The Obstacle is the Path
I am known to say, “The Obstacle is the Path.” It’s a Zen koan, a type of puzzle, and I suggest an ancient example of upside down thinking.
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I am known to say, “The Obstacle is the Path.” It’s a Zen koan, a type of puzzle, and I suggest an ancient example of upside down thinking.
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Collective Impact is all the rage. In my field, everyone is studying it, doing it, and lauding its virtues. Its birth is sourced from an article written a few years back in the Stanford Social Innovation Review by John Kania and Mark Kramer. The brilliance of this initial article, simply titled, Collective Impact, isn’t because it’s full of new ideas or because the authors identified a way of working that no one had considered before. Instead, their article offers an approach to largescale collaboration that is in effect a convergence of proven practice that they found in various places along the broad and complex landscape of social challenges.
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It’s been going on for quite some time to be honest. Often it’s just subtle derision producing comments like “charities need to be more business-like” or “My goodness, how many charities do we really need?” Other times the charity slam manifests as a rant against “poverty pimps” or a rail against artists who create things “that my five year old could make.”
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Preface: Collective Impact calls for transformational practice among our organizations. Models and theories and innovative ideas are critical to the work, but we also need to change how we operate and find ways to maximize our collective capacity to work better, smarter, and with a sense of urgency. This is one attempt to talk about that.
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“I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking”
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It is not uncommon for business leaders or entrepreneurs to suggest that charities need to behave more like business. Of course non-profit operations should be based on sound financial and management principles and practices, but I suggest blanket statements like “be more like business” ignore some fundamental differences between private and non-profit sector organizations. As well this default position of many business leaders is a tad insulting.
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