26 de Setembro 2024
by Cláudia Pedra
Managing Partner, Stone Soup Consulting
Stone Soup Consulting was created in 2008 to improve positive impact, one entrepreneur and organisation at a time. Our eyes were on the distant future, and that is where we still want to keep our focus, 16 years after the inception of our company.
This idea, a bit futuristic in 2008, was based on the belief that we could work on systemic change, improving communities and ecosystems by strengthening the players; those that are focusing on designing solutions for long-term social and environmental change. The premise was that if you work with organisations and entrepreneurs from all fields and sectors, with people truly invested in systemic change, you could enhance the solutions and help them scale-up and develop. This is clearly expressed in our Theory of Change that we keep using as our guiding star or our first stone 16 years later. We have worked with over 350 clients in different geographies and contexts, from the sole entrepreneur to organisations with thousands of employees and in all the original premise still makes sense – there is no one or any organisation that cannot benefit from change and good practices. There is a lot of evidence to show it.
However, systemic change is not limited to designing better and improved processes. It is about understanding the system behind it. Understanding the systemic impact that can be created and the path towards it. In a systems change framework we can address complex societal and organisational challenges, by shifting the underlying systems that are perpetuating the wicked problems. If you focus on overarching issues, such as policies, structures, mindsets, behaviours, you can start by identifying the root causes, promoting a change in mindsets and fostering collaborative approaches to address them. From there, can emerge important changes in public policy and deep organisational transformation. It is an iterative process that takes a lot of time and years to take place, with some more complex issues only showing key results and impacts in 15 to 20 years’ time.
In a society many times (too) focused on quick fixes, the future is quite often ignored, even when it is creeping up to us, one catastrophe at a time. We can easily understand that a long-term focus and commitment to social change can help us be more aware of the consequences of our actions, the positive and negative impacts of them and makes us design more efficient and intertwined solutions. Unfortunately , there are not many willing to invest the time and the resources to do it. That is why systemic change is quite underfunded and institutions hesitate to participate in the processes. Also, because it undercovers issues such as corruption, systemic discrimination, bad public investment, bad organisational practices and overall inefficiency and ineffectiveness. Of course, there are short term results, people that benefit from it and stories to be told, but maybe not the stories that we would like to be telling.
Stone Soup prefers to look to the future. To mobilise the wealth of knowledge in organisations and communities to map systems and foster change, going as far back as possible to project solutions for the future. It is a lengthily process that demands patience, willingness to change, investment, and open-minded people from different sectors, walking the path together and promoting collective action for systemic change. The good news is we have those people all over the world, in all sorts of organisations and communities, and in all sectors. Our role at Stone Soup is to help them through that journey, giving support and advise. And, thus, we can bask in the collective change that is improving the world for all of us.
