Aligning Action to Reimagine Capitalism
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By Anna Muoio, Amit Bouri, and Chris Jurgens
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Originally published at NationalCivicLeague.org
The unrelenting crises of the past year have revealed that many of the systems we rely on, whether health, education, political, or economic, are failing the majority of Americans they are meant to serve. Joseph Schumpeter’s “gale of creative destruction” has blown beyond the bounds of our economic structures to upend every aspect of our lives. It is hard to see silver linings in storm clouds. But even amidst the tragedy, hopeful renewal is sprouting, fueled by a shared urgency and collective commitment to forgo simplistic, short-term fixes to what are increasingly recognized as systemic failures.
People and organizations are finding ways to work together to match the scale of the problems at hand. Many of these efforts are driven by a simple but powerful question: How can we move from isolated interventions to aligned action, so that we accomplish more together than we could by working alone? That collective action is exactly the type of problem-solving that intractable, inextricably-linked problems require. And it is exactly the approach a group of leaders and funders is undertaking for one of the thorniest and most complicated problems of all: reimagining the capitalist system that so many now acknowledge is fundamentally broken.
A growing chorus of stakeholders is demanding change to the current economic system—with ambitions ranging from recalibration to fundamental restructuring—so that it meets the needs of our society and our planet, so that it responds to the greatest challenges of our time. Some have been at this work for decades, and others are just entering the fray. This collection of actors includes individual business and financial sector leaders seeking to drive change; networks and coalitions that bring together actors around common goals; grassroots and advocacy organizations seeking to influence and challenge current business and investment practices; researchers, academics and think tanks incubating new ideas and policy agendas; and philanthropies focused on strengthening this movement for change.
The New Capitalism Project (NCP) was launched as an effort to explore how these diverse stakeholders, who have shared goals in building a more just, inclusive, and equitable economic system, can better align their work aimed at driving systemic change. The goal of meaningful movement toward a transformed economic future is what brought together the three of us from our various backgrounds in social impact and impact investing to push for progress. In order to help guide the first steps toward that ultimate vision, our early collaboration on the New Capitalism Project has worked to better understand our present starting point.
The initial phase of the NCP launched in February 2020, a few weeks before the world shut down due to Covid-19. Its goal was two-fold: First, we sought to make sense of the range of activity and leaders working on the frontlines of shifting to a better economic system. We wanted to help field leaders and funders alike answer questions such as: What is the current landscape of organizations focused on building towards a new capitalism? How does my organization fit into a broader ecosystem of change? Does the current state of activity risk fragmentation and diluted impact? Are there key partnerships to pursue in order to accelerate and amplify impact?
The second goal of NCP’s initial phase was to test the timbre of shared intent among individual leaders and to bridge any perceived differences in ideology and organizational theories of change. Ultimately, we hoped to determine whether more thoughtful coordination could lead to more meaningful impact among organizations that work with the business and investor groups to generate change and who are thinking about broader economic system shifts. So, we began asking: What does it mean, and what would it require, to foster deeper coordination that moves beyond single-point solutions? Often, the biggest obstacle to this pivot is creating the time, space, and capacity for leaders to pursue a different kind of dialogue about the future and what is needed to get there.
First, we interviewed eighteen leaders, all of whom are already working to shift the norms, behaviors, and practices of business and investor groups. This included leaders from the fields of impact investing and sustainable business, as well as people from the fields of racial and economic justice, grassroots organizing, and labor and worker organizing. We worked to engage them each in a deep dialogue to more fully understand their perspectives on how the current economic system is failing, their aspirations for a “new” system, and the opportunities and challenges to get there.
As you might expect, there was no shortage of ways that leaders articulated the fundamental problem with status quo capitalism. Stakeholders framed a market characterized by the increasing concentration of economic power, which distorts political power and leaves capitalism “uncontrolled,” “out of balance,” “short-sighted,” and “with misaligned incentives driving destructive behavior.” At its very core, many saw an inextricable link between the broken economic system and issues of power and race. As one said, “You can’t have a meaningful conversation around finance without talking about power and race.”
Through this kaleidoscopic view on the nature of the problem and the ways it can be addressed, we gained valuable insights into the broad landscape of those reimagining capitalism. From there, we developed a set of viewpoints, productively inaccurate provocations, that help illuminate a path forward to explore collective action.
