Lessons from building and supporting an ecosystem to tackle wicked problems
Image: Intricate Explorer / Upsplash
“The scale of experimentation we need is larger than anything that we are currently doing in the world. It would be very easy to misunderstand what we are trying to do and what’s needed. Words like pilot and experiment suggest a kind of smallness that none of this work has time for. It’s really important that we hold and honor the scale of the level of experiments we need to be developing.”
We know it’s a tired truism that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. We also know that it’s really hard not to do the same thing over and over again. It’s human nature to rely on the structures, practices, norms, and mindsets that have worked in the past. It’s organizational nature to then continue to invest in the infrastructures that sustain those ways of doing and being. This vicious cycle is known as the Capability Trap [1], a hurdle any organization, business, or endeavor must overcome. This phenomenon shows up in particularly pernicious ways when we work with systems.
Systems that are failing produce problems that need to be addressed, like fires to be put out which cannot be ignored, and those problems require ongoing attention and resources. The Capability Trap arises when all the resources go to firefighting today fires, preventing investment in new capabilities, ways of seeing and working to move beyond the status quo. This is certainly true when it comes to understanding the “doing and being” needed to tackle wicked problems. We work harder. We don’t necessarily work smarter.[2]
Like the quote above from a leader in NCP’s Lab puts it: “We need to hold and honor the scale of the level of experiments we need to be developing within NCP” beyond what we are currently doing. The complexity of transforming the economic system -- so it works for all people and the planet and not just a privileged few -- requires we level up beyond the organization as the only unit of analysis of change. It compels us to build, resource, and sustain field-level infrastructure that can support more collective visioning, action and adaptation across a healthy intervention ecosystem comprised of a range of actors and activity.
As a field catalyst and platform for collective action, NCP is poised to continue supporting a growing network of diverse frontline leaders and funders in their shared visioning, mobilization, and action to transform the current economic system. There is nothing easy about this work. To date, each phase of NCP has been purpose-built to tackle a set of critical challenges, identified during NCP’s initial sensemaking phase, that hinder the field’s ability to reach greater coherence, coordination and action such as: lack of shared vision, insufficient field awareness and collaboration among key actors, lack of field infrastructure, and lack of funding for the enabling conditions that support ongoing system health.
In this way, the New Capitalism Project and the NCP Lab has been an experiment in exploring a range of questions essential for driving economic system transformation within a growing movement of leaders and their organizations such as:
How do we support fragile but bold system shifting ideas that can’t be switched on like a light or activated from the sides of leaders’ already overflowing desks?
What does it take to nurture a group to sense, surface, incubate, and develop a portfolio of different experiments aligned behind their shared vision for economic system transformation?
How do we develop the collective courage to fund ideas that aren’t “proven,” ready to scale, backed by years of evidence, but are strong hunches about what is needed from those working, every day, on the frontlines of the economic system?
And ultimately, what will it take to shift away from the mindset that believes we can “fix” systems if we just find the “right” intervention or two — to understanding that the fix will actually come from supporting leaders to work within a healthy ecosystem of connection, interdependency, action, trust?
Over the past few years, NCP has built an integrated stack of assets and activities that comprise the core of our work and exists as a critical foundation for moving forward. We wrote about this stack in greater detail in NCP Note 05. We have learned that building this kind of problem-solving approach — supporting ongoing shared visioning by leaders on the frontlines of the system; nurturing a growing community of leaders as they themselves develop a coherent portfolio of action; and intentionally “clustering” leaders and shared interventions in ongoing action-learning nodes — is an antidote to the fragmentation and isolation that hinders greater field impact.
As we said, there is nothing easy about this work. We’ve learned a few things along the way as we’ve supported this intervention ecosystem. Each layer of this stack represents a significant investment in time, energy and resources. We could write a book on the lessons — successes and failures — gained at every level; but here capture four which reveal implications not just for NCP’s path forward but for those wanting to work in a more “ecological” way.
