The #ThreePercentRule is Your Secret Weapon for Success

Innovisor in conversation with Together an Active Future

First, let’s start with getting to know you:

Richard Santos Lalleman (RSL): Can you tell us about your role at Sport England’s place-based change movement “Together an Active Future” (TaAF) and what excited you most about your work?

Emily Brady-Young (EBY): In my role as Learning and Research Lead for Together an Active Future (TaAF), I help partners across Pennine Lancashire make sense of the complex systems they’re working in. That means designing developmental evaluation approaches, capturing learning from communities, and supporting leaders to use insight in real time to guide decision-making. I act as a translator between research, policy and practice—bringing evidence to life in ways that are useful locally, while also feeding learning back into national conversations about Sport England’s place-based change work Called Uniting the Movement). Uniting the Movement is Sport England’s 10-year strategy to transform lives and communities through physical activity. TaAF was one of the original pilots for this place-based approach, testing how local people, organisations, and systems can work differently to create active, healthier communities. What began as an experiment is now influencing national policy, so much so that government has committed new funding to expand and make this way of working universal across England, embedding the principles of collaboration, local leadership, and systems change into how we support people to move more.

What excites me most is the opportunity to see genuine change happening at multiple levels: communities shaping their own opportunities to be active; local leaders collaborating in new ways; and national partners learning from what’s emerging on the ground. I love making complexity simple, sparking curiosity, and creating stories of change that ripple outwards. It’s a privilege to work alongside such a wide range of people—residents, community organisations, councils, health partners—who are all invested in building healthier, more active places.

RSL: What unique challenges do you navigate in your role?

EBY: One of the biggest challenges is working in the “in-between spaces” of research, practice, and policy. Place-based change is complex—there isn’t a single blueprint to follow—so my role often involves holding uncertainty, helping partners reflect on what’s emerging, and translating learning across very different audiences. Another challenge is balancing pace with depth: communities and local leaders need timely insights to make decisions, while funders and national partners require robust evidence over the long term. Finally, equity is always front of mind—making sure the voices of those who are least heard are brought into the conversation, even when systems are slow or resistant to change.

Next, let’s understand your journey from the challenge to the Together and Active Future/Innovisor partnership:

RSL: What challenge led you to seek Innovisor’s expertise?

EBY:  We turned to Innovisor because we needed a way to make the complexity of our stakeholder work visible. TaAF is all about collaboration across places, organisations, and sectors, but without a clear network map, it was hard to track progress or see how people, policy, practice, and systems actually interact. Innovisor’s expertise in systems mapping allowed us to visualise those relationships, identify hidden connectors, newcomers, and catalysts, and understand where collaboration was strongest or missing. This gives us the insight we need to optimise community-led and lived-experience approaches, strengthen sector-based working, and make better strategic decisions about new projects or expansions. Ultimately, it’s also about credibility: demonstrating to funders and commissioners that our co-designed, collaborative way of working is shifting the needle on tackling health inequalities.

RSL: Which insight or insights from your yearly engagements surprised you the most?

EBY:  A concrete example is how we’re using the insights to shape our next phase. Innovisor’s mapping showed us both the strength and the dependency in our networks, so we’re deliberately shifting focus. In each of our six districts, we’re stepping back from leading health and activity networks and instead walking backwards—encouraging local partners to take ownership and sustain the connections themselves. To reinforce this, our place-based investment is being reduced in a planned way, signaling that the goal isn’t dependency on TaAF but autonomy in place.

In Burnley, for instance, the Active Burnley Forum has grown into a self-organising network of community organisations, leisure, health, and local authority partners. Rather than TaAF driving the agenda, we’ve supported them to shape their own vision, linking it to climate action and outdoor town priorities. Host organisations (local government, voluntary, faith, education, leisure) are now funding roles, changing local policy to be more connected in both programmes, purpose and people. The group now leads on collaborative bids, joint events, and shared commissioning conversations, showing how networks can thrive when the convening role starts to shift locally.

Similarly, in Rossendale, the Rossendale Connected network has become the mechanism through which lived experience directly shapes the new Health and Wellbeing Strategy and informs local government town planning. Community voices are not only present but central, ensuring that strategy and infrastructure decisions reflect real needs and aspirations. This is a clear demonstration of how insights from the mapping have translated into practice—supporting networks to embed equity and lived experience in formal decision-making structures.

Now, let’s understand the collaborative experience:

RSL: What moment in our partnership particularly stands out as meaningful or impactful?

EBY:  A particularly meaningful moment was when our relationship managers across the six districts truly took ownership of the insights. After working with Richard and Jeppe over a couple of years, building trust and seeing the value of the mapping, they reached a point where they were ready to act on it. Now, they’re actively using the insights in their everyday connections, conversations, and planning. That shift, from insights being something “held by TaAF” to being lived and applied by local leaders, felt like a real turning point in our partnership, showing that the work was embedding where it matters most.

RSL: How has Innovisor’s approach influenced your way of driving initiatives?

EBY:  Innovisor’s approach has influenced us by reinforcing what our own evaluation and the NELP conditions have been telling us for years—that information and connection are the real drivers of change in place. Their methods fit seamlessly with our emerging conditions for tackling physical activity inequalities and with five years of process evaluation findings, which consistently show that success flows from strengthening relationships. Innovisor has given us both the stimulus and the tools to act on this. The “3% rule” in particular has been powerful: our local leaders now deliberately seek out the quiet influencers who can unlock progress. In many ways, this has sharpened our practice—we’re in the business of influence for positive health behaviour change, and Innovisor has helped us see and activate that influence more effectively.

RSL: If you were having coffee with another leader considering working with Innovisor, what would you want this leader to know?

EBY:  I’d say: do you really know who’s influencing who in your system? Innovisor can show you that. Their work makes visible the hidden connections and informal influencers who so often shape whether change sticks or stalls. The “3% rule” is real, if you can activate that small group of quiet but trusted voices, you can shift the whole system.

For me, this is huge when working with people with lived experience and when challenging traditional power dynamics. Innovisor’s insights align with what we are learning nationally about inequality and conditions for change. It highlights about leadership in place-based systemic approaches: strategic leaders using their influence to open space for diverse contributions, and multiple people at all levels taking informed decisions aligned to a shared vision. We call this top cover over hierarchy. We’re not fully there yet, but Innovisor helps us move closer to the aspiration where local people routinely influence decisions, their diverse needs are equitably represented, and communities experience greater trust, wellbeing, dignity, and control.