Bonilla beat the odds when she enrolled in an antipoverty pilot program run by New York City’s Center for Economic Opportunity (CEO). In exchange for taking on a full course load, the program provided Bonilla with enough money for tuition, books, and MetroCards for the commute to campus. She received tutoring, academic advisement, and job placement services. The program staff also lent Bonilla a laptop, so that she could do her schoolwork and still be home with her children.

Today, more than 1,000 students from all six City University of New York community colleges are enrolled in the program, and 55 percent of students complete their associate degrees in three years. Bonilla has finished her associate degree and is on track to earn a bachelor’s degree in public administration this spring. After graduation, she plans to open a daycare center for children with special needs.

The community college graduation initiative is just one of more than 40 programs tested by CEO, which evaluates and implements innovative antipoverty initiatives, rigorously assesses their outcomes, and makes funding decisions based on program performance. With an annual budget of $100 million in public and private funding, CEO programs have helped New Yorkers find employment, graduate from college, open savings accounts, shop for healthy foods, and earn tax credits.

In 2006, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg established a commission to analyze the issues and scope of poverty in the city. At the recommendation of the commission, he formed the center within the mayor’s office to better inform the way New York City and the federal government spend dollars fighting poverty. “Usually, mayors are preoccupied with fire and safety and roads and trash pickup,” says Gordon Berlin, president of the education and social policy research firm MDRC. Bloomberg, however, faced an extraordinary situation that was difficult to ignore. “The state requires a dollar-for-dollar match on most programs serving the poor,” explains Berlin. Researchers at CEO calculated a 19.9 percent poverty rate for New York City in 2009.

“It’s daring to talk about poverty and to say: ‘We don’t have the answers. We’re going to build on the work of others, and we’re going to try new ideas,’” says Veronica White, executive director of CEO. “It gets you involved in a conversation that a lot of politicians would be afraid to get involved in, and Mayor Bloomberg wasn’t.”

The center borrows and builds upon existing lessons from private, government, academic, and nonprofit organizations to create its own programs. These antipoverty interventions range from a re-entry program for young offenders that originated in Oregon, to a matched savings program that works closely with the city’s Volunteer Income Tax Assistance sites.

INVESTING WISELY

CEO runs pilot programs in collaboration with appropriate city agencies. Its 15-person staff monitors program performance, and each project’s success and failure is measured by outside research firms such as MDRC. If analysts find that the program makes a measurable impact and an agency can integrate the initiative into its activities with dedicated funding, CEO hands the program over to the agency. “It’s very unusual to see this combination of innovation and mainstream take-up in government,” Berlin says.

Many of the organization’s programs stem from others’ successes. “It’s essential to understand what’s come before you in thinking about programs,” says White, who often looks outside New York City for inspiration. “It is about making sure you do that scan of what’s in existence, what’s working, and what’s not working.”

Preceding her role at CEO, White was a nonprofit consultant and chief operating officer of Partnership for New York City and president and CEO of Housing Partnership. Staff members at CEO are equally versed in government and nonprofit work as well as in translating research into practice. All senior staff have advanced degrees in economics, sociology, public policy and administration, public health, and law.

White says some of her team’s best research comes from talking to providers and participants who are involved in poverty programs every day, asking them about the drawbacks of the existing programs and what they would add if they had more resources. Antipoverty programs dependent on federal funding are often restricted by what they can do with government funds. “There’s only so much room to innovate with federal dollars,” says Allegra Blackburn-Dwyer, chief of staff at CEO. “We start with other resources and test around the edges.”

One antipoverty initiative led Mayor Bloomberg and CEO staff to Mexico. The country’s conditional cash transfer program, called Oportunidades, provides 5.8 million poor families with regular payments if they meet certain requirements, such as going for regular health checkups and keeping children in school. Children enrolled in the program are healthier and stay in school longer.

In 2007, CEO refined the Mexican cash incentive program and adapted it for New York City families. Opportunity NYC: Family Rewards became the first conditional cash transfer program launched in a developed country. During its first two years, the program offered 22 incentives, ranging from $20 to $600, for activities including children’s school achievement, preventive health care, and parents’ work, education, and training. “MDRC worked with CEO and other experts to refine it and adapt it for New York City, and we have put it to a very serious test,” says Jim Riccio, the lead MDRC researcher on CEO projects replicated in New York City from elsewhere.

To appraise its programs, the center uses a range of performance management and evaluation techniques, including random assignment studies. The control group is invaluable in measuring changes in poverty levels, particularly today. “In the current economic climate, of course poverty is going up,” Berlin says. “If you have a reliable comparison group, you may find that the poverty rate would have gone up even more.”

Early results from MDRC’s five-year evaluation of the Family Rewards program are promising. Cash rewards reduced debt and hardship and improved health outcomes and, among some high school students, academic performance. The program also cut poverty among participants by 11 percent.

RIPPLE EFFECT

After benefiting from their predecessors, White and her team return the favor by sharing what they’ve learned. All of CEO’s research and evaluation reports are available to the public on the center’s website. “Other places have done great work, but they don’t necessarily have it available for other people to look at,” says White. “We are really interested in formal and informal learning communities.”

Now, she will be able to expand CEO’s reach even further. The organization was the only government body to win a Social Innovation Fund federal grant of $5.7 million annually for five years to reproduce one or two of its five most successful programs, including the conditional cash transfer initiative, in New York City and seven other cities.

With the federal grant, CEO is replicating its savings account program in Tulsa, Okla., San Antonio, and Newark, N.J. Participants of the SaveUSA initiative are eligible for a 50 percent match, up to $500, if they deposit at least $200 from their tax refund into a SaveUSA account and maintain the deposit for a year. In New York City, the 2,200 participants of the original banking program saved more than $1.7 million in three years.

But not all of CEO’s programs have been worth replicating. As planned, the center has discontinued several of its less effective initiatives. Most programs that the center has cut were inadequately put into practice, had flawed models, or offered too few services. When the center partnered with just a single provider and tested a program that proved unsuccessful, researchers couldn’t decipher whether the program failed as a result of its design, location, or recruitment.

The center’s ventures, successful or not, are not always viewed as positive learning experiences—especially by Bloomberg critics. Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, has been a vocal challenger of the conditional cash transfer program.

“CEO has to deal with the fact that they’re in a political world and can take heat directed by political opponents,” Riccio says. He says the scope of the city’s poverty problem also can set the center up for failure. “They risk setting expectations that are beyond what they can do. The cause of poverty is affected by macroeconomic forces that the city can’t control.”

Despite these challenges, White and her CEO colleagues continue to innovate and test models that they plan to replicate in and outside of New York City. “It’s important to build on the basis of what other people know,” says White. “We’re working with what they’ve done and we’re trying to retool it and make it better.”

The organization is using some of the Social Innovation Fund award to create how-to guides for five of its antipoverty programs, so that other governments and nonprofits can replicate CEO’s star achievements. Says White: “I think part of the long-term value of the center is that we can spread so much of our knowledge base across the country.”

Corey Binns is a journalist based in New York City. She writes about science, health, and social change for publications including Popular Science and msnbc.com.

That’s far from the end of the story, however. Inspired by what happened when people were given a voice in Kisumu, GlobalGiving has continued to fine-tune its strategies for soliciting and making sense of the stories people tell about the projects intended to help them. For nonprofits and potential donors, “this helps you see what you’re doing through the eyes of the beneficiaries,” explains John Hecklinger, chief program officer for GlobalGiving.

Listening to stories may seem simple, but turning this into a method for monitoring development work has meant drawing on fields as diverse as complexity theory, behavioral psychology, and technology. Although GlobalGiving’s typical partners are grassroots organizations with small budgets, the storytelling project has garnered grant support from the Rockefeller Foundation because of potential benefits across the development sector. “There are thousands of small organizations that will never be able to afford or manage typical monitoring and evaluation functions,” says Nancy MacPherson, managing director of evaluation for the Rockefeller Foundation. “This could be a way to help smaller grantees be more systematic.”

The big goal, Hecklinger adds, is helping organizations get to better results more quickly. “We hope this leads to much faster and earlier detection of successes and failures to make the marketplace work better,” he explains. “It’s a way to create an organized and convenient mass of information that helps everyone from donors to beneficiaries make better decisions about what gets funded and what gets done.”

MAKING SENSE OF STORIES

David Snowden, a Welsh cognitive scientist and founder of a UK-based firm called Cognitive Edge, acknowledges that storytelling “is kind of in fashion with a lot of organizations.” Gathering heartwarming stories for their emotional appeal is not his aim. Rather, he’s interested in analyzing what he calls “micro-narratives.” These are the snippets of conversation we exchange while waiting in line at the supermarket or talking around a village campfire. They turn out to be quite useful for providing a snapshot of what’s on people’s minds.

Over the past decade, Snowden has developed a system for gathering and making sense of large quantities of micro-narratives. Listening to soldiers’ stories can improve troop safety in combat zones. Sales representatives’ stories can yield important insights for marketing. Until the GlobalGiving project came along, however, this approach had never been applied to development work.

Central to the Cognitive Edge approach is the conviction that storytellers are best qualified to interpret what their own narratives mean. Snowden has devised a simple system that enables people to put their stories into context. For example, if people are sharing stories about justice in their community, they might be asked whether a specific example is more about retribution, restitution, or revenge. They show how their story relates to those three potentially intertwining meanings by placing a dot on a triangle.

Cognitive Edge’s proprietary software, called SenseMaker, then turns this raw information into data that can be visually represented and analyzed to reveal patterns. With large volumes of data, the result “is like a 3-D landscape,” Snowden says. “You are able to see patterns, attitudes, and belief systems,” as stories form clusters around particular topics. The data can be filtered according to the storyteller’s gender, age, or other variables.

Irene Guijt, a Dutch consultant in organizational learning and evaluation, discovered Snowden’s work just as she was finishing her doctoral dissertation. As a method of generating fast feedback in the development sector, she saw this as “the best of both worlds. You get the value of stories and the merit of statistical analysis so that you can see patterns.” She envisioned how this information could shape community decision making “and lead to more innovation. It’s not a bunch of stories sitting in a dead library.” Guijt brokered introductions between the Rockefeller Foundation, Cognitive Edge, and GlobalGiving, and was soon part of a pilot project to test the storytelling approach in Kenya.

LEARNING FROM THE FIELD

Marc Maxson directs evaluation for GlobalGiving (and was also the bumper sticker-wielding visitor to Kisumu). He’s eager to develop better evaluation and monitoring methods for the 1,000 organizations that are GlobalGiving partners. Most operate on slim budgets with small staffs. Few have ever experienced a formal program evaluation. The handful that have been evaluated, he adds, have most likely never seen a copy of their own reports.

