In the latest instalment of our unofficial and irregular ‘So what exactly does Regen Melbourne do?’ series, Director of Projects Nicole Barling-Luke explains how the different phases of Regen Melbourne’s SOIL methodology add up to systems transformation (or at least, how she thinks they will). 

Last year we shared the SOIL methodology, [sensemaking, organising, insights, leverage points] which describes Regen Melbourne’s approach to systemic transformation. This methodology sets the foundation for our work, and is applied to every project or initiative in our portfolio. 

As we begin 2024 we’ve been building out our understanding and practice of this approach. Based on the evolving project work, the refinement of SOIL has been in response to questions such as:

• How do we more clearly demonstrate what a systems convening role looks like for us  

• What roles do the Lead Convenors, and the whole collaborative team, need to play in different phases 

• How do we recognise the role of wisdom generally and ensure research is an integrated, supportive function throughout rather than compartmentalised into the Insights phase

• And perhaps most importantly, what elements need to be in place in order to move into the next phase with confidence. 

SOIL has focused the directionality of our work across the different phases and helped define the roles we need to play at different times. Perhaps most importantly, the breakdown of the SOIL framework we’re sharing here has helped us understand more clearly what elements need to be in place in order to move into the next phase. Of course, we recognise that any work in dynamic complex systems is never linear. And yet, we continue to find there are components of our evolving methodology which act as essential ingredients to collectively transition from learning about a challenge space into systemic transformations. 

For the fellow system nerds out there (it’s me, hi), what follows is a direct borrowing of the Challenge + Impact Map from the Griffith Centre for Systems Innovation amalgamated and contextualised with the RM SOIL methodology. I’d be absolutely delighted to discuss the specifics of this anytime, get in touch. 

Sensemaking 

The Sensemaking phase involves hyper-relational pattern spotting of emerging energy and activity around an identified challenge area, coming from engaged organisations and individuals working to solve our major social and ecological concerns. 

The Sensemaking, pattern-spotting and noticing emerging energy phase is where much of the effort of our team is spent, but is often the least visible. The reason it has historically been hard to articulate what RM does is because it’s difficult to demonstrate the value of intentionally moving through an ecosystem listening for disparate opportunities and angles that could come together as a defined project. Measuring and tracking the relational field – and all of the emerging connections and opportunities that the work uncovers – is not exactly the kind of thing you can put in a graph or create a report on. 

The essential ingredient in this phase is to end with a shared and ambitious collective orientation: what we call a Wildly Ambitious Goal. 

Our framing is intentionally “wildly ambitious” as we believe that wild ambition is necessary to meet the magnitude of the challenges we’re facing. And the only way to reach that ambition is to act with many people, many organisations using their resources for good, many solutions, many hands and many hearts. It’s naively ambitious for one or two people to be out there working towards the goal – less so if there’s coherent concerted action across the city.  

In order to coherently move into the next phase of organised action, the directionality of a Wildly Ambitious Goal is needed otherwise the emerging energy struggles to coalesce into meaningful and manageable connection. Thus the transition from Sensemaking to Organising is helped by a very clear ‘so what?’. 

We are seeing that getting to the ‘so what?’ happens in different ways and is an imperfect art. Creating the goal too early, without enough shared sensemaking risks landing a goal that is naive or not the right altitude and shared ambition – this then fails to excite the ecosystem as we move into (re)organising. Without excitement this work becomes near impossible.  

For the Swimmable Birrarung initiative, the Wildly Ambitious Goal was embedded within the framing and sensemaking from the outset. As a direction, it has proven to provide the right amount of imaginative joy to act as an infectious catalyst and the right amount of wild ambition for in order to properly undertake this task multiple interconnected complex technical and social conditions of our city will need to shift, some drastically. 

For Food Systems, on the precipice of the Sensemaking phase, we don’t yet know what the Wildly Ambitious Goal might be. Perhaps it will be Ending Food Waste, or perhaps it will be a goal more representative of the inherent relationship between food and the regions in Victoria. Only a period of deep relational pattern-spotting and hunch-testing will tell!  

The roles we play in Sensemaking 

As discussed over here, the types of activities in this phase include: general forums like our seasonal assemblies, visioning workshops, focused round-tables with cross-sector experts, the team attending events and workshops held by other organisations, lots and lots and lots of coffees and walks around Melbourne with existing members of the alliance, new organisations as they join, and our trusted sensor networks (board members, advisors). 

