The Latest

Brenda Zimmerman at the Collective Impact Summit

Brenda Zimmerman is concerned about why some Collective Impact initiatives are falling short of expectations.  She believes that part of the problem is that leaders are “Snapping Back” to old habits and inappropriate modes of management and not recognizing the kind of ecological resilience needed to address complex issues.  In her keynote presentation to the Collective Impact Summit convened by Tamarack in Toronto 6-10 October, she talked about how to understand change in complex social systems, the type of resilience that is needed to address this, and how to mitigate the risks of “Snap Back”.

“Managers would rather live with a problem they can’t solve than with a solution they can’t fully understand or control.” - Eric Bonobeau, researcher in swarm intelligence and CEO of Icosystems 

Read More

Jay Connor at the Collective Impact Summit

Joseph “Jay” Connor brings considerable business success and experience to the challenges of creating community change.  Born in Dublin, Ireland, Jay grew up in Chicago and went on to assume senior management roles in two multi-billion dollar corporations: ADT Security Systems and Johnson Controls.  In the mid 1990’s Jay had an epiphany, sold his business, and decided to take his organizational expertise and devote himself to the nonprofit sector.  In conversation with Mark Cabaj at the Collective Impact Summit hosted by Tamarack in Toronto 6-10 October 2014, Jay described the problem he felt was facing the sector: “At that time (1994), we thought the organizations just needed to work better.  But when we went out to see if communities were better off, we couldn’t find any correlation.  I realized that while peak performing organizations are needed, they are not sufficient.”

Read More

Non-Profits and Lean Thinking

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.

Read More

Working Together – Harder than it Looks

Recently I joined in the Collective Impact Summit hosted in Toronto by Tamarack. Collective impact is all about different types of groups working together to advance a common goal, and while the practice is really nothing new, the work of Tamarack acknowledges that this type of work is:

Read More

Snapping Forward, Snapping Back

Tamarack just finished hosting the first ever Collective Impact Summit (CIS) in Toronto, Ontario in October 2014.  It was an amazing gathering of 300 folks working to advance community change and impact in Canada, the US, Australia, Denmark, New Zealand, Israel, and Nigeria.  The energy in the room was palpable as leaders from across a variety of spectrums shared their questions, struggles, and lessons learned in implementing Collective Impact. 

Read More

How I Got to the Summit: A Personal Reflection

My mother was a professor so you’d think her unequivocal advice would have been to go to university after high school, but instead she directed me toward Canada World Youth, a federally funded international exchange program designed to get young Canadians thinking about cross-cultural learning, community service, and issues of local and global concern. This was long before gap years became popular and I was the only one from my graduating class doing such a thing.

Read More