Reflections on Running NCP’s Economic System Change Lab
Image: Timothy Dykes / Upsplash
“When I saw some of the practical ideas that the NCP Design Team surfaced, I wondered how you might be able to sustain them. How do you continue to build a community that’s keeping their eye on the big picture? To continue evolving the narrative, which is the glue for them? And figure out a lab mechanism to identify a project, resource it, kick if off and get it done? If you could build that machine and imagine solving a bunch of problems, that could be very interesting.”
At NCP we love “how might you” questions that open up tributaries of possibility, stoke collective imagination, and invite us into uncertainty, as uncomfortable as this may be. Two years ago, New Capitalism Project’s funders[1] started to wonder what might come from supporting the capacity of economic system change leaders to turn system change hunches into practical experiments in some kind of Lab structure.
Backed with funds to welcome and support leaders, we launched the NCP Lab. We have shared our reflections along this Lab journey on several fronts – in what it takes to build an integrated portfolio of system change interventions, welcoming all ten leaders and their ideas, insights into the “stack of assets and activities” that fuel this infrastructure for collective action, and the real challenge of how to finance system health work. We’re now taking a moment to reflect on where we are and what we’ve learned as we wrap the first round of the NCP Lab.
The New Capitalism Project (NCP) Lab has been an experiment in how to incubate a set of inter-related ideas for action and bridge them towards a group’s shared vision for a transformed economic system. From the outset, the NCP Lab has focused on cultivating deep connections and trust among a range of leaders in service of supporting more connected and systemic ways of working together. We believe this kind of collective leadership and coordinated action are critical enabling conditions for driving system health. What we also know, is that investments in enabling conditions such as these are hard to “projectize” and therefore harder to fund; and the qualitative and emergent nature of their impact often does not fit well into typical grantmaking reports.
With this in mind, the goal of NCP’s Lab was three-fold. We wanted to experiment with how bringing together a diverse set of leaders, perspectives and specific ideas for action could:
Strengthen each of the individual ideas in the Lab by:
connecting it more deliberately to the shared and co-developed NCP Vision for a transformed economic system,
providing the resources and facilitation – the “space”– to allow leaders to focus on bold, nascent and experimental ideas beyond their organization’s current strategy,
inviting trusted, candid feedback from the diverse and sometimes divergent perspectives of other leaders in the Lab to shape and sharpen each other’s work.
Discover where there were opportunities to build more coherence among the ten ideas as an integrated portfolio of action – without seeking to collapse them to a lowest common denominator or resolve the diversity of approaches and perspectives that we hunched might be our superpower.
Explore what it could look like to keep these ideas woven together over time. Creating trusted human connections through shared work that would persist after the “end of the Lab.” Connections that are antidotes to existing field-level fragmentation and as a mechanism for greater, collective adaptation towards our shared vision over time.
As we reach the conclusion of this Lab experiment, we’re reflecting on the field infrastructure role that the NCP Lab has played and the momentum it has generated for a range of diverse leaders. Below we call out four different types of value we’re seeing from the NCP Lab process:
Nurturing High Quality Relationships to Weave A More Aligned Field
Lab participants highlighted the value of being able to deepen existing or build new relationships. As we know, helping to increase the quality and quantity of connections among individuals in an ecosystem is a powerful system intervention in and of itself. In fact, it’s a critical enabling condition to the long-term health of any system. We worked to focus on the shared values and bold vision “behind” Lab Leaders ideas, not only on their individual organizational mandates that are often the more tactical and transactional basis for collaborations. This has allowed the group to begin to “see” itself as a broader field of intention: an essential ingredient in collective action.
“NCP has been the first ever professional space I’ve been able to be in as a leader—by virtue of the collaboration, the orientation of the vision, the deep work centering around common values and making manifest a shared future vision—where I can show up and say here are things we need in the field to make deeper impact; and then to imagine how we can make them manifest.”
Bridging Individual and Collective Strategy Making to Seed More Possibilities
A main tenet of a healthy intervention ecosystem is the need to support leaders in seeing (and internalizing) how their individual strategies connect to a more collective whole while navigating their specific context as leaders and organizations. As one of our funders put it, “to continue to build a community that’s keeping its eye on the big picture.” This shifting between individual and collective strategy making helps address some of the challenges we identified at the onset of NCP—insufficient field awareness and collaboration among key actors; and insufficient coherence, coordination and action we know fields need to break away from isolated impact.
Strengthening their own organizational strategies.
Insights from Lab activities, the perspectives of other Lab members, and seeing their work through different lenses, informed how participants shifted strategic priorities for their own organizations. This underscores that not only is collective strategy making a necessary precondition for a field’s health, but it can create important feedback loops to help reinforce individual strategies: building an ongoing dialogue between the collective and individual as key units of analysis for change in an ecosystem.
One Lab leader has used the shared NCP Vision to revamp their organization’s strategy and in how they engage key stakeholders (board members, staff). Another leader is expanding the field-building role they play at their organization as a way to step into a perceived need. While another is drawing clear strategic connections between their role supporting individual campaigns and the broader infrastructure they can help build for collaborators.
Informing the design of key strategic initiatives.
The Lab’s focus on supporting leaders in developing practical experiments to test their larger system change hunches, allowed them to refine thinking and articulate the value of specific activities that they then incorporated into existing initiatives at their organization. The ability to “tinker” with transformational ideas and approaches led to improvements to broader, ongoing efforts underway in their work.