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Visions for the Future: A core theme of our consultations with field leaders was understanding the future vision of capitalism they were aiming for, which revealed much about different organizations’ problem definition, theories of change, and visions of success. The leaders we spoke with and the organizations we researched are all working towards some version of a different and improved economy. To describe it, they used words like: inclusive, sustainable, equitable, regenerative, just, multiracial, restorative, conscious, circular, solidarity, wellbeing, and liberation. While each term implies that we achieve something “better,” we found a lack of definitional clarity or consensus around terminology, as well as differences in what it means to achieve said future. As one leader framed it, “It’s not just semantics. People do mean different things.” Developing a shared sense of the possible connection points – that is, where the futures may align and where they are distinct – will be an important next step in order to construct any transformational paths forward.
Organizational Levers and Tactics for change: Our work surfaced a range of perspectives on what level of overhaul the economic system needs, in what manner, and under what timeframe. What began to surface is a spectrum of activity spanning from collaboration to confrontation, from co-creating change to forcing change. From these valuable set of diverse approaches, however, an important set of questions emerge: Is the field overly focused on one “lever” for systemic economic change at the expense of others? Can these actors arrive at a more coherent and explicit division of labor? Can we increase coordination among organizations working on the same “lever?” To drive meaningful progress, we will eventually need to develop a clearer picture of who is working where, and why.
Influence Strategies: Leaders revealed a range of stakeholders they believe are critical to target in order to gain momentum for deeper change. Again, here we were able to generate a series of questions with field-level implications: Are there opportunities for refocusing efforts on certain stakeholders, where new leverage may reside? If so, who within the ecosystem is targeting them? Eventually, answers to these questions will help ensure that influence strategies are both effective and efficient.
Movement Ecology: In any field in which systemic change is in play, there will always be a diverse set of actors fueled by different articulations of the problem and different theories of change. Organizational interests may be complementary, competitive, or even in conflict. Resources will be distributed unevenly, creating competition that can thwart more strategic coordination. That possibility is a cause for concern because we know that complex challenges require strategic coordination. We mapped the 90 organizations we researched according to the Ayni Institute’s Movement Ecology Framework which helped both funders and practitioners alike start to ask: How does my organization fit into a broader ecosystem of change? How does our effort work in relationship to others? Are there key partnerships to pursue in order to accelerate and amplify impact? Where is the right place to direct efforts or funding?
The goal of this initial sensemaking was not to rush to a set of recommendations, but to generate understanding of the current landscape and to surface the critical questions that a group of committed leaders can continue to deliberate and explore. That said, the initial phase of work surfaced a few key takeaways:
First, it fueled a collective sense that we may be approaching a “tipping point” for real change, revealing an opportunity to harness the growing momentum and movement towards shifting our economic system.
Second, that there is appetite from diverse field leaders to work together to explore avenues for aligned action.
And third, any plan for action will benefit from bringing together diverse perspectives that cut across different worldviews and constituencies; that dialogue and learning across ‘silos’ generate the understanding, insight, learning and opportunities that become the critical fuel for aligned action.
As a result, the next phase of the New Capitalism Project is underway. We have mobilized a diverse group of leaders and funders who occupy different realms of the change ecosystem, with different frames of the problems and different ideas of the solutions needed. This design team will work together in 2021 to co-develop a plan of the most important and integrated actions to accelerate field-level change and guide philanthropic investment to move towards a reimagined capitalism.
Ultimately, the spirit guiding the work of The New Capitalism Project is about tapping into the power of a diverse “we” and finding places where individual effort can yield to aligned action. In this way, we see the effort as fostering community alignment toward a more inclusive, more sustainable future. That vision was perhaps best captured by one of the leaders we interviewed, who asked: “How do we build bridges across some of the fundamental ideological differences? Bridges that create trust, and then, let us challenge where we need to challenge?” That bridge-building and forging connections, grounded in trust among people doing the hard work of change, is central to any system-shifting effort; and is the type of work that is needed now more than ever.
Anna Muoio is Project Lead, New Capitalism Project. Amit Bouri is CEO of the Global Impact Investing Network. Chris Jurgens is Director of Reimagining Capitalism for the Omidyar Network.
The Calculus for Commitment: The Power of Involving the Private Sector in Social Impact Networks
Why social sector organizations should make engaging for-profit companies a normal part of their problem-solving strategies—and four ways to do it effectively.
