The Signals The System Can Hear - And The Ones It Is Still Learning To Listen For
SSEN CEO, Terry Murphy, reflects on why systems often struggle to recognise the value of the work that holds communities together.
Over the past month I found myself returning to a piece by Indy Johar that stayed with me. It gave language to something many of us working in social enterprise and civic infrastructure have sensed for years but often struggle to explain. It is called The Signals Markets Can Hear and the Signals They Cannot.
One of the ideas that struck me most is the suggestion that systems rarely respond to what is most important. They tend to respond to what they are able to recognise as information.
In Indy’s example, a speculative essay about AI and labour markets travelled rapidly through investor networks because it could be translated into familiar economic variables. A UK government warning on biodiversity collapse, despite being far more consequential, barely registered because it could not be translated into the same language.
In other words, what seems to matter is not just importance, but whether something can be translated into the language a system already understands.
That idea feels relevant well beyond financial markets. Institutions tend to optimise what their systems allow them to see. What becomes legible can be measured and acted upon. What sits outside that often struggles to attract sustained attention.
It brought to mind a different kind of system. If you look at a forest, most of what makes it work is not immediately visible. Beneath the surface sits a dense mycelial network, quietly connecting trees, redistributing resources and responding to stress. It rarely appears in headline indicators. And yet without it, much of what we see above ground would struggle to survive.
As I was reading Indy’s piece, I found myself thinking less about markets and more about a very practical question we are grappling with here in Sheffield.
A pattern that many places are beginning to recognise
Over the past year I have had conversations with colleagues in other cities grappling with similar dynamics.
The language of inclusive growth, prevention, community wealth building and systems leadership is becoming more prominent. Yet the infrastructure that supports the organisations already working in this way is often struggling to secure stable resourcing.
This does not feel like a lack of goodwill. If anything, the opposite. More often it seems to reflect how difficult it is to translate cross-cutting social value into systems that still organise funding and accountability through narrower lenses.
Seen through that perspective, what is happening in Sheffield may be less an isolated challenge and more a reflection of a wider systemic design issue. It is simply a place where that tension is becoming harder to ignore.
We already have a shared articulation of what we are trying to move towards. Through the Sheffield City Goals, we have a language for outcomes rooted in place, people, neighbourhoods and future generations.
The question it leaves me with is whether our systems are currently set up to recognise and support the kinds of activity that will get us there.
A system that still cannot hear what matters most
We are currently facing the prospect of another gap in commissioned support for social enterprise. At the same time, the allocation on the table represents a roughly 65–70 percent real terms reduction compared with funding available just over three years ago.
In practical terms, that means trying to deliver many of the same outcomes with around a third of the real resources. Anyone working close to this ecosystem will have a sense of how challenging that is.
This is not just about the scale of the reduction. It points to something deeper about how value is perceived and what kinds of contribution the system is currently set up to recognise, which feels important if we are serious about building a more resilient and inclusive local economy.
It also connects to something that has been gaining more attention in recent years, often described as the foundational economy. The foundational economy is the part of the economy that makes everyday life possible. Health, care, education, food, transport, utilities and housing. It underpins stability and employs a significant share of the workforce, yet attracts far less attention than high-growth sectors or the search for the next “unicorn”. If investment in these foundations is limited, it becomes harder to sustain the conditions that allow other parts of the economy to function. Social enterprises often sit precisely in this space, working within the systems that communities depend on most.
In many ways, they operate like that unseen network beneath the surface, connecting people, redistributing resources, responding to pressure and holding things together in ways that are not always immediately visible.
And this is not just a Sheffield issue
Recently I was invited to present at a regional government roundtable in Oxford. What stood out was that the appetite for supporting social enterprise infrastructure was clearly there. The value was understood. The interest was genuine.
The challenge did not seem to be belief. It seemed to be the difficulty of translating that belief into something that could move through existing structures, budgets and decision-making processes. That tension feels familiar. The model is recognised, but the system still struggles to resource it.
When rhetoric and reality drift apart
There is a further tension that many of us will recognise locally.
The strategic language across institutions increasingly reflects social enterprising principles. Place-based working. Prevention. Long-term outcomes. Stronger neighbourhoods. Better outcomes for future generations.
