Over the last month, Liz Weaver, Vice President, Tamarack Institute and I have been engaged in an email exchange puzzling out the answers to many wicked questions about collective impact and community change. Below is part I of V, where we discuss how to ensure a community agenda not just a shared agenda.

How do we ensure that it is truly a ‘Community Agenda’ not just the shared agenda of folks around the collective impact (CI) table?

MAX HARDY:

I believe in going in ‘messy.’ Generating conversations with the broader community of interest before a project has a name; before objectives have been written up and before any business case has been developed for funding. The temptation for organisations meeting together to discuss an issue is to scope the project, work out some key messages, make sure organisations are not falling over each other, and to identify resources.

All good reasons to get all the ducks lined up. However, it’s risky. By the time there is a project announced, and key partners identified, it can look like it’s just another government or NGO led project designed to fix a problem. The rationale is then sold. The importance of working together is marketed. From the community’s perspective, they have not yet got their fingerprints over the project. This looks like another thing that will be done for us or to us.

Going in messy means there is genuine intent to frame the project in a way that is meaningful for those who are meant to benefit by, or contribute, to an initiative. Going in messy means the project can be shaped. Every project has to start somewhere. But don’t go too far without knowing your community has had genuine involvement in identifying the purpose, and the key questions to be answered.

What advice do you have Liz?

LIZ WEAVER:

Being comfortable with the messy, being open to different perspectives allows us to really unpack the problem.

Many collective impact initiatives start as a response to a community need, issue or opportunity of some sort. There are usually two or three people who get together and say, this is not right or this is an opportunity that we can’t miss out on. Their conversation usually leads to other conversations about who we need to connect with whether there is support for at least moving this conversation forward.

Keeping the conversation open at the beginning is challenging. Many of us want to jump to the solution quickly given our area of expertise. But what we have learned is that collective impact issues, problems or opportunities are often very complex. There are multiple players in the system, multiple perspectives and multiple solutions. Being comfortable with the messy, being open to different perspectives allows us to really unpack the problem.

But there will be a time where clarity is required. This is when data disaggregation and community mapping become useful. What is the data telling us about the complexity of the problem and how it is impacting different individuals in our community? Who is already delivering services and how are these services connected? Who cares about this issue and how are they connected?

Approaching complex challenges is tough and messy work. In collective impact approaches, we can’t jump quickly to solutions. We need a tolerance for ambiguity, for learning about how forces are impacting the problem, and then we can bring in tools that help to bring focus and clarity. If we do this well, the issue becomes owned, not only by us, but by the community.

Do you agree with their perspectives? Do you have other questions they should consider? What are the challenges you are facing as you engage in collective impact? We invite you to add your comments and join the conversation here. 

Click here to view the publication.

To view subsequent discussions, click on the discussion below:

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V

Perspectives from the field: A conversation about collective impact and collaboration from Australia and Canada

Over the last month, Liz Weaver, Vice President, Tamarack Institute and I have been engaged in an email exchange puzzling out the answers to many wicked questions about collective impact and community change. Below is part II of V, where we discuss how to ensure a community agenda not just a shared agenda. You can view Part I here.

How can we measure progress when so many of the measures or indicators are lagging indicators?

MAX HARDY:

This is a really important question to consider, especially in the early days of an initiative. I’m a big believer in the power of appreciative inquiry; and the saying ‘What you focus on will grow.’ The question then becomes more specific; what kind of behaviours and practices would we like to see more of?

We need to be wary of indicators that measure a range of things. For instance, simply measuring, ‘What percentage of meetings does a certain organisation or individual attend?’ will give you some data, but not information. If someone attends very regularly it may not necessarily tell you whether they are committed. It could mean they are there because they don’t trust others at the table and they want to see what is going on, for instance.

So, we need to pay attention to, and yes, measure, more than simplistic data. Perhaps it would pay to measure things like, ‘What additional information is being shared to help our collective endeavours?’ ‘How much are we all learning from each other?’ ‘To what extent are we following through with commitments we each make in between meetings?’ ‘How much do we enjoy, or at least look forward to, our gatherings?’ ‘To what extent are we confident we are working with our community of interest rather than just designing another way of delivering services?’

These questions are not always that easy to measure, but they might be easier than people think. For instance, noticing the body language as people arrive, and how willingly people stay longer to have a one on one conversation, may provide really useful information about the level of enthusiasm.

Reviewing progress will be much richer if we talk about how much we are learning from each other and sharing with each other, than simply counting bums on seats. If we focus on some of these things we are likely to measure our progress in a more meaningful way; and if we focus on these things they are likely to grow.

How about you Liz?

LIZ WEAVER:

Lagging indicators are data points that are a few years old. This type of measure often is generated through a national survey. In Canada, every five years there is a national survey that Statistics Canada conducts which looks at several population indicators. The data is then analyzed and released a few years or more later. This data is helpful, and can be useful to determine population trends over time. But, the lag time is an important factor to consider. If your initiative is only a three-year initiative, national statistics data may not be carried out with the type of regularity that is required and therefore may not be relevant to your effort.

