A Systems Exploration of Pearson’s Paper on the ‘Full Circle’ Project
The ‘Full Circle’, a project of the Women’s Employ, Enter & Training United (WEETU) group, is used to explain core systems thinking principles, including visual representation via a systems map. Strategy, policy and programme development often suffers from impractical and unimplemented actions, and unintended consequences. Systems thinking principles help avoid some of these challenges. Additionally, three types of inter-organizational relationships, a form of tension which interacts with strategy and policy development, are also explored. This article aims to be useful in strategy, policy, and programme development, particularly in collaboration with others.
Firstly, too many change efforts fail to incorporate key system participants, particularly those at the frontline with lived experience of systemic weaknesses, and those at the action-front with sight of opportunities for improvement. Various system participants have different viewpoints on the situation of interest, and typically have greater awareness of key influential factors. Therefore the WEETU systems map aims to include all key participants. In this case there are 5 core groups; National Government, Unemployed Employee Workforce, Rural Low-Income Women, the WEETU Organization and Funders.
Secondly, one very common cause of unrealistic and impractical interventions is inappropriate boundary judgement, i.e. (sometimes unconsciously) ignoring critical influential factors rather than actively considering what needs to be in-scope and making explicit what is out of scope. Often the benefit here is in discussing with participants what needs to be scoped in and what can be excluded. Values, what is important to different participants, also often come into play during boundary discussions. Therefore the WEETU systems map makes system boundaries explicit, here with a bold blue line. Similarly aspects / components key to each of the 5 groups will appear within their circle.
Thirdly, too much strategy and policy development fails to articulate effective actions (much less incorporate learnings) and, where interventions / actions are identified, too many lofty ambitions die enroute due to system blindness, i.e. there is a lack of understanding of, sometimes conflicting, influences within the situation of interest. Often this manifests as lack of knowledge of the lived experience and the action-front, i.e. strategy / policy is disconnected from reality. So this diagram aims to depict critical influencing factors and also depict links between strategy and action.
Key Systems Thinking Concepts
- Identify Key Systems Participants in the Situation of Interest
- Explore the Boundary of the Situation of Interest: What’s in, and what’s out of scope?
- Group Influences and Linkages Between Different Systems Components
In sum then, this systems map applies systems thinking principles which aim to make explicit; the key systems participants/components; the boundary choice, influential links or interrelationships in the WEETU micro-credit project.
Inter-organizational Collaborative Relationships
This particular systems map also scopes inter-organizational relationships. Collaboration, working together towards a shared goal, is a common theme in contexts as diverse as workplace inclusion to innovation ecosystems to social justice efforts to projects such as WEETU. In any inter-organizational situation, there are networks of relationships between the participants. A large part of successful collaboration is getting to shared understanding of each other’s constraints. Harriss et al (2000) suggest that there are three basic ways that individual participants or groups relate based on different types of tension: competitive, coordinated and cooperative. Competition (orange in the diagramme) means there is tension amongst rivals for some kind of limited resources (such as in sport where winners are indicated by points, or in markets where consumers are indicated by pricing). Co-ordination (grey in the diagramme) requires some kind of agreed formal rules and hierarchy (such as division of responsibilities between board of management versus an executive operational team, or in a voting democracy). Cooperation (blue in the diagramme) is more complicated as commonality is more fluid, and established around something shared, such as a larger goal or values. Cooperative arrangement are typically voluntary agreements with participants continuing to re-evaluate and re-choosing to opt in (or out!). Most relationship include aspects of all three types and selecting a primary categorization is sometimes a value judgement.
The systems map here also shows two time periods with existing relationships (solid line connectors) and developing / new relationships in (dotted line connectors). It also shows one key missing relationship (in red).
Inter-organizational Relationship Types
- Competitive – with rivalry (orange)
- Co-ordinated – with organizational oversight (grey)
- Co-operative – opted into some commonality (blue)
A large part of successful collaboration is getting to shared understanding of each other’s constraints.
More generally, applications of these concepts include network organizations seek to find common ground and to give (less powerful) system participants a stronger, shared voice by providing a forum for collaboration between individuals and groups. They also apply to moving towards ‘joined up thinking’, a term used to reference governmental cross-departmental collaboration, or lack thereof.