The storytelling approach can drive down the cost of evaluation to about 5 percent of more traditional methods, Maxson estimates. It’s also a way to gather community feedback—positive or negative—and share it quickly. “You don’t have to wait years for formal evaluation. This makes it cheaper for everyone to be effective.”

During the pilot year of the storytelling project in Kenya, Maxson saw “a 180-degree turn” in how grassroots organizations view monitoring and evaluation. “Instead of thinking of this as something that happens from the outside—from above—now it comes from within the community,” he says.

Maxson worked with local nonprofits to recruit native Kenyans who would gather stories from people they already knew in the community. Paid “scribes” underwent brief training in how to gather stories and have people interpret them. What motivates people to share their stories? Story sharers were entered into a lottery for a chance to win $100. Beyond that, says Hecklinger, “they have to see a value—that something might change as a result.”

Scribes were encouraged to ask deliberately open-ended questions. For example: “Tell us about a community effort that was successful (or one that failed).” Some stories that bubbled up spoke to broad community concerns, such as crime or jobs. Others were more specific and set the stage for follow-up by local service providers.

One cluster of stories mentioned the Trans-Nzoia Youth Sports Association (TYSA), a GlobalGiving partner that provides a range of services—school fees, uniforms, nutrition, and medical care—to children in the Rift Valley of Kenya. “A lot of the stories were about violence by police against youth. The organization’s goal has been to keep kids out of trouble,” Hecklinger says, “but now they are considering new strategies to work with the police as youth advocates.” Similarly, TYSA’s efforts to protect the rights of children got little mention in most stories, even though that’s a major emphasis of programming. “It is a gap we are seeing, a gap between our service and the community’s awareness,” explains a TYSA staffer. Storytelling doesn’t necessarily present a solution, Hecklinger notes, “but it can help organizations develop a hypothesis.”

The 2,500-plus stories collected in Kenya cited the work of more than 200 organizations. Many were previously unknown to the GlobalGiving team. Through stories, Hecklinger points out, “you detect what’s going on in your network and also outside it. You find out what you didn’t even know to ask.” As a result, some new organizations have been invited to join the GlobalGiving platform. “If you want to replicate innovation in the field,” he adds, “you have to be able to find it first.”

MORE TO LEARN

The eclectic team working on this effort agrees that there are more lessons to be learned. With a second round of funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, new projects are under way in Uganda and, soon, Tanzania to gather more stories and fine-tune best practices.

To share lessons learned, GlobalGiving has published an online guidebook called the Real Book for Story Evaluation Methods, coauthored by Maxson and Guijt. Among their conclusions: Community feedback needs to include multiple perspectives—those who have received services as well as those who haven’t. It needs to happen fast, so that feedback can be applied quickly to make improvements. It needs to generate action to make story sharing worth doing. And participants must be open to surprise—and willing to learn what they didn’t expect to learn.

GlobalGiving is working on strategies to make sure that stories collected will get back to the communities as well as to potential donors. The organization’s online platform will soon be updated with maps to show story locations, along with narrative feedback on individual project pages. Meanwhile, the role of technology to accelerate story gathering is still being worked out. Unreliable Internet connections in Kenya made Web-based tools impractical during the pilot. Eventually, there may be a role for SMS texting using mobile phones.

Guijt hopes to introduce the storytelling approach to other contexts, such as tracking values across the cotton supply chain. Already, she has a sense of where storytelling is appropriate and where it’s not. “This works best in situations where there is room to adapt en route. If you’re talking about a five-year program that’s set in stone, forget it. But if you anticipate a lot of obstacles between A and B and are willing to make changes along the way, then this approach becomes interesting,” she says.

Maxson ends her book with this advice: “Keep listening and keep sending these messages back and forth so that the people with the cash hear from the people in the grass of every grassroots project.”

Suzie Boss is a journalist from Portland, Ore., who writes about social change and education. She contributes to Edutopia and is co-author of Reinventing Project-Based Learning.

Over the course of the day, these eight women, all of them trained through a program funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), listened to dignitaries and met the event organizers, watched a video, and participated in team-building exercises. But most of the time was spent with their teams. At the end of the day, each team emerged with a goal and a plan to increase usage of family planning services in the communes surrounding their community health centers, within the next 100 days! Shortly thereafter, the leader of one team broke into tears. “When everyone left the room, I started sobbing,” the woman said. “I had just committed to my colleagues and to ministry officials that we would increase the regular users of family planning services by 30 percent in the next 100 days. We had never been able to do anything like this before.”

One hundred days later, in September 2005, Jean Louis Robinson, the minister of health, celebrated the extraordinary results achieved by these teams, with special praise for the community volunteers. The eight teams had far exceeded their original goals. Instead of the targeted 30 percent increase, the number of regular users of family planning services had increased by a factor of five—from an average of 50 visits per week in each center to 250 visits per week.

EXTRAORDINARY RESULTS THROUGH ORDINARY KNOWLEDGE

These teams did not use any innovations or new technology. At the workshop no one introduced a global “best practice” on family planning, or spoke about social marketing and social media. Instead, the community volunteers, along with their other team members, had walked door-to-door, talking with people in their neighborhoods about family planning. This might be viewed as low-tech work, hard on the feet and tedious. Yet those who participated were engaged and enthusiastic. They had produced the tangible, groundbreaking outcomes that had eluded others for several years.

These teams achieved breakthrough results by using a process that we call Rapid Results. The practices built into these initiatives have evolved organically from work pioneered by Robert Schaffer and his colleagues in private sector consulting engagements stretching back 50 years.¹ After introducing this work in developing countries² with support and sponsorship from the World Bank, Schaffer Consulting spawned the Rapid Results Institute as an independent NGO focused on building capacity to provide coaching support for this work to local organizations in low-income countries.³

During the 10 years we have used this process, we have witnessed how resourceful and persistent people can be in using their available knowledge and techniques to achieve goals that are meaningful to them. We have also observed that when the existing knowledge falls short, they are motivated to fill these gaps and have a greater readiness to use an infusion of external input.

No doubt there are many situations where one can stumble on the right mix of people and circumstances that make this resourcefulness and persistence a naturally occurring phenomenon. Unfortunately, this is not the norm. And it is particularly lacking in public sector agencies engaged in development work in low-income countries. Our experience is that there is plenty of untapped capacity for performance in these agencies, but several systemic barriers prevent this potential from translating into actual performance.

First, the grand design of most development projects, typically hatched by outside development professionals, makes local ownership of this work difficult. Second, the hierarchical structure of most public sector agencies in low-income countries, coupled with the implicit rules for allocating credit and blame, make it unappealing for middle managers and frontline staff to commit themselves to performance goals. Third, in many low-income countries, the public views public sector workers as incompetent or corrupt. And public sector workers often view themselves as victims of a dysfunctional system that encourages corruption and rewards inefficiency. Consequently, public sector workers on the whole assume an identity that does not promote accountability and professionalism.

Rapid Results stimulates high performance in spite of these systemic barriers, by helping leaders create a protected work environment where these barriers are temporarily neutralized, and where ownership, commitment, and a professional identity are possible. This does not change the system. Nevertheless, the initial progress and experience of success that are enabled by this temporary process create the energy, momentum, and confidence people need to tackle systemic barriers to performance.

The thinking behind our work aligns with views advanced by nontraditional development thinkers stretching back to economist Albert Hirschman in the 1950s, up to the current scholarship of economist William Easterly, author of The White Man’s Burden: that long-range comprehensive “planners” can have a limited impact on development, and that the real breakthroughs will come from “searchers” who are attuned to small solutions that work in the local context.

The approach is a natural fit for what Harvard University professor Ronald Heifetz refers to as “adaptive problems”—ones that can be solved only if people in the community or organization change their values, attitudes, or behaviors.⁴ An example of an adaptive problem is promulgating safe sex behavior as a way to fight the spread of HIV/AIDS. The approach is not a good fit for purely technical problems that can be solved by an expert working by himself or by decree from someone in authority, for example, figuring out the optimal location for a health center designed to serve a cluster of villages. Furthermore, Rapid Results should not be used as a way to organize the implementation of predetermined solutions in carefully scripted ways, because its transaction costs would be too high to warrant the additional value it can provide in these situations.

This approach is not a silver bullet. Development effectiveness has many unsolved riddles. Our aim in this article is to shed light on one of these: how to overcome the implementation gap—the gulf between knowing what is important and actually making it happen.

FROM RICE FARMING TO FAMILY PLANNING

In 2005, Madagascar was one of the poorest countries in the world, measured by GDP per capita.⁵ The Malagasy culture favors large families. For newly married couples, the common blessing is “May you have 14 children—seven girls and seven boys.” Starting in 1990, the Ministry of Health & Family Planning had been pursuing a national policy around modern family planning services. Many programs had been implemented to reduce the fertility rate: training health agents, inaugurating celebrations for National Family Planning Day, and distributing contraceptives through community programs. Despite these investments and the continued focus of the ministry, progress had been disappointing. Over a period of 15 years, the usage of family planning services by Malagasy women of childbearing age in the central region of Analamanga had increased by a mere two percentage points, from 10 percent in 1990 to 12 percent in 2005.

The Rapid Results approach had been brought to the attention of Robinson at a government workshop sponsored by the World Bank. This approach had been earlier introduced in Madagascar to help avoid the shortage of rice that had provoked street riots that year. After the workshop, Robinson convened a few of his senior aides for a planning session with the Rapid Results coaching team, who suggested that the ministry start by focusing on one theme and one region. After some discussion, the group selected family planning, and Robinson instructed his director of health services to contact Norolaolao Rakotondrafara (also known as Lalao), a medical doctor serving as director of health in the Analamanga region.

THE CHOREOGRAPHY OF ENGAGEMENT

Each Rapid Results initiative⁶ focuses on achieving an ambitious goal in 60 to 120 days. The structure of the initiative is simple, although highly choreographed in three acts—pre-launch, launch, and implementation—each designed to neutralize one of the systemic barriers to performance.

Pre-Launch: Creating the Space for Engagement and Ownership

Most development work is based on the implicit assumption that the country participants are “willing but unable” to make progress because of gaps in their functional knowledge or techniques. In many instances, however, it is just the opposite. People’s “willingness” to act is far more problematic than their “ability” to act. That’s because donor analysts often dominate the design phase and frequently produce plans that are too complex to be implemented. Judging the risks and potential benefits, public sector staff see that more work is involved for which they will receive no additional pay, and that senior managers will claim the credit. Too little time is spent on the crucial issue of encouraging ownership and of creating a protected space within which vulnerable middle-level staff can try new things.

Act I—the pre-launch—reverses this dynamic of disempowerment. In Madagascar, Lalao was honored to be selected as the operational leader of this effort, but she was also skeptical, having seen consultants come and go over the years. Serving as a constant testing ground for other people’s ideas was risky business, and it was not improving health delivery in her district.

