Food for Thought: Redesigning Systems for Whānau-Centred Outcomes
At a time when incremental change is no longer enough, this whakaaro challenges us to rethink how our health and social systems truly serve whānau. Grounded in the strengths of our region, our relationships, collective wisdom, and deep connection to place, it calls for a shift from fragmented, institution led models to a whānau centred system built on partnership, trust, and shared accountability.
From the concept of a Pa Network to the power of lived experience, collective intelligence, and community led innovation, this paper invites leaders and practitioners into courageous redesign. It highlights practical pathways for change, strengthening collaboration, rebalancing power and resources, and embedding innovation where it matters most, alongside whānau.
This is not about fixing the system as it is. It is about creating something better, together.
Introduction: Transforming the Health System.
We stand at a turning point. If we are to truly improve the wellbeing of our people, our region cannot simply repair what already exists. We must create a new reality. Transforming our health system means re-imagining how we work together, how we share responsibility, and how we unlock the conditions for collective wellbeing. We already hold some of the vital ingredients for change. One of the region’s greatest super-powers is the strength of our partnerships and collaborations - the trust, relationships, and communities of practice that bind us. Alongside this, our region itself is both miracle and challenge: the richness of our diverse landscape oDers a deep source of wellness and connection, while the uneven distribution of infrastructure or resource flow often leaves whānau struggling for access. True transformation asks us to move beyond the centre of the mainstream and to lean into the edges into the gap. It is here, where friction is strongest, sparking innovation. This is where we stretch past our current limits and beliefs to design a system that reflects who we are and what we value most.
The Wero: Challenge-Opportunity
This paper calls our Strategic Leadership Groups into that space of possibility. It is an invitation to exercise courageous leadership: to see the larger system, to foster reflection and generative kōrero, and to shift focus from reactive problem-solving to cocreating a future together. By drawing from our collective wisdom and the depth of our connections to this rohe, we can design a health system that is just and fair while also more responsive - one that grows from the lived realities of our people. The work ahead is not about incremental adjustment. It is about building, together, a new vision of health and wellbeing in our region - one that endures because it is centred in partnership and sustained by our shared commitment and accountability to whānau [families] and hāpori [community]. The following provides some stimulation for the Strategic Leadership Groups to consider as we move toward a significant change in the way we operate and influence systems transformation.
Building the Pa Network – Whānau-Centred Services in Action
As collaborations mature, government agencies, iwi services, health providers, and NGOs can redirect our focus, effort, and influence into evolving like a Pa Network. The Pa Network represents a genuine whānau-centred system of care and response. It prioritises warm handovers, relational approaches, and joined-up services that meet needs quickly and effectively. This will mean removing unhelpful processes, streamlining access, and working in concert to ensure whānau receive the right support, at the right time, in the right way.
Growing Collective Wellbeing – the Building Blocks for Change
To truly grow collective wellbeing, we must shift from top-down policies to local decisions shaped by the real experiences of those most affected. By designing new strategies using the six conditions for systems change: policy, practice, resource flow, power dynamics, relationships, and mental models – we can activate the building blocks, break old patterns and lay the groundwork for communities to actively shape, not just receive, the systems that support them.
Leadership and Strategic Influence
Strategic Leadership Groups, representing ecosystems of common purpose, advocate for innovation, protect the collective vision, encourage alliances, and influence decision making across sectors. These leadership groups ensure that systemic redesign is not fragmented but instead guided by coherent strategies that keep whānau outcomes at the centre.
Data Sharing, Data Sovereignty, and Collective Intelligence
A critical enabler of change is data. High-trust relationships, robust safeguards, and respect for data sovereignty should underpin new ways of sharing information. By doing so in an honourable and safe way, we can maximise collective intelligence while protecting whānau privacy. This ensures that decision-making is informed by both lived experience and data analysis, strengthening the capacity for transformation.
Communities of Practice [COPs]: Learn While Doing
Innovation flourishes when knowledge is shared and collective capability is built. Professions and communities can form COPs to drive learning, practice improvements, new knowledge, and shared problem-solving. These groups strengthen relationships and peer support across an ecosystem, creating strategic advantage through connection and shared purpose.
Designing Alternatives with Lived Experience
Whānau and Practitioners are not passive recipients in services – they are important designers of solutions. Whānau and frontline practitioners can contribute to the co3 design of alternative options, pathways, and service solutions that reflect a better reality founded from their knowledge and experience. Transforming the health system requires healing and strengthening processes. Therefore, rather than forcing rigid systems and unhelpful processes on to whānau and kaimahi, they can be involved in informing, designing, and testing the parts they see would be most effective.
Redirecting Resources for Greater Impact
Large-scale change requires shifting the flow of resources to where they can serve whānau most effectively. By combining resources, expertise, and information across organisations and sectors, we could provide a more comprehensive, efficient, and effective approach. This is particularly critical for whānau with complex needs, and when working with and/or in, complicated systems. Redirecting resources can enable emergent practice to get us ahead of the problems quicker and closer to home.
Prototype Change Through Whānau Design Villages
Whānau Design Villages and prototypes can provide real-time insight into what works for whānau. Instead of designing policy and service models at a distance, we can embed innovation in real community contexts where whānau are experiencing the system every day.
The Role of the Innovation & Research Hub
Te Oranganui’s Innovation & Research Hub provides a backbone function to collective impact and movement building. The Hub has the competencies and methodologies to:
• Hold the collective Vision, ensuring everyone has direct line of sight.
• convene and coordinate the collective.
• support knowledge sharing.
• synthesises data to formulate insights.
• disseminate actionable intelligence, and,
• ensure lived experience is consistently informing design and decision-making.
The Hub anchors, supports, and encourages collective effort to enable community-led innovation and systems’ transformation. It is the container for change.
Why This Matters
This approach represents a shift from fragmented, institution-centred service to a whānau-centred, collaborative system of care. By embedding innovation within communities, building ecosystems as communities of practice, and anchoring efforts through shared vision, encouraging mutually reinforcing activities, grounded in relational-first - we start creating the conditions for enduring change. For investors and government, this means greater impact, smarter use of resources and investment, the competencies and capability to deliver local innovations, solutions, and outcomes.