The Washing Machine is a model of how system change actually happens, from the green paper Building Better Systems by Charles Leadbeater and Jennie Winhall for the ROCKWOOL Foundation. It rejects the conventional disruptive-innovation story, in which outside challengers displace tired incumbents, and argues that change in public systems comes instead from innovative insiders working with entrepreneurial outsiders. The two meet in a turbulent middle where the old and the new clash and combine — like stepping into a washing machine on the spin cycle.
Combination, not displacement
In the conventional account, change is a battle between the declining incumbent regime and rising entrepreneurial alternatives, and it ends when the challengers replace the insiders. Leadbeater and Winhall think that account is at best partial for public systems, which are densely interconnected, leave little room for new entry, and are already full of adaptive innovation aimed at optimising what exists. Start-ups, meanwhile, rarely reach scale without teaming up with incumbents who hold the capital and the reach — and for social ventures the obvious route to scale is to be absorbed by the very system they set out to change. What emerges from the spin cycle is therefore hybrids: new constellations built from parts of both.
Insider-outsiders
People who work inside a system but see its shortcomings clearly, and act as conduits — connecting the system’s own strategy and activity to ideas forming outside it. Karyn McCluskey is the paper’s example: she had the credibility that came from working within Strathclyde Police, could see its strengths and its failings, and brought in an epidemiological reading of violence from outside.
Entrepreneurial ventures
Ventures that do not merely scale a new solution but embody the operating philosophy of a different system, whether they are social innovations or businesses spawned by new social movements. They often begin in marginal markets and promote a social philosophy as much as a product, as organic producers did in reshaping a mainstream food system.
Convenors
Organisations and individuals who create and hold the space where insiders and outsiders, challenge and possibility, can meet and find collaborative solutions — from dedicated systems-change programmes to intermediaries, industry associations and collaborations between far-sighted funders.
Coming out of the machine, new processes take over: viable solutions have to be scaled by mobilising resources and opening markets, and outmoded systems have to be deliberately wound down to make room. The paper’s hypothesis is simply that change becomes more likely the more people step into the machine, and that system-shifting entrepreneurs need backing for their collaborative rather than their competitive advantage — scale is not a reliable measure of system shift.
Also see Four Keys, System Shift - Three Levels, Multi-level perspective and Berkana Two Loops