🤔 Learning from the Community Sector and reimagining engagement strategies
One of our colleagues has a number of clients in the corporate sector wondering why their efforts at employee engagement have failed (their perspective, not ours) based on feedback from numerous pulses and surveys related to #culture, #employeeengagement, wellbeing and the like.
What emerged from this conversation was the following proposition – yet to be tested – while the NGO and community sector, for years, have been required to behave more like ‘business’ in the way they manage, administer and measure, many have still been able to achieve extraordinary results in community led change and improvement initiatives. For many, that is despite measuring, monitoring and reporting frameworks that are not necessarily the most congruent with their context.
- Given this, is it time for the corporate world to start learning from the community sector, what works and what doesn’t in the sphere of engagement, consultation, involvement and co-creation to effect sustainable, long lasting and embedded change?
- Is there now sufficient evidence from local and international organisations – large and small – related to the importance of creating the importance of context, collective engagement and involvement and investment in the capacity to do things differently?
- What might some reverse learning look like on the ground?
🤔 Does the data help or hinder decision making and complex change?
We had already been exploring what is meant by ‘data driven strategy and decision making’ for existing projects and clients.
On the topic of data-driven strategies, we’re seeing a shift. Data alone, especially big data, often lacks the crucial context needed to make meaningful decisions. It’s not enough to just rely on numbers and analytics. We’ve been exploring the idea of eco-systems of data, incorporating different sources of data to generate knowledge that adds value – not just information.
In deciding to be data driven, it would seem that decisions regarding what kind of data and for what purpose could be missing. We have uncovered, so far, the following kinds of data that an organisation might decide would be useful:  big data, thick data, rich data, chunky data and warm data.
Like many issues in the world of complexity, it is not either/or, it is both/and based on considerations of context, variety, speed of feedback, proximity to decision makers, equity of access to the data and involvement in implementation.
🤔 Emerging from the dusty archives
Viv spent time over the break going through boxes of historical (at times hysterical!) documents from her and her mentor, the late Professor Bill Ford, spanning some 50 years in the world of workplace reform and systems change. Emerging from the dusty archives are a number of issues warranting further pondering and publishing.
We are seeking to identify what may be common (universal) principles, heuristics or protocols for social systems and system change that can be tracked back for those who have always seen workplaces and/or communities as complex social systems.
How do we draw on the wisdom of Indigenous Knowledges to inform the ‘how’ complex systems change can be embedded and sustained?
To this end, we are Ko-labbing with Dr John Davis (Riteways Wanjau) and mob on this and related areas of application.
#SystemsChange #EmployeeEngagement #DataDrivenStrategy #CommunityLedChange #ComplexSystems #CorporateLearning #IndigenousKnowledge #KoLab #FutureOfWork #WorkplaceReform #Complexity #ComplexChange