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By Anna Muoio & Faizal Karmali
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The importance of engaging the private sector in efforts to address social problems is increasingly apparent. Wicked problems defy single-point solutions, and no single organization or sector working in isolation can solve them. This widespread understanding is matched by a growing number of businesses exploring the integration of social impact into their core strategies. “We’re seeing companies interested in moving from chipping away at problems to solving them,” as Tom Murray, vice president of corporate partnerships at the Environmental Defense Fund, put it. “If you are talking about ... climate change, over-fishing, or deforestation, no one can push solutions on their own—it will take collaboration across industries and supply chains. And these efforts are business driven, not driven by values or altruism.”
Originally published in Stanford Social Innovation Review
Janet Webb, CEO of the California-based timber company Big Creek Lumber, echoed this sentiment as she framed the motivation for her company to join a nascent social impact network of conservation groups and land-owners to effectively steward Santa Cruz mountain forests. For Webb, participating in a social impact network is about being “at the table” and having an opportunity to reframe what good land stewardship looks like: “Getting involved was more concern-driven than anything else,” she said. “We feel strongly that responsible resource utilization is a critical component of region-wide land policy and that there are significant environmental benefits to procuring local products for local markets. If we do not participate, this perspective may be left out of these important discussions entirely.”
The steady drum beat for more cross-sector collaboration and the recognition of the importance of private sector participation raises a set of important questions for any social change leader focused on mobilizing an ecosystem to address systemic challenges: How can a network of groups and institutions, not just a single organization, successfully compel private sector organizations to be part of their effort? How can we shift the conversation about addressing social needs from one based on a moral imperative to one that reveals a market incentive? And ultimately, how can we design an aligned action network that delivers both business value and drives social impact?
These are a few of the questions we set out to answer in a recent study on the power of involving business in social impact networks. We identified and analyzed more than 50 social impact networks that involve both civil society and the private sector, scoured the current literature, drew on the experience of both of our organizations in supporting and facilitating these networks, and interviewed more than 20 practitioners with direct experience leading or participating in networks that involve companies.
The exciting and encouraging news is that there is already a range of networks in operation across the globe, where the private sector plays substantive roles. We found cross-sector networks designed to engage global seafood supply chains in rebuilding depleted fish stocks, collective efforts to reduce deforestation, and collaborations purpose-built to surface new market-based solutions to building healthy and sustainable food systems, to name a few. The challenge going forward is enabling more organizations to meaningfully and effectively engage with the private sector. To reduce the perceived chasm between the social and private sectors, social sector leaders need the skills and courage to act as bridge builders. A more capable and confident social sector can make engaging the private sector a normal part of systemic problem-solving strategies.
What we came to understand was deceptively simple: If we want to see more cross-sector collaborations, we have to get better at crossing sectors. What this entails, at a very tactical level, is that social change leaders intent on recruiting the private sector into their network craft business cases that clearly articulate the value of engaging. A business leader needs to see a clear path to participation, sense how that participation will serve a high-priority business need, and feel confident that their commitment is both well-defined and tightly bound.
Sundaa Bridgett-Jones, a senior associate director at The Rockefeller Foundation, underscored the necessity for a clear “value prop” when she shared her experience courting a large multinational for the Global Resilience Partnership, a nascent cross-sector network focused on building resilience in communities throughout three crisis-prone regions in Africa and Asia: “We had almost a year of conversation with them, and in the end, the value proposition still was not hitting the mark. While it may sound engaging to have an open white-boarding session about how to partner, we have learned that with business, it does not work as well as having a focused ask underpinned by a clear understanding of why that ask would be valuable to us and the partner.”
Crafting a focused ask that makes explicit the value for all partners is the critical first step in any “sector crossing”—an often overlooked but sorely needed move—and it has four main components:
1. Describe the business value the network can deliver.
At the heart of any social impact network that involves businesses is a value exchange that gives both business and social change leaders a reason to make participation a strategic priority. Social change leaders have a better shot at engaging the private sector if they can provide value to companies, both directly to their core lines of business and indirectly by addressing their broader needs.
For instance, how would working collaboratively with a broad set of stakeholders to steward a region’s watershed serve a company’s interest? How would ensuring access to quality education for disadvantaged youth address the talent needs of a local business? Authentic participation by the private sector can accelerate a certain set of social impact goals—goals that also directly benefit a company’s core business. And conversely, the motivations for companies to join a social impact network fall into five kinds of potential business value (see chart below). Understanding this calculus for commitment is important.
