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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Complexity is, by its very name and nature, a complex phenomenon to understand. Yet, many of the most urgent, challenging problems we face as a species – from climate change to social inequities and inequality through to health system sustainability – sit in the realm of the complex. Thus, if we are to make any positive shift in addressing threatening complex problems we need to be able to engage society in conversations about them and develop strategies to learn and adapt that work with complexity rather than fall into the trap of what Russ Ackoff called ‘doing the wrong thing, righter.’
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Two weeks ago, Tamarack hosted a webinar where Elayne Greeley interviewed Mark Holmgren about Upside Down Thinking. As Mark said, he doesn’t claim to have created this term but I’m certainly glad they brought it forward for us to think about. Actually he has been talking about his for a while to get us thinking about a lot.
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This week was bookended with facilitated discussions in Alaska and Collingwood on the topics of Collective Impact and community transformation. While both conversations were productive, engaging and challenging, a couple of things stuck out for me.
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Sometimes, a job pays much more than just what’s in the paycheck. Millions of people have occupations that provide rewards that don’t show up on a W-2 form – the warmth of accomplishment, the knowledge that they are helping people, and the satisfaction of giving back to and improving their community. For many of these jobs, the positives linger long after the workday ends. Let’s take a look at just four such careers:
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By now we know that collective impact is often messy work. These collaborative processes are designed to address complex problems by bringing both traditional and non-traditional partners to a collective table. Inherent in this is messiness. The complex problem is often shifting both through the efforts of the collective impact table and also through external changes that are normal to community work.
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