A conversation with Thea Snow, Director of the Centre for Public Impact Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. Thea works in exploring ways to engage government and other changemakers to reimagine what government could be.

Interviewed by: Amanda Reeves

Transcript

Amanda Reeves: How does government understand its role within the ecosystem? What assumptions does it hold and how might we test these? How can we avoid polarization, and instead have generative conversations with people who hold differing views?

I'm Amanda Reeves, and I'm your host for FuturePod today.

Thea Snow: Part of what I'm observing is that people feel let down by the existing system. People are feeling left out of that system. And when you don't have good social security nets that's really frightening, you know? I think we're overwhelming ourselves, and what happens when people feel disconnected or frightened is they revert to sort of a tribalism. And that's, that's what I'm observing, that our ability to have conversations with other people who have different views to us seems to be getting harder and harder.

Amanda Reeves: That's my guest Thea Snow, Director with the Centre for Public Impact for Australia and New Zealand. Thea works in exploring ways to engage with government and other actors within the ecosystem to reimagine what government could be.

Welcome to FuturePod Thea!

Thea Snow: Thanks. It's great to be here.

Amanda Reeves: It's, it's such a treat. I've really enjoyed following your work for a while, and I'm so excited to be sharing a bit about what you and CPI are doing through the pod.

To get us started, can you tell us a little bit about what is the Thea Snow story?

Thea Snow: Yeah, sure. So I actually started my career as a lawyer. I studied history, politics, and law, and was pretty convinced that I wanted to be a human rights lawyer. And so went sort of down that path. I actually went to a big corporate commercial firm but was able to be part of a human rights law group as part of that.

And then pretty quickly realized through a number of cases that I was involved with, that the problem with the law is that you can only apply the law as it is when you're a lawyer and sometimes the law feels really unfair. And so I decided pretty quickly that I couldn't stick with that. And that law probably wasn't for me.

And so I moved into government because I thought that's the place that shapes the laws, so maybe that's a better place for me. So I spent almost 10 years in government in, on and off while I had kids, working in social policy in the Victorian government. And towards the end started to feel pretty frustrated, I have to say, around the lack of risk taking, around the lack of creativity, and around the lack of collaboration.

And I didn't even necessarily have language for all of that at the time, but it was just this sense of frustration at what government could be and what it wasn't doing.

So I took some time out to study. I thought I need to take a break and, and actually find space and time to, to think about these questions that I'm holding and to understand why government works the way it does a little bit better.

So I did my Masters in public policy and I did that in London. And while I was in London, I just met this incredible community of people who were asking the same questions as me and gave me a language and a way of talking about this stuff that I'd never had before. And one of those groups that I met who was doing that was the Center for Public Impact, which is where I am now.

So when I came back to Australia in 2020 I, I couldn't see people doing that kind of work. The work of re-Imagining Government, that's the language that we use, in an Australian context. And so that's when Adrian and I spoke and agreed that it felt like an exciting opportunity to bring CPI to this part of the world and to explore what we could do here.

Amanda Reeves: Oh, fabulous. I can, I can really relate to that. I spent a few years working in government as well, and I arrived in very similar sort of ways. I was very keen on trying to think about where are those points of leverage and how can you have more impact in sort of shifting some thinking around things. And my experience of government wasn't quite what I expected or hoped it might be.

Thea Snow: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that there are absolute heroes

Amanda Reeves: Mm

Thea Snow: who despite feeling like that, stay in government and keep pushing. And I have so much respect for them.

Amanda Reeves: mm-Hmm.

Thea Snow: There are also lots of great people, I think, who, who end up leaving because of that sense of frustration or disappointment or, or a lack of agency to sort drive the change that they wanted to be able to be part of when they entered government in first place.

Amanda Reeves: Absolutely. And so I'm really interested in this idea of reimagining government. What does that look like for you?

Thea Snow: Well, it's actually, it's a really great question and I think I hadn't necessarily thought about the language of reimagining really deeply until I was actually having a conversation with a woman called Cassie Robinson, who is doing a lot of work in imagination. I had a conversation with her a few years ago and she said to me, you know, why do you choose the language of, of reimagining why that word? And what does it mean to reimagine? And I think that to me, what re-imagining something means is questioning it in a really fundamental way, and that's what we do at CPI. So we talk about changing not just what government does, not just what the methods that it uses or the the toolkits that it applies, but also what government is.

