Changing ourselves

If we’re serious about working on the system (and we are) we have to be serious about changing ourselves. Transforming the sector must start with us.

Our understanding of what this change looks like will evolve over time. We have developed five interconnected design principles for what a healthy system looks like and are tracking our progress accordingly.  

1. Meet in the Middle: Bringing people together from all parts of the system to ensure the expertise of people and services on the ground and in communities influences and shapes the 'rules' of policies, funding and commissioning.
2. Prioritise people and relationships over risk and compliance management. Reimagining how our systems interact with people and families in ways that recognise people as complete humans and enable more relational service delivery that's built on trust and collaboration.
3. Share and devolve power. Putting more trust, decision-making and autonomy in the hands of people and communities, to support outcomes that people care about. This includes promoting self-determination for First Nations people, and understanding how to have effective two-way cultural governance in our organisations.  
4. Collaborate more than we compete. Sharing resources, information and data in ways that better enable community outcomes. Supporting improved coordination, connection and integration between service providers, government and community.  
5. Tackle root causes, not just the symptoms. Moving from crisis response working on systems and building capabilities that help prevent crises in the first place.
   
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Meeting in the middle, to shift systems

Across Australia we see countless examples of communities that are taking control of their own futures, where organisations and community members are coming together and working in different ways to put people first.

This work is hard, and often comes about through the resilience and persistence of great leaders in communities and organisations hacking the current system.

We believe that we have a lot to learn from this work, and that we have an opportunity to work alongside these leaders, to:

• Find and share the stories of what works
• Surface and tackle the systemic barriers that currently stand in the way of enabling better outcomes for community

In this way, we hope to help make it easier for more communities, organisations, governments, and others to lead work that enables more people to thrive.

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Learning together

We recognise that systems change is complex, and that we don’t have all the answers we need to move forward.

Similarly, no one organisation or sector can make change happen on their own. Sustainable change will require many shifts – small and large – to take place in different ways, in parallel across communities, governments, services and businesses. We see sustainable change as a process of collective learning, aligned to a shared vision of a future we want to work toward. Learning will come in many forms, and in particular,

• Through learning from others who are themselves changing the system in different ways, and
• Through trying new things and learning first-hand about how we can drive different outcomes
  

The Possibility Partnership has a commitment to ‘learning in the open’, and making available what we learn along the way. What we learn will be shared through this website, through events and workshops, and through action-oriented partnerships with others.