Lalao’s first meeting with the Rapid Results coach caught her by surprise. The coach did not attempt to convince her of any particular solution, but instead shared examples of how teams in other countries had created their own solutions to varied challenges—from farmer productivity to school enrollment to HIV/AIDS prevention—and had achieved significant results in 100 days.

Even more surprising, the coach invited Lalao to turn down the challenge if she did not feel the timing was appropriate for her. It would be difficult for Lalao to turn down a request originating at the ministerial level, but the coach offered to make the case for launching the process in another region, allowing Lalao to bow out gracefully. Without pressing for an answer, the coach scheduled a follow-up work session.

When they met again, a few days later, Lalao had decided to go forward. In development work, the importance of having a country champion, in this case the minister of health, is now accepted as conventional wisdom. What is often not considered is how this champion creates the space and safety for others, such as Lalao, to also take ownership of the process. The shift from compliance to ownership can happen only when operational leaders have a genuine choice in the matter.

Other dynamics were also at work. Lalao was given the sense that she could try the approach out for 100 days. If it didn’t work, she could shift to another activity without great difficulty or disruption. The short time frame is a departure from the usual “comprehensive, big-bet” design that increases the sense of potential risk.

Lalao and the coach worked late into the night to get ready for the launch. They identified team members who would assume accountability for progress, and others at various levels providing critical support. Inviting a range of people to interact with the teams would give these people the opportunity to take partial credit for the results.

Launch: Nudging Teams Toward Commitments

Act II—the one-day launch workshop—has two objectives. The first, and the more familiar, is the crafting of goals and plans that the teams believe can be accomplished in 100 days. The emphasis is on the application of tacit country knowledge and experience and identifying opportunities and resources, rather than the conventional transfer of international best practice through a detailed analytical “design” phase.

The second objective is to create the conditions for forging a new organizational contract between the leadership (the minister and his senior team), the sponsor (Lalao), and the teams. To make Rapid Results work, country staff must believe that new ideas can be tried, that credit and recognition will be possible, and that their goals and activities will be supported by the hierarchy. The intent is to create an emotional and psychological case for frontline workers to make a commitment to significantly higher performance levels.

Two weeks after the planning session between the coach and Lalao, the eight community volunteer women showed up to the launch workshop. These volunteers joined teams that included staff from the community health center, nurses’ aides, schoolteachers, and other women from the neighborhood. The day began with speeches from local dignitaries about the importance of family planning. Then the dignitaries and their entourages left, and the Rapid Results coach took the stage. She described how similar teams in Nicaragua, Sierra Leone, and other low-income countries had committed to 100-day goals, despite their initial skepticism. She showed video clips of individuals describing their experiences in these efforts. To set the stage for goal setting, she engaged the teams in a competitive exercise involving the passing of tennis balls, challenging them in several rounds to reduce their time. Planning and laughing among themselves, the volunteers and their teammates began to loosen up.

The coach then presented the task. Each team would define its own 100-day goal for increasing the use of family planning services and then develop a work plan for achieving that goal. Lalao spoke about why she believed these teams, and this approach, would generate compelling results. She then left, saying that she would return at the end of the day to hear about their goals and plans.

The teams plunged into conversation, reviewing records from their community health centers, sharing what had been tried in prior family planning efforts, and weighing possible goals. The day culminated in a public presentation of the teams’ goals and plans, attended by Lalao and many of the dignitaries who had made speeches earlier that day. Each goal was characterized by three signature elements of Rapid Results initiatives.

First, the goal was focused on both program and capacity outcomes. Goals were set for increasing, by a certain percentage, the number of regular weekly users of family planning services. The deliberations also included people developing and practicing new skills. These were enshrined in a “team contract” for how team members would interact with each other and deal with potential setbacks and issues over the next 100 days. Second, the emphasis was on rapid action. Within 100 days each team had to declare victory or declare a shortfall. Third, the goal was intended to be truly ambitious. After each team developed its plan, the coach asked whether they were “90 percent confident” of reaching the stated goal. If the answer was “Yes,” the coach challenged the team to increase their target. The tennis ball exercise set the stage for this, by anchoring the teams in a recent experience of achieving a seemingly impossible goal.

As the teams presented their goals and plans, the meeting hall was bristling with enthusiasm and energy. Underneath the bravado, however, team members were anxious about the challenge of the task ahead. In such situations, it is perfectly rational behavior to avoid taking on commitment and accountability, given the likely allocation of blame and credit. Yet over and over, Rapid Results teams exhibit this seemingly irrational behavior, without being coerced or being promised payment or special incentives.

We believe that two factors contribute to this counterintuitive behavior. First, the stories of Rapid Results teams making significant progress despite equally daunting odds appeal to people’s intrinsic sense of pride: “If others can find and implement solutions in 100 days, why not us?” Second, the new organizational contract choreographed at the launch workshop provides a safer and more encouraging environment for making commitments. Paradoxically, the temporary 100-day time frame of this contract makes it more credible. For people in the public sector in developing countries, the prospects of large-scale, comprehensive, long-term change are usually suspect. Politics intervene. Ministers and permanent secretaries change too fast to be held accountable for their promises. Donors lose interest and resources disappear. By contrast, the short duration of a Rapid Results initiative is credible because frontline staff can see the possibility of follow-through for a short period of time.

Implementation: Experiencing a New Sense of Identity

Much of the focus in development work is on intent, policy, advocacy, prescription, and design—the “what should be done” questions. The implicit assumption behind this approach is that insightful analysis and good ideas will generate the support and momentum to make operational progress on the ground. And yet we know from experience that the actual implementation of a program can grind to a halt in the face of unanticipated resistance and obstacles, regardless of the elegance of any prior analysis or intent. Without continuous problem solving and persistence, the best designed projects and strategies are doomed to fail.

The 100-day period thus becomes more than a way to implement the work plan developed by the team. It is also an opportunity to shape and reinforce a new identity among team members as capable, resourceful, and innovative professionals. This emerging identity is enabled and reinforced by two other factors. One is a feeling of group engagement and cohesion that shifts the focus from individual to group accountability. The other is the supply of continuing operational support in the form of coaching and advice.

Act III—implementation—began on the day after the launch workshop. The teams divided up their areas and assigned a section to each member, with a target number of house visits per week. Each community volunteer taught some of her teammates what she had learned about family planning techniques in her USAID training. Their core strategy was to go house-to-house, talking with women about family planning services at their community health centers. One team also focused on thought leaders in the communes: Soon after the team started its work, pastors in the district began to subtly weave family planning messages into their Sunday sermons. Team members took on other tasks: preparing collateral materials for the visits (such as demonstration kits) and ensuring that the community health centers could handle the additional demand for services.

Each week the teams met to review progress, guided by a local coach trained in supporting teams. Gradually, the team leader began to run these weekly reviews, with the coach observing and providing feedback after each session. The coach intervened a few times to nudge the teams forward. When the initial house visits were not well received and some teams were about to back off, the coach reminded them of the tennis ball exercise at the launch session. One of the teams decided to completely rescript the conversations with the women so the focus was on the family’s general health. The script proved to be much more effective than the direct approach.

By day 50, all of the teams had exceeded their 100-day goals. The coach helped Lalao convene a workshop to review progress, share experiences, and challenge the teams to begin to think about how they would sustain their results following the first 100 days. After this midpoint review, there was another surge of energy and creativity as each team sprinted to outpace the others. At the end of the 100 days, the teams had increased the average number of women using family planning services at each center from 50 women a week to 250 women a week.

Over the 100-day period, the behavior of participants in this process begins to change. Implementation is hard work. Commitments must be clarified and then honored. Team members must communicate and collaborate, with each other and with outsiders. A tremendous amount of detail must be navigated. For most people, this discipline does not come naturally. The coaches help team members stay the course and build new habits along the way.

The coaches also help participants overcome setbacks and obstacles that emerge during implementation. Some of these are rather trivial, such as the bureaucratic hoops team leaders have to jump through to secure the funds needed to buy tea for team members at the midpoint review. When faced with these and other more substantive obstacles and frustrations, the natural response of many teams is to revert to the familiar pattern of waiting until someone, typically more senior, intervenes to deal with these issues.

At these critical moments, the coach frames the team’s response to the obstacle as a conscious choice to self-empower: “We can wait and then explain to colleagues at the ministry and in this community why we were not able to make progress. They will surely empathize and understand. Or we can create an alternative around this obstacle. We may not be able to change the system, but we need not be defeated by it. This is your choice.” With each obstacle surmounted, people’s confidence level increases. Over the course of the 100 days, many team members begin to view themselves in a new way. Rather than feeling like victims of the “system,” they begin to view themselves as goal-oriented professionals who are capable of dealing with challenges that impede their progress.

The key contribution of the coach in the implementation phase is to help team members focus on outcomes and process at the same time. In development work, focusing on results, especially short-term results, often led to compromises in developing local capabilities. Rapid Results coaches help resolve this tension. They use the focus on results and the short duration of the team’s life span to motivate, legitimize, and lower the risk of experimenting with new behaviors and acquiring new skills and capabilities. By doing this, they create a positive spiral of results achievement and capacity development.

BEYOND THE 100 DAYS: SUSTAINING THE INITIAL RESULTS

Between June 2005 and May 2006, more than 100 initiatives focused on family planning were launched in Madagascar’s Analamanga region. During that period, the coverage rate of family planning services (the percentage of women of childbearing age who were regular users of family planning services) increased from 12 percent to 17 percent. This was a five percentage-point increase in nine months, contrasted with a two percentage-point increase in the previous 15 years, with minimal additional financial investment.

As they had envisioned at the outset of this effort, Robinson and his team introduced Rapid Results initiatives in each of the 22 regions of the country and extended the scope of teams to the ministry’s immunization and antenatal care programs.

A similar story of sustainability and scale-up unfolded in a schoolbased HIV/AIDS prevention effort in Eritrea. The initial team was one of six Rapid Results initiatives that were sponsored by the Eritrean Ministry of Health in March 2004.⁷ Each team focused on making progress, within 100 days, on one element of the country’s national strategy for HIV/AIDS prevention and care.

The initial school-based prevention team focused on influencing the behavior of 100 boys and 100 girls at six schools in the capital city of Asmara. The team decided to introduce life skills programs, delivered by peers as an extracurricular activity, building on technical training that UNICEF had delivered to the ministry. This team’s achievement generated enthusiasm and interest in the ministry and in the targeted schools. The Ministry of Education, with minimal technical support and outside help, expanded this model into a national program. Within two years, every school in Eritrea was running a school-based HIV/AIDS prevention program, modeled after the initial initiatives in Asmara.

Although teams often succeed by working around the systemic obstacles in the somewhat artificial construct of Rapid Results initiatives, sustaining the breakthrough results of these teams requires changes in the way performance is managed, and embedding some of the practices the teams learned into existing systems for delivery and management.

