Building bridges across boundaries — Part one
Implications for changemakers when forging new and different paths in uncertain times
This blog post was made better by the thoughtful and considered reflections of Carla Groom, who reviewed and helped me accessibly express the complexity of my thinking. Without you, it wouldn’t have been as good. Thank you.
This is the first post in a multi-part series that explores my reflections on how to be a changemaker in the UK Civil Service amidst the challenges of our time, with a focus on the realities of making change during crises.
Hello dear reader,
So, you found this blog post…and that means you’re either lost or are on a journey to somewhere new. Whilst I’m not quite sure where this blog post will go, being able to explore that curiosity feels like a gift.
I started thinking about the relationship between crises and organisations some while ago. I’ve had versions of this piece drafted for a long time. But months after I started writing, I couldn’t figure out exactly what, or for whom, I was writing. Candidly, I never assumed that I could write about crises. I’m not an emergency planner. I’m just someone who has been a changemaker during converging, seemingly never-ending crises. And I always figured that my experiences would remain a matter for me, because my story isn’t that significant.
But I found myself asked one day about bearing the burden of a process full of complex, agonising choices. We’re on the edge of this precipice more often than not lately. It became clear that I had to write something so that others could learn — and to know that they’re never really alone. So, if you’re going through a change, on the edge of a change, or in a transitional space and worried that it will feel like this forever, then this is for you.
So, here goes.
Systems are resilient, but not endlessly so
We act differently in a crisis. And in its aftermath. Radical change, reorganising work, reinventing organisational practices, and leadership training all take place simultaneously. That makes us participants in a crisis, not just spectators.
We’re dealing with so many visible and invisible crises. I think about the people who have been trying, often single-handedly, to move organisations from the inside. It’s an impossible balance doing unexpected things in atypical ways during the hardest times, particularly in suboptimal conditions or unsafe spaces. We don’t acknowledge how difficult it is to do change work.
Underpinning and exacerbating crises are the existing problems of state capabilities and capacities. Oftentimes demanding — but failing to find — urgent and bold action to change. So, it’s right that we ask questions about our institutions and their practices. We have a sacred responsibility in public service to get our crisis response right. And I think we are only in the foothills of asking the right questions, let alone finding the right answers to those questions.
Slowly, slowly then all at once
“In the moment of crisis, the wise build bridges and the foolish build dams.” — African proverb
My work is in the borderlands of organisations — as a border-walker* of sorts. A kind of landscape gardening of organisational, community, and cultural spaces. The language of the Civil Service, with its many unwritten rules and rituals, can seem impenetrable. I’ve been particularly adept at moving between different organisations, professions, and cultures in a way that creates opportunities for building bridges.
Bridge building takes different forms. We can practise it by taking what is there and assembling it in new ways, or re-contextualising stories, ideas, or rituals in new spaces. Pointing out or addressing the necessary fixes can be uncomfortable. It relies on tacit or ‘non-expert’ ways of knowing, courage to speak powerfully from the margins, asking meaningful and challenging questions, and deliberately playing a role in amplifying voices.
Sometimes the transition to shape and construct things has left me caught between worlds. Because of my ability to operate in liminal spaces, I’m positioned to walk the borders of different cultural groups to bring conversation and connection. All the time acting in stewardship of what I’ve been given. But the act of moving in and out of places can be all-consuming. It’s frequently lonely and uncomfortable work.
This work isn’t well understood. Translating intent into action is hard. The challenge in acting as a trusted insider is to close the gap enough to make the unsexy and seemingly small fixes that make a big difference. To exercise boldness requires gaining, and keeping, entry to certain spaces, and from the inside, shaping. By always working towards shining light on new paths.
This form of traversing boundaries between systems is untypical. Life on the cultural borderlands of organisations is defined by tension, literal and figurative. So dwelling in organisational borderlands requires its own kind of courage, and at times it may be perilous. I find myself in a conjuncture of events, ideas, and people. It provokes needing to know and hold the heft of multiple truths and glaring omissions every day. Here, I’ve found it necessary to show the need to ‘stay with the trouble’ and, sometimes, to step away. The line between the two is always there — but it’s harder to stay with the trouble.
Seeing the forest for the trees
It is complex, patient work to respond to crises. Situations can rapidly spiral. There is less and less room for manoeuvre in times of relentless demand. Perhaps it’s a particular form of crisis — service failure? — that produces these reflections. Here, the choices feel impossible. Navigating this is terrifying and disorienting. The sense of being stuck is overwhelming. We’re so used to extremities that we can’t see these landscapes anymore.
Yet these moments have been some of the most fertile stretches of growth and creativity for me. So much has sprung from deciding to remain curious, off balance, and at the edges of my own practice. Being on the verge of some unknown has helped me do things I hadn’t thought possible. Perhaps because that is when it is most necessary.
