By Sarah Binos, CEO of Huddle Education
Innovation requires trust and messy experimentation
Innovation in social change is often imagined and then proposed as a clean, linear progression: vision, mission, theory of change, strategic and operational plans, then implementation, monitoring and evaluation and (the intention to) scale. But anyone working inside public systems knows the truth is far messier. Real innovation looks less like a project plan and more like a squiggle: false starts, breakthroughs, detours, insights that arrive sideways, and long stretches of learning that only make sense in hindsight.
From the outset our early stage funders held a deep belief in me as a pioneer – a belief shaped by the decades I have spent in the development sector often working inside complex public systems. Their confidence did more than renew my courage; it created the trust required for early-stage innovation, where the risk of failure is not incidental but inherent. That early affirmation of my leadership was not incidental; it became an emotional and strategic anchor. It created a sense of safety that allowed me to experiment boldly, hold complexity without fear, and re-engage public education with renewed conviction.
Innovation is enabled by relational and strategic conditions
What has become increasingly clear over the last two years is that innovation is not just technical – it is profoundly relational. The posture a funder adopts – the degree of trust, transparency, proximity and shared purpose they bring, together with full rigour and accountability – directly determines the speed, depth and sustainability of innovation.
This article distils what I have learned about the relational and strategic conditions that enable innovation to flourish in the complex reality of South African public schools in six key insights:
1. Trust accelerates innovation
When we first engaged with our funders, they did not primarily evaluate us on the elegance of our model – they simultaneously evaluated our track record, ability to execute, learn and adapt at speed. They positioned themselves from the beginning as innovation partners, not just ‘auditors’. That posture created the psychological safety needed for genuine innovation.
Trust meant we could be transparent about what was working and what was not. In most funding environments, honesty carries reputational risk. In public school environments, where many variables sit outside an organisation’s control, the pressure to provide certainty can silently distort reporting and slow down learning.
Trust meant we could be transparent about what was working – and what was not. In many funding environments, honesty carries reputational risk. In public school contexts, where multiple variables lie outside an organisation’s control, the pressure to offer certainty can distort reporting and slow down learning.
Our funders have cultivated an environment where candour is not only safe – it is expected. Funders attend our strategy sessions, listen with curiosity, and encourage us to surface challenges early.
This trust creates speed: faster pivots, smarter decisions, shorter learning cycles.
Insight: Without trust, organisations hide the squiggles. With trust, the squiggle becomes where breakthroughs happen.
2. Transparency makes failing forward possible
‘Failing forward’ sounds bold and exciting, but very few organisations are structurally or relationally set up to do it. Compliance frameworks reward ‘neatness’, not iteration. Because public systems operate under pressure and constant scrutiny, they are often risk-averse and leave little room for experimentation.
For us, transparency has meant being able to say things like: “This pilot didn’t shift teacher behaviour the way we expected”, or “We took a detour and it taught us something important”, or even “This implementation design is flawed; we need to pivot”.
Because our funders receive this kind of information as insight, not failure, our learning cycles have shortened dramatically. We refine lesson design constantly, test teacher-support strategies in real time, and interrogate data without fear.
Without that relational safety, organisations “perform” for funders instead of telling them what is actually happening.
Insight: Once the work becomes performative, learning becomes stunted.
3. Focus is a discipline
Visionary teams attract opportunities. The real strategic work is choosing what not to pursue. At one point, frustrated by the limits of working inside public systems, our team proposed opening a Huddle school – a controlled environment where we could implement our model with full fidelity. The idea was attractive and potentially powerful.
One of our funders – Allan And Gill Gray Philanthropies – engaged with the idea in a way that was both supportive and steadying: “That’s a great idea but running a school and innovating to shift outcomes in public schools at the same time might split your focus. Pick your lane.”
They were right.
Instead, we negotiated a sandpit classroom inside a public school – a controlled testbed that allowed us to deploy new ideas rapidly and collect behavioural and instructional data immediately. It also enabled us to observe implementation barriers in real time, and to. run do–review–learn–try again cycles at high speed.
We achieved what we needed to, without losing focus.
Insight: Good funders do not shrink ambition – they help teams channel it wisely.
4. Partnership is a posture, not a label
Many funders use the language of ‘partnership’, but few embody the posture. What makes our Funder–Huddle relationships robust is the way both sides show up. These relationships are characterised by co-creation, rather than oversight, and by shared purpose, rather than by parallel interests. This enables joint problem-solving rather than compliance ‘policing’, embedded in mutual humility, rather than institutional ego. Proximity also plays a role: one of our funders will soon sit on our board. We lean on our funders when confronted with key strategic decisions. So often they provide us with a high-altitude systems perspective, offered generously to shape our thinking.
This relational architecture strengthens the technical architecture of innovation.
Insight: When both sides treat each other as co-sojourners, even difficult moments become generative.
5. Relationship is the backbone of sustainable innovation
Across hundreds of public school classrooms, one truth keeps resurfacing: people, not models, drive change.
Teachers engage not because our approach is perfect, but because they feel seen, supported and accompanied. Funders stay not merely because milestones are met, but because trust has been built over time.
The real indicators of innovation success are evident when teams do not only curate data for reporting, but are able to interrogate data honestly, so that they can name failures early and adjust course quickly. An environment where partners challenge each other without defensiveness, and surface implementation barriers instead of smoothing them over, enables innovation. This is when strategy can evolve in response to real-world feedback, not fixed plans. Under such conditions, trust deepens over time, as setbacks are navigated together.
These relational qualities are not soft; they are the infrastructure that holds innovation steady in complex systems.
Insight: Sustainable innovation grows where the ‘relational soil’ is deep.
6. Funders can accelerate or inhibit system-level change
Funders occupy a unique position in the ecosystem. Their posture can either accelerate innovation or unintentionally slow it down.
Funders who enable system-level change, have learnt that it is important to back people as much as ideas, and to fund learning, not just delivery. At the same time, they understand the value of encouraging iteration, not perfection, and that they can add value by bringing systems insights and not just oversight. Funders who accelerate systems change move away from silos and support collaboration, and they hold the long view, especially when systems move slowly. Taking a bet on people is risky and can be messy, but funders who show up as human and offer help when needed are invaluable to pioneers who are pathfinding in huge amounts of complexity.
Insight: In South Africa – where public education is shaped by history, inequality and complexity – funders who understand innovation as relational are indispensable.
Innovation happens at the speed of trust
When funders and implementing organisations relate to each other with openness, transparency and mutual trust, the work stops being transactional and becomes transformational. And in that space, the ’messy squiggle’ of innovation becomes not a source of anxiety, but the exact pathway through which real, lasting change emerges.
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HELPFUL REFLECTIONS FOR FUNDERS
A practical set of questions to reflect on whether your funding approach builds or blocks learning systems:
- Do we treat organisations as partners or grantees?
- Do our reporting requirements reward candour or punish it?
- Do we design for learning cycles or linear compliance?
- Do we separate experimental performance from organisation performance?
- Are we close enough to understand context, but not so close that we distort autonomy?
- Do we bring a meaningful systems view into the partnership?
- Do we support partners in saying no as much as yes?
- Are we funding learning, prototyping and testing, not just delivery?
- Do we hold the long view when systems move slowly or politically?
- Are we helping build networks and communities of practice that strengthen impact?