In the case of family planning in Madagascar, this involved several shifts that Lalao introduced, with support from Robinson. Reports of usage of family planning services in the community health centers were aggregated weekly at the commune and district levels and were reviewed by Lalao before being delivered to the ministry. Lalao used these metrics as a management, motivation, and learning tool, timing her visits to the health centers based on these reports, to probe and to learn. Lalao also organized conferences so that community health centers and the Rapid Results teams could share experiences across communes and districts. In addition, Lalao and her directors engaged international family planning NGOs in the process, partly to secure funding to compensate community volunteers for daily expenses. This helped integrate the volunteers more fully in the outreach programs of the community health centers.

These methods to institutionalize the initial gains might have been adopted without the waves of Rapid Results initiatives, and it is possible that adopting these may have generated similar results. What we have found, however, is that the readiness to pursue this type of thinking increases significantly because of the energy, confidence, and commitment unleashed by Rapid Results initiatives.

SCALING UP: THE LEADERSHIP CHALLENGE

Scaling up this work requires even more attention to systemic issues. In both Madagascar and Eritrea, staff members at the respective ministries were trained to provide support to Rapid Results teams operating at the level of community health centers and schools. District-level resources assumed new managerial responsibilities. New roles for managing, supporting, and reporting this work had to be defined and clarified.

In Eritrea, the ministry revised the national curriculum to embed the life skills programs being used by the Rapid Results teams. In Madagascar, three service areas (family planning, antenatal care, and immunization) were integrated to pave the way for the scaleup of Rapid Results teams at the community health center levels. These steps and changes require thoughtful assessment of the current situation and elaborate planning—generally commissioned by the head of the organization and engaging all layers of management.

In Madagascar and Eritrea, and in several other sites, scale-up emerged organically after the initial Rapid Results teams completed their 100-day initiatives. But scale-up is by no means assured. In many other instances it did not happen. Initial Rapid Results initiatives on HIV/AIDS prevention in Mozambique, for example, generated exciting initial results, but did not take root in the sector or the country.

Much research and experimentation will be needed before we fully understand the factors affecting sustainability and scale-up of this work. Perhaps this will always remain more of an art than a science. It may be a form of development entrepreneurship. In most places it works, and in some it spontaneously scales. And where it does, the process evolves and adapts to respond to the emerging barriers to performance.

It is clear though that the role of leadership is critical. At the core of each scale-up story are individuals who have stepped up to drive a multifaceted change process. Some were anointed leaders, like Lalao and Robinson, who created the space for the initial teams to perform and then shaped the scale-up process, tackling the systemic issues that stood in the way.

Other leaders emerged as part of the process, such as Negusse Meakele, a subdirector who served on the initial school-based prevention team in Asmara. Meakele became a change catalyst, rallying his superiors at the Ministry of Education and working with them to shape the scale-up phase. It was unusual that a young man at a subdirector level would take such an active role in an Eritrean ministry. But Meakele brought the credibility and the confidence that comes from delivering dramatic results in 100 days. Perhaps the most enduring legacy of Rapid Results work is the space it creates for new leaders to emerge, giving them the legitimacy to advocate for change in their organizations and their communities.

Nadim Matt a is a founding board member and president of the Rapid Results Institute and managing partner of Schaffer Consulting. He works with executives at Fortune 500 companies on change and results acceleration. With his colleagues at Schaffer and the institute, Matta introduced the Rapid Results approach into public sector agencies and NGOs in several developing countries, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa.

Peter Morgan is an independent consultant living in Washington, D.C. He specializes in capacity and institutional development and has worked in Africa and Asia with most of the major international development agencies, including the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme.

Given this context, the timing seems especially ripe for Nonprofit Sustainability from co-authors Jeanne Bell, Jan Masaoka,and Steve Zimmerman. The authors, all respected nonprofit executives and consultants, have developed a framework that will help nonprofit executives take an approach that integrates financial performance and social impact considerations in strategic decision making. The book’s premise is that “financial and impact information can and must be brought together in an integrated, fused discussion of strategy,” which is true and increasingly important. Much as 21st-century corporations are integrating social responsibility and sustainability practices in their business models, 21st-century nonprofits must integrate financial considerations with their social impact priorities as well. It’s all reflective of the movement toward a broader perspective of organizational performance and the idea of “blended value” that Jed Emerson gave us many years ago.

Beyond this important premise, Nonprofit Sustainability’s primary contribution is a framework for operationalizing the integration of financial and social impact. The “Matrix Map,” a standard 2 x 2 matrix that is the trusted friend of every good consultant, is a simple but powerful model for assessing the impact and profitability of a nonprofit’s programs. In this model, programs are reclassified as “business lines” and include fundraising efforts as well. Each business line is assessed on its impact and profitability and then plotted at the appropriate point and scale on the matrix. Through this process, nonprofit executives get a clear picture of both the absolute and relative performance of each important program and fundraising effort. No doubt the picture this exercise reveals will be enlightening for many nonprofit leaders and put them in a better position to make smart resource allocation decisions. A simple, easy-to-use framework that gives nonprofit leaders sharpened strategic clarity about the value of programs and initiatives? For that alone, we should all hail the arrival of the Matrix Map.

It should be noted, and more overtly than it is in the book, that the Matrix Map is a direct descendant of Boston Consulting Group’s Growth-Share Matrix, which dates to 1968 and is familiar to everyone who has since pursued an MBA. The BCG Matrix famously gave us “Stars,” “Cash Cows,” “Question Marks,” and “Dogs,” and suggested that companies should classify and manage their product portfolios accordingly. Nonprofit Sustainability’s Matrix Map gives us “Stars,” “Money Trees,” “Hearts,” and “Stop Signs,” and suggests that nonprofits classify and manage their program portfolios accordingly. If it sounds like the Matrix Map is essentially the BCG Matrix applied to nonprofits, it’s because that’s exactly what it is. Even so, the Matrix Map’s lineage doesn’t change the fact that its application to nonprofits is at least somewhat novel, and it does create a potentially important new tool for nonprofit boards and executives.

The first half of Nonprofit Sustainability develops the Matrix Map as a model and helpfully illustrates its use and applicability through a variety of examples and situations. The second half is largely filler, seemingly purposed around the need to reach a certain page count to achieve book status. Part Four in particular, a 32-page laundry list of every imaginable fundraising and earned income vehicle, bears little relevance to the Matrix Map or its application. Rather than an encyclopedic list and description of earned income types, a chapter on how social enterprise models could be evaluated using the Matrix Map model would have been far more valuable. Similarly, although the book does devote a few pages to the Matrix Map’s usefulness in potential merger evaluations, surely there is more to say about how this tool can help facilitate nonprofit merger and joint venture activity, which has to be one of the biggest untapped opportunities in the sector.

Nonprofit Sustainability is a book that would’ve been, and probably should’ve been, a great article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, where the core idea and useful Matrix Map could have found a larger audience. Nonetheless, I fully intended to order copies for the executive directors and board chairs I work with, until I found it priced at a whopping $35 for a paperback edition. Although Nonprofit Sustainability and its Matrix Map deliver an important idea for nonprofits, it’s an idea that should have been delivered more accessibly and affordably. Something isn’t right about a business model that takes a good (but hardly proprietary) idea for nonprofits and turns it into a high margin, low volume product. Perhaps that’s a critique of book publishers more than the authors, but Nonprofit Sustainability is ultimately a product of both.

Jim Schorr is a professor at Vanderbilt University’s Owen School of Management, where he teaches coursework on social enterprise and CSR. Previously, he was executive director of Juma Ventures and a co-founder of Net Impact. He currently serves as a trustee of the Nature Conservancy of Tennessee and as board president of Oasis Center, Nashville’s leading nonprofit organization for disadvantaged youth.

Lobbying and bribery are both time-honored ways to seek influence. The most important difference between them, according to economist Bård Harstad of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, is not that one is legal and the other a crime. It’s that bribery doesn’t last as long.

Whereas successful lobbying changes the rules, bribery only bends them. Harstad built a mathematical model to track and explain why bribery is more common in poor countries and lobbying in rich ones. “If you are bribing, you get permission to break the rule only once,” says Harstad. “If you want to break the rule later, you have to pay again.” For a small firm paying a small bribe, that is cost-effective. But in a thriving economy, corrupt bureaucrats essentially price themselves out. “When the company grows, the bribes become bigger and bigger. Eventually it’s cheaper for the big company to lobby to change the rules,” says Harstad.

This analysis suggests a natural evolution away from bribery. But a closer look at the model shows that corruption can be self-reinforcing. “The problem is that the more you invest, the more you have to pay in bribes. This then discourages you from investing,” says Harstad. Without that investment, the firms don’t grow and may never reach the threshold where they would switch to lobbying.

So how can developing nations escape this trap? Harstad’s analysis paradoxically suggests that punishing bribery only reinforces it: High penalties for corruption merely increase the cost of bribing, further slowing growth. But that prediction is not necessarily borne out by the facts, says Charlie Monteith, counsel at White & Case in London and a key architect of the UK Bribery Act 2010. In the aftermath of 9/11, the US Department of Justice began enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in earnest, says Monteith. “There has been a sea change in the last five to seven years. I see more ethical behavior, and it has, a lot of it, been prompted by enforcement action,” he says.

It’s not just a big stick that motivates change. “The carrot that’s involved for poorer countries is development aid,” Monteith says. For example, Sweden and the Netherlands recently withheld millions of dollars in health aid to Zambia after finding evidence of embezzlement. That loss has got to hurt. But if Zambia clamps down on bribery in response, losing development aid could ultimately turn out to be good for development.

Bård Harstad and Jakob Svensson, “Bribes, Lobbying, and Development,” American Political Science Review, 105, 2011.

A third skill—I call it civic reach—distinguishes a great board member from a merely adequate one, a world-class nonprofit from one that is simply functioning. Take a couple of examples: Back in 2005, Rochester Area Community Foundation’s (RACF) smart, highly engaged board had few well-known civic leaders. With the guidance of Jennifer Leonard, the foundation’s president and executive director, RACF aimed to become greater Rochester, N.Y.’s “catalyst for community change” and realized that movers and shakers could extend the institution’s influence. RACF added to its board the CEO of the city’s chamber of commerce, the CEO of a leading advertising company, the area’s school board president, a noted venture capitalist, a former United Way campaign chair, and the head of Rochester’s downtown development group. In just one of the positive outcomes, the chamber incorporated RACF’s recommendations into its annual state advocacy platform, resulting in $7.8 million in restored child care subsidies, plus crucial support for after-school funding.