LESSON ONE | Building and Sustaining a Movement Ecology for Economic System Change
We lack deliberate and strategic field-building infrastructure/s for those working to shift the economic system. And for a group of aligned but currently siloed actors to “see” itself as a broader field of intention and action. We need to invest in and attend to the capacity for sustained processes in support of field-level strategic discussions, connections, shared visioning, and ideally collective action among a growing ecosystem of leaders. We have learned that the transformative potential of this field-level approach is inextricably linked with the power that comes from connecting diverse leaders and their differing perspectives in a true movement ecology of action. Field infrastructure requires building containers to surface and hold creative tensions among diverse leaders and to illuminate how their own shared visions for transformation can align to a greater whole.
LESSON TWO | Supporting Collective Leadership and Collective Strategy
One of the most powerful “assets” within NCP is the people who have been a part of shaping it over the years; and the trust that comes from this shared endeavor. Afterall, it is people working within an ecosystem — filled with a range of organizations, theories of change, theories of action —who will make or break the future. We must build spaces that allow leaders, both individually and collectively, to attend to the adaptive, long-term strategy of their own organizations within a richer understanding of the failures of the current system. To shape, together, the future that each of their organizations will need to move into. Building spaces to engender trust and high quality relationships supports collective strategy development and helps make each leader’s work stronger, growing the human ecosystem we need to tackle the vast problem ecosystem.
LESSON THREE | Experimenting with Fit-for-Purpose Funding Structures that Support Collective Action
Attending to leaders in their shared visioning and development of integrated action agendas opens opportunities for more connected ways of working, experimenting, learning and adapting together. We see potential power in supporting Clusters of Collaboration and Impact. Clusters are smaller groupings of leaders emerging from the Lab who are committed to discovering practical and thematic connections among their ideas, potentially connecting them in multi-faceted ways. We believe clusters — those in the Lab now and those we could attract in the future— are powerful units of change. Clusters need (and need innovation around) financing mechanisms that move beyond a point-solution funding architecture and provision the “enabling conditions” to support their more system-aware orientation, collective experimentation, learning and adaptation.
LESSON FOUR | Crowding in New Economy Funding
We hear from practitioners and funders alike that the amount of philanthropic funding focused on economic system change in the U.S. needs to increase. Supporting an ecosystem of disparate actors throughout the ecosystem means intentionally building more on-ramps for funders with a variety of different perspectives and priorities (climate, health, democracy, justice) to see themselves as part of the overarching field of economic system change. The polycrisis does not categorize itself according to philanthropic or organizational thematic silos. We need capital holders to develop more integrated views of the interdependencies of their own work, which the polycrisis demands, and more aligned strategies for their shared interventions.
Wicked problems demand that we organize and act in different ways. They demand that all of us in the system — leaders, funders, field builders — experiment with new capabilities and ways of being in relation to each other, in relation to the system we are working to transform, and in relation to the interventions we launch through our organizations. Wicked problems compel us to center both collective action and individual organizations in more elegant intervention ecosystems that allow new relationships and therefore potential new actions to emerge. These ecosystems should unlock new resources rather than trying to get more “bang for your buck,” build long-term capacity for collaboration (not just collaboration for specific interventions), and encourage us to work on the bolder, experimental and truly transformative ideas that we dream about.
The growing community behind NCP and their motivation to act, learn, adapt together are priceless. The trust they’ve built, the awareness they’re gaining of how their work fits into a broader whole, and a commitment to stay in relation with each other as they move to experiment are the ingredients needed to sustain a system’s health.
No matter what system you are operating (or funding) in, it is critical to support the groups which can build the cadence and capacity to expose their mental models about how change happens—and to avoid the Capability Trap. To “Stay humble, to stay learners. Expand time horizons. Expand thought horizons.” [3] To break out of the philanthropic capability trap of “prediction and control;” to be and act in ecosystems that sharpen a collective capacity to engage with “interconnection and complication.” And yes, as Donella Meadows urges, to dance with systems not try to fix them. There is nothing easy about this work.
[1] As defined by Erik Landry and John Sterman in The Capability Trap: Prevalence in Human Systems: “…pressures to boost short-run system performance lead to greater work effort at the expense of investment in maintenance, process improvement, and learning. As the organization’s capabilities erode, performance falls further, leading to even greater pressure to work harder and even lower investment in capabilities.”
[2] With thanks to Bobby Milstein, Director of System Strategy at ReThink Health, for framing the Capability Trap vis-a-vis NCP’s work.
[3] Donella Meadows “Dancing with Systems.”