Organizations and leaders must evaluate whether they are ready to embrace systems entrepreneurship.

If you are an organization that has been working on tackling a complex social issue, you have surely felt or thought that profound social change is more difficult than expected. It is a given that the more you learn about the issues you care about and work on, you mentally put together a complex web of sub-issues and their causes and effects. The solutions you are pursuing have many more layers than a few years ago, and your organization has been adding new components and programs for a while. Decisions must be made about what your organization should focus on. Deciding what not to do is a challenge on its own. Still, you want the problem to be resolved, hopefully in your lifetime. Since you cannot do everything, the question that haunts you is what you can do that is meaningful to reduce the pervasiveness of the problem or solve it.

We help our clients to answer this question and navigate the institutional implications of taking steps into a systems change approach to their work. And possibly also, steps into becoming a catalyst for system-wide collaboration, as there are so many organizations and constituencies focused on the same issue.

Achieving a higher level of collaboration among actors and constituencies confronting a complex social issue is precisely the aim of systems entrepreneurship. We have talked to hundreds of changemakers that have been behind successful efforts to bring everyone to the table, build a shared understanding of the problem, design a collective strategy towards a solution and work on it. We share with our clients the relevant insights and experiences of others and facilitate a process to assess and adapt such knowledge for their use and to create the institutional conditions to be innovative and creative.