Why Centering a Shared Vision Matters in System Change Work and in the Lab?
In system change work, it’s easy to get caught up in an endless problem-definition loop describing what’s wrong with the current system. We construct complicated system maps. We draft detailed “problem statements,” helping us focus on what we’re against, but also risk shortchanging an articulation of what it is that we are for.
When we launched NCP in 2020, we spent months listening to leaders in the field of economic system change in the US. We wanted to understand the futures that different efforts and organizations were trying to manifest. This inquiry led us into a word soup of labels for the horizons those in the field of economic system change were orienting towards. Some version of a, fill in the blank: inclusive, sustainable, equitable, regenerative, just, multiracial, restorative, conscious, circular, solidarity, well-being, liberation economy for all. We like all of these words. They signal critical aspects of any new economic system. But while each term implied that we achieve something “better” than the status quo, there was a lack of definitional clarity or consensus around terminology. As one leader framed it, “It’s not just semantics. People do mean different things.”
Why does this matter? Because if people do mean different things about any future striving to replace the current and dominant mode of neoliberalism—and, if we want to align distributed action more coherently to increase chances of actually shifting the status quo—then we need to sharpen our collective understanding of the contours of a future we’re trying to move towards. Not in a let’s-carve-this-future-into-stone kind of way, following an unwavering mandate that collapses on one single future point. But as a way to understand the broad terrain where different leaders’ hopes and visions for a better future might intersect and complement each other. As a way to craft a shared future that then helps a network of leaders generate a portfolio of system change ideas to make that future manifest--driving more aligned action, coherence and coordination in doing so.
The process of developing NCP’s shared vision had three important outcomes critical in system change work--and which have set the foundation for the transformative collaboration we’re now supporting in the Lab.
New connections and trust among a group of diverse leaders emerged from the hard work of building, out of different perspectives, a shared vision of a “better” economic system.
In 2021, NCP brought together a group of twelve leaders of organizations on the frontlines of economic system change, working across fields including racial and economic justice, workers’ rights, economic policy advocacy, impact investing, shareholder activism, and responsible business. We did this because during NCP’s sensemaking phase, we learned that within the field of economic system change there was little to “no interaction between most ‘camps.’”While seen as perhaps appropriate, during the early stages of the field’s development as each organization was “figuringout who we each were and how to survive,” there was a recognition that in order to achieve the systemic change many organizations were striving to make, new pathways of connection, understanding, and coordination would need to be forged and nurtured.
We know that individual and organizational ego and competition, in any domain, can easily derail productive interactions, despite best intentions. As one leader put it: “if there is a lack of trust among individual leaders, it’s going to be hard to work with other institutions. You have to have more trust and less ego. To be guided by mission more than self-interest.” The impact of a group rolling up its sleeves and hashing out a collective future that each can stand behind is a powerful mobilizer of intent and action.
This notion of being guided by a shared mission planted a firm flag in this work. We strove to identify and recruit a diverse set of leaders who could bridge their individual, organizational and ideological differences to move towards “amore unified and positive version of the future.” From this more unified vision of the future, we hypothesized, leaders on the operational frontlines of change could then co-develop a perspective on the portfolio of ideas needed to manifest that future.
Over a year—and through bi-weekly, ninety-minute virtual working sessions—the Design Team worked diligently to explore where their futures might intersect, and where they might not. Creating a shared vision allowed each leader to see how the work of their organizations could be recalibrated to achieving it. The sustained commitment, time and“sweat” from the group—to honor this collective work and each other--are exactly what allowed them to move beyond a discussion of “whose theory of change is better” to help reveal the range of interdependent pathways forward.
As one Design Team member captured it: “There's something unique and beautiful that we’ve been able to weave together. We are bringing together, in one conversation, people who authentically believe in the forward-looking power of big business and the redemptive possibilities within capitalism with those who do not believe in either of those things. Hard stuff. But this is where real impact can surface; and what we need more of in this work.”