Articulating the value exchange that makes explicit how a network effort can both make progress toward a social impact goal while delivering business value is critical, a point highlighted by Ryan Whalen, director for initiatives and strategy at The Rockefeller Foundation: “Before you approach a company, ask: ‘Are we ready to approach them, and do we have the right pitch for the right person?’ You don’t have endless bites at the apple. So make sure you make your case in an honest and serious way, not in an aspirational way. It demands a much colder calculus than most of what we do in social impact work.”
2. Discover the companies and individuals who would bring value as participants.
Knowing the right companies to engage and the right individuals within those companies can sometimes feel like finding a needle in a haystack. There’s often an assumption that the best portal into a company is through its corporate social responsibility (CSR) function, but it can be even more effective to ground the effort in a business unit where the strategic priority for participation is apparent.
One way to identify the signal from the noise is to understand what type of company you’re considering. A 2015 Deloitte survey of the Fortune 500 mapped the distribution of firms across four typical ways that large companies relate to social impact (see graphic below). As you assess a company’s particular situation, look for indications that it might be an example of one of the four archetypes. While not an exact science, the traits of that archetype can help fill in the picture of the company’s motives and interests, and help you craft a more-focused ask and nuanced value proposition.
3. Define how a company can participate.
Once you sharpen the value exchange, set clear expectations of the minimum a company will need to bring to the table as a participant. Consider who needs to come to convenings, provide input, or make decisions. Think about the amount of time and preparation required by companies—and whether you will ask them to find creative ways to put their organizations’ non-financial resources to use.
Cheryl Dahle, founder of the Future of Fish—a bold experiment in cross-sector collaboration engaging entrepreneurs, industry players, and investors in seafood supply chain challenges—explained the importance of valuing participants’ time: “We are always trying to earn our entrepreneurs’ time. We want them to leave every meeting feeling that their time was well spent and they got something out of it.”
A naïve mistake is to see private sector participation only in terms of financial support—and to assume that businesses are like donors, willing and able to write blank checks in support of the network’s goals. Hal Hamilton, an experienced hand at recruiting companies to participate in the Sustainable Food Lab, a cross-sector network that surfaces market-based solutions to build healthy and sustainable food systems worldwide, reflected on the importance of widening the aperture of partnership possibilities when engaging a business: “There’s a greater possibility of real partnership if the project is material to the business, and you can make deeper impact by baking the sustainability goals into procurement and strategy. There’s a lot of money in the world, but there is not enough integration of sustainability and social equity goals into the way business happens. That’s where the gold lies.”
4. Craft the network story for a business audience.
Crafting a compelling story about what the challenge is, what the network wants to achieve, and how it will measure success is critical. At Monitor Institute, we call this “telling the story that’s not yet true.” It means creating a sense of what’s possible, architecting a larger story of change and impact that is bigger than any one organization’s story but still allows every member of the network to see themselves in it. To do this, frame the nature of the problem the network will address, the barriers to a solution, the stakes for overcoming those barriers, how the problem impacts commercial markets (such as its effect on natural resources, supply chains, talent pools, consumer attitudes, or government policies), the resulting business value that could be created, and what changes the network can achieve.
Future of Fish does this well. Its problem is that many fisheries are on the path to collapse. If a given fishery collapses, the result will not only entail significant environmental problems but also include lost livelihoods for the fisherman, fish brokers, grocery stores, and restaurants. To put it bluntly: an entire ecosystem is at risk. It’s a dire story that spawned a sophisticated set of strategies to address it: “The driving belief behind Future of Fish was that it was going to take more than one idea and one business to change a global supply chain,” says Cheryl Dahle. “We needed a platform that [acts like] a machine to continually invent new ideas and continually launch new businesses.”
This story, like many others we uncovered, is a testament to a new way of mobilizing a wider array of stakeholders to address wicked problems. And it’s a call to authentically understand just what it takes to do the “crossing” in cross-sector collaborations. As we build the skills to traverse sectors, we hope these networks will grow.
Four Questions to Ask Before You Engage with a Network
Funders want to create big change by using networks for social impact. But where to start?
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By Anna Muoio & Kaitlin Terry
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When Jennifer Berman, executive director of the Maverick Lloyd Foundation in Vermont, wanted to re-orient her state’s approach to climate and energy challenges, she wondered whether launching a network of diverse stakeholders, working on different parts of the same problem, could be the right approach. “No effort had brought together a strategically chosen group of folks to think about where the state needed to go, mapped out how to get there, and created the capacity for that group to do work over time,” she said.
