ESLA Loopers – Dr. Jody Aked and Robbie Gregorowski
“Funders and commissioners can enable a collective, systemic response by reframing their relationships with providers. They no longer see a purchaser/provider split, they see a collective responsibility for creating the conditions for people to achieve better outcomes. They are stewards of a system of care and support.” – Exploring the new world: practical insights for funding, commissioning and managing in complexity
When working to bring about change in complex systems it can be hard to identify where impact is happening, what work should continue and where new directions need to be taken. A funder or Chief Impact Officer may have oversight and over-arching accountability, but their position in a complex system does not come with enough partner or grantee touch points to make wise choices.
Collectivising the process of learning for action
ESLA Loops is an approach – integrating process and platform – of structured and facilitated collaborative sense-making on evidence. It uses the ‘wisdom of the crowd’, bringing diverse worldviews, lived experiences and assumptions about how change happens into a conversation with evidence. New knowledge is generated through dialogue, meaning-making, and deliberation.
In practice, the value of a ‘space’ to collaboratively make sense of evidence to inform future strategy unites funders and grantees under a common purpose and intent. By doing so, it shifts emphasis away from the grantee demonstrating results to the funder towards a shared focus on the complexity of the issues and our collective roles in trying to address them (emergent co-learning). Fundamentally it creates trust and enhances collaboration between funder and grantee about the evidence on what’s working.
The skills ESLA Loops offers is in designing the sense-making platform and facilitating the collaborative sense-making process. We bring together diverse data sources (e.g., bellwether interview data, stories of change, case studies, social science surveys, quantitative data) into synthesised, accessible and consistent summaries of the strategies, tactics and contexts that have led to change. The next step of the process organises diverse data sources into bigger “stories of stories” which tell a collective account of what the system is learning about itself. This collective account is then validated, explored and integrated into people’s experiences. The result is a deeper level of reflection, a set of evidence-based actions everyone understands and the shared conviction to see these actions through.
What does collaborative sense-making look like in practice?
In the place where you work, this might mean bringing strategic leaders into evidence-led conversation with those they employ and fund as well as those who fund and invest in them to explore insights that support and challenge strategy. In the place where you live, collaborative sensemaking might mean bringing different groups of residents together with local authority officers, with funders and businesses to examine how the local economy works and who it serves. In natural habitats it might involve bringing the experience of nature, living systems and other species into the collaborative sense-making process to shape decisions about how humans contribute. In the school your child attends it might mean bringing children, teachers and parents together to make sense of the annual pupil wellbeing survey to co-create a set of actions for the year ahead.
Power is carefully and deliberately worked with so diverse ways of knowing are respectfully brought into the learning process. We pay attention to the questions we need to ask, who we need to ask those questions of and how people will be safe to contribute.
The ESLA Loops process stewards and everyone leads
By starting from what we know, not what we think we know, ESLA Loops uses evidence to help people see a system – a workplace, a place, a field we want to restore, the wellbeing of children – from different perspectives. Distinct mental models and positionalities within a system are unearthed. As Jewla Lynn and Julia Coffman’s work on mental models about systems change expresses, this work is important because it is our deeply held beliefs and outlooks that affect how we examine problems and who gets to generate solutions.
Learning as an ecosystem
What we typically see in evaluation and learning is one person or a small team leading and others contributing. In this scenario one or very few people are identifying patterns and being the layer of human interpretation between evidence, learning and strategy. The success of this strategy then relies on the capacity to communicate and advocate for it.
Instead, ESLA Loops strives for knowledge to be collectively co-created and co-owned. In an ideal scenario monitoring, learning and evaluation budgets would be large enough to pay attention to who is learning in the system and where. ESLA Loops can involve the people who should be feeling the effects of all the human effort to change things – as co-designers, as co-evaluators, as co-sense-makers and co-producers of change.
For the CLARISSA programme this meant working with children in worst forms of child labour and people living in informal settlements as equal, if not privileged knowledge holders. They informed learning, strategy and action as much as the national and international academics who were schooled in concepts and frameworks. The result was future directions in programming and funding that were informed by an ecosystem of actors with different powers and positionalities to drive impactful change.
If we change how we learn in complex systems, we can improve how effective we are
“Complex challenges require initiatives to develop new approaches which integrate evidence and insight to better understand how change happens. By subjecting evidence of change to scrutiny in groups – through collaborative sense-making – interpretations are debated and challenged, generating more useful insights and actions.” – ESLA Loops
By creating knowledge together, we can learn about the multiple elements, dimensions and levels which are connected and interdependent with each other in complex systems. The more nuanced our understanding of these interplays, the wider and deeper the possibility spaces for action. A dynamic that appears stuck, solid and resistant to change begins to reveal its cracks and fluidity. The result is often a tighter theory of change and a more focused strategy, because ESLA Loops has built the capacity for more of the system to get to know itself.
For example, clarity may emerge about how changes at one level (e.g., community action) can be complemented by action by a different stakeholder group (e.g., business), which collectively complement national and international advocacy (e.g., policy and legal changes). Or signals from different scales of a complex system may bring confidence to programme decisions to pause, pivot or amplify efforts so that change efforts stay contextually relevant and alive to the political economy of effective action. This coherence eases the process of deciding how to do things better and how to do better things.
About the ESLA Loopers:
Jody Aked – Jody loves learning in complex systems. She designs participatory research, facilitation and evaluation, with a focus on designing processes that build connection and conviction between people for social and ecological transformation. Jody has a PhD from the Power, Participation and Social Change team at Institute of Development Studies.
Robbie Gregorowski – Runs a small consulting company called Sophoi. Throughout 2025 he is focussed on translating Sophoi’s Results Sense-making Learning expertise into the more complete and practical ESLA Loops approach. He is passionate about more collaborative and innovative approaches to using evidence to inform learning and action on complex challenges.