In another example, the board of directors of Make-A-Wish Foundation International, a nonprofit devoted to granting the wishes of children with life-threatening medical conditions, shifted its composition to achieve a worldwide leadership profile. Previously, the organization was governed by chapter affiliate representatives from various counties, a decidedly internal focus. The new board boasts a powerful cadre of business leaders with the prestige, power, and contacts to open doors worldwide. Two board members illustrate this new heft. Jim Fielding, president of Disney Stores Worldwide, connects Make-A-Wish to Europe, Asia, and North America, prime markets for both Disney merchandising and Make-A-Wish civic engagement. Tim Kilpin, general manager and senior vice president for Mattel Brands, provides Make-A-Wish with cash contributions from the company’s toy sales and facilitates business relationships through its worldwide network. Savvy, connected players like Fielding and Kilpin—people with profound civic reach—serve as global thinkers for charities while they tend to their own business interests. As a result of its new board, Make-A-Wish more expertly navigates its corporate and individual relationships, ties its work to corporate social responsibility efforts, attracts a wider range of corporate sponsorship dollars, and manages its wish granting on a worldwide scale.

POWER TO THE WEAKEST SECTOR

Board members with civic reach compensate for the inherent limitations of the social sector, arguably democracy’s most critical, yet weakest, arena in terms of money and power. Social ventures generally lack the commercial sector’s profit-driven muscle and the public sector’s power to mandate by law and levy taxes to raise resources. Nonprofits need deep civic roots to thrive. To scale up operations, they need strong relationships with leaders in business, government agencies, and elective office. The sum of every board member’s civic reach is the soil in which those roots grow. Boards anemic in civic reach oversee organizations that are weak in civic relevance and resilience. Such organizations might have a range of funding sources and may run well operationally. But they rarely find themselves plugged into the civic power grid, where decisions about community and individual needs are largely made. Even with success, organizations deficient in civic reach often stand as capable orphans, unaccountably disconnected and alone, wondering why the recognition they think they deserve lies beyond their grasp.

In my work as a nonprofit organization executive, I’ve learned that civic reach is a function of three factors in a prospective board member: the person’s personal and professional prestige, his local knowledge, and what he can deliver in terms of communitywide or worldwide strategic relationships. These three assets—prestige, knowledge, and connections—matter as much to the organization as attentive governance, outright donations of money, and the ability to solicit gifts. Taken together and used wisely, board member prestige, knowledge, and relationships can produce monetary and marketing returns while elevating ordinary fundraising and routine governance into transformative stewardship. Nonprofits cannot afford to leave to chance that board members will acquire these abilities.

This street also runs both ways. The smartest board members want to serve on nonprofit boards that know how to trade on civic reach. These people know that investing their prestige, knowledge, and connections on behalf of an organization can have the virtuous effect of increasing and enhancing their reach in other civic settings and on other boards.

OTHER NECESSARY QUALITIES

People with civic reach also distinguish themselves through at least four other qualities. They tend to have what I call shrewd environmental sensing. They possess upstream knowledge about unfolding events and can position nonprofit programs and services at the confluence of opportunities to make positive change and secure resources. Board members with civic reach can sensitize the organization’s antennae to read political, economic, and societal signals and translate them into planning and initiatives that succeed and grow. For example, former cable television business executive Perry Parks grew up in south Los Angeles, served as a social worker after college, and for most of his business career lobbied every department or political body in the city that touched on telecommunications interests. On the board of Community Partners, the organization I run, Perry became the go-to guy for decoding the interests of elected officials or for developing strategies to reach civic leaders in ways that would cause them to listen and respond.

Another quality that distinguishes board members is an ability to advance and defend a nonprofit’s organizational mission. When board members of impeccable credibility stand up on behalf of an organization, decision makers heed what they have to say. For example, Robert Hertzberg, a successful business entrepreneur and former speaker of the California State Assembly, co-chaired the board of the nonpartisan policy organization California Forward. Respected as a pragmatic moderate in the assembly, Hertzberg lent his finely honed legislative instincts to practically every recommended element on the organization’s reform agenda. When California Forward took the agenda to the state’s governor and other elected leaders, everyone knew that Hertzberg’s political intelligence and political weight lay behind the ideas up for adoption. The jury’s still out on the agenda of California Forward, but according to Hertzberg, California voters and the state’s new governor, Jerry Brown, will have ample chance in the months ahead to grapple with its recommendations, both legislatively and through initiatives on statewide ballots.

Board members also should be able to reach the broader public. The visibility, credibility, and genuine commitment of board members with civic reach can confer indisputable local authenticity on nonprofits, even when the nonprofit is a private grantmaking foundation. Time saved in establishing public credibility translates directly to money saved for other organizational priorities. For example, Tessie Guillermo, former president and executive director of the Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum and president and CEO of the nonprofit ZeroDivide, straddles many civic, cultural, and community boundaries. From her perch as chair of the California Endowment’s board of directors, Guillermo can confer legitimacy for the grantmaker’s sometimes controversial giving agenda inside and beyond the state’s swelling Asian-Pacific Islander community. As a recognized change maker and leader with strong roots and relationships in the state’s Asian-Pacific Islander community, Guillermo’s presence on the California Endowment’s board speaks volumes about the foundation’s commitment to a fair shake in its grantmaking for groups serving Asian-Pacific Islanders.

Finally, board members should have inside access to power. That way, they can help place representatives of groups they serve at tables where pivotal deals and allocation decisions get made. This notion became clear to me when I met Norm Clement in 1997. Some called Clement, now deceased, a political fixer. He worked for Richard Ferry, co-founder of executive search giant Korn/Ferry International. He knew the business community and had a reputation for getting things done. President Bill Clinton had just passed welfare reform legislation, and cities and counties everywhere were feverishly fashioning programs to help low-income people meet the new law’s work requirements tied to receiving welfare. Clement offered himself less as a board member and more as a civic scout to our loose-knit coalition of nonprofits and business groups in Los Angeles. We’d tell Clement what we were looking for—office space, seed funding, meetings with important people—and, more often than not, Clement could deliver or direct us to someone who could.

All of this shows that the moral aura of nonprofit charitable endeavors must be accompanied by the actuality of real influence. Time and time again, I have heard funders and other donors insist that they want to invest dollars for maximum leverage. Nonprofits interested in answering this call need to prove they have adequate capital substitutes to backstop their work. Nonprofit boards with extensive civic reach provide that bulwark. Experience has shown me that funders and donors place their grant bets on confident civic achievers accustomed to getting community work done quickly and without fuss.

Alongside fundraising and governance, then, civic reach represents nothing less than the essential third leg of a nonprofit board’s sustainability platform. Organizational sustainability depends on intimate local knowledge that can inform program direction and on relationships that can connect programs to resources and communities. No matter how good an organization becomes at fundraising and governance, without civic reach it risks failure.

Paul Vandeventer serves as president and CEO of Community Partners, a civic innovation springboard in Los Angeles that joins social entrepreneurs, innovators, grantmakers, and civic leaders in accelerating good ideas for effective action and social change. He is the coauthor of Networks that Work: A Practitioner’s Guide to Managing Networked Action.

Against these daunting odds, a remarkable exception seems to be emerging in Cincinnati. Strive, a nonprofit subsidiary of KnowledgeWorks, has brought together local leaders to tackle the student achievement crisis and improve education throughout greater Cincinnati and northern Kentucky. In the four years since the group was launched, Strive partners have improved student success in dozens of key areas across three large public school districts. Despite the recession and budget cuts, 34 of the 53 success indicators that Strive tracks have shown positive trends, including high school graduation rates, fourth-grade reading and math scores, and the number of preschool children prepared for kindergarten.

Why has Strive made progress when so many other efforts have failed? It is because a core group of community leaders decided to abandon their individual agendas in favor of a collective approach to improving student achievement. More than 300 leaders of local organizations agreed to participate, including the heads of influential private and corporate foundations, city government officials, school district representatives, the presidents of eight universities and community colleges, and the executive directors of hundreds of education-related nonprofit and advocacy groups.

These leaders realized that fixing one point on the educational continuum—such as better after-school programs—wouldn’t make much difference unless all parts of the continuum improved at the same time. No single organization, however innovative or powerful, could accomplish this alone. Instead, their ambitious mission became to coordinate improvements at every stage of a young person’s life, from “cradle to career.”

Strive didn’t try to create a new educational program or attempt to convince donors to spend more money. Instead, through a carefully structured process, Strive focused the entire educational community on a single set of goals, measured in the same way. Participating organizations are grouped into 15 different Student Success Networks (SSNs) by type of activity, such as early childhood education or tutoring. Each SSN has been meeting with coaches and facilitators for two hours every two weeks for the past three years, developing shared performance indicators, discussing their progress, and most important, learning from each other and aligning their efforts to support each other.

Strive, both the organization and the process it helps facilitate, is an example of collective impact, the commitment of a group of important actors from different sectors to a common agenda for solving a specific social problem. Collaboration is nothing new. The social sector is filled with examples of partnerships, networks, and other types of joint efforts. But collective impact initiatives are distinctly different. Unlike most collaborations, collective impact initiatives involve a centralized infrastructure, a dedicated staff, and a structured process that leads to a common agenda, shared measurement, continuous communication, and mutually reinforcing activities among all participants.

Although rare, other successful examples of collective impact are addressing social issues that, like education, require many different players to change their behavior in order to solve a complex problem. In 1993, Marjorie Mayfield Jackson helped found the Elizabeth River Project with a mission of cleaning up the Elizabeth River in southeastern Virginia, which for decades had been a dumping ground for industrial waste. They engaged more than 100 stakeholders, including the city governments of Chesapeake, Norfolk, Portsmouth, and Virginia Beach, Va., the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the U.S. Navy, and dozens of local businesses, schools, community groups, environmental organizations, and universities, in developing an 18-point plan to restore the watershed. Fifteen years later, more than 1,000 acres of watershed land have been conserved or restored, pollution has been reduced by more than 215 million pounds, concentrations of the most severe carcinogen have been cut sixfold, and water quality has significantly improved. Much remains to be done before the river is fully restored, but already 27 species of fish and oysters are thriving in the restored wetlands, and bald eagles have returned to nest on the shores.

Or consider Shape up Somerville, a citywide effort to reduce and prevent childhood obesity in elementary school children in Somerville, Mass. Led by Christina Economos, an associate professor at Tufts University’s Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, and funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, and United Way of Massachusetts Bay and Merrimack Valley, the program engaged government officials, educators, businesses, nonprofits, and citizens in collectively defining wellness and weight gain prevention practices. Schools agreed to offer healthier foods, teach nutrition, and promote physical activity. Local restaurants received a certification if they served low-fat, high nutritional food. The city organized a farmers’ market and provided healthy lifestyle incentives such as reduced-price gym memberships for city employees. Even sidewalks were modified and crosswalks repainted to encourage more children to walk to school. The result was a statistically significant decrease in body mass index among the community’s young children between 2002 and 2005.