So we talk about the distinction between being and doing, and a big part of our work in reimagining government is working with partners in government to help them surface assumptions that they might hold around the role of government in relation to the rest of the system. And by that I mean not-for-profits, communities, citizens you know, corporate players.

Like how does government understand its role within that ecosystem? What assumptions is it holding and how might we test those? By virtue of sort of surfacing them and testing them, open up new possibilities for what things might be possible and how it might look different.

So for me, this process and practice of imagination is around surfacing invisible scripts and then giving people permission and the sense of possibility around recognizing that those scripts can be changed and the incredible power that lies within that.

Amanda Reeves: Oh, I love that. And so the work that you're doing, is that predominantly with government or are you also working with some of those other relationships that you mentioned?

Mmm.

Thea Snow: A lot of our work is with government and that's at all levels. So federal, state, and local. But we also do work with other actors from different parts of the system. So one of our partnerships is with Dusseldorp Forum, which is a philanthropic organization that funds a lot of place-based initiatives across the country.

We are also in conversations with people who call themselves intermediaries. So other groups like Collaboration for Impact or you know, there's a group called the Possibility Partnership, who we are speaking to at the moment who are groups of people who are part of the ecosystem of actors who are challenging norms around how does government relate to community? How does government engage with service providers in the not-for-profit sector? And how do we sort of collectively shape new narratives and imagine new possibilities around that?

Amanda Reeves: Oh, I love that. Fabulous.

I'd like to ask a bit about your practice and your methods. How do you approach bringing the future into this work?

Thea Snow: Futures and foresight methodology interestingly is not a methodology that we've explicitly used at CPI. And I think that that is absolutely an aligned field of practice. But it's not something we've lent into really heavily because we don't skillset in our team the moment. But something that we have been playing with, which feels really complimentary to that, is an explicit imagination practice.

So, I spoke before about imagination being you know, sort of, like flowing through all of our work. But we also recently partnered with the City of Melbourne to design and deliver a five day imagination journey for citizens in Southbank, citizens and community and business people and, and local government people as well, come together to imagine new futures for that place in the context of the climate crisis.

And that work was led by my colleague Kira and supported by Asitha, our other colleague, and it was just this incredible I guess affirmation of the power of imagination and giving people permission and spaces to pull themselves out of the every day to come together with people who they wouldn't necessarily otherwise know or meet, and do collective imagining.

That was a really sort critical feature of that work that it's not about an individual going through a process. It was about a collective of people coming together to engage as a collective in this process of envisioning new futures. And I think the relationship between that community building piece and that collective imagining is, is something that we are really, really interested in exploring further as well.

Amanda Reeves: I'm really curious. How has that work been approached?

Thea Snow: Yeah, so a lot of our work, because we want people to sort of really tap into parts of themselves that perhaps they're not used to tapping into. We tend to do work and activities and create experiences that are very embodied, and, and, move people out of the sort of pure cognitive space, into a space where they can feel things or they can experience things, or they can laugh at things in ways that sort of aren't typical, certainly for people who work in government. And so some of the work that we've done to support public servants in their practice of imagination is to use metaphors.

So get them to build things with different materials, or even not build things, but represent things. So one of one of the programs that we ran with really senior public servants, it sort of feels almost absurd, you know, to give them leaves and little seed pods and twigs and say, we want you to represent your system using these seeds and pods and you can see them sort of stiffen at the beginning. But then the power of using metaphor is that it opens up conversations that would never otherwise be possible. One of the things that we gave them were roots, and sure enough the idea of the stuff that happens beneath the surface, the subterranean matter and the way that those invisible foundations shape everything else that these very senior public servants think is or is not possible was just such a profound conversation and not a conversation that I feel like we could have accessed had we just sat around and done some sort of brainstorming and used whiteboards. So for us, a big part of what we do is gently and carefully practicing stuff that feels a little bit uncomfortable for people. We talk about you know, we don't wanna push people into the panic zone, but we do wanna push people into the stretch zone because stretch is where you are challenging, and that's really the difference I think between sort of an analytical process and an imaginative process.