Originally published in Stanford Social Innovation Review
Meanwhile, when Shruti Sehra, partner at the venture philanthropy fund New Profit, began asking not just how the fund could scale organizations, but how it could scale impact, she explored the role that a network could play in bridging divisions between different groups in education. She told us, “We saw all kinds of programs expanding their models, and leaders would wonder, ‘How much do we keep expanding?’ Inevitably they would talk about how they could do more together than they could on their own. So we started to ask ourselves, ‘What would it look like if we approached social change from a network perspective? What would it take for social entrepreneurs? What would it take for funders?”
Berman and Sehra are just two of the growing number of funders striving to address today’s “wicked problems” in bigger and better ways, but feeling confined by the limitations of scaling up narrowly focused interventions. Increasingly, these funders have begun to experiment with a variety of social impact networks that could allow them to scale impact beyond what a single organization can accomplish. These networks may have little in common in terms of their design, intent, or issue area, but the way they operate suggests a common set of questions that can help funders decide whether a network is the right approach for them—and, if it is, how to work with that network. In ENGAGE, a web-based guide we developed with the support of The Rockefeller Foundation, we present 10 of these questions as a way to provide some structure for funders choosing whether to launch and support networks—a process that is often fluid and can easily become confusing. Questions include:
1. Where is the network in its evolution?
We know networks come in different shapes and sizes, and there’s no one-size-fits-all path. But we also know that each network will move through certain lifecycle stages, from conceptualization (when you’re not even sure how best to frame the problem or opportunity) to action—including organization, growth, and ultimately transformation. Whether you’re starting a new network or assessing whether to support an existing one, it is important to evaluate which stage it’s in so that you know what kinds of activities and support are most appropriate—and what might be coming next. Do you have a general sense of the social issue or problem that the network would address but don’t yet have a well-articulated point of view for the change it can create? Are you generally unfamiliar with other stakeholders or initiatives that address the issues? If so, then the effort is most likely in the “discover phase,” meaning you must undertake a certain set of activities and roles to build momentum before moving to other steps, such as mapping the problem or inviting new people to sit at the table. Alternatively, if you have already started weaving a network around a specific social issue, and if that group is ready to launch pilots to move ideas into action, then you might be in the “knit phase,” and can support the group’s efforts to move and act together.
2. What network design is most useful?
Networks vary in so many ways that the possibilities can seem endless. Our research, however, identified eight particularly significant variables in network design: size, leadership, governance, purpose, alignment, sector, orientation, and geography. Each of these attributes represents a spectrum; combined, they create a useful set of axes that describe a network’s “shape.” Plotting your desired attributes along these axes at the outset will help you understand which network design can best address the scale and type of challenge you face.
For example, knowing that working with a place-based collaborative will be a better fit for your mission than partnering with a nationally focused network allows you to plot yourself on the geography axis. On the orientation axis, you might see indications that the right approach is more of a learning stance than an action-oriented one. Combined, these attributes will determine the ways your network can contribute to the issue it seeks to address.
3. What type of network funder could I be?
Funders typically provide two major types of support to networks. Financial support, of course, is one of them. But network funders also often provide their time, strategic guidance, and other non-monetary resources—otherwise known as “backbone support.” Putting these two dimensions together, three types of network funders emerge:
The “behind-the-scenes funder” contributes significant financial support but is not especially involved in the network’s activities. This role is most similar to the traditional funder. In contrast, the “roll-up-the-sleeves funder” provides a modest financial contribution relative to the investments she makes in backbone support. This aligns with how Carolyn Bancroft, formerly at the Rockefeller Foundation, described Rockefeller’s role in the Joint Learning Network for Universal Health Coverage: “cheerleader, influencer, convener, advocate, and connector.” This aspect of the role, she added, “doesn’t cost us money but does cost us time and human resources to support the network and its growth.” Finally, the “full-spectrum funder” takes a “do it all” approach, combining significant financial investment with high-touch backbone support.
Figuring out what type of funder you can (and should) be requires that you be realistic about the type of support you can provide. How do you know what to provide? Start by asking another crucial question:
4. What forms of financial and backbone support do networks need?
The network’s needs should drive the role a funder plays, not the other way around. And networks might need different kinds of support at each stage of growth. Like financial support, backbone support for a network does not need to come from a single organization, and funders can provide it in many forms. But funders are usually better suited to some roles than others; so precisely which kind of support each funder offers merits careful consideration.