I’ve been thinking about the years I’ve spent working in this way. A journey of many slow, incremental steps and shifts to bring change, rather than dramatic breakthroughs that happen in a flash. Border-walking to me has always been an exciting affair. I’ve sought to search out “crisis potentials,” those fearfully unexpected circumstances that overwhelm organisations and systems.
This combination of real time social watchfulness, which is both fire prevention and firefighting, is an important craft skill. By crossing over at the intersection of systems, it makes certain things possible: facing outwards. I’ve wanted to do that: help teams avoid the gravitational pull of unreality, slow down the rush to easy answers, and focus on longer-term effectiveness. I move between ‘editor’ and ‘mediator’ and ‘translator,’ the boundaries of my roles blurring as contexts shift. Sometimes I’m identifiable by my influence. Other times by story listening and storytelling with generosity and care that offers an imperfect way forward.
This way of settling troubled waters and rebuilding quiet places contrasts starkly with the dominant approach in the Civil Service. The organisational environments that cultivate this capacity are rare. It is a latent, unseen, and imperceptible approach requiring the kinds of subtle and appreciative inquiry that is so different to the ‘I-can-fix-it’ crisis mentality. People are tempted to address troubles by stopping something from happening that looms in front of them. But this pulls people away from being able to react quickly when something is sensed (Dave Snowden’s Cynefin Framework).
Breakdown in sensemaking
We need to develop the ability to take the blows and respond whilst also adapting in the face of events. I’m interested in the short transitional period of crises — when the constraints start to bite, but before they become a problem of the scale that is someone’s priority to deal with. So, how do we find ways to act on “crisis potentials” based on things sensed within organisations?
Crises ripple through systems differently, affecting some parts quicker than others. There can be a common sense of feeling even if the degree of being affected is not the same. But something has changed in the wake of recent crises, and I’d argue that it’s accelerating. Communal experiences that blossomed briefly before and during the pandemic are being side-lined. It has been increasingly hard to hold onto the time, care, and perspective as a way of response. The snapback from deep connections and shared maps of meaning to rapid and rigid has been jarring. These have been especially hard years for changemaking.
This breakdown in sensemaking may be because it is intrinsically difficult to absorb novel and surprising experiences into ordinary day-to-day operations — especially large, technically orientated organisations. I’ve observed that in crisis conditions of anxiety, overwhelm, and dread affect the dynamics within organisations. The best sense I can make of this mirrors the way people experience complex and demanding circumstances: the struggle to make sense of what is happening and how to respond.
Having a story play out itself is never straightforward. In a crisis, there are competing attempts to sensemake and define what the narrative(s) will be. This process can take place in communication vacuums. Sometimes it’s a bridge for understanding stories, a lens for comprehending events. Other times, the limits of storytelling frames and impedes responses.
There are innumerable consequences for departing from sensemaking. It is often precisely the reverse of what would be needed in the face of crises. The heart of the matter is that in a crisis, we are called upon to discern and decide and act. Limitations are not allayed, but compounded and amplified. Somehow it feels simpler to attempt to break the system into separable, controllable parts. But this attempt at producing change through linear control is at best an illusion. It produces failed attempts at control which inhibit changemaking that itself would mitigate against crisis.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme
The echoes of crisis are ubiquitous and enduring. There’s little choice in government about the endless set of crises that need to be responded to. Most of them never get any public exposure and many are deeply obscure (Sam Freedman). Whilst there’s no real way to predict how things will turn out, we can consider where we, and our systems are, and where we think they should be.
What is emerging is a narrative about institutional responses to crises. I don’t want to rehash every crisis of every year, but the same phenomenon keeps happening repeatedly: our institutions are faltering in the face of seriously problematic demands. Perhaps this current moment is just the familiar tone of history rhyming with itself.
The Civil Service is full of creativity, spirit, cooperation, and resources. Those within it are part of something bigger, more enduring. But it has been a victim of growing complexity. The basic issue is that it is very difficult to be the kind of organisation that can regularly and systematically take a preventative approach across time. It’s a model which requires constant regular organisational adjustments. These sorts of adjustments to systems are hard — they require a significant amount of energy into administrative, ways of working, and relationships change. But without it, this can lead to a cascade of institutional consequences.
The trouble is that in normal times, the system “just works,” more or less as designed or should. But crises are crises because things are not being handled well by the current environment. So the rules get rewritten, and things previously considered impossible are subject to change. Some things get more stable (new normal), some revert, and some unravel further. Suddenly, it’s possible to accommodate the things you’re trying to do. Partly because the system reorganises its relationships and tries different things to bridge what isn’t working in the short term.
When the Civil Service goes out of equilibrium in unpredictable, potentially dire circumstances, it triggers overwhelm in its existing ability to respond. The alternative is by having a significant amount of what looks like “capacity” in the system; capability dedicated to identifying, understanding, and establishing what is going to be needed to act in crisis. This requires high levels of institutional flexibility and novel cooperation.