Even companies are beginning to explore collective impact to tackle social problems. Mars, a manufacturer of chocolate brands such as M&M’s, Snickers, and Dove, is working with NGOs, local governments, and even direct competitors to improve the lives of more than 500,000 impoverished cocoa farmers in Cote d’Ivoire, where Mars sources a large portion of its cocoa. Research suggests that better farming practices and improved plant stocks could triple the yield per hectare, dramatically increasing farmer incomes and improving the sustainability of Mars’s supply chain. To accomplish this, Mars must enlist the coordinated efforts of multiple organizations: the Cote d’Ivoire government needs to provide more agricultural extension workers, the World Bank needs to finance new roads, and bilateral donors need to support NGOs in improving health care, nutrition, and education in cocoa growing communities. And Mars must find ways to work with its direct competitors on pre-competitive issues to reach farmers outside its supply chain.

These varied examples all have a common theme: that large-scale social change comes from better cross-sector coordination rather than from the isolated intervention of individual organizations. Evidence of the effectiveness of this approach is still limited, but these examples suggest that substantially greater progress could be made in alleviating many of our most serious and complex social problems if nonprofits, governments, businesses, and the public were brought together around a common agenda to create collective impact. It doesn’t happen often, not because it is impossible, but because it is so rarely attempted. Funders and nonprofits alike overlook the potential for collective impact because they are used to focusing on independent action as the primary vehicle for social change.

ISOLATED IMPACT

Most funders, faced with the task of choosing a few grantees from many applicants, try to ascertain which organizations make the greatest contribution toward solving a social problem. Grantees, in turn, compete to be chosen by emphasizing how their individual activities produce the greatest effect. Each organization is judged on its own potential to achieve impact, independent of the numerous other organizations that may also influence the issue. And when a grantee is asked to evaluate the impact of its work, every attempt is made to isolate that grantee’s individual influence from all other variables.

In short, the nonprofit sector most frequently operates using an approach that we call isolated impact. It is an approach oriented toward finding and funding a solution embodied within a single organization, combined with the hope that the most effective organizations will grow or replicate to extend their impact more widely. Funders search for more effective interventions as if there were a cure for failing schools that only needs to be discovered, in the way that medical cures are discovered in laboratories. As a result of this process, nearly 1.4 million nonprofits try to invent independent solutions to major social problems, often working at odds with each other and exponentially increasing the perceived resources required to make meaningful progress. Recent trends have only reinforced this perspective. The growing interest in venture philanthropy and social entrepreneurship, for example, has greatly benefited the social sector by identifying and accelerating the growth of many high-performing nonprofits, yet it has also accentuated an emphasis on scaling up a few select organizations as the key to social progress.

Despite the dominance of this approach, there is scant evidence that isolated initiatives are the best way to solve many social problems in today’s complex and interdependent world. No single organization is responsible for any major social problem, nor can any single organization cure it. In the field of education, even the most highly respected nonprofits—such as the Harlem Children’s Zone, Teach for America, and the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP)—have taken decades to reach tens of thousands of children, a remarkable achievement that deserves praise, but one that is three orders of magnitude short of the tens of millions of U.S. children that need help.

The problem with relying on the isolated impact of individual organizations is further compounded by the isolation of the nonprofit sector. Social problems arise from the interplay of governmental and commercial activities, not only from the behavior of social sector organizations. As a result, complex problems can be solved only by cross-sector coalitions that engage those outside the nonprofit sector.

We don’t want to imply that all social problems require collective impact. In fact, some problems are best solved by individual organizations. In “Leading Boldly,” an article we wrote with Ron Heifetz for the winter 2004 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, we described the difference between technical problems and adaptive problems. Some social problems are technical in that the problem is well defined, the answer is known in advance, and one or a few organizations have the ability to implement the solution. Examples include funding college scholarships, building a hospital, or installing inventory controls in a food bank. Adaptive problems, by contrast, are complex, the answer is not known, and even if it were, no single entity has the resources or authority to bring about the necessary change. Reforming public education, restoring wetland environments, and improving community health are all adaptive problems. In these cases, reaching an effective solution requires learning by the stakeholders involved in the problem, who must then change their own behavior in order to create a solution.

Shifting from isolated impact to collective impact is not merely a matter of encouraging more collaboration or public-private partnerships. It requires a systemic approach to social impact that focuses on the relationships between organizations and the progress toward shared objectives. And it requires the creation of a new set of nonprofit management organizations that have the skills and resources to assemble and coordinate the specific elements necessary for collective action to succeed.

THE FIVE CONDITIONS OF COLLECTIVE SUCCESS

Our research shows that successful collective impact initiatives typically have five conditions that together produce true alignment and lead to powerful results: a common agenda, shared measurement systems, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication, and backbone support organizations.

Common Agenda Collective impact requires all participants to have a shared vision for change, one that includes a common understanding of the problem and a joint approach to solving it through agreed upon actions. Take a close look at any group of funders and nonprofits that believe they are working on the same social issue, and you quickly find that it is often not the same issue at all. Each organization often has a slightly different definition of the problem and the ultimate goal. These differences are easily ignored when organizations work independently on isolated initiatives, yet these differences splinter the efforts and undermine the impact of the field as a whole. Collective impact requires that these differences be discussed and resolved. Every participant need not agree with every other participant on all dimensions of the problem. In fact, disagreements continue to divide participants in all of our examples of collective impact. All participants must agree, however, on the primary goals for the collective impact initiative as a whole. The Elizabeth River Project, for example, had to find common ground among the different objectives of corporations, governments, community groups, and local citizens in order to establish workable cross-sector initiatives.

Funders can play an important role in getting organizations to act in concert. In the case of Strive, rather than fueling hundreds of strategies and nonprofits, many funders have aligned to support Strive’s central goals. The Greater Cincinnati Foundation realigned its education goals to be more compatible with Strive, adopting Strive’s annual report card as the foundation’s own measures for progress in education. Every time an organization applied to Duke Energy for a grant, Duke asked, “Are you part of the [Strive] network?” And when a new funder, the Carol Ann and Ralph V. Haile Jr./U.S. Bank Foundation, expressed interest in education, they were encouraged by virtually every major education leader in Cincinnati to join Strive if they wanted to have an impact in local education.¹

Shared Measurement Systems Developing a shared measurement system is essential to collective impact. Agreement on a common agenda is illusory without agreement on the ways success will be measured and reported. Collecting data and measuring results consistently on a short list of indicators at the community level and across all participating organizations not only ensures that all efforts remain aligned, it also enables the participants to hold each other accountable and learn from each other’s successes and failures.

It may seem impossible to evaluate hundreds of different organizations on the same set of measures. Yet recent advances in Web-based technologies have enabled common systems for reporting performance and measuring outcomes. These systems increase efficiency and reduce cost. They can also improve the quality and credibility of the data collected, increase effectiveness by enabling grantees to learn from each other’s performance, and document the progress of the field as a whole.²

All of the preschool programs in Strive, for example, have agreed to measure their results on the same criteria and use only evidence-based decision making. Each type of activity requires a different set of measures, but all organizations engaged in the same type of activity report on the same measures. Looking at results across multiple organizations enables the participants to spot patterns, find solutions, and implement them rapidly. The preschool programs discovered that children regress during the summer break before kindergarten. By launching an innovative “summer bridge” session, a technique more often used in middle school, and implementing it simultaneously in all preschool programs, they increased the average kindergarten readiness scores throughout the region by an average of 10 percent in a single year.³

Mutually Reinforcing Activities Collective impact initiatives depend on a diverse group of stakeholders working together, not by requiring that all participants do the same thing, but by encouraging each participant to undertake the specific set of activities at which it excels in a way that supports and is coordinated with the actions of others.

The power of collective action comes not from the sheer number of participants or the uniformity of their efforts, but from the coordination of their differentiated activities through a mutually reinforcing plan of action. Each stakeholder’s efforts must fit into an overarching plan if their combined efforts are to succeed. The multiple causes of social problems, and the components of their solutions, are interdependent. They cannot be addressed by uncoordinated actions among isolated organizations.

All participants in the Elizabeth River Project, for example, agreed on the 18-point watershed restoration plan, but each is playing a different role based on its particular capabilities. One group of organizations works on creating grassroots support and engagement among citizens, a second provides peer review and recruitment for industrial participants who voluntarily reduce pollution, and a third coordinates and reviews scientific research.

The 15 SSNs in Strive each undertake different types of activities at different stages of the educational continuum. Strive does not prescribe what practices each of the 300 participating organizations should pursue. Each organization and network is free to chart its own course consistent with the common agenda, and informed by the shared measurement of results.

Continuous Communication Developing trust among nonprofits, corporations, and government agencies is a monumental challenge. Participants need several years of regular meetings to build up enough experience with each other to recognize and appreciate the common motivation behind their different efforts. They need time to see that their own interests will be treated fairly, and that decisions will be made on the basis of objective evidence and the best possible solution to the problem, not to favor the priorities of one organization over another.

Even the process of creating a common vocabulary takes time, and it is an essential prerequisite to developing shared measurement systems. All the collective impact initiatives we have studied held monthly or even biweekly in-person meetings among the organizations’ CEO-level leaders. Skipping meetings or sending lower-level delegates was not acceptable. Most of the meetings were supported by external facilitators and followed a structured agenda.

The Strive networks, for example, have been meeting regularly for more than three years. Communication happens between meetings too: Strive uses Web-based tools, such as Google Groups, to keep communication flowing among and within the networks. At first, many of the leaders showed up because they hoped that their participation would bring their organizations additional funding, but they soon learned that was not the meetings’ purpose. What they discovered instead were the rewards of learning and solving problems together with others who shared their same deep knowledge and passion about the issue.

Backbone Support Organizations Creating and managing collective impact requires a separate organization and staff with a very specific set of skills to serve as the backbone for the entire initiative. Coordination takes time, and none of the participating organizations has any to spare. The expectation that collaboration can occur without a supporting infrastructure is one of the most frequent reasons why it fails.

The backbone organization requires a dedicated staff separate from the participating organizations who can plan, manage, and support the initiative through ongoing facilitation, technology and communications support, data collection and reporting, and handling the myriad logistical and administrative details needed for the initiative to function smoothly. Strive has simplified the initial staffing requirements for a backbone organization to three roles: project manager, data manager, and facilitator.

Collective impact also requires a highly structured process that leads to effective decision making. In the case of Strive, staff worked with General Electric (GE) to adapt for the social sector the Six Sigma process that GE uses for its own continuous quality improvement. The Strive Six Sigma process includes training, tools, and resources that each SSN uses to define its common agenda, shared measures, and plan of action, supported by Strive facilitators to guide the process.

In the best of circumstances, these backbone organizations embody the principles of adaptive leadership: the ability to focus people’s attention and create a sense of urgency, the skill to apply pressure to stakeholders without overwhelming them, the competence to frame issues in a way that presents opportunities as well as difficulties, and the strength to mediate conflict among stakeholders.