For example, funders tend to be particularly good at attracting additional funding for networks from other interested donors. They’re also good at giving an effort much-needed traction in its early stages. As steering committee member Kate Gordon said of the early days of the RE-AMP Energy Network, “How significant was it to have money at the table? It was huge. Early on, the real value added was that funders were coming to the table, too.” That said, funders should be careful not to overstep their role in guiding the network’s vision and strategy and should avoid squelching network participants’ energy for taking leadership. Ivan Thompson of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundationweighed such factors when deciding what role to play in a water network his foundation supported, ultimately deciding to take more of a back seat on issues of strategic direction. “They keep trying to pull me into a more strategic partnership,” he said. “But I trust them. They’re making progress, and I get informed of the gaps so I can fund them accordingly. It’s really hands-off.”
Finding new solutions to old problems demands that we do things differently and ask a new set of questions. There is no manual for social change, and we don’t pretend to offer one. But we do hope to encourage exploration and smart coordination against the wicked problems we face. After all, sometimes the questions we ask are just as important as the answers we find.
The Network As Social Change Tool: An Interview with Anna Muoio
Originally published by Social Velocity
In today’s Social Velocity interview, I’m talking with Anna Muoio, an expert on the use of networks in social change efforts.
At Monitor Institute, a part of Deloitte Consulting, Anna leads the practice on how to drive large-scale social change through galvanizing networks around a shared agenda. She has led aligned action efforts for organizations such as New Profit, Skoll Foundationand Venture Philanthropy Partners. Anna is the author of GATHER: The Art and Science of Effective Convening; ENGAGE: How Funders Can Support and Leverage Networks for Social Impact; and most recently, “Wicked Opportunities” in Business Ecosystems Come of Age.
You can read interviews with other social change leaders here.
Nell: Is the idea of a network entrepreneur new in the world of social change? Or how do you think the use of networks is different now than it has been in the past?
Anna: The idea of an individual who works, often tirelessly, to mobilize diverse stakeholders to tackle a tough problem by developing a coordinated plan of attack is not new by any means. Funders and practitioners have been galvanizing networks to address large scale challenges for decades. But the term “network entrepreneur” is new. I heard it recently from two practitioners, David Sawyer and David Ehrlichman from Converge, who are working with network leaders in California.
Over the years we’ve used several terms to describe this type of person: network weaver, network CEO, system leader, tri-sector athlete, Chief Resilience Officer, ecosystem integrator, to name a few. What is changing, though, is the acceptance of why developing the capacity to lead and engage in problem solving through networks is important—as well as an appreciation for what it takes to do so. Increasingly, we’re seeing a shift from the organization as the primary unit of change to the network as a viable means of achieving social impact goals.
Nell: Why do you think nonprofit leaders should embrace the idea of a network entrepreneur? What makes this approach so attractive to social change efforts?
Anna: It’s not just nonprofit leaders who should embrace the idea of using networks to drive systemic change. The tough problems we face as a society have no consideration for sector or issue boundaries—and can’t be solved by leaders from any one sector. Business and government leaders have just as important a role to play in cross-sector social problem solving. And for companies, working through networks is becoming a powerful way to integrate social impact into their core business strategy rather than isolate it within a corporate social responsibility initiative. This is where a lot of exciting activity is happening globally.
We’ve identified five types of networks that create that intersection between social impact and business value—and in which companies are playing critical roles. There are those networks which can directly benefit a company’s core business and are designed for addressing strategic goals such as stewarding natural resources, enabling market-based solutions and raising industry standards. Then there are networks that tend to more indirectly benefit a company’s core business; and these focus on aligning solutions within local communities and mobilizing action around large-scale solutions. We are seeing bold cross-sector experiments in many arenas–where social impact networks are successfully engaging the private sector to tackle a range of challenges while also meeting specific business needs, such as: effectively stewarding the forests of the Santa Cruz Mountains in California; redesigning the global seafood supply chain to preserve fisheries; surfacing new market-based solutions for building a healthy and sustainable food system worldwide; improving access to new and underused vaccines for children living in the world’s poorest countries; and enabling communities to create local education ecosystems to support children and youth from cradle to career.
