Community Building:  The Short and Long Views

When we are in the deepest, darkest days of community change work, our sightlines are narrow and our focus usually ends up on the microscopic parts of the process that are frustrating us. We want to move faster. We want to see bigger impact, bigger results. We become impatient with the process recognizing that even our best work may only have limited impact.

Since 2011, many communities have organized their community change efforts using a Collective Impact framework. The promise of Collective Impact is that this way of working might have the capacity to move to larger scale community change impacts. Indeed, in some circumstances, communities are seeing population level changes and impacts on vexing issues like homelessness, the environment, educational outcomes and poverty.

But Collective Impact and community change is not for the faint of heart. It requires a focus on both short term and incremental changes but also the patience to watch the long view. In the book, The Art of the Long View by Peter Schwartz, the author describes the importance of ‘rehearsing the future’. Schwartz describes the process of building future-oriented scenarios as a means of rehearsing for possible alternative futures.

In building a theory of change, envisioning a possible different future for our communities, Collective Impact pushes us into the longer view. This is counterintuitive to our current culture of work, looking for short-term solutions and quick wins.

A longer view perspective may take some of the pressure off of the current. However, as many communities have learned in Collective Impact efforts, the balance and tension has to be both on the short and the long view. If the gaze to the future is too long, the opportunity to miss an important leverage or change point becomes too easy.