Amanda Reeves: Mm. Yes. Yeah, that's such a good point. And I love, I love that idea of using the roots to help people connect with the things that if we were just doing this on a whiteboard, we'd be looking often just at that surface level and having something that explicitly invites people to think about what's below the surface. It's so simple, but so elegant in the can do that.

Thea Snow: Yeah. And you never know, you never know what's gonna come out as well. You know, like sometimes that's something that I've learned, like sometimes you give the roots and they come up with a completely different explanation or you know, it was really interesting, like that one group that we worked with, we were using a Play-Doh kind of thing. And they made these cannoli and they were talking about, you know, the stuff in the middle and the sort of the, the crust on the outside and, and using that as a metaphor, which is not something that I ever would've thought of. So you gotta hold, hold, you know, hold lightly the ideas around where you think they might go with those materials or those activities because I'm constantly surprised, and I constantly learn. That's part of what I love about my work well, that the openness of the way that we work with people means that I'm constantly learning and being exposed to new ideas and new interpretations of things as well.

Amanda Reeves: Absolutely, and that you're really creating that space for people to bring their own subjective sense making into it, that what a root means for me might be very different from what a root means for you.

Thea Snow: Exactly.

Amanda Reeves: Oh, I love that.

Amanda Reeves: So Thea, I'm interested in what's catching your attention. So what might be shifting around you that's setting off your feelers.

Thea Snow: Yeah, it's hard at the moment not to ignore what's happening in the world when you ask a question like that.

And the world does feel a bit frightening at the moment in terms of the fact that there are lots of very important elections this year.

Mmhmm. There's a number of wars on foot at the moment. You know, Trump is looking like the next likely Republican candidate and it's sort of like, how did we get here? And part of what I think is happening, and part of what I'm observing is that people feel let down by the existing system.

I think that's partly the fault of the way that market capitalism has developed and the way that people are feeling left out of that system. And when you don't have good social security nets that's really frightening, you know? know I think it's also people feeling overwhelmed by the pace and the speed. I don't think we've worked out as humans how to have good relationships with technology and with our screens, and I think we're overwhelming ourselves, and that's leading to some strange behaviors and reactions as well.

I think it's also what happens when people feel disconnected or frightened is they revert to sort of a tribalism. And that's, that's what I'm observing, that our ability to have conversations with other people who have different views to us seems to be getting harder and harder.

This sort of tribal, I believe this and you believe that, and therefore we are different and we cannot ever meet, is feeling more pronounced.

That feels like a really frightening trend for me because the ability to have conversations and find ways of meeting each other, even when you hold different values or different views is so critical to the advancement of everything.

And so a question that I'm holding is how do we do that? And you know, something that I'm really excited about is that my job does allow me to engage in questions like that. So a sort of a hopeful side of what I've just described is that as CPI we're in very early conversations, but exploring with another organization the idea of what kind of thing could we offer?

What kind of learning program or learning experience could we offer, which would tackle that question of how do we have generative conversations across difference? How do we avoid polarization? And what skills and mindsets do we need to make that possible?

Amanda Reeves: Hmm. It's such an interesting space, like I feel, I feel there's something really interesting here between moving from talking about embodiment and sort of being connected and present with our whole selves and who we are, and then it feels like this real contrast with what we're seeing in terms of that fractious separating and the return to tribalism. And I'm wondering, I'm wondering if there's maybe a connection between those two pieces or maybe there's a potential for embodiment to be an important part of how we help. You know, I, I just keep thinking about all of these sort of frayed nervous systems, trying to make sense of everything that's happening under stressful conditions.

Thea Snow: Yeah, it's such an interesting point, and I think that's, you know. One of the big problems of the enlightenment thinking that we've stayed stuck in is this idea that mind and body are separate things.

Amanda Reeves: Mm-hmm. And that mind is superior to body.

Thea Snow: And that mind is superior to body. Exactly. And there's, you know, Ian McGilchrist has written about that, and there's all that stuff about embodied cognition.

I'm fascinated by those conversations and

Amanda Reeves: Yes.