These concepts, both the systems thinking concepts and the three types of collaboration, have been applied at many levels of abstraction. Systems thinking aims to be discipline-agnostic providing frameworks for thinking holistically and reflectively about situations, problems and solutions, even messy ones where participants have different values.
About the ‘Full Circle’ Project, Micro-Credit for Poverty Reduction in Rural England
Micro-credit “appeals to the left with talk of empowering women and the right by insisting on individual responsibility” (Roodman, 2012) so strategically is may be considered a good fit for organizations and individuals on both the left and right. The Women’s Employ, Enter & Training United (WEETU) brought together funders from the private and public sector to provide microcredit, lobby national government, and work with local businesses via their ‘Full Circle’ Project. By filling, this so called ‘market gap’, the project aimed to create ‘a path from welfare to work’ via micro-credit with a suite of services commonly offered to entrepreneurs; skills, training, and finance adapted for rural low-income women. Pearson, at the University of East Anglia, wrote the 2002 paper upon which the remainder of this article is based: ‘Micro-credit as a path from welfare to work: the experience of the Full Circle Project, UK’.
Group 1 – National Government and Key Components / Considerations (top right)
Within public sector resources there exists competition (orange dotted line) between welfare, employment and self-employment supports; interventions need to align more closely with the situation in which people find themselves. Governments are under a constant balancing act between income from tax and public expenditure, including welfare. Further, the then Department of Trade and Industry was different from but has an existing relationship with the Social Exclusion Unit with both competing for resources and a place high on the policy agenda (orange).
Pearson (2002) highlights that entrepreneurial interventions including microcredit were a blind spot for the UK’s ‘New Deal’ Labour approach despite being popular in low-income geographies. Perhaps Labour’s traditional relationship with big players in employment, unions and large employers, rather than the self-employment, may have fed a lack of awareness of entrepreneurs. The ‘International Social Banking Movement’, inspired the project, and is shown, but depicted as, outside the core systems map boundary. Greater diversity of representatives at the party policy table (and within the public sector) and greater partnership with local and national partners, and those representing rural women would enrich (and add complexity to) collaboration (creating additional blue lines).
Group 2 – Unemployed Employee Workforce and Key Components / Considerations (top left)
All prospective employees, each with diverse mixes of characteristics, compete with each other for jobs, back-to-work services and welfare. Additionally key characteristics most prevalent amongst the unemployed are shown, including age group, lone parents, the long-term unemployed and those with a disability. These different groups interact with each other. The group, the ‘unemployed employees workforce’, competes with prospective entrepreneurs for attention and thus policy, funding and services. This group also overlaps (below you’ll see the two overlapping ellipses) with low-income rural women who may similarly be part of this ‘unemployed employee workforce’.
(Further, the invisible institutional expectations of ‘men as bread-winners’ may also have been a blind spot, which is not depicted here.)
Group 3 – Rural Low-income Women and Key Components / Considerations (middle)
The rural low-income women have similarities as well as differences. Some of these participants have very complex personal circumstances as the five-way Venn diagramme shows. The most cursory reflection might conclude that for many of these women, entrepreneurship is not a viable option despite the presence of supporter, depicted in blue dotted line, but beyond the immediate project boundary (families, others in the household and organizations). The project made no attempt to interact with these parties but they are clearly connected to the women. The uninvolved fathers’ whose absence ‘creates’ lone parent families are also depicted (in red).
Intersectionality refers to the different experiences of people who fall into multiple minority or disadvantaged groups versus those whose experience is different from those with just a single disadvantage.
Intersectionality Examples
Gay Older Black Female Migrant versus Gay Middle-aged White Irish Man
Group 4 – WEETU Project Creates New Relationships / Connections
The project attempted to create new relationships with prospective entrepreneurs within the rural low-income group on the one hand, and with financial funding agencies on the other, depicted in solid blue. One way to consider the success of the project is by considering the solid blue links indicating additional new relationships. At the core, the project successfully created linkage between those seeking micro-credit and Funder – Group 5 (on the far right). Within WEETU one can envisage a degree of competition (depicted with orange connectors) to get the balance of these 3 elements of micro-credit, network opportunities and business skills, optimized. Participants may also have had to vie against each other for a share of the programme resources.