As they are undertaking all these activities the role of the Lead Convenor in Sensemaking is akin to ‘a magician’ – bringing together real elements and magicking them together to show the real, ambitious and achievable path, even if it still feels a bit mysterious. This comes together with the research function which is focused on providing grounding for existing knowledge about the challenge and the system in which it exists.    

In summary, the Sensemaking phase is about landing on a shared and ambitious collective orientation: a Wildly Ambitious Goal. 

Organising 

In the Sensemaking phase, we’ve already started to see how an existing ecosystem of actors is already connected and engaged with one another. The Organising phase involves identifying the gaps or barriers across silos and sectors, which are in need of new collaborations, partnerships and ways of working to realise the transformative potential. 

The essential ingredient in this phase is Fields of Action. 

Fields of Action are, for the poetic types among us, landscapes for collaboration.  For the technical types, they are a set of nested challenges, created to convene an associated (and interconnected) ecosystem of actors around defined themes to enact change. When taken together the sum total of the activities, insights and actors in the fields of action, oriented towards the Wildly Ambitious Goal, can transform our system towards a more regenerative Melbourne. 

Let’s break that down with an example. Swimmable Birrarung has six fields of action: Storytelling and Reconnection; River Health; Legal, Policy and Governance Systems; Business and Capital; Campaigns - Building a Movement; Swimming Activations.  

These were established at the end of 2022, after one year of Sensemaking, as an output of a design forum, attended by key stakeholders in the river ecosystem. They respond directly to the persistent and new challenges identified like stormwater pollution, the increasing extreme climate effects, disconnection to the history and story of the waterway and lack of access to the river. 

The Fields of Action signalled the shift from understanding the landscape towards creating coherence across a complex landscape, in order to get the ecosystem in formation. All the while learning about the interconnected behaviours, decisions, capabilities, infrastructures and relationships we need to realise the goal. 

These six Fields of Action for the Swimmable Birrarung map directly to a variety of system layers – in this project, we’re using the Water for Systems Change approach [values & beliefs, power, relationships, resource flows, practices & policies]. This means as we traverse across the fields of actions, we can be curious about the very specific details of why public liability insurance matters while recognising it is in conversation with guerilla campaigns involving diving boards coming off city bars. 

Again, to pause for a disclaimers on the imperfect art of this, each Field of Action of course contains within it the multilayered nature of reality and is never just power or just policies, and yet, by understanding the primary condition each field of action holds we can be assured that all angles are being addressed in order to affect change.   

The roles we play in Organising 

Within the Field of Actions, we’ve seen the role the Lead Convenors can play range from; convening, connecting, sensing, experimenting, enroling, sharing, chasing, leading, visualising, inspiring, challenging, gathering, listening and observing. It goes without saying the Lead Convenors are expert shape-shifters. The expectations of the different roles to be played at any given time is immense. To contain these roles under one hat, the best way we’ve come to understand the position of the Lead Convenors in this phase is akin to that of a community organiser, bringing together people, understanding their connection to the goal and catalysing scenarios for new relationships and collaborations to be born. This role happens in parallel to the research integration, which in this phase is about identifying the role of existing or new research for the Fields of Action. 

The reason for these multifaceted roles and activity sets, is (1) to accelerate collective knowledge and action around barriers and opportunities and (2) the necessity for connectivity between the Fields of Action. While it is necessary to break down the complexity of the system into meaningfully actionable sizes, we also must necessarily hold the connectivity of them all at the same time. 

In summary the Organising phase is about getting an alliance of actors in powerful formation towards the ambitious orientation through the Fields of Action.

Insights 

The Organising phase is coupled with the generation of insights that iteratively inform the roles and direction taken towards the shared goal. These organic insights are complemented by the power of research to ensure attunement to existing and emerging knowledge. This ensures our collective work is supported by, and honours, the deep knowledge held across the city. 

Often these are not sexy new insights, rather they are entrenched, sticky, layered up decades of decisions that need to be pulled at like a thread. Insights present themselves in many different forms. Sometimes insights are in the ‘traditional’ sense of research through literature reviews, global scans of best practice, policy documents and academic papers. Insights are also the little nuggets you overhear at an event, learning from others who are doing the same thing elsewhere (eg. making the Parramatta river swimmable), insights are also the outcome of introductions made through field of action activities where a storyteller meets a lawyer and what happens next…   

Organising and Insights cannot be consciously uncoupled. For it is only through the engagement, collaboration and organising work we do, that insights are surfaced.  