I don’t want to put an unrealistic sheen on the power of networks to solve all problems. Working in this way is one of many important tools in our collective problem-solving toolkit. What networks do, however, is allow us to pursue solutions that would be harder to attain in other ways. A network approach aligns the actions of a diverse set of stakeholders to tackle a larger piece of a problem than by working in isolation; diversifies risk and spreads bets across many experiments; enables innovation by building a platform where different voices can come to the table to shape new solutions; and ultimately, helps build a resilient problem-solving ecosystem where a dense web of relationships provides the resilience necessary to adapt to new challenges and opportunities as they arise. These qualities are harder to get through one-to-one partnerships or from the efforts of a single organization. A network builds a platform that can launch a portfolio of interventions and simultaneously pull many levers for change. That’s what makes them attractive for social change efforts.
Nell: Networks are often organic and can become ineffective if they are overtaken by a single person or entity, yet they also require leadership to be successful. How does a network balance the need for leadership with the need for organic growth?
Anna: Walking the right “leadership line” is certainly critical in a network context; but that’s not to say that networks don’t need focused and intentional leadership. Network leadership requires a different mindset than operating in a traditional organization. It’s more loosely controlled and emergent than top-down and planned. Decision making is shared rather than concentrated in one person. Insights come from the collective rather than from individual “experts.” Power and commitment come from trust among many not from mandates from the C-suite.
In this way, leadership is just one of the many attributes to factor into a network’s design. Through our own work with networks, we’ve identified eight particularly common ways that they can vary to suit different circumstances—and enable or hinder growth. Besides the important leadership attribute, network entrepreneurs need to consider others such as a network’s purpose, alignment, governance, sector, orientation, size and geography.
Our Axes of Collaboration (to the left) is a useful tool for any network entrepreneur as they think about the foundational DNA of a network—and how to design one to best match the type of problem it’s meant to tackle.
For instance, if you’re a network like REAMP, now with over 165 participating organizations focused on the ambitious goal of reducing carbon emissions 80% by 2050 across the Midwest, you won’t want to design a network that “lives” more on the left side of these axes: one with distributed leadership, informal governance, that’s more learning than action oriented, and has minimal alignment. You’ll never hit that goal with that kind of design. Leadership is a critical component of any network; but so are the other factors that will either help support or inhibit a network’s growth. Considering all these dimensions—and then designing appropriately—is essential.
Nell: When you look at some of the social movements active today — like Black Lives Matter and the protests on college campuses — how does your research on networks help inform your understanding of whether or how successful you think those efforts will be?
Anna: I won’t try to predict the future of these movements. But through our work helping design and launch networks, we know that we need to apply a different frame to evaluate a network’s success. We’ve been influenced by the work of Peter Plastrik and Madeline Taylor who are pushing the field’s thinking around how we measure the impact of a network. For a network, it’s important to understand—and to be able to measure—not just the effects, what a network achieves in terms of outcomes, but also to measure its operations, its “internal health” and how it runs.
We segment network effects into three areas:
Beneficiary effects (the outcomes and impacts on the people a group aims to serve),
Idea dissemination (the spread and adoption of language, concepts or practices a network supports) and
Field building (changes we’ve promoted in the development of the fields in which we work).
We then segment network operations into its structure and health and measure things such as the network’s membership, connectivity, activities, resources, infrastructure and value proposition. Many years ago we developed a diagnostic tool to evaluate a network’s effectiveness. Many of the elements to consider may be highly relevant to those working more directly with movements.
Ultimately, a network’s—or movement’s—success depends on a variety of factors. And getting smart about how to track them in order to refine, recalibrate or redirect the network’s strategy is what matters. Unfortunately, there’s not one solitary variable to evaluate the multi-dimensional nature of a network that’s built to tackle deeply systemic and complex challenges. I wish it were that simple, but it’s not.
Three Steps to Collaboration That Tackle Society’s Toughest Challenges
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By Anna Muoio & Dana O’Donovan
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Originally published by The Chronicle of Philanthropy
When you think of New York Fashion Week, what is the first thing that comes to mind? If you don’t think infusing insights from neuroscience into the classroom and transforming the American education system, you’re not alone.
But last month a $30 million project called Reimagine Learning harnessed the creativity and energy of New York Fashion Week — including a performance by John Legend and a cameo by cutting-edge fashion brand Public School—to highlight the promise of creating learning environments that unleash the talents and creativity of all young people.