Yet at the same time, the infrastructure supporting this work is often shrinking. Our ambitions are becoming more expansive just as the practical capacity to deliver them is being reduced. Part of this may relate to how value is framed.
Social enterprise does not create value neatly inside one departmental silo. Its impact tends to sit across employment, health, communities, environment, skills and prevention.
And yet support is often funded and assessed through just one part of the system. That inevitably captures only part of the picture. The result can be a mismatch between what the work actually is and how it is understood.
If the system is primarily set up to see individual outputs, it will tend to miss the relational work that sits between them. The connective tissue that allows activity to cohere into something more resilient.
Counting what is easy, missing what is vital
This is not an argument against measurement. Programmes like our Social Enterprise Growth Accelerator (SEGA) need to demonstrate value. But the metrics that tend to dominate are those the system can hear most easily.
How many organisations were supported or created?
How many jobs were created or safeguarded?
These matter, but they only tell part of the story. Much of the value sits in things that are harder to capture. Through SEGA and earlier programmes, we have worked alongside hundreds of founders navigating difficult conditions.
Often the most important support looks like:
helping clarify direction
making connections that unlock opportunity
building confidence and capability
strengthening relationships across the ecosystem
This is the quieter work of resilience. It is also, in many ways, the kind of relational infrastructure that allows a system to function more coherently over time. Without it, activity becomes more fragmented. Organisations operate in isolation. And the system as a whole becomes more brittle.
The wrong pocket problem, all over again
Social enterprise creates value in multiple places at once, but no single institution captures the full benefit.
Health may see one part.
Economic development another.
Communities another.
If support is funded through one budget line, it will tend to look too expensive from that perspective and too small from the perspective of the wider system. This can create a persistent tension. We ask social enterprises to respond to joined-up challenges, but the systems supporting them remain fragmented.
There is also a further risk. When value is only partially understood, it is not just that support is limited. It is that the support that is commissioned may not quite match what is actually needed.
A city cannot build resilience on shrinking foundations
If we are serious about inclusive growth, prevention, climate resilience and stronger neighbourhoods, then social enterprise support starts to look less like an optional extra and more like part of the city’s underlying infrastructure.
Because much of the work being done in this ecosystem already reflects those ambitions in practice. In a deeper sense, this also relates to the capacity of a system to respond, adapt and reorganise over time.
That capacity does not sit only in formal institutions. It also sits in the relationships, networks and shared understanding that allow people to act collectively. And yet we find ourselves once again facing reduced provision, which suggests that this layer of the system is still not fully visible.
So here is the provocation
I care deeply about this ecosystem because I see the work being done every day by people holding communities together in difficult circumstances.
This is written from that place of concern, not criticism. It leaves me wondering whether the issue is not simply one of funding, but something deeper about how value is understood.
Perhaps we are still trying to justify this work through metrics that were not designed to capture the kinds of outcomes we now say matter. There is something slightly uncomfortable in that, particularly when our strategic frameworks already point towards a broader conception of value.
So the question becomes whether our systems for commissioning and measurement are keeping pace with those ambitions.
What next?
This is one of the reasons our regional impact measurement pilot matters.
Not because better metrics alone will solve this, but because we need better ways of evidencing cross-cutting value and making it legible enough to shape decisions.
At a local level, we already have a framework that could help. The Sheffield City Goals offer a way of connecting outcomes across systems and focusing on what matters for people, neighbourhoods and future generations. Read through them closely and they seem to point towards a more social enterprising approach to the city. And yet progress has been uneven.
At SSEN, we see the potential in this every day. We are ready to play our part in helping translate those ambitions into action. What remains less clear is whether the system as a whole is ready to recognise and resource that work at the scale required.
Because behind all of this are real people. People running community centres, building pathways into work, supporting marginalised communities and holding local infrastructure together.
Much of that work sits quietly beneath the surface, like the mycelial networks beneath a forest floor, rarely visible but often determining whether everything else can grow, adapt and survive.
If we genuinely believe in the direction we have set as a city, then perhaps the question is a simple one. What would it look like to better recognise and support the infrastructure that is already helping to make that vision possible?
Terry MurphyCEO, Sheffield Social Enterprise Network