Collective Impact Follow Up | By Amy Delamaide and Seth Bate

About a million years ago—or maybe just a few months—I wrote a post about an article we at CCSR are reading, “Collective Impact” by John Kania and Mark Kramer. I promised a follow-up post once we had discussed it at staff meeting.

Your wait is over. Here is that promised follow-up post.

We talked about the article at our August 10th staff meeting. In no particular order and without attribution to the staff members who contributed, here are some things we discussed:

• Communication is important to keeping collective impact efforts going. When different organizations are working on the same issue, sharing what each organization is doing and the impact it is seeing would energize the other organizations and support mutually reinforcing activities.
• The idea of collective impact seems rather utopian. In real-life, it was suggested, change takes much longer than the article indicated. The work is never done and practitioners are constantly revising their approach.
• It is worth exploring what barriers exist that prevent us from moving towards collective impact. How do you reinvigorate organizations at a grassroots level when they are in crisis or under stress, such as many are in these economic times?
• When doing research, especially participatory or action research, it is worth engaging the people doing the work as co-researchers and co-evaluators. This could result in having several “layers” of researchers—the participants in an intervention, the direct service staff delivering an intervention, and those academics observing at a distance could all contribute as researchers.
• It is useful to us as an organization to continue sharing articles and periodically discussing them as a large group. This makes sense for us as a university-based center where continued learning is valued. This might be something that makes sense for your organization, too.

We’ve continued hearing “backbone support organization” and “collective impact” in meetings with partners, so the ideas from the Kania and Kramer article are definitely worth grappling with if you haven’t yet. There is also a blog where the authors and other contributors are continuing to develop their ideas: Collective Impact Blog. Check it out.

Assessing Impacts, Discovering Values | By Lael Ewy

A problem-solving tool we teach in the Certified Peer Specialist 5-Day Basic Training involves, among other things, looking how a person is negatively impacting his own problem, asking how one’s actions or beliefs may be exacerbating that problem or preventing it from being solved. This is an aspect of problem-solving we tend to shy away from or ignore. 

I suspect that’s because doing so brings us into contact with all sorts of things we don’t want to hear. Brainstorming practical solutions makes us feel effective; looking at our own role in causing a problem can make us feel uncomfortable. Coming up with solutions might change the way we act in the short term, until the immediate effects of the problem seem to be alleviated. But examining how we’re contributing to a problem may force us to change who we are and what we believe—and that has implications for the long term. 

Indeed, fostering long-term solutions is exactly why we examine what we are doing to create and perpetuate problems. How many “solutions” have been implemented, their effects measured, and congratulations extended to those involved, only to have the effects reversed by a new set of problems or another bout of the same old thing? We see examples of this everywhere, from weight loss programs that fail to address our basic attitudes about exercise and food to military “victories” that precede the chaos of a failed state. To admit to how we are negatively impacting a problem is to admit that we are flawed. But to do so is also to take responsibility for a problem, or at least for that part of the problem that is under our control. 

For individuals, this might mean measuring our espoused values against the beliefs we express through our actions: I may agree that the local coffee shop wastes an appalling number of paper cups, but my own vanity may prevent me from bringing my battered travel mug in for a refill. 

For an organization, taking stock of what it’s doing that contributes to a problem could force an accounting of institutional values for the first time—and that might reveal how incoherent or contradictory those values really are. For instance (and to keep a theme alive), the desire to stock the office break room with pricey fair trade coffee might go against the value of keeping operating costs low. 

But this also reveals the power of reviewing our own negative impacts: the organization might decide that the value of doing right by the grower of the coffee beans outweighs the value of cost-effectiveness in this case. Confronted with the values underlying the impacts, a person or organization is empowered to act intentionally.  And sometimes, through reviewing how we negatively impact a problem, we may realize that it’s not actually a problem, and that the proper solution is no action at all.  

Change Part 2 | Kevin Bomhoff

Last post, I shared the story of the startling change my daughter experienced in starting first grade. I also introduced the “Productive Zone of Disequilibrium,” the term Ron Heifetz uses for the zone that promotes learning and progress in systems.

When the “temperature” or level of discomfort is too great, the organism can explode or implode.  When the temperature is too low, the organism stops learning and adapting. The activity does not result in the organism “blowing up” nor does it “blow off” what needs to be done.

Reading the temperature of an organization requires a certain amount of data gathering and experimentation.   Based on observations, what are all the possible interpretations to be made?  We need input from internal and external stakeholders.

CCSR is in the midst a deliberate process our director, Dr. Scott Wituk, has deemed “Listen, Think, Act.” 


Listen
We have visited over 35 partners asking probing questions about their needs and experience with our services.

Think
Using this data, staff members are now adding their own reflections.   The information will be used to develop as many interpretations as possible about our current and future activities.

Act
We will design experiments – perhaps new approaches or different processes based on what we have learned.   These “Acts” will inevitably turn up the temperature as we experiment with new ways to define our organization and help our customers.

Sometimes, of course, the temperature needs to be turned down -- while avoiding complacency. This is its own challenge.  When an intervention works, system functioning improves and the temperature lowers.  When an intervention does not produce the desired outcome, it is critical that data is readily available to inform a timely “course correction” before serious damage occurs.

Adapting in a timely manner using formative data reduces the temperature as new, more productive interventions replace those that did not work.    Beginning with research and using “evidenced-based practices” can give the system a great head start but does not guarantee success.   Our assumptions about the application of such practices in new settings and our ability to accomplish fidelity to proven models must be tested.     

What’s all this got to do with a six-year-old kid who’s already had it with “systems change” on her first day of first grade?   Well, later that night the ice did thaw a bit, and her nasty observations were interpreted though her own eyes with a little input from stakeholders (mom and dad).   Some of these rules worked for her.   Some seem to be made for other kids who appeared to be “out of control.”   That could help her too – indirectly.  Some rules clearly needed to change and probably would as the year unfolded.  It was, after all, just the first day. The first day of the rest of her life - observing, interpreting and intervening as part of one system after another.                                                                         
     


“Productive Zone of Disequilibrium,” courtesy of the Kansas Leadership Center   |    Photo courtesy of Couchlearner