Our thanks to the respondents who shared their perspectives on our article “Strategic Philanthropy for a Complex World.” We found much agreement on our framing of the challenges facing strategic philanthropy today, along with more disparate views on how funders should respond, and some disagreements with our language and interpretation of strategy. Altogether, the responses create a robust debate consistent with the predicament of philanthropy in a complex world.
We are particularly heartened by the supportive views of those running and working with foundations, because those responses validate the three goals we had when writing the article. First, we wanted to heighten urgency to help strategic philanthropy evolve so that it will be more in sync with how social change happens. Second, we wanted to propose newer practices that, as additions to existing practices in strategic philanthropy, could increase the odds of improved outcomes. And last, we wanted to invite those in the field who seek better outcomes to co-create a more impactful future for strategic philanthropy. A good place to begin this co-creation might be to explore several themes that resonated with us in the responses to our article.
Complexity avoidance is not an option. Several of the respondents are extremely articulate on the need for strategic philanthropy to avoid oversimplifying the complex ways in which social change happens. Ford Foundation’s Darren Walker writes, “Too many of us have bought into a polemic that fails to account for the ways social change transpires. . . . The time has come for us to set aside our prescriptive theology that constrains how philanthropy approaches solving complex challenges.” Katherine Fulton of Monitor Institute writes insightfully of the deepening understanding that comes when we act in accordance with the complexity of social change, “As you experiment, you learn about the problem system, which may force you to question whether you have even articulated the right goal, or misjudged what it will take to succeed.” Stanford University’s Paul Brest states that “too much of philanthropy fails for want of these essentials,” in referring to the constant feedback, learning, and adaptation necessary for strategic philanthropy to be effective.
Rigor or flexibility? It’s not either/or, it’s both. Walker writes, “Our sector has become mired in a false choice. We have been trapped in a binary discourse that categorizes grantmakers as either strategic or undisciplined, either focused or haphazard, either rigorous or sloppy.” The sector today finds itself in an “accountability trap,” in which the real and pressing importance of identifying and measuring progress toward outcomes is often conflated with the desire to create “false levels of precision” around both plans and outcomes. Yet the acknowledgment that this precision is often oversold does not preclude the need to take a critical eye to a more fluid way of practicing strategic philanthropy. As Fulton points out, “Trusting emergence does not mean relaxing intellectual standards or simply improvising. It does mean remaining open to testing not only your precise solutions but your understanding of the problem you are addressing as well.”
One area of emergence that we find to be continually and significantly discounted in strategic philanthropy is the impact of human interactions on the success or failure of strategies. Vodafone Foundation’s Mark Speich touches on this problem in his response, “In a substantial number of philanthropy-led projects, human interactions [have] proved far less predictable, scalable, and replicable than a foundation’s grand strategy had mapped them out to be.” We believe strategic philanthropy must significantly increase its rigor in incorporating the impact of human relationships, and we called this principle out in our sidebar on “relational trust.”
And yet, the tension between intentionality and flexibility, particularly as it relates to gauging progress toward outcomes, remains a central challenge for even the most sophisticated of today’s strategic philanthropy practitioners. Rockefeller Foundation’s Zia Khan takes this challenge directly to us (and, we hope, to others as well). He responds, “When is the failure to realize goals a natural outcome of working in a complex system, and when is it due to poor implementation? Defining management approaches for addressing this tension when working on complex problems would help make the valuable ideas in this article even more useful to practitioners.”
Structural changes will be required. The dissonance between fluid strategies for complex problems and the rigid foundation structures of today is noted by several respondents, most extensively by Harvard University’s Christine Letts. Letts comments, “Adaptation takes time because of the necessity to plan, do, check, then act, evaluate, and start over. . . . [Foundations] need to be given flexible funding to respond with agility to changes in the world rather than rely on grantmaking timelines of the board. Many foundations simply need to have more staff in order to be learning and adjusting along with partners and grantees. The board needs to get as big a kick from learning as from launching initiatives.” We agree and encourage boards, in particular, to test their assumptions about how social change happens and their own role in accelerating or hindering the change they seek in the world.
