A three-part series into the School of System Change’s journey of cultivating systemic practice and facilitative capacity alongside partners. Sean Andrew shares his experience as Learning and Practice Partner Lead at the School, as he now transitions to a collaborative partner role.
Over the years at the School of System Change, we have been evolving our approach to supporting people, organizations, and networks to cultivate the capacity to design and facilitate systems change initiatives and learning processes. Through cycles of doing, reflecting, adapting, and articulating, Learning and Practice Partnerships have become the way we work and walk alongside people navigating complexity and change. They are guided by a generative dynamic of bringing forth capacity (tapping into what is already present), building capabilities (developing new skills), and moving together toward the broader systems change goals people are pursuing.
I have been stewarding our LPP work since it first took shape four years ago, and am now re-constellating with the School as I step into a collaborative partner role. This felt like a natural moment to harvest, weave, and offer what this work has been about and what it has meant to our partners and for us.
This series is offered not as a definitive or exhaustive account, but as one glimmer that gestures toward a threshold moment, closing one cycle and opening another.
As this work has unfolded, we've noticed more and more organizations offering similar forms of support (noting that we ourselves did not originate this), alongside a growing interest in working with us in this way. There has also been plenty of stumbling as we've attempted to invite in a relational, learning, and systemic paradigm between us and those we partner with – one that feels prefigurative to the change to which we wish to contribute. It has been refreshing, at times confusing, and deeply meaningful to us – authentic to who we are and to what we sense is needed in the world at this moment. We feel grateful to be sharing our learning and practice more widely now.
The series includes three blogs that explore different dimensions of the journey:
- The Origins – Early experiments of a relational paradigm
- The Everydayness – LPPs in practice: polarities and accompaniment
- The Ripples – Change spreading across scales
Alongside this series, we are developing a set of case studies that explore specific Learning and Practice Partnerships in greater depth and look forward to sharing them.
Learning and Practice Partnerships are grounded in being and wayfinding alongside one another. We hope this series is read in that same spirit. If something resonates, sparks a different perspective, or surfaces a question, we’d love to hear from you as part of a shared inquiry into what becomes possible as we learn and practice together. Get in touch with us at [email protected].