FUNDING COLLECTIVE IMPACT

Creating a successful collective impact initiative requires a significant financial investment: the time participating organizations must dedicate to the work, the development and monitoring of shared measurement systems, and the staff of the backbone organization needed to lead and support the initiative’s ongoing work.

As successful as Strive has been, it has struggled to raise money, confronting funders’ reluctance to pay for infrastructure and preference for short-term solutions. Collective impact requires instead that funders support a long-term process of social change without identifying any particular solution in advance. They must be willing to let grantees steer the work and have the patience to stay with an initiative for years, recognizing that social change can come from the gradual improvement of an entire system over time, not just from a single breakthrough by an individual organization.

This requires a fundamental change in how funders see their role, from funding organizations to leading a long-term process of social change. It is no longer enough to fund an innovative solution created by a single nonprofit or to build that organization’s capacity. Instead, funders must help create and sustain the collective processes, measurement reporting systems, and community leadership that enable cross-sector coalitions to arise and thrive.

This is a shift that we foreshadowed in both “Leading Boldly” and our more recent article, “Catalytic Philanthropy,” in the fall 2009 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review. In the former, we suggested that the most powerful role for funders to play in addressing adaptive problems is to focus attention on the issue and help to create a process that mobilizes the organizations involved to find a solution themselves. In “Catalytic Philanthropy,” we wrote: “Mobilizing and coordinating stakeholders is far messier and slower work than funding a compelling grant request from a single organization. Systemic change, however, ultimately depends on a sustained campaign to increase the capacity and coordination of an entire field.” We recommended that funders who want to create large-scale change follow four practices: take responsibility for assembling the elements of a solution; create a movement for change; include solutions from outside the nonprofit sector; and use actionable knowledge to influence behavior and improve performance.

These same four principles are embodied in collective impact initiatives. The organizers of Strive abandoned the conventional approach of funding specific programs at education nonprofits and took responsibility for advancing education reform themselves. They built a movement, engaging hundreds of organizations in a drive toward shared goals. They used tools outside the nonprofit sector, adapting GE’s Six Sigma planning process for the social sector. And through the community report card and the biweekly meetings of the SSNs they created actionable knowledge that motivated the community and improved performance among the participants.

Funding collective impact initiatives costs money, but it can be a highly leveraged investment. A backbone organization with a modest annual budget can support a collective impact initiative of several hundred organizations, magnifying the impact of millions or even billions of dollars in existing funding. Strive, for example, has a $1.5 million annual budget but is coordinating the efforts and increasing the effectiveness of organizations with combined budgets of $7 billion. The social sector, however, has not yet changed its funding practices to enable the shift to collective impact. Until funders are willing to embrace this new approach and invest sufficient resources in the necessary facilitation, coordination, and measurement that enable organizations to work in concert, the requisite infrastructure will not evolve.

FUTURE SHOCK

What might social change look like if funders, nonprofits, government officials, civic leaders, and business executives embraced collective impact? Recent events at Strive provide an exciting indication of what might be possible.

Strive has begun to codify what it has learned so that other communities can achieve collective impact more rapidly. The organization is working with nine other communities to establish similar cradle to career initiatives.⁴ Importantly, although Strive is broadening its impact to a national level, the organization is not scaling up its own operations by opening branches in other cities. Instead, Strive is promulgating a flexible process for change, offering each community a set of tools for collective impact, drawn from Strive’s experience but adaptable to the community’s own needs and resources. As a result, the new communities take true ownership of their own collective impact initiatives, but they don’t need to start the process from scratch. Activities such as developing a collective educational reform mission and vision or creating specific community-level educational indicators are expedited through the use of Strive materials and assistance from Strive staff. Processes that took Strive several years to develop are being adapted and modified by other communities in significantly less time.

These nine communities plus Cincinnati have formed a community of practice in which representatives from each effort connect regularly to share what they are learning. Because of the number and diversity of the communities, Strive and its partners can quickly determine what processes are universal and which require adaptation to a local context. As learning accumulates, Strive staff will incorporate new findings into an Internet-based knowledge portal that will be available to any community wishing to create a collective impact initiative based on Strive’s model.

This exciting evolution of the Strive collective impact initiative is far removed from the isolated impact approach that now dominates the social sector and that inhibits any major effort at comprehensive, large-scale change. If successful, it presages the spread of a new approach that will enable us to solve today’s most serious social problems with the resources we already have at our disposal. It would be a shock to the system. But it’s a form of shock therapy that’s badly needed.

John Kania is a managing director at FSG, where he oversees the firm’s consulting practice. Before joining FSG, he was a consultant at Mercer Management Consulting and Corporate Decisions Inc. This is Kania’s third article for the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Mark Kramer is the co-founder and a managing director of FSG. He is also the co-founder and the initial board chair of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, and a senior fellow at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. This is Kramer’s fifth article for the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

I was invited to speak because for the last few decades I have examined the way business schools around the world teach ethics and values, and I have developed a new approach for preparing future leaders to act on their values. Instead of asking, “What is the right thing to do?” this approach starts at the point when you have already decided what is “right,” and instead asks, “How can I get it done?” This approach is all about building the skills and the muscle to get the right thing done. It is not about perseverating about what philosopher John Rawls might say as opposed to Aristotle, or discussing our immobilizing fears at how our bosses or colleagues might react. I help people practice their arguments about values, out loud and in front of their peers, so that these scripts become the person’s default position when she confronts a situation where her values are on the line.

I had, perhaps naively, assumed that social innovators would quickly resonate with this emphasis on action and that we could move directly to a creative brainstorming session about what would be the most persuasive ideas and arguments we could craft to promote the values-based positions that they each espoused about the environment, public health, socially responsible investing, and other important issues. After all, they were here precisely because they were trying to enact their values through their work.

Many of the social innovators did warm to my approach and turned directly to action planning. But a couple of people spoke up with objections. One said: “But Mary, my project is all about positive values, social impact, and innovation. And my employer is supporting me. So why are you talking to me about ethical conflict?” I responded that social enterprises and nonprofits are not immune to ethical challenges—in fact, whenever two or more people get together there are likely to be values conflicts.

During the session, one successful and internationally known social innovator working at a major corporation became strangely quiet. Later that evening he pulled me aside to say that I had “rocked his world,” shaking his previous confidence that he was already doing everything he could to voice his values, simply by the nature of his work.

This line of thinking—that because my cause is pure, I don’t need to be concerned about values, conflicts, or ethics—is particularly relevant for social innovators. It can blind social innovators to their own value biases or failings; and worse, it can too easily let them conclude that their pure ends can justify some questionable means.

Despite very real and thorny ethical complexities and pressures, some people find successful ways to voice and act on their values, and we can learn from them. This is a skill that can be developed, principally by anticipating the types of values conflicts that might arise and practicing our responses to them. This article explains how to do that, an approach called Giving Voice to Values (GVV), ¹ and the seven principles that make up the approach.

FINDING MY VOICE

Giving Voice to Values grew out of a personal crisis of faith. After spending many years helping business school faculty integrate ethics into MBA programs, I began to wonder if teaching business ethics was truly ethical. Most business ethics programs focused first on building awareness of the problem—on the assumption that managers needed to learn to recognize ethical conflicts when they encountered them—and next on teaching models of ethical reasoning and analysis—so that managers could discipline their thinking to determine what was right or wrong.

The problem with this approach to teaching ethics is that it doesn’t address the actual problem that most managers confront in real life—the troubling situation when a manager already knows what she believes is right but she doesn’t believe it is possible to act on her belief. I asked myself, “Is it even possible for business managers to put these lessons into practice?” And if it isn’t possible, “Was I simply providing cover for business schools that wanted to say that they taught ethics?”

As I was trying to answer these questions I had the good fortune to find two pieces of data. First, I worked with the Aspen Institute’s Business and Society Program on their surveys of MBA students, which found that most students expected to encounter values conflicts in their careers and when they did, that they would be genuinely troubled by them. In the most recent survey, more than 80 percent of the respondents reported that they strongly (28.6 percent) or somewhat (54.2 percent) agreed that they were likely to encounter values conflicts in business. In the same survey, 7 percent of students reported that they were not being prepared at all to manage values conflicts, and 50 percent reported that they were only somewhat prepared. Interestingly, the closer students are to graduation, the more they report a lack of preparation.²

I encountered the second data point while consulting at Columbia Business School. There, I had the good fortune to read more than 1,000 essays written by students about a time in their career when their own values conflicted with what they were asked to do in the workplace, and how they handled the situation. What was striking about the essays was that with very few exceptions, all of the students had similar stories to tell—pressures to distort earnings reports; pressures to inflate product capabilities; pressures to lie to colleagues or customers; and so on. What differed was how the students handled these pressures. The largest group, just under 50 percent, simply sucked it up and did what they were told. The next largest group tried to do something, with a 3-1 ratio of students who felt they were successful versus those who felt they failed. A much smaller group, about 5 percent of the total, was so troubled by the situation they encountered that they requested a transfer to another team or quit their job.

I wondered why some students were able to act on their values while others were not able to do so. After rereading these essays I saw that the answer was not that some students had a deeper moral awareness; the ones who acted successfully did not express more moral discomfort than their peers did. And it was not because some students were able to better analyze the situation; the students who acted did not seem to have a more sophisticated understanding of the situation than those who didn’t act. The only difference that I could find was that at some point during the experience the successful actors had said something to someone about the situation. They often began by speaking to a friend, a family member, or a spouse, but what eventually changed the trajectory of the experience was that they were able to say something to someone inside of their organization about their dilemma—in effect giving voice to their values.

Those two pieces of data led me to look deeper into the subject. In doing so, I found an interesting piece of research on altruism and moral courage that had been published several decades ago by Douglas Huneke and Perry London. In the research the two interviewed “rescuers”—people who had risked their lives to save others threatened by the Nazis in Europe.³ One of the common traits that rescuers reported was that at an earlier time in their lives they had had the occasion to rehearse, out loud and in front of someone they respected, what they would say and how they would behave if they encountered a moral conflict. That is, they had pre-scripted themselves. Could business education provide such an opportunity for pre-scripting and rehearsal? Could business education make visible the reality that voicing and enacting values was possible and that many students had, in fact, already done so? These questions and subsequent interviews with managers who had voiced their values as well as current research in social psychology, behavioral economics, and cognitive neuroscience formed the basis for GVV.

GIVING VOICE TO VALUES

The goal of GVV is to transform the way we think about and respond to values conflicts when we encounter them. It starts from the assumption that most of us would like to act on our values if we thought we had a chance of being effective, and the principle that we can become better at acting on our values if we give voice to them beforehand by researching the situations, crafting action plans, pre-scripting our responses, and practicing our scripts.