One leader was able to leverage the learning from incubating their Lab idea into the design and launch of a multi-million-dollar initiative that mobilized other leaders from labor, civil rights, climate change, progressive policy movements in a broader coalition.
Leveraging the Lab process to attract new partnerships and funding.
Several leaders used the validation provided by the NCP community, Lab process, and opportunities for collaboration with their “lab mates” to attract more philanthropic resources to their organization or broader strategic initiatives – beyond the scope of their NCP idea or experimentation.
Through participating in the lab, one leader was able to deepen a partnership with another Lab organization which led to a resourced fellowship position as well as a significant grant from another organization to continue developing their NCP Lab incubated idea.
Developing standalone proposals for experiments that they are fundraising for and plan to launch themselves.
Leaders were able to take advantage of the time, resources and input provided by the Lab to develop specific, fundable proposals for experimentation aligned to their Lab idea that they can independently fundraise for and launch as part of their own organizational priorities. We underestimate the value of time, space and process to support leaders in their focused imagination and the vaster wilds of what’s possible.
A Lab leader has added the proposed experimentation developed in the Lab to their 2024 organizational fundraising priorities and several others are adapting versions of their Lab ideas into proposed activities for their organizations or with collaborators in the near future.
Nurturing New Initiatives to Support a Transformative Portfolio of Ideas
From the start, the goal of the Lab was to bring together ideas and leaders who were guided by a diverse set of approaches and theories of change and working across the barriers to a transformed economic system our community had identified. Being ready and willing to support not just nascent ideas but also nascent organizations and initiatives was key to building a portfolio that reflected the richness of our shared vision. The Lab provided critical, initial support for new organizations and initiatives emerging from within the broader NCP community. By helping to provide initial financial support, broader networks of supporters, and collective input on key questions of strategy, the Lab process was an important accelerant for new organizations aligned to the NCP Vision – strengthening our portfolio of leaders and contributing to the evolution of the field more broadly.
“To be sure, NCP has played the catalytic and key role in backing this startup by providing the risk capital necessary to launch our new effort.”
“The funds provided by NCP have been instrumental in driving forward the vision of our new organization—to allocate dedicated staff time to actively engage in the Lab activities, ensuring that our participation was not only meaningful but also impactful.”
Supporting the Emergence of “Clusters” of Collaboration and Impact to Experiment with More Connected Ways of Working
While the Lab provided space and resources for leaders to develop their individual ideas, it also focused on discovering connections among those ideas and opportunities for more connected ways of working. This iterative effort resulted in the identification of “clusters of collaboration and impact” - smaller groupings of leaders committed to discovering practical and thematic connections among their ideas, potentially connecting them in multi-faceted ways. For the work of many organizations to “add up” to something transformative requires more effort and resources but also more connected ways of working. The organic emergence of potential “clusters” from with the NCP community provides opportunity to experiment in authentic ways with what these more connected approaches look like in practice.
There are currently three emerging clusters within the NCP community, that are each pursuing different areas of momentum around specific, common themes of interest. Going forward, NCP will work to onboard additional clusters as we continue to build a platform for collective leadership and coordinated action:
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Cluster Themes | What are the specific issues bringing this cluster together?
New narrative infrastructure to advance liberatory economic worldview and compete with neoliberal infrastructure
Nurturing and testing alternative approaches and practices for creating narratives, narrative-power and worldbuilding – especially from within communities of color
Building power and narrative power between and within Black and Indigenous communities
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Cluster Themes: What are the specific issues ing this cluster together?
Catalyzing the adoption of rigorous system stewardship in practice, at scale
Revitalizing and evolving the practice of fiduciary duty
Integrating stakeholders in bolder and stronger demands on pools of capital and corporations they govern
Shifting the narrative around the role of corporations and capital in communities and the economic system
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Cluster Themes: What are the specific issues bringing this cluster together?
Institutional investor adoption of systemic investing approaches like multi-asset class integration, multi-investor coherence in places, systems-level impact goals, benchmarking, etc.
Specific opportunities in regenerative farming in Midwest to prototype “total portfolio”, “systemic investing” approaches
More systemic approaches in IMM and evolving IMM to support and catalyze systemic investing approaches
As we wrote in Lab Note 06, “Lessons From Building and Supporting an Ecosystem to Tackle Wicked Problems:”
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.
We’re proud of the value that the infrastructure of the NCP Lab has provided. We are excited about the foundation that field leaders’ work builds for continued collective exploration on how to manifest their bold aspiration for a transformed economic system. In the only way a complex system can be tackled – more connected, more transformational, and more experimental. And we are emboldened by research out of Bridgespan attesting to the critical impact of field catalysts like NCP: “All of our research indicates one key truth: field catalysts are among the highest-leverage investments philanthropy can make when it comes to equitable systems change.”[2]
And yet, we know that supporting and sustaining this kind of collective leadership and critical enabling conditions for system health is difficult within a broader system of social change often more focused on accelerating specific solutions. But once tributaries of possibilities have been opened, collective imagination has been stoked, and social change leaders are able to aspire together, it gets harder to pretend that we can simply carry on the way we’ve always carried on and hope for different results.
[1] The initial sensemaking phase of NCP was supported by The Omidyar Network and The Ford Foundation. Subsequent phases have been supported by The Omidyar Network, The Ford Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Kresge Foundation and the Skoll Foundation. The Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) has played a key role in conceptualizing and launching this endeavor and hosts the NCP.
[2] “Equitable System Change: Funding Field Catalysts from Origins to Revolutionizing the World,” The Bridgespan Group