We meet brilliant people every day who are trying to make things better. Things should be better, but we know that it’s really bloody hard. Partnerships wobble. Strategies are written, beautifully, and then quietly ignored. New funding lands, and then creates pressure rather than possibility.
More stuff is happening but impact doesn’t follow.
The common response is to do even more stuff: new programmes, new structures, new initiatives.
We think something else is needed, and we need to respond differently (which is easy for us to say, we know).
Most work struggles because the conditions surrounding the work aren’t strong enough.
Work (and the demands of work, often made by others!) moves faster than the foundations can support, and things get messy.
When the conditions are strong, the work works.
Where they are weak, even well-funded initiatives struggle to sustain impact. For us, getting the conditions right is the work.
The 3 Lenses
There are loads of ways to approach this stuff, you’ve probably read the books or the substacks. We, of course, borrow theories, practices and tools gathered across time and space and long(ish) careers. We bring all that with us, taking what works for us and what we think will work for you.
When we pull it all together, we look at work through three lenses:
Relationships:how people actually communicate, make decisions and take responsibility together
Conditions for Success: the things that need to be in place for the work to actually work
Energy & Joy: the meaning, motivation and energy people bring to the work
Using these three lenses helps people think more clearly about:
the meaning and purpose in their work
the relationships that will actually help things move
whether the basics are in place to make any of this work
This is the starting point for our work (not the answer to everything), they help us share what we do and how we do it. From there, we build the right mix of support - whether that’s research, strategy, facilitation or practical tools - to help make good work happen.