News
“Exploring the new world”: responding effectively to complexity
Collaborate CIC and Newcastle Business School (NBS) have recently released a supplementary follow-up to their well-received report “A Whole New World: Funding and Commissioning in Complexity”. The new publication, titled “Exploring the new world: practical insights for funding, commissioning and managing in complexity” builds on the former by providing “practical examples of how organisations, funders and commissioners are fundamentally rethinking their design and delivery of support.”
The report’s authors, Toby Lowe and Dawn Plimmer, summarise it thusly on the Collaborate CIC blog:
… to respond effectively to complexity, funders, commissioners and those who work on the ground adopt a Human, Learning, Systems approach by:
- Being Human to one another: they recognise and respond to human variety with bespoke support, they build empathy between people, they recognise the strengths of others, and they seek to trust and be trusted.
- Using Learning to enable performance improvement: they use a variety of both quantitative and qualitative data to learn; they create learning cultures; and they fund and commission for learning, not for the delivery of specified services.
- Looking after the health of the Systems which create social outcomes: they create the conditions in which people can understand the systems of which they are part, and enable effective collaboration and co-ordination of actors within these systems.
Collaborate and NBS are also working to “build a movement” based on these principles, and those interested in getting involved are advised to keep an eye on Collaborate’s website, or to check out the burgeoning knowledge hub. In the meantime, the full “Exploring the new world” report is now available for download.