Reimagine Learning is a diverse collaborative of over 100 organizations and individuals whose work is fueled by a set of core beliefs:
There is no such thing as an average learner. Sharing the same classroom does not mean sharing the same mind.
The best learning environments equally value and cultivate cognitive, social, and emotional skills and understand that together they drive academic performance, well-being, and life success.
It is critical that students have a say in their own learning journey: what they learn, how and where they learn it.
Reimagine Learning brings together innovative entrepreneurial organizations like Achievement Network, Eye to Eye, New Classrooms Innovation Partners, New Teacher Center, Peace First, and Turnaround for Children to align their efforts to fundamentally change how learning happens in this country. New Profit, a venture philanthropy in Boston, has raised the money and is pulling together participants.
Reimagine Learning’s runway debut came after two years of work that highlights a growing trend as nonprofits of all kinds join forces to turn complex, dynamic, and seemingly intractable challenges into opportunities.
Getting groups to work together this way is not easy. While there’s no one road map to any collaborative effort, we have identified a series of stages needed to get to the point where they are ready to make a difference.
Discover the real problem you want to solve. A network has to start somewhere. Usually it begins with a group of people who share a sense that existing solutions aren’t sufficient, but those same people may also have divergent views of the issue and conflicting beliefs about what will work.
As groups come together to take on an ambitious goal that will compel a broad range of people to action, it is essential to understand how to define the problem, how it has developed over time, and what solutions are being tried and by whom.
This is just what happened in 2012 when Vanessa Kirsch, head of New Profit, and trustees of the Peter and Elizabeth C. Tower Foundation discussed their views on how students with learning and attention issues remain at the margins even as schools make big improvements in other ways. They were talking about students with dyslexia, ADHD, dyscalculia, and other brain-based difficulties that make learning in an “average” classroom environment challenging and that can create social and emotional problems as a result.
Concerned as they were about the problem, the group also had a hunch that bringing together key leaders from different fields could help generate new insights and innovations that focus on a student’s needs — and fundamentally improve education for all students.
Over the next year, through a process that included meetings, research, interviews, and a lot of talking and listening to people in the Reimagine Learning Network, we helped members understand where they agreed and where they did not. By gaining a broader sense of the context in which the network operated, encouraging a conversation about a future the network could collectively influence, understanding what the participants believed, whom they served, what problem they solved, and how they had made a difference, we began to write a shared vision for how to change the education system.
This produced a document that allowed everyone in the network to think hard about the ways working together would produce far stronger results than continuing to work alone.
Know the players and how they’re connected. Once the network pinned down its agenda, it focused on who else needed to be involved and how all of the players could work together. We conducted a social-network analysis to see this group’s collective impact across the country — the connections and the gaps. We found that Reimagine Learning’s members work in 47 states, 519 cities, 545 districts, and 1,101 schools — a reach that is fueling practical conversations about how to coordinate changes in classroom activities at the regional, city, and district levels.
With New Profit’s policy arm, America Forward, the network is also focused on pushing for policy changes to remove barriers and create incentives that support new types of teaching and learning environments. Reimagine Learning is also looking for ways to change the culture of how Americans talk about education so they will focus on the understanding that not everyone learns the same way.
Knit disparate efforts to test what works. With over 100 organizations, Reimagine Learning is now starting to collaborate on projects that put their ideas into action. New Teacher Center and the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning are distilling research findings to equip teachers with instructional resources. Together, 15 members of Reimagine Learning launched Understood.org, a free and comprehensive resource for parents of students with learning and attention problems. City Year will open a new school, Compass Academy, which will build on its insights from working with at-risk students for over two decades. MIT Media Lab will expand its work to create technologies that support students who learn in different ways and help them take charge of their own education.
Before John Legend sat down at the piano to sing “Shine” from “Waiting for Superman” at the event that marked the public launch of Reimagine Learning, his call to action echoed in our ears: “In today’s world, expecting every child’s education to be the same, progress at the same rate and be measured against the same narrow standards of performances is not just outdated, it’s a disservice to young people and to the educators who dedicate their lives to helping them. So let’s stop funneling people through a system and start letting each person discover the power and uniqueness of his or her own passion.”
We hope that our experiences will help other groups — no matter what big problem they are trying to solve — have the courage and knowledge to tackle challenges that no single organization can ever hope to make a dent in by working alone.