Kania & Kramer — Collective Impact

Can Coordination Become a Capability?

Kania and Kramer’s argument begins with a simple criticism of the social sector: complex problems are often approached through isolated organisations even when the outcome depends on many actors behaving differently at the same time. Their alternative, collective impact, requires a common agenda, shared measurement, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication and a backbone function capable of holding the effort together. The obvious lesson is that collaboration needs more structure than goodwill, but the more interesting question is what should happen once that structure begins to work. A climate coalition may initially need a strong intermediary to connect a weather service, municipality, employers and communities, yet a genuinely resilient system should eventually make some of those relationships routine rather than permanently dependent on the convenor. The real capability may therefore not be the backbone organisation itself, but the habits, information systems, decision rules and relationships that the backbone helps the wider system acquire. That distinction matters for funders because financing permanent coordination is different from financing the development of a system’s capacity to coordinate. The harder question is whether we can design coalitions so that coordination gradually becomes distributed without allowing responsibility to disappear.

Source: John Kania & Mark Kramer, Collective Impact, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2011. Read the source