Thea Snow: how do we integrate those two things. Again, like I think dichotomous thinking, which probably started with enlightenment thinking to some extent has been super useful for certain things know, like logic as a practice, which, you know, predated that, but really useful.

But also I think that what we are starting to realize is that we've created a whole lot of false dichotomies. Because dichotomies feel neat, and easy to categorize and easy to understand, we lean into them because it's much harder to say this is true and this is also true even though there's an inconsistency between those things.

And so I think that idea of the dichotomy between mind and body is also something that we've really allowed to take hold in a way that's really unhelpful. And, you know, interestingly, one of the other sort of projects that I'm peripherally involved in is around the role of healing as part of systems change.

So what role does healing play? What is the role of healing in supporting systems transformation? Recognizing that sometimes, you know, the trauma that exists in a system is holding it stuck that the, the, you know, the group that I'm lucky enough to be involved with are healing practitioners, who do meditations and healing practices and embodied things.

On the one hand, it feels really quite wacky. Like how, how I bring this to a group of public servants?

And on the other hand, I think there's something really, I'm really fascinated by that and I'm holding onto it because I think there's something, there's something there for sure.

Amanda Reeves: I'd like to ask you a little about this. I got curious when you were telling me about sort of bringing, you know, some of these leaves and sticks to senior public servants. How do you, how do you navigate that? I don't know that sensibility that, you know, professional people do very serious, important work and don't create space or capacity for doing things that are a bit left of field or a bit more embodied or a bit more creative, imaginative, you know, our idea of what professionalism is often is about excluding those things. So how do you approach that when you are trying to introduce these kind of left of field practices?

Thea Snow: mm It's a great question, and the answer is slowly and carefully, and often in spaces other than their workplaces.

Amanda Reeves: Hmm.

Thea Snow: So, like when we do the leaves and twigs we are not in the office, you know, we're in a different space. And we don't do that until it's like part of a residential program that we run, and we don't do it till day three.

Because we recognize the importance of introducing it when there has been trust built, when people have relaxed and it actually comes after a whole lot of embodied games. So we sort of, we let people be silly first in a almost like frivolous way. And then you see them shedding stuff, you know, they, they relate to each other differently. They, they laugh, they lighten, they're able to lean into the, what we call the sticks and twigs more easily. But I think what you've pointed out is really important in that you can't push people into activities too quickly that feel really foreign to them.

At the same time, there are really simple things you can do, like really simple embodied things like we did a great, a really fantastic facilitation, like we learned about facilitation with a woman called Viv McWaters.

And she teaches things like sociometry. So instead of saying to people, you, you ask question you know, where do you sit on a scale of one to 10?

And instead of asking people to say it, you ask people to stand along the line.

When people stand on a line, they, they look at other people and then they adjust themselves relative to other people. And there's this interplay between people that there is not when you just say, oh, I'm a number nine, or I'm a number two.

I think there are sort of really, you know, there's the sticks and twigs, but there's also stuff that you can introduce right away that seems quite benign. But that gets people standing up and using their bodies in different way. And you know, the conversations that that opens up in and of itself is, is different to what it would be if we were just talking.

Amanda Reeves: Mm. And it sounds like it really invites in that relational element as well, that it's not just about where I am in isolation, it's about where I am in relation to other people.

Thea Snow: Exactly right. And I think the other element that Viv sort of taught us about that's such a powerful facilitation tool is the element of surprise. And love that. So one of the activities that Viv teaches is rip it up.

Amanda Reeves: Ooh

Thea Snow: you, you're at a workshop and you get people to write down ' what is the right definition of systems change?'

For example, what is the, what is the definition of stewardship?

Everyone sits there and they think about it and they write it down. And then you say, okay now what I want everyone to do is stand up and with your piece of paper, rip it up and, and.

Amanda Reeves: I',m holding my breath just thinking about it !

Thea Snow: And everyone's sort of like shocked initially and a bit upset because they've just thought so hard about what to write. What it opens up is a conversation about there is no single definition of systems change. There is no single definition of stewardship. And actually trying to codify it too neatly is not the purpose of what we're gonna be doing together today.

