No Blueprint: What Four Years of Action Learning Has Taught Me About Systems Change
By
on
Richard Dzikunu
Co-Director, YIELD Hub
Working across systems change, partnerships, and institutional learning to design structures and learning approaches that help people and organisations create lasting change
Four years ago, Action Learning at YIELD Hub was largely a concept on paper. Translating it into a process that organisations across different contexts would trust, invest time in, and return to repeatedly required constant adaptation. There was no blueprint.
When I joined YIELD Hub, one of the most significant responsibilities I took on was bringing Action Learning to life at scale. At the time, Action Learning was a promising learning approach and idea, but not yet a large-scale process for bringing together youth-led organisations, funders, INGOs, researchers, and institutions working across complex systems challenges.
The task was both exciting and intimidating. How do you design a process that people from vastly different backgrounds, institutions, and geographies find useful? How do you create a space where organisations do more than attend sessions, where they genuinely trust the process enough to show up honestly, wrestle with difficult questions, and return year after year?
We were learning in real time. Testing assumptions. Adjusting approaches. Paying attention to what created value and what did not. Trying to understand what would make a process not only meaningful, but valuable enough for people to keep coming back to.
Looking back now, what I find myself reflecting on most is not simply what we built, but what that journey revealed.
We began with around 40 organisations. Four years later, we have worked alongside more than 200 organisations across 40 countries through our Action Learning cycles. In 2026 alone, we received close to 400 applications from over 50 countries, including youth-led movements, INGOs, funders, regional organisations, researchers, and institutions seeking spaces to learn, solve problems, and work differently together.
For me, the most interesting part is not the growth itself.
It is what the growth revealed.
People are increasingly looking for approaches that create space for reflection, relationships, and shared problem-solving in a sector often driven by urgency, delivery pressures, and the expectation that everyone should already have answers.
That realization has shaped much of what four years of Action Learning has taught me about systems change.
Often, the most valuable thing was not providing answers. It was creating conditions where stronger answers could emerge.
Systems Change Is Rarely About Having Better Answers
But one of the biggest lessons I have learned is that systems change often begins somewhere much less dramatic: with better questions.
Many of the organisations joining Action Learning were not lacking expertise or commitment. Most already had highly capable teams and ambitious goals.
What they often lacked was protected space to slow down, reflect, and think differently.
Action Learning repeatedly reminded me that progress does not always come from introducing more solutions. Sometimes progress comes from helping people pause long enough to interrogate assumptions they did not realise they were carrying.
Relationships Are Infrastructure
Another lesson that surprised me was how often systems work eventually comes back to trust. We often think of infrastructure as funding, policies, institutions, platforms, or governance structures. But increasingly, I have come to believe relationships are also infrastructure.
Strong systems are built on the quality of relationships between people, institutions, and communities. Trust determines whether people share honestly, collaborate openly, challenge assumptions, and navigate complexity together.
You can build technically sound structures, but without trust, systems become performative. Some of the most meaningful moments within Action Learning were not visible outputs. There were moments where organisations felt safe enough to admit uncertainty, ask difficult questions, or rethink assumptions in front of peers. Those moments often created more movement than formal plans ever could.
Building Systems Often Means Building While Learning
Perhaps the most personal lesson for me has been this:
Many of us like the idea of designing systems as if we can fully map them before implementation. Reality rarely works that way. Bringing Action Learning to life taught me that sometimes you build while learning. You test. You adapt. You pay attention. You make adjustments. You remain humble enough to accept that assumptions made in theory often behave differently in practice.
Some of the most important leadership decisions I have made over the past four years did not happen because there was a manual.
They happened because complexity required judgment. And perhaps that is also part of systems change.
Not certainty.
Not a perfect design.
But creating conditions where learning, relationships, and adaptation remain possible.
Four years later, I still do not think Action Learning gave me a blueprint for systems change. But it gave me something more useful:
A deeper appreciation that meaningful change often happens through people, trust, reflection, and creating spaces where new possibilities can emerge. And perhaps that is where systems change begins.
A deeper appreciation that meaningful change often happens through people, trust, reflection, and creating spaces where new possibilities can emerge. And perhaps that is where systems change begins.
