Dancing and Tending the Spaces-in-Between

This article offers theory-informed, learning-oriented, and imaginative insights into working in and with the unique stuckness of public sector organizations when trying to generate and catalyse transformative innovations on complex challenges. Imagining and enacting systems transformation in the public sector is transdisciplinary, creative, often subversive, and definitely daunting. We focus here on the Two Loops Model as a helpful archetype, a theory of change, and a creative prompt for systems transformation. Unlike many other models of transformation that are ultimately oriented toward finding and scaling solutions, Two Loops shows the dominant and emergent systems in an oscillating dance with a clear space between. We found this space to be an overlooked and potent place of praxis in our work, perhaps particularly so in the public sector, which tends to perpetuate the dominant system even when “innovating.” In this article, we dive deeply into this space to see what new and different perspectives it offers when working on complex challenges. We draw upon Black, Indigenous, queer, feminist, and decolonial scholars to help us think more deeply into this space, which is variously described as fugitive, wayward, hospice, Trickster, break, refusal, and snap. We then engage with this thinking in our own practice space—a public sector innovation lab inside local government. We visualize nine different views into and from this potent space-in-between and how we worked in, with, and from these views in our practice. Using engaged theory, reflective practice, images, metaphor, and poetic language, we aim to open up different possibilities for transformation efforts in the public and other sectors. We invite you to join us as we dwell in the messy, ambiguous, inner and outer work in this space, where we grapple with what we might need to do less of, and what we may need to do more of, in our efforts to move away from the dominant what is, and toward the emergent and resurgent what must be/come.