Sign Up
To receive updates about insights and curated content.
Contact Us
Phone: +1 703 651 6540
Email: info@systemsentrepreneurs.com
© 2019 Systems Entrepreneurs Advisors. All rights reserved.
We work with our clients to create the right conditions and processes for productive partnerships and collaborations.
When it comes to achieving impact at a systems level, it is hard to argue that it can be done alone, as a single organization. In the article “The Need for Cross-Sector Collaboration[1]” published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, the authors make the point:
“[W]e, as solution seekers, can choose to focus on a piece of the problem and tackle just that piece, or we can engage multiple stakeholders to craft solutions that are complex enough and possess the various perspectives and resources necessary to adequately address the challenges.”
Systems entrepreneurs need to go beyond sector or institutional boundaries to tackle complex social issues effectively and to keep innovating and scaling their impact.
Just because collaboration is important, however, does not make it easy. Collaboration for the sake of collaboration has been known to feel like a waste of time. Organizations have enough to do already. Members of collectives have similar goals but often have different approaches. They also might have different sets of stakeholders. These factors and more make working together complicated.
So, with all this, the question becomes: are you able to put collaboration at the center of your work?
We have found that there are two key factors in building high-value partnerships that need to be done right: selection of partners and design of an ongoing process to yield impact from collaboration.
We have seen that partnerships, whether to build a collective or to increase your own impact, can be successful when they are predicated on:
- Designing the right methodology to facilitate the process;
- Allocating resources for a minimum of staff and administrative costs;
- Agreeing on a common mission, outcomes, and measurement systems;
- Openness to disclose the interests and expectations of everyone involved;
- Adding value.
We can help you define the right steps, find the most relevant partners, and set up an ongoing process in your organization to expand your network and deepen collaboration. Collaboration is a core element of systems entrepreneurship. Let’s work together to make this an efficient and effective element of your work.
An individual or organization must first be able to put forward a new solution or set of solutions to a pressing social challenge. This sounds obvious, but we’re suggesting that organizational theories of change, business plans, and other foundational materials need to reflect systems thinking. The most important tool in the new systems entrepreneur’s suite is the ability to embed the solution into the larger system being targeted. https://hbr.org/2016/07/why-social-ventures-need-systems-thinking
While continuing to pursue solutions that can help prevent the problem from continuing or growing, our clients intuitively know that more can be done. They want to increase collaboration among actors, harness the power of the collective, overcome entrenched interests, and become comfortable working with many others and hence dealing with even more uncertainty.
As an example, an organization working on homelessness from a systems perspective knows that someone needs to keep feeding the homeless and offer them an array of services and options if we are going to reduce the homeless population. But such organizations also know that someone must ask a key question: how do we prevent more people from becoming homeless in the future? Our prospective clients know that this is not a task that can be achieved by a single organization. Nonetheless, a single organization or a coalition of them can agree to inspire a process of large-scale collaboration among all actors and constituencies to find a pathway to change and act in a coordinated manner to increase their collective level of impact.
Here are some of the existing factors that our clients need to be aware of when attempting to create a comprehensive strategic plan for systems change:
- The timeline in which change happens in the world has accelerated exponentially. This scale and scope of change have never been seen before.
- Many of the challenges we are facing today are experienced locally but are global in nature.
- These changes are fueled by unprecedented interconnectedness that is changing the way ideas flow in our societies.
- Technology has enabled a global marketplace of ideas, giving people access to content worldwide. Even in countries that deny open access to information, people are still engaged in this marketplace of ideas.
- Even though the world is becoming more interconnected, it is not necessarily becoming more uniform. We are experiencing today more positive progress than ever in history, and at the same time, never before individuals have existed on this planet under such extreme differences in terms of access to education, health, basic services, knowledge, opportunities, technology, wealth, power, etc.
- The external landscape is rapidly and constantly evolving. The interconnectedness that we mentioned before makes things more uncertain, presenting a challenge for traditional approaches to strategic planning. Especially if strategic planning has been pursued with the expectation of having a clear and predictable path forward.
To change systems, we need diverse and sometimes numerous actors to work together, agree on a strategic vision and a definition of success, determine the outcomes expected, divide up the work, design on a common way to measure their progress, and embrace radical transparency. At the core of this endeavor is the capacity of the collective to assess progress, external influences, agree to make adjustments, even substantial ones, and cross-correct in a timely fashion.
Strategic planning in this world of heightened complexity and rapid change is not so much a task as it is a process. Organizations need to embrace a mission, vision, and goals to achieve. Specific outcomes should be planned and agreed upon, but the path to execution must be reviewed often and informed by the analysis of new developments, trends, and forces. Outcomes might need to be revisited too.
We help our clients design and execute a successful process. We draw from our own experience and from studying some of the most successful efforts in the field of systems change and sharing with you relevant insights and practical support to embrace systems entrepreneurship successfully.