By John Kania, Fay Hanleybrown, & Jennifer Splansky Juster
Since the initial publication of “Collective
Impact” in Stanford Social Innovation Review
(Winter 2011), collective impact has gained
tremendous momentum as a disciplined,
cross-sector approach to solving social and
environmental problems on a large scale.
The idea of collective impact is not
new—many collaborations pre-date the original
article and embody the five conditions of
collective impact1—but the original article
created a framework and language that have
resonated deeply with practitioners who
were frustrated with existing approaches
to change. Since 2011, hundreds of new collaborations
have begun implementing the
principles of collective impact in a variety of
domains around the globe, from the United
States and Canada to Australia, Israel, and
South Korea. Collective impact ideas have
also started to influence public policy. In the
United States, for example, the concept has
been written into grants from the Centers
for Disease Control and the Social Innovation
Fund, a White House initiative, and a
program of the Corporation for National and
Community Service.
Our team at FSG has studied successful
collective impact efforts around the world,
supported dozens of new collective impact
efforts, and trained thousands of practitioners.
We are inspired by their successes,
from improving juvenile justice outcomes
in New York State to reducing childhood
asthma in Dallas to boosting educational
attainment in Seattle.
People often ask whether we would refine
the five conditions of collective impact that
we articulated in the initial article: a common
agenda, shared measurement, mutually reinforcing
activities, continuous communication,
and backbone support. (See “The Five Conditions
of Collective Impact” below.) Although
our work has reinforced the importance of
these five conditions and they continue to
serve as the core for differentiating collective
impact from other forms of collaboration (see
“Maintaining the Integrity of a Collective
Impact Approach” on page 4), we also realize
that they are not always sufficient to achieve
large-scale change. In addition, several mindset
shifts are necessary for collective impact
partners, and these are fundamentally at odds
with traditional approaches to social change.
These mindset shifts concern who is engaged,
how they work together, and how progress
happens. Although not necessarily counterintuitive, they can be highly countercultural and
therefore can create serious stumbling blocks
for collective impact efforts.
Mindset Shift One: Who Is Involved
Get all the right eyes on the problem | As
we said in our 2011 SSIR article: “Collective
impact is the commitment of a group
of important actors from different sectors
to a common agenda for solving a specific
social problem.” By their very nature, these
complex problems cannot be solved by any
single organization or sector alone. Yet many
collaborations that seek to solve complex
social and environmental problems still omit
critical partners in government and the nonprofit,
corporate, and philanthropic sectors,
as well as people with lived experience of the
issue. Including the often radically different
perspectives of these diverse players can
generate more meaningful dialogue.
Cross-sector perspectives can improve
collective understanding of the problem and
create a sense of mutual accountability. In
New York, a group of cross-sector leaders
came together in 2010 to reform the juvenile
justice system, which was widely viewed as
inefficient, ineffective, and unsafe, with high
youth recidivism rates. The group included
leaders from law enforcement, the governor’s
office, large state and local agencies, community
advocates, judges, and private philanthropic
and nonprofit organizations. Many
of those partners had never worked together
before, and some had dramatically different
views. Over several months this group
grappled with their differing viewpoints and
ultimately created a shared vision for reform:
to promote youth success and improve public
safety. This effort now has backbone staff
embedded in the state’s Division of Criminal
Justice Services to coordinate action among
hundreds of participant organizations. After
three years, the effort has built upon earlier
successes and contributed to remarkable results:
The number of youths in state custody
has declined by a stunning 45 percent, and
juvenile arrests are down 24 percent, with no
increase in crime or risk to public safety.2
In addition to engaging the formal sectors,
we have learned the importance of working
with people who have lived experience.
Too often, the people who will ultimately
benefit from program or policy changes are
excluded from the process of understanding
the problem and then identifying and
implementing solutions. Authentic engagement
with people who are experiencing the
problem at first hand is critical to ensuring
that strategies are effective. For example,
young people play a critical role in Project
U-Turn, a collective impact effort in Philadelphia
that focuses on improving outcomes for
disconnected youths by reconnecting them
to school and work. Its Youth Voice working
group focuses on ensuring that young people
are integrated into all aspects of Project U-Turn,
including participation at committee
meetings. Youths also participate in specific
projects, such as developing a public awareness
campaign about school attendance. And
the approach has paid off: Project U-Turn has
seen an increase of 12 percentage points in
high school graduation rates in Philadelphia
since the program’s inception in 2005.3
Mindset Shift Two: How People Work Together
The relational is as important as the rational
| In his “Slow Ideas” article in the July 29,
2013, issue of The New Yorker, systems theorist
Atul Gawande asked why some powerful
and well-documented innovations that help
cure social ills spread quickly, whereas others
do not. One of the answers to that question
was found in the global problem of death in
childbirth. Every year, 300,000 mothers and
more than six million children die around the
time of birth, largely in the poorest countries.
As Gawande points out, many—perhaps the
majority—of these deaths are preventable.
Simple lifesaving solutions to the causes of
these deaths have been known for decades,
but they just haven’t spread.