The thing about “capacity” is that it can be changed. That is the statecraft of government: balancing present interests and future possibilities. How we manage the inherent tensions that arise from making progress on the urgent whilst laying the foundations for longer-term structural changes. Because crises engender conflicting interpretations about how to respond. Every issue is not a strict binary, and addressing them involves difficult choices and different interests, not all of which can be reconciled.
We can’t control how things work out. But we can decide how we respond. In tricky, high stakes decision making, the task is to become capable of response. The most difficult of the numerous, nearly insurmountable challenges is the one most neglected: the intention to improve long-term response capabilities and capacities for coming generations. We can’t prepare for whatever’s coming next without facing whatever we’ve found in crisis. And unless we’re doing the work to change, we won’t be ready for the next crisis that’s coming.
Does it matter which road you took to Rome? Or does it only matter that you’re in Rome?
If nobody bothers to use the plans developed, then what is the point? — Lucy Easthope
There is an increasing number of people right now who are thinking about how to build better institutions. Yet surprisingly little attention is given to the human side of this, or the reasons why crises due to internal risk (i.e. government action) are not confronted soon enough.
When was the last time we had a substantive discussion about preparedness? For many of us, it’s been a while. It’s rare these days to talk about how to solve real problems or what crisis thinking requires. We almost never debate the actual nuts and bolts of solutions, of how to effectively coordinate and allocate scarce resources. The trade-offs, the choices, the uncomfortable inglorious compromises.
The Civil Service generally doesn’t have as good an understanding of how the public realm and country actually functions as it thinks it does. There is a fixation on how things are known and a lack of curiosity toward how things are. When under pressure, we haven’t known where the vulnerabilities and bottlenecks are, and so plans have had to be torn up and decisions made as improvisations. Something on paper that could have been manageable became the thing that tipped us over in reality.
The default is to negotiate uncertainty through imitation. There’s a tendency to copy other organisations. Keeping pace with a changing world is tough. Blueprints are used as a way of shortening the process. But the size and shape of a solution that had worked somewhere else is unlikely to work here. Namely because what works for/in one, well-versed context does not translate to another. The crisis may be clear, but the way it ripples out is not.
We must ask ourselves: do we want a manual or a map and a compass? We seek reassurance in plans. But not knowing is a legitimate response. There cannot be much forward planning for particulars that could have been predicted, but weren’t. We end up iterating and figuring out how to navigate an often entirely new context. By taking the next small step, and then the one after that. Because the more crisis ridden the situation, the more deeply surprising and unpredictable it is — and the more the plan gets shredded.
It is, therefore, a critical part of the work to experiment with new ways of being and learning. To approach things with curiosity during uncertain and ambiguous times. Many of the crises we face are deeply, inextricably intertwined. They require thoughtful, sustained consideration of how to respond when the worst is upon us. I’ve wrestled with this tension of coming into contact with difficult problems, and the realities of complexity. However, there’s little that has prepared me for the burdens of making the least worst decisions.
Rarely is there a deep dive into why plans won’t work — or what we should do instead. We don’t ask if they are sufficiently elastic, if they allow people to adjust it to their styles and approaches. Planning is a valuable learning process. But it relies on the quality of the questions asked. You learn what you do through the process of tackling hard things.
Our interventions cast long shadows. Crisis response should and absolutely must be broad churches, within which there can be considerable divergence of thought. This includes opinions that there’s no one template for each crisis, and a single ‘plan’ may not be the answer. After all, it’s the responders — who have the responsibility for navigating the situation — that really matter.
The ghosts of the future await
I love public administration. I see endless adaptability in the last eleven years or so of my life. Public services keep providing in a shifting landscape to provide more for and with less. I’m amazed and bewildered and haunted by my journey within the system. I keep fighting the good enduring fight. But I’ve worn the burdens of being at the sharp ends of public service heavily. Tenacity is essential in a system that wears you down and tires you out. I’m held together by deep passion, but also by trepidation. Yet I still look at the next ten years and I see endless opportunities.
But things are not working well. I feel hopeless and helpless sometimes, but I still dream of a better future. I believe in people. I believe in hope. I’m energised by what we can do together. Because despite everything, I am (pragmatically) optimistic about public service. It’s a belief based on experience, on a realism of what’s behind us and what’s before us.
So, what are we going to do? The future will not be crisis-free by any stretch of the imagination. Sometimes we barely have enough energy to put out the fires. How could we possibly think about building bridges or planting new trees? And how can governments possibly prepare for a future where uncertainty is the only certainty?
Well, there are really hard moments ahead, and really hopeful moments, too. Yes, things aren’t working as they should, and our systems are teetering on the edge, but the challenges are not insuperable. There are folks that are working towards better futures. They still believe something else is possible. They’re filling in the gaps and making sure the right things happen, whilst also thinking about how everything fits together and what needs to happen next. A lot has been done, but much more remains to do.
And, after everything, there is creativity and inventiveness in public service — and there isn’t anything more hopeful than that.
* Mearcstapa is an English word used in Beowulf, translated as “border-walker.”