So that element of of surprise that we try to incorporate can also be a really powerful moment. And people often remember that at the end when you say, what's something that stood out for you? They say the rip it up because it's that moment of like. Surprise and, and being caught off guard that really lands

Amanda Reeves: I love that. And I can see there's also something about. About being certain, about knowing, about being very clear on things. And I could see that could be a really lovely way to start inviting people into being in that, in uncertain space or, where there is more ambiguity.

Thea Snow: exactly right. Exactly right.

Amanda Reeves: So Thea I'm gonna ask you probably the most challenging question that I can think of, which is when you meet someone new for the first time, how do you explain what it is you do to someone who doesn't necessarily understand what it is you do?

Thea Snow: Very badly is the answer, and the answer is, it also sort of depends on who they are, that's what I've realized. Like I need to adapt my answer based on who I'm talking to. So if I'm talking to someone who doesn't know much about government, who doesn't know much about systems change who doesn't know much about, an imagination or a futures practice, generally what I say is we work with h governments to support them, to innovate, and then sometimes people will follow up with a question of what do you mean by innovate?

And then I'll sort of go into it in more detail. Often those people are, are happy with that, with that answer. I think with people who are more attuned to the kind of work that we do, what I talk about us doing is working with people in and around government to change the role of government, and that the way that we do that is we work with people to interrogate both how things are currently done, the beliefs and the ways of being that underpin the way that things are done. Because if you just change the way that things are done without changing the beliefs that sit underneath, that, things don't change in enduring ways. So an example that I can always give, which I think is, is a really simple one, is there's all this excitement around co-design

Amanda Reeves: Mm-Hmm.

Thea Snow: at the moment in government and all of this energy being paid to co-design methodologies and co-design toolkits.

And that's great. But if the people who are responsible for implementing those toolkits or those methodologies don't actually believe that people with lived experience have a valid perspective, then it doesn't work. And so that's what we do, you know, we work with people to shift both what they're doing and how they're doing it, and the beliefs that underpin them.

Amanda Reeves: Absolutely. Yeah. When you don't have that inherent belief, there is value people's lived experience or that it will be worthwhile, then you end up doing things like co-design theatre, where you say that we're doing co-design, but really we've made some decisions and we're just we are, we're, we are sharing with you what we're going to be doing, or we're asking your opinion without having space to use that in a, in a generative way.

And as you're talking about this balance between being and doing, it's making me think of a few different frameworks. It obviously brings to mind Donella Meadow's points of leverage in a system where the easiest things to change are really often our metrics, but what's harder yet more fruitful can be starting to shift some of those beliefs and those metaphors, the stories we have, the way we understand who we are and what our place is in the world.

Thea Snow: Absolutely.

Amanda Reeves: And it's also connecting for me with some work from Sohail Inayatullah who does beautiful work on causal layered analysis and helping step through, you know, what's obvious, what's above the surface, what do we see? And then finally moving down into those myth and metaphor stages of, you know, really how do we take our understanding of the system in a very in a very succinct but powerful way.

Thea Snow: Yeah, I think that's spot on. And actually, Ingrid Burkett, Emma Blomkamp and I wrote a blog based on a, a framework that Ingrid has developed called from mouthset shift to mindset shift, and the idea that there's a lot of mouth, you know, mouthing around changes, but how do you actually shift people?

She's done this spectrum from the mouthset shift to the actual mindset shift. And the other thing that I was gonna mention, when you talk about Donella Meadows.

Amanda Reeves: Mm-Hmm

Thea Snow: It's really interesting because a friend of mine, Luke Craven, who works in systems change stuff as well. I'd always thought about the Donella Meadows leverage points as a hierarchy 'cause that's actually how she presents them.

But Luke pointed out, rightly I think, that that sort of actually sits in tension with systems change, because systems change is recognizing the interconnectedness between the different components, and there is no hierarchy, right? They're all just different parts of a system which interact with one another. And I think that's something that I've really learned in my work. I think when I started off in this practice I was, too focused on shifting how people are, shifting the being, and where we need to focus our attention. And what I've realized is I've done more and more of this work is that there is symbiotic relationship between the doing and the being. And often, in government in particular, people aren't ready or don't want to have a conversation about mental models.

And so what you do is you sort of incorporate into the ways of doing things, conversations, provocations, exercises, et cetera, that enable people to practice new ways of being through the doing that they're doing. I sort of started off thinking that we had to separate those two things more, more neatly, but I've realized that that was the wrong approach.