Towards more effective strategic philanthropy practices. In our article we proposed three newer practices rarely seen in strategic philanthropy today that we believe will improve the likelihood of achieving positive outcomes to complex problems. The three practices are co-creating strategy, working positive and negative attractors, and improving system fitness. All three practices are based on our observations of evolving approaches by effective strategic philanthropies. Importantly, they also derive from the extensive body of knowledge on how complex adaptive systems evolve. Although none of the respondents directly addresses these recommended practices, we see additional areas for agreement and disagreement in comparing our perspectives here to respondents’ comments on their own remedies for strategic philanthropy.
Co-creating strategy: Many in strategic philanthropy today must change their orientation from “acting on the world” to “acting in the world.” And here’s where we differ by degree with several responders who questioned the utility to strategic philanthropy of the simple/complicated/complex framing. In the words of Brest, our framing makes “the simple too simple and the complex too complex.” Although we agree with the observation that the challenges strategic philanthropy addresses are not dichotomous (Letts aptly points out that even a theoretically simple problem such as building a hospital may have complex dimensions), we think the acknowledgment that complex problems in particular require co-creating with others is a critical mindset shift for the staffs and boards of many foundations. It is much easier for a foundation to affect on its own, from the “outside,” problems at the simple end of the spectrum, such as providing scholarships to meet the financial needs of students from low income families. The necessity of co-creation becomes much harder to ignore when staff and board truly acknowledge the intersecting (and sometimes conflicting) strategies, relationships, and power dynamics enmeshed in the complex issues they wish to address.
Working the attractors: In our article, we said, “Complex systems are not predictable, but they do exhibit patterns of momentum. By paying close attention we can identify when energy within the system is moving in a specific direction toward what, in system dynamics, is called an attractor.” We found the response from Peter Frumkin at the University of Pennsylvania, and his emphasis on “boundaries,” to present a similar notion in its focus on constant vigilance and attention by strategic philanthropists to the exigencies affecting their goals. Frumkin suggests that “the problem with strategic philanthropy thus comes down at its core to where the boundaries of a problem will be set. . . . The most effective funders are constantly aware of the noise in the systems and attempt to internalize little by little some of the most significant externalities.” This, to us, sounds like using different language to describe a similar phenomenon.
Improving system fitness: In our article we suggested that “emergent strategy focuses on strengthening the systems and relationships that can generate solutions, rather than on constructing the solutions themselves.” We found this concept to be central to the example Kahn shares of the Rockefeller Foundation’s successful eradication of hookworm disease in the early 1900s. As Kahn points out, on-going strategies that contributed to the solution were the result of Rockefeller Foundation’s relationship-strengthening efforts that connected multiple parties—including the medical profession, public health officials, boards of trade, churches, schools, and the press. In similar fashion, Kenneth Prewitt of Columbia University describes in his response several successes in strategic philanthropy that relied on the strengthening and relationship nurturing of multiple players in the system who subsequently produced positive solutions not initially apparent to the funders of these efforts.
On common sense and jargon. Several of the respondents take us to task on two dimensions that we are more than happy to own. First, a few of the respondents state that our perspectives and recommendations are nothing more than “common sense.” The willingness to change strategy in the face of unexpected circumstances is indeed common sense (even if many foundation processes today don’t always permit such timely changes). But truly acting in accordance with the non-linear conditions of complexity remains counter-intuitive behavior to many in the field. The activities of co-creation, working the attractors, and improving system fitness are ways of setting and implementing strategy profoundly different from the approach pursued by most of strategic philanthropy today.
Second, several respondents say that we added unnecessarily to the jargon in the field. We agree that strategic philanthropy today is indeed replete with jargon, but many of the prevailing concepts and tools in strategic philanthropy (for example, the logic model and use of quarterly dashboards) are insufficient to accommodate the nuances of social change. We believe there is a need for new framing and new tools—even at the added expense of a new lexicon—to which the field can turn in finding better ways to develop and implement strategies that address complex problems. As Fulton suggests in her response, “Transformative social change requires confronting messy political, social, and human realities, with a strong tolerance for ambiguity. . . . That’s why many of us are busy creating tools, concepts, and approaches to supplement logic models while boosting strategic learning.”
Our closing word is an invitation. As mentioned at the outset, our primary intent in writing “Strategic Philanthropy for a Complex World” was to help foster co-creation among kindred spirits who seek to improve the outcomes of work in philanthropy. We hope this article and the responses catalyze a broader dialogue on improving strategic philanthropy, and we welcome the opportunity to work with others to find ways for philanthropy to play a more important role in creating a better future.
Read the rest of the responses.