dilemmas to be balanced, for example:

the pressures for both universal provision and locally sensitive services
working with individual organisational performance targets and the need to “join up” provision by working across organisational, community and occupational boundaries
managing with accountable bureaucracies and hierarchies and with locally owned partnerships, networks, communities of practice and other ‘'new' forms of organising
working with both top-down and bottom-up pressures for change

Our energy is not to create ‘'new wine in old bottles' but to bring together our experience and expertise in understanding these real-world change dilemmas and to develop desirable and sustainable solutions via developmental methods, such as coaching, action learning and collaborative enquiry.

Values and Principles

“Awareness is Curative”

We aim to work in partnership to bring about transformations in people, services, organisations and policies. This involves a number of key operating assumptions and principles including:

Fresh Questions and New Ideas –- in circumstances of risk, uncertainty and confusion, the power to change and transform ourselves and what goes on around us, comes from ideas and insights that follow the posing of fresh questions.

Complexity and Crisis –- collaborative and partnership working is core to meeting the demands of complexity and ecological sustainability; “'managerialism'”is an inadequate response to this crisis.

Communities and Connectedness –- even when things look fragmented, they are densely connected through communities of place, occupation and interest. Understanding how these communities work and interact is central to any change strategy.

Co-Production and Collaboration –- we do our best work as equal partners with clients, communities and communities of interest who share the responsibility for valued change. We aim both to teach and to learn in this work. Our commitment is to ensure that our learning, skills and experiences are transferred to those with whom we work, and not just taken away to benefit our own subsequent work.

Top-down, Bottom-up and Lateral Working –- we work in the spaces to join up the multiple initiatives and energies to be found in any system.

Trajectories and Transformation - all living organisms - people, communities, and organisations - can be viewed as having trajectories. From a biographical perspective, seen over time, we are declining, maintaining equilibrium or developing new options, possibilities and capabilities. In The Stamford Forum, we work with the deeper and longer-term processes to shift the trajectories of people and organisations from decline or steady state to success.

How can the trajectories of declining communities or organisations or people be shifted to the positive? In the face of complex problems, single or piecemeal interventions are unlikely to be sustainable. To work with these processes of change and development means focusing on organising (rather than organisation) to join up all those stakeholders - people, groups and communities - who need to be part of the solutions to the problems as currently experienced. Successful interventions will be governed by timeliness, proper pacing, a sense of collective direction and cohesive leadership.

3. OUR OFFERING: What we do

“Connecting People for Social Impact”

The Stamford Forum works with the ideas and principles of whole systems development. In our view, most of what is currently called “'organisational development'”does not transform services or systems, but serves to maintain the status quo.

Transforming systems and services requires an overview or “'big picture' of the system concerned. It also means working with all the people who make up the system, including the relevant stakeholders and policymakers, to progress sustainable development through joint action and learning. Transformation is not achieved by single events, but requires “'change architectures' that map out an agreed set of activities and processes over time to sustain the change initiative. (Attwood et al 2003 p131-142).

We work at multiple levels, in diverse parts and in the spaces between them, to bring about change and development. In any system we pay attention to four main spheres or domains:

Policy formulation, implementation and evaluation
Organisational change
Service delivery
Impact on and engagement of individuals

Figure 1: “WHAT WE DO (1)

We believe that giving attention to all these domains (and often overlapping circles of activity) is essential to bring about lasting change and sustainable development. Our experience of change initiatives is that they tend to impact, principally, only on one of these domains –(perhaps in terms of service or individual development) – and do not “'transform' or bring about “'cultural change'” in the system as a whole.

Although the four domains are overlapping and mutually constitutive, they each pose particular challenges:

Developing, Implementing and Evaluating Public Policy

Policy development is relatively easy, but implementation is hard. Service delivery and organisational frameworks are often not evidence based and assume that complex agendas can be delivered top down and managed through a myriad of short term targets.

Current public policy on the development of communities, the services they receive and their ways of engaging their people is fragmented. Many government initiatives are pursued in separate ‘'silos'. It is important to move to evidence-based policy and to work with creative ways of evaluating the connections, or lack of them, between policy intentions and their outcomes for communities.

Organising

Very little now is accomplished by single organisations acting alone to implement public policy within communities. Public service agendas can only be delivered if they are framed and implemented horizontally as well as vertically.

For example, action to improve the employment of offenders requires partnerships between the prison and probation services, the police and the courts, local employers, education providers and so on. The development of great communities requires great partnerships and networks both between such organisations, nationally, regionally and locally, and between them and the communities they serve.

This work has especial importance because many individual organisations are ephemeral in the face of the persistence of government assumptions that changing structures creates improved outcomes. The evidence does not support this view; rather such initiatives are counterproductive as those concerned focus on personal survival and not improved service delivery.