Beyond the individual and the immediate project, it is well established that some protection for existing welfare payment for those attempting to work their way out of poverty remove a potential barrier. Entrepreneurship is risky at the best of times and the prospect of losing an already-low income is likely to discourage participation. Government interventions need to consider both the income and expenditure side of personal finance, i.e. co-ordinate welfare and tax rules. The project constructively brought this idea to the table depicted by solid blue lines to national and local policy makers.
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Outcomes for the Women
Overall, 1 in 5 of the women are off income support and less than half self-employed. It also improved some “critical problems arising from years of social exclusions” (Pearson, 2002, p 172). Experience in other contexts suggests microfinance assists existing / fledgling microenterprises, and self-employment is unsuitable for most people. To name just one barrier to self-employment, the Full Circle project does nothing to address child-care. Against a multigenerational norm of welfare dependency, it seems doubtful that this intervention will scale beyond those for whom the traditional banking system was the barrier. Thus micro-credit is unsuitable for most people.
A more rounded view of common personal and intersectional circumstance (see diagramme) may help avoid simplistic or tweak interventions. To choose another example, the project did nothing to address a key poverty issue; lone parenting on low income; where is the support of fathers? Admirable as the project is, what opportunities for lone-parents have been foregone in favour of this project? Interventions, such as relationship supports for separated parents, or enforcement of child support payments, and other interventions that align income to need, may have had higher impact. For the individual rural poor women, welfare independence seems to a way off today with or without micro-finance.
Positive Unintended Consequences
While interventions may be built with one purpose in mind, there is the possibility of positive (and negative) unintended consequences. In the case of Full Circle, in addition to reducing social exclusion of the women, 9% of the women went onto further education, and the project evolved to offer business skills. Interventions benefit from the flexibility to respond flexibly as was seen here.
Defining Success – Funders versus Low-income Women
An Exercise in Values and Perspectives
For the funders, Pearson highlights successful loan repayment and ‘reaching’ low-income women. This is an example of different system participants judging success on different terms. Further, some system participants may see micro-finance as helpfully pulling people into the competitive market, but this is neither poverty alleviation nor welfare independence, risking a misalignment of vision for the project. Working to facilitate developing a shared vision with realistic outcomes for beneficiaries and partners, such as through facilitated workshops, can help to further inter-organizational co-operation and contribute to gaining buy-in for outcomes, resourcing and actions.
Systems Gaps – Identifying Potential New Relationships
As the project developed the need for business network and skills development emerged. These are well understood needs in entrepreneurship programmes and the project could have commenced with these two components in place had connections to existing entrepreneurship programmes been developed; thus there continues to be an opportunity to develop a new relationship with experienced entrepreneurship (adding to the existing local businesses connections).
Similarly as the UK state moves away from state service provision, more co-operation with NGOs and other service providers, such as the Organization for People with Disabilities, will be required in order to ensure knowledge from the action-front is incorporated. A future version of the map could identify and prioritize new relationships / connections to build.
Limitations
It seems that programme designers at WEETU iterated reflexively (which is welcome), but developed an intervention that is unsustainable without the financial cooperation of funding partners. There is no indication that the low-income rural women themselves were involved in programme design, although they may have indicated the need for business skills and developing business connections/networking. Sustainable interventions go beyond empowering small numbers of individuals to making structural changes in the wider environment and building local communities, i.e., sustainable intervention need to take a wider lens on poverty and employment creation in rural England. “More cognisance of everyone’s role in the co-created protection of social development” (Mowles, 2012) reveals gaps and opportunities for further development. Despite some success, the project may have benefited from more learnings or a wider set of objectives.
References
Harriss, J. (2000), Hewitt, T. and Robinson, D., ‘Why Inter-organizational relationships matter’, Managing development: understanding inter-organizational relationships, London, Sage Publications in association with The Open University, pp. 5.
Mowles, C. (2012) ‘Keeping means and ends in view – linking practical judgement, ethics and emergence’, Journal of International Development, vol 24, no. 5, pp. 544-55.
Pearson, R. (2002) ‘Micro-credit as a path from welfare to work: the experience of the Full Circle Project, UK’, in Lemire, B., Pearson, R. and Campbell, G. (eds) Women and Credit: Researching the Past, Refiguring the Future, Oxford, Berg, pp. 167–178.