Amanda Reeves: Mm. That's really insightful. You know, I think about some of the work that I've done with organizations and working around change, and often there, there is that piece around you need to do some mindset, you know, there needs to be a mindset shift, but if you're coming in and telling people that they need to change who they are or how they identify or how they feel like they belong in an organization like that is much harder sell than trying to explain to people how to do things in a different way.

Can you tell me a bit about the Storytelling for Systems Change work that you've been collaborating on?

Thea Snow: Yeah, sure. So this is a piece of work that has my heart. It's a project that we've been doing in partnership with Dusseldorp Forum, who I mentioned before, and Hands Up Mallee as well. Hands Up Mallee are a backbone team in Victoria who are really driving community-led systems change work in place.

And the project sort of started with Teya Dusseldorp attending a webinar that we held on systems change, and her reaching out to me and saying something like, I'm seeing systems change happen all the time. We just don't know how to talk about it. We don't know how to measure it, we don't know how to talk about it.

Amanda Reeves: Mm.

Thea Snow: I'd love to explore that with you. And so that was the sort of genesis of this work, which is exploring what is the role of stories in systems change work. And we've had two phases of work. So the first phase of work, which was published in 2021, was around the role of stories. And we spoke to community members who are involved in community led systems change work.

We spoke to storytelling experts. We spoke to academics and we were exploring what role does stories play in supporting systems change and enabling systems change. And we heard a bunch of really interesting insights including that stories both shine a light on the change that is happening, which is where Teya started off with her question, they do so in ways that quant data can't because the richness that a story can have, that gets flattened when you translate it into numbers. So stories shine a light on the change that is happening, but stories are also a force for change in their own right.

And that's like when we talk about mental models, the language that we use, the stories that we tell, shape the reality that we live in.

And so that was a really powerful insight to emerge from that first piece of work that we did together. The first piece of work focused very much on what we call the supply side of storytelling. How do we tell better stories?

How do we upskill, what needs to happen? But there was a question that came up, which sort of just sat with me, which was around the demand side of stories, which is how do we create an audience in government, in philanthropy, in the people who are funding these place-based systems change initiatives, to value stories? 'Cause we can like craft the best stories in the world and we can do that through art and experiential, like stories don't just have to be written, where we can do stuff, but if there's no one who wants to hear them, they land on deaf ears. And so this is the second phase of work which we've just completed which is a report called Storytelling for Systems Change, Listening to Understand.

And the question is how do we create an audience in government and philanthropy who value stories and who, who know how to listen to them in ways that are both discerning 'cause stories can also be used badly. Stories can also be used to manipulate and we don't want to, you know, there's the danger of relying on the single story.

So how do we encourage an audience of people who are discerning and mature in their use of stories, but who recognize the inherent value in stories as a way of both understanding and driving change in their own right.

Amanda Reeves: Mm-Hmm. It makes me think of what you were saying before about inviting people with lived experience to do co-design with government, and that idea of really being able to be ready to receive those stories and to hear what's important there and to be able to be in relation with people sharing those stories is so important to being able to use those stories in a useful way.

Thea Snow: I think that's a, yeah, that's a beautiful connection. And another connection, which I just thought of like looping back to our conversation on dichotomies.

You You know, so often quantitative data and stories are set up as a dichotomy. Like either you use this or you use that.

It was interesting 'cause a bunch of the people we spoke to were a little bit that way inclined, we don't actually, we don't trust quant data. Particularly we spoke to one philanthropic organization who works a lot with Maori communities in Aotearoa, in New Zealand, and almost all of their sort of evaluation is story based because of the terrible relationship that Maori people have had with quantitative ways of measuring things in that country.

But I think one of the really beautiful insights to emerge from the report was the rejection of that dichotomous thinking and the recognition that what we need is ensemble thinking. So we to need be able to weave together insights from the quant data and insights from the stories, even when they're telling you different things. 'Cause that was a question that I, I had, you know, I asked this sort of data geek from government who I know and who I really love. I was like, what happens when the data, the quant data tells you something different from the stories?