Holding the space for a group to aspire together, beyond the urgency of “today’s fires,” expands the horizon of what’s possible and supports a place for collective imagination to take root.
We used the Three Horizon’s framework to underpin the group’s collective strategy work. It helped the team craft a picture of how the current economic system is in decline, to sense the emergence of a different future, and to consider the zone of transition between the two. Individual leaders were invited to step beyond their organizational constraints and near-term priorities to both think more systemically about their goals and to re-consider their own organizations in a different context.
Shared visioning is an act of collective imagination. It’s a muscle we don’t flex often in change work. Yet it is exactly the act of imagining a different future that can galvanize a group to make it real. We like to believe that imagining is easy. That it is like an act of daydreaming. Or something that can be accomplished in a fun day-long offsite. It is not easy. Developing an aspired future, that can engage leaders and their organizations to work towards it, is arduous. This is especially true when doing so with people who may hold radically different views. The word aspire means to desire, aim for, hope for. Its literal meaning, however, is “to breathe on.” The connotation being that you breathe heavily in the exertion of attaining a goal. Landing on a shared vision for a different economic system was hard work for the NCP Design Team, for as it has been said, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.”
As NCP has shifted its work from visioning to action, and as we have moved into the Lab, we still draw on imagination as the fuel for our collective endeavors. Supporting ideas in development in the Lab is not about scaling what works, replicating efforts with proven track records of success. The imagination required now is to boldly experiment with what may work in the future. To experiment. To explore new configurations of existing solutions. To imagine how new collaborations can cut fresh grooves of connection among leaders in the economic system change field, shifting the quality and quantity of interactions as a system intervention in and of itself. To imagine how learning from the successes and failures of a range of experiments over the long-haul journey of system change work can help make the collective collectively smarter.
Aligning intent and action through the process of shared visioning helps in the discovery of new ideas, new priorities, and new ways of combining tactics behind a unified strategy.
The NCP shared vision emerged from the power of divergent perspectives and through a convergence of collective imagination. It helped the Design Team see their organizational work differently, and, equally important, to imagine what the collective could accomplish working in more alignment.
The NCP Design Team was tasked to develop a portfolio view of some of the interventions needed to shift the economic system. Systems defy single-point, silver-bullet interventions. They resist isolated action. Shifting a system requires that we launch a series of targeted interventions, in various places throughout the system, and that we do so simultaneously. That we do so fueled by a collective coherence for how different efforts can best work in concert to address shared goals. This belief has underpinned NCP’s work from the beginning—and it is driving the collective work within the Lab.
The important point here is that shifting a system requires we intentionally bring a range of change types to the effort—those who affect change through collaboration and consensus and those who do so through confrontation and creative destruction. While each change type can be a potent force on its own, bringing types together, however, is the tough stuff nurturing a movement ecology. It is also where the real magic can happen.
There is more work to be done to continue to create and support the kind of movement diversity needed to drive deep system change on this set of intractable and interrelated problems. And we believe this lens can serve as a foundation for ongoing field-level strategic conversations, as a broader set of leaders continues to explore the archetypal diversity needed to drive systemic interventions.
The Lab is already supporting productive discussions around critical questions, such as: How can we see diverse change efforts, that aim for similar outcomes, in a comprehensive way? What are the relationships and potential dependencies between different organizational approaches that may be under-leveraged? How could those interact more powerfully to accelerate and amplify change?
The Three Horizon framework teaches us that we need to engage in today’s battles to accelerate the decline of a failing system. It also teaches us that we need to attend to the “glimmers of the future in the present,” the faint but critical activities and ideas that will become the long-term successor to the dominant, current system. We may not know what shape these glimmers will evolve into; but creating a space to explore them with intention, and with each other, is a smart move.
In this way, the Lab is striving to help de-risk the ambiguous, uncertain and often unknowable paths to a future state. We find strength in numbers and value in mitigating the isolation that can come from the lonely hard work of changing a complex system.