Creating conditions for change: The CELCIS Approach to Place-Based Complex Change

How do we create the conditions for change?
Some of the most complex challenges facing children and families cannot be understood or addressed by any one service or organisation alone. Different partners bring different perspectives, priorities and experiences, and there is rarely a ready-made solution that can simply be implemented. Implementation Science helps us turn evidence into effective and sustainable practice.

But what happens when there isn’t yet agreement about the problem to solve, the way to solve it, or the conditions needed to make change possible?

The CELCIS Approach to Place-Based Complex Change builds on existing evidence and focuses on the work needed to create and sustain the local conditions for change: helping people understand their system, develop a shared understanding of the problem, explore how it might be addressed, and learn and adapt as they go. Leadership is central – creating the conditions, capacity and permission for people to work differently across organisational boundaries.

Join us for this free, national webinar, we’ll introduce the approach and explore how it aligns with Implementation Science, focusing on the complex work that creates the conditions for intentional implementation and continues to shape and support change over time.

The session covers:

• What needs to happen so that we can intentionally implement change. Why complex challenges require time to understand the system, build shared understanding of the problem and develop agreement about how it might be addressed.
• Creating the conditions for change. The role of leadership, place, capacity and learning in enabling people to work across organisational boundaries and make progress on complex problems.
• The CELCIS Approach to Place-Based Complex Change. Four connected domains – understanding the system, building an approach to change, learning intentionally, and acting together – and how they work together rather than as a linear sequence.
• What this looks like in practice. What we’re learning from applying the approach alongside partners in local authority areas in Scotland, and how this work can support the conditions for intentional implementation and ongoing adaptation.