Of Recipes and Principles - A Musing about Collective Impact

If we are in the work of community and systems change, which is where collective impact is best suited as a framework, then we should privilege the idea of principles versus the implementation of recipes. 

Moving the needle on complex or systems problems requires a different way of working.  To understand the complexity of the problem requires multiple perspectives and multiple ways of making sense of the problem. 

In the book, Systems Thinking for Social Change, author David Peter Stroh identifies the following as reasons to use a systems thinking approach: 

• A problem is chronic and has defied people’s best intentions to solve it.
• Diverse stakeholders find it difficult to align their efforts despite shared intentions.
• They try to optimize their part of the system without understanding their impact on the whole.
• Stakeholders’ short term effects might actually undermine their intentions to solve the problem.
• People are working on a large number of disparate initiatives at the same time.
• Promoting particular solutions (such as best practices) comes at the expense of engaging in continuous learning.

(Source:  Systems Thinking for Social Change, page 23)

Solving complex problems require a systems thinking and seeing approach.  The challenge is that none of us have the capacity to see the whole system.  More often, we view the system from the lens or perspective that is dominant to us.  Our frame of reference or perspective is the combination of many factors:  the knowledge we have about the issue; the approach because of sector we work in; our cultural, religious or political beliefs; or where we find ourselves from an economic, lifestyle, or life stage perspective.  For most of us, our frame of reference is also in the day to day delivery of results not on how to influence and change systems. 

Influencing systems and tackling complex issues requires a different way of working.  We need to move away from the notion of recipes – that we can follow a set of steps and come to solutions – to trying to understand the system as a whole and develop a set of principles which will work effectively within the system. 

The collective impact framework should be considered a set of principles to operate in the spectrum of complex community change.  Defining a common agenda; identifying shared measures; building mutually reinforcing activities; focusing on continuous communications and facilitating a backbone are only useful when considering the context of the community and the complexity of the problem. 

Working in complexity is more challenging.  We like recipes.  We like to follow them.  We think they will provide the answers.  But we know that recipes also fail because of conditions:  the temperature of the stove; the taste levels of the participants, etc. 

The truth is that moving the needle on community change is challenging.  It requires us to undercover context and understand complexity.  Thinking about collective impact as a set of dynamic principles that shift over time, allow us to enter the work of community change more effectively and more responsively.