Why is this? Gawande quotes the late
scholar Everett Rogers: “Diffusion is essentially
a social process through which
people talking to people spread an innovation.”
Gawande illustrates this observation by
describing a birth trainer in northern India
who, after more than five visits, convinced a
birth attendant in a rural hospital to include
evidence-based childbirth practices. The
attendant adopted the new practices because
the trainer built a trusting relationship
with her, not because of how convincing the
evidence-based practices were. To quote
Stephen M. R. Covey, and a common view in
the community development world, change
happens at “the speed of trust.”4
We have seen that data and evidence are
critical inputs for collective impact efforts, but
we must not underestimate the power of relationships.
Lack of personal relationships, as
well as the presence of strong egos and difficult
historical interactions, can impede collective
impact efforts. Collective impact practitioners
must invest time in building strong interpersonal
relationships and trust, which enable
collective visioning and learning. Reflecting
on the recent success of the juvenile justice
reform effort in New York, one leader commented:
“There is now a shared sense of why
we’re doing things and where we want to drive
the system to be. The process of having sat at
the same table and gotten to know one another
has really changed our work and the level of
trust we have in each other.” Collective impact
can succeed only when the process attends to
both the use of evidence and the strengthening
of relationships.
Structure is as important as strategy |
When beginning a collective impact initiative,
stakeholders are often tempted to focus on
creating a “strategy”—a specific, tangible set of
activities that they believe will ensure progress
toward their goal. Although it is important
to have a sense of how partners will address
a problem, the fact is that in many cases the
solutions are not known at the outset. We
believe that a critical mindset shift is needed:
Collective impact practitioners must recognize
that the power of collective impact comes
from enabling “collective seeing, learning, and
doing,” rather than following a linear plan. The
structures that collective impact efforts create
enable people to come together regularly to
look at data and learn from one another, to
understand what is working and what is not.
Such interaction leads partners to adjust their
actions, “doubling down” on effective strategies
and allowing new solutions to emerge.
Collective impact efforts coordinate the
actions of dozens—sometimes hundreds—of
organizations, and this coordination requires
an intentional structure. As we wrote in
the Jan. 26, 2012, SSIR article “Channeling
Change: Making Collective Impact Work,”
cascading levels of collaboration create multiple
ways for people to participate, communicate
lessons, and coordinate their effort. By
structuring how stakeholders share information
and engage with each other, initiatives
enable collective insights that identify new
strategies as the process develops.
Sharing credit is as important as taking
credit | One of the biggest barriers to collective
impact that we have seen is the desire by individual
organizations to seek and take credit for
their work. This tendency is understandable,
particularly in an environment where nonprofit
organizations are frequently asked to
demonstrate evidence of their unique impact
to receive scarce grant funding, boards hold
foundation staff accountable for results, and
companies look to strengthen their brands.
Nevertheless, seeking to take direct credit is
extremely difficult in large-scale collaborations,
and it can inhibit participants from making
decisions that are aligned with the broader
system and common agenda and hamper
their efforts to create mutually reinforcing
activities. We do not imply that organizations
should not rigorously evaluate their own work
and how it contributes to shared outcomes, but
rather that organizations should think about
their decisions in the context of others. Doing
so also requires a behavior change among public
and private funders, who must recognize
an organization’s contribution toward the
common agenda rather than seeking evidence
of attribution of a grantee’s work.
For collective impact efforts, sharing credit
with others can be far more powerful than taking
credit. Consider the Partnership for Youth
in the Franklin County and North Quabbin
region of Massachusetts, a coalition that over
the past 10 years has made significant progress
in reducing substance abuse and other risky
behavior by young people.5 The backbone team
consistently puts the work of the coalition in
the forefront, publicly giving awards to a select
number of coalition members. Award plaques
are given annually, and the same plaque is
passed around each year with the recipient’s
names added so that partnership members
can see how their work builds over time. The
backbone staff also has held press conferences
highlighting the work of the school districts
and other partners to draw attention to their
contributions. The ethos of the coalition is
summarized by this statement from one of the
coalition leaders: “We always think about who
we can blame the good results on.”
MAINTAINING THE INTEGRITY OF A COLLECTIVE IMPACT APPROACH
The pace at which the concept and language of collective impact
have spread over the last three years is inspiring. We are encouraged
to see that many organizations in the social and private sectors have
embraced the concept as a new way to achieve large-scale systems
change. Practitioners, funders, and policymakers have begun to recognize
that solving complex social problems at a large scale can happen
more effectively when actors work together, rather than through
isolated programs and interventions—a tremendously important shift
for the field.
Unfortunately, we have also observed that along with enthusiasm
about this momentum, “collective impact” has become a buzzword
that is often used to describe collaborations of all types. Many efforts
using the term do not resemble the uniquely data-driven, cross-sector
approach that employs the five conditions of collective impact.