And I sort of thought, now I've got you! And he was like, that's where the magic happens. That's where the greatest insights emerge. That is exactly why we need to use both. And just, for me, that is a skillset that we all need to be thinking about and cultivating. How do we hold those tensions, work with them, and avoid this idea that one is better than the other, or that if there are inconsistencies, you have to choose one and reject the other.

Amanda Reeves: Yes. I think there's something really valuable in that, in making space for different ways of understanding and different ways of knowing. And what it makes me think of listening to you say that is I've had experiences with work where we're trying to change behavior and we might be trying to change behavior by putting in some some metrics or some, some goals that we're trying to work with to make that behavior functional for us. But what we end up doing is creating perverse incentives. So we might be trying to influence a system to behave in a particular way, but instead of that behavior delivering what we want, it actually motivates quite a different response and people will start to game the system based on those incentives.

And for me, I can see that sort of, here's our quantifiable, this is what we're trying to achieve. You know, for example, we're trying to improve, you know, reporting of safety issues. But we also have this narrative that we should be seeing less safety issues. So we'll see, start to see those go up because we're encouraging more reporting, but then that creates this anxiety around the story that we're telling about, well, actually we should be having less of these.

And there can be that real mismatch, but I think that's where the crux of so many of those really valuable insights comes from.

Thea Snow: I remember that happening in government, when I worked in government, in social policy, that tension that you've described. There are also even simpler situations, someone was telling me about a program that was designed to reduce recidivism.

And the numbers looked terrible. Like the quantitative data looked terrible. It looked like the program was doing really badly. But actually when you were talking to people who were part of the program, they loved it and it was changing their lives. What do you do with that? You know, and I think that, I think that part of the answer lies in how the questions that are capturing the quantitative data have been framed and who they've been framed by, I think they're asking the wrong questions.

And that's one of the things that stories, because they are windier, and more open and, you know, we also differentiate between stories and qualitative data.

So qualitative data is sort of structured and the power vests in the person asking the question, whereas stories really the power vests in the story holder, and because of that you can find yourself in completely unexpected places that surveys and other forms of information gathering don't allow you to to go.

So I think that often what happens is if there's a tension between the quant and the stories is because the quant has made assumptions around what the right questions are to be asking without necessarily making space for the people who are experiencing the thing to say, no, this is what's important to us.

And it might unexpected, but you know, quite magical that emerges from it.

Amanda Reeves: Yeah, that's such a good point that it can actually be that misalignment between what's important to the person setting the questions for quantitative collection and what matters to the person who's having an experience of the system.

Thea Snow: Part of what we talk about at CPI as well is that part of working in complex environments is recognizing that you can't always anticipate what the impact of an intervention is gonna be. So a government might say, you know, we're running this program with the hope that it does X, Y, and Z.

If you only focus on looking at X, Y, and Z and it's actually achieving Q, you'll never see that it's achieved Q And you know, it's interesting, right? Because there are examples of drug trials that have done that, where they've been doing a drug trial to try to reduce a certain symptom.

And they've recognized that those people actually have benefits over there. So it's not, you know, it's not an unknown phenomenon. It's just for some reason we try to control for it. We don't allow ourselves to be open enough to dance with that complexity in a way which allows us to discover and then, you know, capitalize on unexpected things that might emerge from that intervention or that program.

Amanda Reeves: Absolutely, that dance of attention between what are we focused on, but then can I broaden my attention and see what else is happening?

Thea Snow: Exactly.

Amanda Reeves: I love that. Well, Thea, on behalf of the FuturePod community, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today about the really exciting work you've been doing. If listeners are interested, I'd really encourage you to have a look at the Storytelling for Systems Change, the new report on listening to understand, it's such a good read. And thanks again, really appreciate you sharing your perspective and expertise.

Thea Snow: Thanks Amanda. It's been a great conversation. And yeah, love, love, love chatting with you about all, all the things and really appreciated the insights that you offered, the links that you drew as well. It was wonderful.

Amanda Reeves: I hope you've enjoyed today's conversation as much as I did.

FuturePod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of supporters like you. If you'd like to support the pod, please check out our Patreon link on futurepod.org. I'm Amanda Reeves. Thanks for joining us today.

EP 178 - What Government Could Be - Thea Snow

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