The Invisible Labour of Systems Change

When people talk about innovation in public services, they often focus on what can be seen.

The new programme.
The funding secured.
The outcomes achieved.
The case study that gets published.

But some of the most important work happens long before any of that becomes visible.

Over the last few years, I've been reflecting on the creation of the System Convener roles in Hackney. Looking back, what strikes me most isn't the eventual success of the roles or the fact that they secured long-term funding. It's what the experience taught me about invisible relational labour.

Back in 2021, I came across Beverley and Etienne Wenger-Trayner's work on systems convening through a network connection. The idea resonated immediately because it gave language to something many of us had experienced but struggled to articulate: the work of connecting people, building trust, spotting patterns, and creating the conditions for collaboration across organisational boundaries.

In 2022, we recruited two System Conveners. Rather than testing technical expertise, we designed a process that allowed candidates to demonstrate relational capability. We dropped them into a live online space with voluntary sector, health and council colleagues and asked them to notice connections, make introductions and reflect on what they observed.

The roles began as a one-year pilot.

Every six to twelve months we found ourselves back in conversations about how to prove their value.

This is where things became interesting.

Because the most important outcomes of the work were often the hardest to measure.

How do you quantify increased trust?

How do you evidence the value of relationships that prevent problems before they emerge?

How do you capture the impact of someone helping organisations see one another differently?

How do you measure the value of creating the conditions where collaboration becomes possible?

The challenge wasn't that the work wasn't valuable.

The challenge was that much of its value was invisible to the systems used to assess it.

There is a kind of testimonial injustice at work here.

We often privilege visible, measurable, attributable forms of labour while overlooking the relational labour that makes those outcomes possible.

The meeting happens, but we don't notice the years of relationship-building that allowed people to enter the room differently.

The partnership succeeds, but we don't see the countless conversations that built trust.

The innovation works, but we don't acknowledge the people who held uncertainty long enough for something new to emerge.

Eventually, through a community of practice for Systems Conveners, we came across Ripple Effect Mapping as a way of making some of this invisible work more visible. It helped us tell a richer story about what was actually changing.

And then something important happened.

When a qualitative researcher from the DWP visited organisations distributing support to residents facing hardship, the value of the relational work came through clearly. The experience of frontline workers, voluntary organisations and partners spoke more powerfully than any performance metric could.

The result was national recognition and a further three years of funding.

But the lesson I took away was not that we eventually found evidence.

It was that sometimes we need the courage to act on relational knowledge before the evidence exists.

If we only invest in what can already be measured, we will struggle to innovate.

Many of the things that matter most in systems change are initially felt before they can be counted.

Trust.

Belonging.

Participation.

Connection.

Collective learning.

Relational integrity.

The challenge for those of us working in systems change is not simply to do this work.

It is to develop better ways of recognising, valuing and teaching it.

Because the point isn't that relational labour should finally receive applause.

The point is that if we fail to recognise what it takes to create the conditions for change, we will struggle to cultivate those capacities in others.

And at a time when so many of our systems need to change, that feels like something we can no longer afford to overlook.