We're going to start with creating a stakeholders map from a bird's eye view. Now a bird might be an appropriate image. If your organization has a relatively small local organization. If it's larger, you may need to be up a little higher. So it might need to be a helicopter, maybe even an airline or a hot air balloon. Or if you're working in a global organization, you may need to be on the space station to see this.

But I want you to get up and above and it will make sense as we start to develop the image. Find worksheet number three, it's essentially a blank sheet of paper. And that's plenty of space for your first systems map. If you're working on your own. If you're working with other colleagues in your organization to develop this, what you'd might find a little bit easier to work with is a flip chart sheet and some different colored markers. I'm going to unfold a story here as this one particular group developed it systems map.

We will stop occasionally and get you to break Your map up to that same level of detail. We're going to start with you yourself. I'd like you to put your name your initials inside some shape. This example, AJ was a local area senior manager inside an early learning group. And that early learning group existed inside a larger group called Learning Services. And that division existed inside a school board.

Now this school board was just in one city, so it didn't have any geographic spread other than inside that city. But all of these other functions, all of these other groups and departments, board itself building support superintends office planning, you can see them all there, those were all of the stakeholders inside the school board that in some way, shape or form, directly or indirectly impacted Learning Services. But Learning Services was all So impacted and especially early learning was impacted by a number of players that weren't inside the school board. These are external stakeholders. So we've got parents and students and provincial governments, different agencies, global experts on early learning other school boards that are doing different things, private schools, unions, and so on. So, I'd like you to push pause and get your map up to this point.

Now that we've got the stakeholder map created, what I'd like to do is to depict some of the fundamental or the more pressing relationships that are being brought to bear right now that are impacting you in your particular group, much of the pressure that was impacting AJ and the early learning group was coming from the outside. And what I'd like to do is have you depict these pressures, whatever it is in your particular situation, with arrows, so these will be arrows that are incoming towards your particular group. In this example, we had several pressures that were coming into ajs organization, but only one was a really direct force from the outside. We have parents and the provincial government were bringing their concerns to the school board around her how early learning was dealing with different situations, other school boards and some global experts were saying different things.

The school board, were starting to listen to all of this, and the school board suggested to the superintendent. Well, I don't think it was a suggestion. I think the school board said to the superintendent, we'd like you to do some hard looks at how we're delivering early learning. Well, the superintendent knew who to talk to. So the superintendent got together with the head of the Learning Services Group and AJ, the head of the early learning group. So the thickness of the arrows depict the strength of that force, the significance Africans have that pressure.

So what I'd like you to do is just push pause now and draw some incoming arrows from wherever they're coming from. Now you've got some incoming arrows. Let's continue the story and let's see what you've been doing. In this particular case, AJ, Director of Learning Services and the superintendent, after many, many conversations, and many, many planning sessions, decided to come up with an initiative called transform early learning. They wanted to fundamentally shift how they were delivering early learning programs and Early Learning Services inside this particular school board. And they, for more than a year, started to reach out.

So here we're asking you to draw arrows that are going out from you and your team to different players, different stakeholders on your map, again, the thickness of the arrows depict how much care and attention you're giving each of those particular stakeholders. Now at some level, everything's connected to everything else. I don't want you to make this so messy, you can't read it, simply highlight the three or four or five or six different places where you have been trying to influence and move your change forward. So push, pause and draw the outgoing arrows. Good. What I'd like you to think about is how effective Have you been with all of those relationships as you've been moving?

This particular series of changes or big change forward in ajs case, and the early learning groups case, it took them a while it was probably a full school year, the first pilot year of this transforming Early Learning Initiative to recognize they couldn't possibly keep up with all of the actions information that everybody was looking for. And there were some groups that they really had no business talking to anyway. And they thought, who are the key players here? Who are the ones that we really need to stay focused on in the coming years to make sure that this works. And this is what I'd like you to determine going forward who are the go to relationships in this stakeholder map that are absolutely vital to your success? I'd like you to draw big, thick, dark, wide double ended arrows.

And I'd like no more than five probably three maybe four early learnings case it was four. So these will be the relationships that you need to continue to invest time, effort and energy in to ensure your changes successful