The contribution of the Stamford Forum to this organising work is based on our experience in the relevant fields of policy development, organisational learning, community development and network development.

Improving Services

Investment in public services has been dramatically increased over recent years and much has been, and is being, done to improve local services. Nevertheless it is still usually the poorest communities that receive the worst services. ‘'One size fits all' ways of strengthening local services do not work in these communities.

We aim to shift the trajectory of improvement within such neighbourhoods. This requires an understanding of the dynamics of particular local communities and an encouragement of those who work at local level to join up their efforts in ways that create sustainable change for and with local residents.

Developing Individuals

Successful action and learning in policy, organisation and service development goes hand in hand with the personal development of those concerned. We also work with the development of individuals - within local services and local communities, and also up the chain to managers, directors and policy makers.

Our commitment is to work in ways which are sensitive to individual needs in the context of the participant's ‘'world'. This may mean, for example, encouraging policy makers to learn more about communities by creating development settings that afford connection with and learning from local residents. Similarly, we design learning opportunities between providers of local services and service users. Coaching enables individuals to find different ways of relating with potential partners across the boundaries of community, occupation or organisation.

The Relationship between the Four Domains of Activity

The four work domains described above are both separate and connected. Using the metaphor of a hologram, work with the primary aim of improving local services will be conducted in ways that also pays attention to the policy context, better ways of organising local services and their regional or national connections; and in ways that will also be developmental for those involved.

Figure 2: “WHAT WE DO (2)” The four domains can also be represented more systemically. As four aspects of any system, they are mutually constitutive; that is, each exists only in company with the others, and each exerts influence on, and is influenced by, the other domains.

In the well-functioning system, attention and resources are given to all four domains; in return each provides vital information and energy to the others. They do this through processes of exchange and feedback.

In a poorly functioning system, domains are neglected or isolated one from another; there is a marked reduction in energy and information flows and the conduits for exchange and feedback become blocked and feeble.

In the Stamford Forum, the way that we work will regularly ensure that projects can be organised in such a way that they start with any one of the four domains and then move on or out to link to and encompass the others:

4. How We Work

We work in a wide variety of ways that reflect both the situation in question and our own different skills and preferences. We can loosely be described as a ‘'Listen, Think, Do, Talk, Learn and Share Tank'. We bring people together in different forums and events, and together develop our thinking and planning at different levels, in order to find the levers of change that will make real and sustainable differences to the organisations we are working with

We employ a range of ‘'context-sensitive' learning processes - as discussed in Attwood et al (2002 pp111-183). These include community events, leadership networks; communities of practice and learning networks, action learning, service improvement tools, coaching, mentoring; job shadowing and exchange visits.

This diversity is underpinned by common values and principles. In particular, we work with an overall action learning approach to development. An Action Learning Approach Although action learning is a specific methodology, it is also a general approach that makes learning integral to, and inseparable from, working: “There is no learning without action, and no (sober and deliberate) action without learning” (Revans 1998 p 10) In contrast to conventional change management, learning is not an add-on or something that happens in parallel to the work; it is part of the work itself. In our work, the action learning perspective is fundamental to how the core objectives of any project are achieved. This implies a built-in evaluation process to test progress and learning on goals and purposes as the work unfolds.

5. Our Plans

We focus on both development pathways and development platforms. Pathways might be centred on a thematic common interest such as integration of services or new kinds of working together to achieve collaborative advantage (Huxham et al); the whole offering much more than the sum of the parts. Platforms can be specific geographic settings (often exhibiting the most significant disadvantage or greatest decline in trajectory), or particular groups (e.g. travellers or people with mental health problems).

Our agenda will emerge to reflect the priorities and focus of our Members, as well as issues that arise from changes in their external environment. We anticipate that key areas of interest which will influence our emerging agenda will be those that impact most heavily on our public services and the communities they seek to serve

We anticipate spending specific time on each of the areas of focus, in order that in-depth thinking, acting, learning and sharing can take place. We will aim for and expect that sustainable changes are made to the organisations and systems we work with and within, and that real benefits are seen by those who work for and are affected by these organisations and systems.

6. Our Members

In helping to build social and community capital, the Stamford Forum seeks to maximise co-production, the extent to which individuals and communities can express their latent skills and capacities to add greater value together.

Membership of the Stamford Forum is open to anyone who commits to its principles, agenda and way of working. Wide membership offers the benefits of lateral relationships and networks, and can support talking, listening, acting, sharing and learning with individuals, groups and organisations who may not otherwise work together. We want the policy makers and the implementers to connect at early stages; we want the budget holders to share decision making with those most affected by their decisions; we want joint action and shared responsibility.