Some collective impact efforts also consider leading indicators. A leading indicator is a measurable economic factor that changes before the economy starts to follow a pattern or trend. Leading indicators are used to predict changes in the economy, but they are not always accurate.

In the case of leading and lagging indicators, the group must determine the relevancy of the indicator to the context of the initiative. Sometimes there just aren’t the right set of indicators in place and that is when the evaluation questions that Max suggests may be more helpful to determine how the initiative is moving forward. For shorter term efforts, focus on a small set of indicators but also ask questions to determine how behaviour is changing by key stakeholders over time. These short-term behaviour changes have the potential, if supported and encouraged, to lead to major impacts over time.

Do you agree with their perspectives? Do you have other questions they should consider? What are the challenges you are facing as you engage in collective impact? We invite you to add your comments and join the conversation here.

Click here to view the publication.

Perspectives from the field: A conversation about collective impact and collaboration from Australia and Canada

Over the last month, Liz Weaver, Vice President, Tamarack Institute and I have been engaged in an email exchange puzzling out the answers to many wicked questions about collective impact and community change. Below is part III of V, where we discuss how to ensure a community agenda not just a shared agenda. If you would like to view previous posts, please click on the part you would like to view: Part I, Part II.

Why is local context a critical success factor in community change efforts?

MAX HARDY:

This is an interesting question as some might believe local context is important simply because every local context is unique. While that may be somewhat true, I believe what makes local context important is the extent to which the ‘community of interest’ have ownership of the solution they are co-designing. Having evaluated many pilot programs there was one feature that jumped out at me. Pilot schemes were often much more successful than when a fuller program was rolled out. I am convinced that one of the reasons for this is that programs or initiatives work when we rely on something new being developed. There is no ‘newness’ about being told that an initiative will be rolled out in a particular location because it was deemed to be a successful approach in another location. In Australia, I have observed some resentment in locations when told that government is tackling a certain problem using a ‘best practice’ model that worked somewhere else.

Local context is more than unique characteristics; it is about local ownership of the process. If the process is being ‘done to’ a community, it will not be welcomed. If it is being done by the community, or being led or actively influenced by a community, the energy is completely different. There is something motivating about trying something new without being certain if it will work or not. Being told something will work because it has elsewhere tends to kill motivation. Indeed, in Australia there is a tendency to try to prove the bureaucrats or professionals wrong about the promised success of some new model. The factor present, when pilots or initiatives work, is the excitement and curiosity in trying something new or different. This is something which is very hard to replicate or roll out. When pilots succeed, the very factor that led to its success is denied in other areas.

Beyond this, local context is important because it is about respect; identifying local strengths to build upon; and engaging the community as an asset to understand and work with rather than as something broken needing to be fixed.

So, here are my thoughts about it. What have you found to be important about local context?

Over to you Liz!

LIZ WEAVER:

I agree with you Max. Local context is more than unique characteristics, but it is also important to understand and leverage those ‘unique, local characteristics.’ Among the local characteristics to pay attention to include the demographic make up of the community; the degree and engagement of community leadership in the initiative; the history of collaboration in the community; the willingness and ability of key players to become engaged; the amount of financial and human resources it will take to move an issue forward; the community’s knowledge, commitment and passion around the issue being tackled; and, the initial convening leadership. There are likely many more characteristics but these are the ones that I have seen to be pivotal.

These local characteristics factor into key topic areas: leadership commitment and capacity; resources; issue passion, commitment and data knowledge; and community readiness. It is the mix of these ingredients that create a base for communities to be able to tackle complex problems. Many others have written about community readiness including Rich Harwood and Jay Connor. By understanding the readiness of the community to move forward, you can begin to work on the elements of what it will take to get to community change and impact.

That is where the co-design and co-development elements that you have highlighted Max are critically important. That is also where philanthropy may get it wrong. True community change occurs when the community is passionate about the issue and there is a sense of urgency to get things done. Having issues imposed by external, if well intentioned, forces does make it more challenging to get things done because it takes longer to build buy in. I experienced this directly when a funder offered substantial funding to my organization to build a community leadership program. While the idea was great, we needed to develop the leadership program to suit our local context and build broad-based leadership support around this idea. It took us two years of work to get from idea to launch and often felt like we were pushing against a boulder.

When we finally got there, the program was a success, but it was because we put in the time, built the relationships and did not just take something off the shelf. This experience, for me, emphasized the critical importance of connecting into our local context.

Do you agree with their perspectives? Do you have other questions they should consider? What are the challenges you are facing as you engage in collective impact? We invite you to add your comments and join the conversation here.

Click here to view the publication.

To view subsequent discussions, click on the discussion below:

Part IV

Part V