Reengineering Collective Impact for Results
Collective Impact (CI) is a logical innovation that we intuitively think will work. Yet, the first systematic review of it and other community organization frameworks don't demonstrate anything close. In what follows, I will explain why CI underperforms and how we flip it upside down to deliver real change.
Here is that systematic review that looks at CI performance:
Kadariya et al. published their review in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in 2023. It reviewed 5,044 "community organization" initiatives, including CI worldwide. Only thirty-eight were complete enough to meet the inclusion criteria for analysis. Of those thirty-eight, including several CI projects, none stood out better than the others.
Results, when present, were short-term and nonstandard. As of this writing, there is no tangible evidence that a "CI-style organization" makes a lasting difference.
Why it matters: Funding programs make sense if they are effective. Sustainable funding should, at the least, deliver a social ROI with potential economic impact.
The basics of Collective Impact: The Collective Impact Forum and the Aspen Institute are active promoters of CI and provide resources to CI programs. One essential resource is the Principles of Collective Impact.
In 2011, observations by Kania and Kramer CI published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review indicated five conditions for success (seen below).
Eight additional principles of practice
Design and implement the initiative with priority placed on equity.
Include community members in the collaborative.
Recruit and co-create with cross-sector partners.
Use data to learn and adapt continuously.
Cultivate leaders with unique system leadership skills.
Focus on program and system strategies.
Build a culture that fosters relationships, trust, and respect.
Customize for local context.
All of this sounds great, so why so few results? These conditions and practices focus more on how collaborators organize than what is special or unique about the problems they confront. The problem, on the other hand, arises from a separate set of dysfunctional complex adaptive systems.
CI uses social organization to address social issues without regard to the underlying social physics. Our biology, brains, and social nature haven't had a significant upgrade for over 75,000 years. They are why we are in this predicament and not the road out.
Why social issues are problematic: First, we tend to focus on issues affecting individuals. In contrast, the drivers of those issues arise from the multiple social systems affecting each person. These include the cost of housing, the safety of neighborhoods, employment, shared beliefs, and many more we barely notice.
The social systems we live within define the choices available to a person at any given time.
A person's specific choices depend on how they see their lot in life at the time.
Generalized rules are complex for individuals because their position and dynamics are constantly changing.
At the same time, the behavior of the more powerful social systems we live within is inherently unpredictable, with consequences that are only visible later.
Every significant advance in human history was made possible through advances in science and engineering. Curandi deploys a specific integrating infrastructure to take advantage of what is available and learn more about social mechanics. Community organization paradigms like Collective Impact need scientific and technical system support to succeed.
New conditions for success begin a force multiplier from science and engineering.
Specialized Integrating Infrastructure and Tools make it easier to learn about community systems and structure collaboration for sustainable results from multiple simultaneous agendas.
Clarity of Purpose is any system's most potent tangible point of leverage. We need to align the actual purpose, "what a system does," with the intended purpose, what we want it to do. We do this by replacing the common agenda of CI with many smaller, lighter-weight purpose-driven initiatives. The shared infrastructure is agenda-neutral and provides a platform for alignment of activity, measures, and credit for shared success.
Systemic and Individual Measures both support individual outcomes. Systemic change is more challenging but necessary for sustainable community-level improvement.
Adaptive multi-purpose collaboration acknowledges that our knowledge is imperfect and that even if it were, the issue will adapt to what we do. Shared measures and processes within the platform provide shared observations of the whole. These observations enable each purpose-based agenda to match each shift. This mechanism helps the interventional system create an appropriately nuanced requisite variety of responses to guide each issue's self-organization toward the desired purpose.
Neutral Open Network Architecture enables all potential services or agencies to participate in community-level initiatives. The platform exists in network connections to provide a legal framework, resources, and management services, ensuring compliance and monitoring.
One advantage of this is that the individual client is never further than one network path length from all services or agencies supporting their improvement.
Curandi is currently delivering this integrating infrastructure to its partners in Marion County.
It is a platform to understand the behaviors of community systems better.
It is a platform to implement better solutions that we will show in future blogs.
It is how we manage social systems to reduce unnecessary disease.