From a European perspective, Mark Kramer and his colleagues’ seminal essays on strategic philanthropy have had an enormous impact on the way that charitable work and the societal purpose of foundations are currently understood. The impact and theory-of-change-driven turn that Kramer et al. helped to bring about fundamentally challenged the foundations’ world, in which program aesthetics and pilot projects, without any consideration of scaling, were still quite widespread. They furthermore helped to demystify the similarly widespread claim of success that was based on the unsustainable principle of pouring a lot of money on a rather small group of people and then hoping that someone would come and replicate these efforts. It was fascinating to observe how the buzzwords “impact,” “collective impact,” and “catalytic” steadily moved from the fringes of the European debate on philanthropy to its very core.

At the same time, other related phenomena triumphed as well. Any senior foundation manager with some aspiration had to juggle the concepts of impact measurement and advocacy. Corporate foundations were especially fond of this turn, as it presented them with patterns and a vocabulary their funders felt familiar with.

But then came the great sobering. Simplistic models clashed with what Immanuel Kant called the “crooked timber of humanity.” In a substantial number of philanthropy-led projects, human interactions proved far less predictable, scalable, and replicable than a foundation’s grand strategy had mapped them out to be. And when it came to social change, foundations quickly had to realize that any reliable measurement of impact required a tremendously complicated—preferably longitudinal—evaluation process that even then might not be able to isolate and trace the impact of a single intervention. But who would ever have seriously assumed that the careful evaluation of philanthropic work could produce rules of general validity?

In reaction, some just retreated to the mere simulation of impact assessment by applying greatly insufficient evaluation methods—project aesthetics disguised as strategic philanthropy. Against the backdrop of a tradition that discouraged openly discussing failures, the emerging skepticism has not yet made it to the front stage of the European debate on philanthropic trends, but the rising murmurs cannot be ignored anymore either.

Into this situation John Kania, Mark Kramer, and Patty Russell have introduced an article putting forward their thought leadership’s most recent breed: emergent strategy. Expectations were high that once more the view from the heights of FSG would open up new perspectives on the path philanthropy should take. Alas, I cannot help admitting that what is described as emergent strategy falls somewhat short of being strategic. I do not want to be misunderstood: The challenges of complexity are laid out convincingly, and the need to adapt to the complex nature of social reality is clearly justified. Yet at this point such an analysis does not lead the way anymore. Rather, it merely catches the widespread existing sentiment and seems to label a sound and prudent application of a rigid strategy as a strategy itself.

From my perspective, a catalytic approach to philanthropy that does not provide for the uncertainties of human conduct is in most cases doomed to fail, even without the challenge of complexity. A complicated situation is fully sufficient to wreak havoc on the beauty of a pure strategy. Thus emergent strategy describes the day-to-day duties of a foundation manager who in a prudent way feels responsible for the success of the programs he is overseeing. There is nothing wrong with that. But there is no need to style such an approach as strategy, when in a Clausewitzian sense it seems to be mere adaptive tactics and sound judgment.

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