Nor are they intentional about building the structure and relationships
that enable the emergent, continuous learning over time that
is critical to collective impact. Many funders report frustration at
receiving grant applications that claim to use collective impact but do
not resemble the approach at all. Conversely, grantees have shared
their frustration that some funders are creating programs mandating
participation in collective impact that force grantee cohorts to
collaborate with each other in ways that are inconsistent with the
cross-sector, emergent collective impact approach. Neither of these
occurrences is useful to advancing efforts to achieve positive and
consistent progress on a large scale.
Maintaining the integrity of the collective impact approach is
important. For the field to continue to embrace collective impact
as a path to large-scale change, efforts appropriately identifying
themselves as collective impact must see results. In addition, to avoid
movement away from collective impact as the preferred way the
social sector does business, we must help efforts inaccurately calling
themselves collective impact to better understand the important
changes they need to make to increase their odds of success. The
stakes are high. If, through misinterpretation and disappointment in
collective impact, the current tide toward working collectively were to
turn—and working in isolation were once again to become expected
and accepted organizational behavior—society’s potential to achieve
urgently needed progress will be severely diminished.
Mindset Shift Three: How Progress Happens
Pay attention to adaptive work, not just technical
solutions | Collective impact initiatives
are designed to help solve complex social and
environmental problems. As we described
in the July 21, 2013, SSIR article “Embracing
Emergence: How Collective Impact Addresses
Complexity,” complex problems are
unpredictable and constantly changing, and
no single person or organization has control.
Such problems require adaptive problem
solving.6 Because the answer is often not
known at the outset, participants must engage
in continuous learning and adaptation. Collective
impact allows for adaptive problem
solving by pushing multiple organizations to
look for resources and innovations to solve
a common problem, enabling rapid learning
through continuous feedback loops, and coordinating
responses among participants.
In contrast, much of the social sector has
historically focused on identifying technical
solutions, which are predetermined and replicable.
Indeed, technical solutions are often
an important part of the overall solution, but
adaptive work is required to enact them. In
the juvenile justice reform work in New York,
for example, many stakeholders knew that
keeping incarcerated youths in or close to
their home communities, where they receive
services and support, would likely improve
outcomes. Yet although this technical solution
was clear, the question of how to enact
the policy was not—it required an adaptive
solution. By building trust and establishing
shared aspirations among previously contentious
stakeholders, the collective impact effort
helped pave the way for implementation
of Close to Home legislation. The success of
the initiative in bringing about much needed
policy change—the new policy was signed into
law by the governor in 2012—demonstrates
the emphasis collective impact efforts must
place on adaptive work that creates the processes,
relationships, and structures within
which real progress can unfold at an accelerated
pace.
Look for silver buckshot instead of the
silver bullet | Achieving population-level
change, the ultimate goal for collective impact
initiatives, requires all stakeholders to abandon
the search for a single silver bullet solution.
Instead, they must shift their mindset
and recognize that success comes from the
combination of many interventions.
This mindset shift—from seeking a silver
bullet solution to creating silver buckshot
solutions7—is important for initiative partners
as well as public and private funders.
For practitioners, this shift means thinking
about their work as part of a larger context
and considering how their contribution fits
into the larger puzzle of activities. Funders
and policymakers similarly must shift from
investing in individual, single-point interventions
toward investing in processes and
relationships that enable multiple organizations
to work together.
In the case of juvenile justice reform in
New York, multiple efforts in concert dramatically
and quickly reduced the number of
incarcerated youths. Partners created linked
data systems, which allowed agencies to coordinate
more effectively. They also established
a public database of evidence-based programs
for young people in the court system, which enabled
providers and families to understand and
use the many programs available with greater
transparency and access than previously possible.
Furthermore, they assembled evidence
about alternative sentencing outcomes,
which allowed judges to avoid incarcerating
young people for misdemeanor offenses only.
Finally, they enhanced coordination among
government agencies and nonprofit providers.
They enacted many additional changes at the
organizational, local, and state levels. None
of these changes would have been sufficient
for large-scale change on its own, but taken
together they represented a shift in the system
that benefits thousands of young people and
communities across the state.8
The shift toward silver buckshot solutions
does not minimize the importance of high
quality individual programs, interventions,
and policies. Rather, it emphasizes that each
of these programs and policies is necessary,
but not sufficient, for success. Rather than
isolating individual programs and trying to
scale them up, collective impact works best
when it focuses on the ways that strong individual
interventions or policies fit together
and reinforce each other to solve a complex
problem. This mindset is highly countercultural
for many public and private funders, and
for practitioners who design and implement
their work in isolation from others.
Conclusion
The widespread momentum around collective
impact is exciting. It demonstrates a vital
shift for organizations, away from considering
their work in isolation and toward seeing
their work in the context of a broader system,
paving the way for large-scale change. The
five conditions, however, are not by themselves
sufficient. Achieving collective impact
requires the fundamental mindset shifts we
have described here—around who is involved,
how they work together, and how progress
happens. These shifts have significant implications
for how practitioners design and
implement their work, how funders incentivize
and engage with grantees, and how
policymakers bring solutions to a large scale.
Without these vital mindset shifts, collective
impact initiatives are unlikely to make the
progress they set out to accomplish.