The essential ingredient in this phase is twofold; making relevant knowledge visible, actionable, coherent and in service to the wild ambition and providing an evidence base for an emerging portfolio of leverage points. Or Knowledge in Action. 

In the same way the form of the insights are different, the outputs of the insight phase are diffuse. So far the outputs have included a synthesis of emerging insights, typologies of themes and system dynamics, identification of new research questions, repositories of resources, systems transitions mapped onto the Three Horizon Frameworks, presentations, summary reports and field notes.  

Importantly, whatever the form, the insights add up to (1) value and orientation back into the Fields of Action about the collective knowledge of barriers, opportunities and dynamics and (2) target areas and criteria for the leverage points to be considered a portfolio of transformative projects.  

The roles we play in Insights 

The role of the Lead Convenor here is akin to that of a design researcher - making emerging insights visible, shared and action oriented, ensuring that the insights have orientation, directionality towards a shared purpose. This is deeply interwoven with the role of research in this phase which is focused on consolidating and amplifying foundational knowledge as well as emergent questions. 

In summary, the insights phase works to tilt our knowledge systems, and activities within the fields of action, towards the ambitious orientation to close the gap between wisdom and action. 

Leverage Points 

After working below the surface (in the soil), we can then begin to explore which existing and potential projects might unlock systemic transformation through Knowledge in Action. This phase involves collectively assessing which projects are (or could be) powerful leverage points for systems change and focusing our efforts on building a dedicated portfolio of collaborative projects. 

After two years we are at the Leverage Points phase for the Swimmable Birrarung initiative. The other projects are still in Sensemaking (Regen Streets and Food Systems) and Organising (Participatory Melbourne). Therefore we’re still learning specifically about which ingredients are the essential ones, and which add unique flavour. 

What we do know is, the essential ingredient for Leverage Points is a dedicated portfolio of collaborative projects. 

And our hunches about what is needed within this essential ingredient include:

• Understanding what shifts are required for transformative change, or at least what productive pokes we can make at a system to test where there is opportunity and to surface the deeper nature of the barriers 

• Making visible a transition logic across the Three Horizons Framework in order to understand what to focus on as we build stepping stones to the future we want to see 

• Enough legitimacy, trust, care and relationships to move fast on the fast layers and gently agitate the slow layers.

The roles we (intend to) play in Leverage points

This leverage points phase often has a gravitational pull to it as energy is unlocked in the doing and tangible projects are often easier to fund, structure and implement. We have experienced the pull into project land, where opportunities to add value or test something tangibly were justifiably taken. We love the energy and delight that people find in the action orientation of working above the ground. And yet, part of the role at the systems orchestration layer is to stay attuned to what is required for a set of activities to be transformational. We believe part of our role is to build coherent pathways to join the systemic work below ground so we, together, can learn about the collective efforts required which added together amount to the scale of change we need; in other words irresistible invitations to delve into the SOIL. 

More tangibly, what we’re learning about the role of Lead Convenor at this stage is more akin to that of an entrepreneurial project manager - spotting opportunities based on a rich landscape of knowledge and quickly mobilising a group of actors around the work to demonstrate what transformative above-the-ground action could look like. This, of course, is closely coupled with a rigorous research role of building new knowledge about the projects and their roles (positive, negative or neutral) in shifting systems. 

In summary, the Leverage Points phase presents and drives a tangible portfolio of projects that together generate tangible and systemic impact. 

Shaping the SOIL (while letting SOIL be SOIL)

A disclaimer: as anyone in this work knows, nothing is ever straightforward and linear. Detangling what is a ‘Sensemaking’ conversation from what is an ‘Insights’ activity is simply an exercise in performative logic so we don’t go mad in a vortex of complexity. 

Perhaps more generously, a vital part of the role we believe adds value at the systems layer is to manufacture containers to understand what will always remain messy and entangled. Without thoughtful containers of manageable actions to take to move something forward, it is very hard to get anything done. AND YET, nothing in the above piece evokes the dynamism, paradoxes, movement and aliveness of the city we are in service to; Greater Melbourne. Nor does anything in the above evoke the grittiness, diversity and teeming liveliness of actual soil.  

If you can, please go out and put your hands in the dirt and think of that as the container of action we’re working towards.  

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