Paul Brest has been a persuasive advocate of strategy in philanthropy, and his piece helpfully lays out—and powerfully refutes—many of the cases commonly made against so-called “strategic philanthropy.” His call for foundations to take on the big challenges, embracing even risky low-probability efforts when the potential reward is big enough, resonates because it is what foundations are uniquely positioned to do. Indeed, it is what they have historically done at their best.

The last century-plus of philanthropy in the United States has included many great examples of strategic philanthropy: from the work of funders, nonprofits, government actors, and companies on the tuberculosis epidemic a century ago; to the Green Revolution; to the more contemporary example of the work of the Gill Foundation and Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund and numerous other funders and nonprofits on marriage equality.

There is nothing new about strategy in philanthropy, at least as we at the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) define it (which is slightly different than how Brest does), though I’d be the first to argue that it has been rarer in practice than would be optimal.

So why the “discontent”? One reason is there has been too much bad strategy—too much top down, uninformed, static strategy that almost invariably doesn’t produce the desired outcomes.

Too many have failed to understand that strategy in philanthropy is uniquely challenging in the ways that Patricia Patrizi and others have been describing for years. This is due to the extreme difficulty of predicting what will occur in complex contexts with many actors working on the toughest challenges—the very ones that have defied market or government solutions.

I think Brest may underplay this by comparing a foundation creating a strategy to an airline pilot laying out a flight plan. A foundation has much less control than a pilot, and no air-traffic control providing up-to-date knowledge of everything happening in the surrounding environment.

Related, Brest under-emphasizes what is perhaps the most significant reason for whatever backlash against strategy may have occurred in recent years among those in philanthropy and the nonprofit sector: the widespread promotion of a conception of strategy that asserts primacy of the foundation over other actors and likens it, inappropriately, to a business in a competitive context. While Brest himself has not contributed to this problem, he underestimates the degree to which it explains the “discontent.”

Most damaging, as I have written here before, has been the efforts of those who took to the pages of the Harvard Business Review in the 1990s to urge foundations to focus on “unique positioning” and “unique activities,” to do things “differently from others,” and to choose the “best” grantees in the manner of “investment advisors in the business world.” This market-based, top-down conception of strategy ignores the fundamental distinction between a competitive environment, in which you want your strategy to be yours alone, and one in which shared strategy across organizations is necessary for success. It also almost invariably leads to bad strategies that grantees know won’t work but, because of the dynamic between funders and grantees, often won’t say.

Strangely, it is only after roughly a decade of promoting this business-as-analog approach that the very same consultants who once advocated a focus on “uniqueness” began promoting the notion of “collective impact,” shared strategy, and a more nuanced and “emergent” approach to strategy of the kind long advocated by Patrizi. Yet it should have been no revelation to anyone in philanthropy that all the great examples of successful philanthropic strategies—including the ones I mention above—have succeeded because of sound strategy pursued collectively by many actors, in an iterative fashion.

Foundations work with many different actors and in many different ways in pursuit of their goals, of course, but no one is more crucial in this collective effort than grantees. Brest discusses the challenge of relations between funders and the funded—the sense grantees sometimes have that strategy is being imposed upon them.

We at CEP have found, in surveys of some 50,000 grantees of 300 foundations, that the clarity of a foundation’s goals and strategies is vitally important to grantees. So grantees aren’t against foundations being strategic—quite the contrary. But, as Brest notes, they want to be seen as “the central partners they are,” as Patrizi and her co-author Elizabeth Heid Thompson put it in a passage from their 2011 article that Brest quotes. “They are not only the main executors of strategy, but have the on-the-ground knowledge and experience essential to sort the wheat from the chaff in strategic thinking.”

Sadly, the conception of strategy pushed by many in the business school crowd has failed to understand this. Too often, the assumption has been that the funder knows best, that sound strategy can be cooked up inside the walls of a foundation, with the help of MBA-wielding consultants, and then fed to grantees to subserviently eat—with little interest in how it may taste to them.

It should be mentioned that Brest sought to practice what he preaches in terms of listening to those on the front lines when at the helm of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Hewlett was among the early users of CEP’s Grantee Perception Report in 2003 and the first to make public its results—something it has continued to do routinely over the years as it has worked to strengthen its relationship with its grantees.

So is the push-back, the “discontent,” really about strategy in philanthropy, or is it about a particular conception of strategy?

My view is that when you remove the corporate-speak baggage that it has been loaded down with in recent decades, and break it down to what it really is—a set of logical hypotheses connecting decisions about resource allocation to the achievement of clear goals that is continuously iterated and refined based on evidence and feedback—few thoughtful practitioners, whether funders or grantees, would argue against the idea that strategy is essential.

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