Change Process Management
Putting a mission-led approach into practice requires a significant reframing in our ways of working
A mission-led approach demands a commitment to strategic change process management over incremental project management, combined with rigorous Collective Learning.
Doing this work well means committing to strategic action over a longer timeframe – transcending that focus on shorter-term projects and funding streams that has become so common. This is why it make sense to focus on a mission-led radical change process over at least a decade.
Change process management anchors all the other elements of our approach, and therefore key areas of change process management include:
- Awareness-raising: to build knowledge of the needs and opportunities for change with local citizens, organisations and businesses; focussing especially on young people. It is also good to create a mission-brand to identify work and communications relating to the community’s missions
- Horizon-scanning: to gather global inspiration on trends, ideas and experiences that help to inspire thinking and confidence on what could be done locally.
- Storytelling: Collaboratively developing strategic narratives that help to illustrate what an ambitious missions could look like in the community, and the benefits they could generate. This is part of rebuilding civic imagination capacities.
- Mission Co-creation: working with representative networks of community stakeholders to shape missions for the community – see Mission-led Change.
- Assets and Systems Mapping: iterative cycles of mapping local assets and systems to better understand the status quo, connections, gaps and to analyse scenarios that offer the greatest potential for change.
- Backcasting: to develop mission delivery pathways. Backcasting supports the ‘what must we do’ process of developing plans that are honestly aligned to missions. These pathways then help to inform more detailed portfolio development.
- Enablers Development: building on backcasting, assets and systems mapping to identify critical gaps relating to Enablers of Change, then design actions and experiments in response.
- Mission Portfolio Development: iterative portfolio development. informed by backcasting, enablers development, assets/systems analysis and learnings. Then managing continuous portfolio implementation and evaluation.
- Eliminate off-mission work: establish whether the community is currently planning to develop or invest in actions that are incompatible with the mission and therefore would soon become stranded assets. Find ways to cease these actions and divert effort and resources towards the mission portfolios.
- Continuous collective learning: along with evaluation cycles to establish what is working and what is not, impacts and to bring learnings into improving the overall process and action portfolios.
This is complex work, which is why a well-resourced Mission Incubator model and core team is so essential to hold, shape and accelerate the change process for a community’s missions. It is also why we invest in providing capacity development for mission-led change support.