Voice, in this context, is a metaphor for a wide variety of actions. It includes speaking, of course, but it also includes the entire process of action planning: data gathering; identifying what’s at stake for all parties; anticipating arguments and crafting responses; building coalitions when necessary; and crafting systemic responses to systemic problems. Even if you follow the principles and process outlined in this approach, it is not easy to do, and there is no guarantee of success. Nevertheless, GVV is based on the premise that it is important to try and that voicing and enacting our values is a skill that can be developed and improved with practice.

GVV has been piloted in more than 100 schools and organizations on five continents. Although originally designed for MBA programs, increasingly it is being used in a variety of undergraduate, graduate, and executive education programs. Recently, business and nonprofit organizations have begun to experiment with ways to use the approach in their internal education programs.

Although it is too early to report the results of follow-up studies on the efficacy of GVV, there are a number of studies in development—including empirical studies in social psychology, pre- and post-learning assessments, and assessments of its impact when used to train accountants. There are, of course, many anecdotal reports of those who have been inspired to voice their values after experiencing the curriculum.

SEVEN PRINCIPLES

1. Values. Despite cultural differences, there is a set of values that everyone around the world shares and that we can appeal to when interacting with others. The list, however, is a short one: honesty, respect, responsibility, fairness, and compassion.⁴ Although one might quibble about the exact list of shared values, knowing that there is one provides a useful and manageable foundation for addressing values conflicts in the workplace.

Last year I was invited to Shanghai to speak to a group of nearly 100 business school professors from across China. The Chinese government had decided that business ethics should be a part of the required MBA curriculum, and this conference was designed to help faculty learn how to teach ethics. I had been warned that my approach might not appeal to people from other parts of the world, particularly in Asia and the Middle East, so I approached this event with the mind and heart of a learner.

I was pleased to find wide agreement with the idea that all people share certain core human values and that the kinds of organizational pressures and challenges that an individual confronts when trying to enact his values are similar. After several hours of engaged and positive discussion, however, one of the professors stood up and said: “I very much appreciate this GVV approach and would like to use it in my own teaching. My question is how do you voice your values when it is the government that you wish to contradict?”

In this moment, the common and deeply felt impulse to express one’s values was palpable. There were certainly cultural differences that existed between us, but rather than getting stuck on those differences, we came together around our shared commitment to personal integrity and the desire to apply the GVV method to this particular cultural reality. To be sure, there are values that are not universally shared and that do give rise to conflict. Some might consider the process that I propose a sleight of hand, allowing people with different values to sidestep value conflicts. But in my experience this process creates a common space and the permission to try to solve a problem, without having to agree on everything before the process even begins.

2. Choice. Many of us have the feeling when encountering values conflicts that our hands are tied and that we can’t do anything about it. But GVV encourages us to look back at our own history and posits that we all can think of times when we voiced or acted on our values in the face of a challenge, as well as times when we failed to do so. Acknowledging and examining these past choices can expand our ability and likelihood of choosing to enact our values in the future.

A major financial services firm had a corporate initiative to increase the diversity of its professional staff. A partner at the firm argued, with some resentment, that he had been punished in the past when he made an effort to hire a diverse staff and ended up having to fire one of the people he had hired. “The firm is being hypocritical because I pay a price if I take a chance that fails,” he said. Notwithstanding all the assumptions in his argument about how hiring anyone other than a white male would require him to “take a chance,” the heart of his position was the idea that he did not have a choice. But when asked what price he had paid after his previous hire had not worked out, he sat in silence for a moment before acknowledging that he had not, in fact, actually paid any price at all, even though he had truly believed that he had.

This executive had more choices than he was able or willing to acknowledge, even to himself, until he was invited to do so, sincerely and without any malice. These moments of recognition—that we have made choices in the past and that we can do so in the future—can be empowering, but they need to be offered as invitations rather than as accusations.

3. Normality. Values conflicts are a regular and predictable part of our professional lives. By recognizing the normality of our ethical challenges, we reduce the tendency to vilify those with whom we disagree—a position that often limits our effectiveness in working with them. Normalizing also reduces the tendency to panic, freeze, or rush through these situations without using the full range of our skills and arguments.

A consultant for mergers and acquisitions was sitting in an airport with two executives from a firm that was to be acquired. They asked him: “Be straight with us. You’ve known us and worked with us for six months now and we’re friends. Are our jobs on the cutting block?” Taken off guard and feeling torn between his friendship for the two men and his responsibility to his employer, he told the executives that he did not know, even though they all knew this was untrue. By saying this, he not only risked the trust he had built up with these individuals, he also probably telegraphed that they were, in fact, at risk. In my interview with this consultant, he said: “Mary, I lied. Instinctively I lied!” Lying bothered him, and he began to realize that if he stayed in this line of work he was going to encounter this situation again and again. He needed to think through what he could honestly say that would be helpful and preserve his working relationships, without violating his obligations to his employer.

So he pre-scripted himself. His message was something like this: “I’m sorry. Even though we’ve worked together and I like and respect you, we both know I’m legally and ethically bound not to divulge information about whose jobs might be lost. On the other hand, I want to be helpful to you. After seeing acquisitions and mergers many times before, my experience is that the people who fared best were the ones who took the following steps to optimize their options.” He would then outline a set of career-enhancing moves that the person could make.

The important moment for the consultant came when he recognized that this is not an unusual situation and that it was going to come up again and again. The decision he faced was whether he was going to keep lying to the individual executives or to his employer, or whether he could come up with an honest answer that was still helpful. By normalizing this very predictable situation and prescripting himself, he was able to navigate the ethical waters with both compassion and integrity.

4. Purpose. It is easier to voice and enact your values when you have defined your personal, professional, and societal purpose both broadly and explicitly. People who find ways to be true to their values are those who put their daily decisions into a larger framework, asking whether the act is in line with their organization’s mission and the reasons why they had selected their particular line of work. This kind of thinking helps people find the courage to act on their values and to find persuasive arguments to engage others.

A newly promoted chief financial officer (CFO) was strongly encouraged by his peers at the company to make some adjustments in the way certain financial restructurings were presented in the firm’s quarterly report. The CFO felt that the adjustments amounted to falsifying the record, but wondered if he should buck his peers on his very first decision. When he stepped back and thought about what kind of organization he wanted to be leading and what his professional commitment was as a CFO, he decided not only to say no to his peers but also to seize the moment of his promotion to announce a new framework for financial reporting that was based on integrity, and to roll out a campaign and training program to promote it. He acted first and then asked for support from his CEO later. This approach worked, and his first major decision set the stage for a successful tenure as CFO.

What he did, in effect, was to write a new script for the organization, moving beyond the narrow request of his peers to a broader and more explicit statement of values that would not only empower his team to support his decision but also make it more difficult for the executives who were pressing him to carry out their agenda under the radar.

5. Self-Knowledge and Alignment. We won’t make much headway asking someone to be bold and stand up for his principles if that person sees himself as cautious, or asking someone to be conservative if that person views herself as a firebrand. The trick is to build a story about who we are and how we voice our values that is based on self-knowledge and is in alignment with how we already see ourselves and that plays to our strengths.

Consider the earlier story about the angry partner in the financial services firm who was upset about hiring policies. It was actually a diversity consultant who saw herself as conflict averse who was able to move the partner to rethink his resentful stance. When the partner angrily asserted that the firm was being hypocritical and bemoaned the price he had paid for his previous commitment to diversity, she was stymied at first about how to proceed. She knew that this was a moment when she had the chance to live her values or back down.

There were all sorts of arguments that she might have raised to poke holes in his assertion: Wasn’t it possible that his previous hire had “failed” because he did not receive the support that other hires received? When a white male had failed at a job, had the partner pledged to never again hire a white male? She didn’t want to pursue this approach because she was not comfortable pitting herself against this man. His style was forceful and combative and she was a bit of an introvert. Instead, she simply asked him—in all sincerity because she really wanted to understand—“So what price did you pay?” That question made all the difference when the partner recognized he had not really been penalized at all. The consultant, playing to her strengths and expressing her values in a manner that was consistent with her personality, broke through to a more genuine conversation with him about diversity.

6. Voice. The more we practice crafting and speaking our values and developing our own voice, the more likely those scripts will become our default positions when we face conflicts. We are more likely to say those words when we have pre-scripted ourselves and have rehearsed in front of our peers, inviting supportive feedback and constructive coaching.

This idea really hit home several years ago when I was teaching a course at Harvard Business School on managing diversity. I taught the course because I believed it was an important topic and skill for future managers, but also because I hoped that through researching the course and generating case studies, I would learn how to better stand up for diversity when I witnessed discriminatory behavior. Although the course went well and resulted in several books, in the end I still felt unconvinced that I would be better able to address inequity when I observed it.

Months after the course ended, I began working with a large consulting firm and found myself in a meeting between my team and a major client. The client began to make ethnic jokes that made me—and some of the junior consultants in the room who were a diverse group—uncomfortable. My senior partner said nothing, and I did not want to offend the client. With a smile and lighthearted tone I said: “Perhaps we should get down to business. We may have strayed into areas where we don’t have enough information to support us.” The client, not feeling singled out, chuckled with recognition and agreement. It may not have been the perfect response but there was a palpable relief among my team.

What I later realized was that I had spent so much time working through the arguments and counter-positions around diversity while designing my course that I had in effect prepared myself for such situations. I had normalized these situations. And I had practiced my voice, making that my default position. Because these words came naturally and easily, I did not need to screw up my courage or my emotion, and therefore I did not telegraph either blame or anxiety to my audience. It all seemed natural.

7. Reasons and Rationalizations. Not only are workplace values conflicts predictable, the arguments we are likely to hear when we try to speak up are predictable as well, which makes it easier to develop and practice effective responses. Some of the most common of these reasons and rationalizations are what I call preemptive rationalizations. They are the reasons we come up with before we even try to craft our action plan and that prevent us from applying our full creativity to the task.

Anyone who has spent much time in an organization has encountered some of these rationalizations. For example: “Everyone does this. It’s the norm in this industry.” A useful counter to this rationalization is to point out that “If it is standard practice, why is there a policy against it?” Another rationalization is, “If I stand up for my values here, I will hurt my manager.” The interesting thing about appeals to loyalty is that they can go in any direction. One could answer, “Why should we choose to be loyal to our manager over our colleagues?” By unmasking the rationalization, it allows us to recognize that loyalty to one does not justify hurting another, and enables us to move forward and focus on problem solving.

“This decision won’t really hurt anybody” is another often used rationalization. A useful response could point out that materiality depends on where one stands; what seems small to me might seem large to you. This kind of counterargument works best if it is couched as a story that illustrates the point, rather than offered as a righteous little speech. Or we might hear “This is not my responsibility.” When someone uses this line of reasoning, she is already conceding that there may be an ethical problem. What we need to do then is move directly to solving the problem by providing real solutions, rather than spending time trying to persuade the person that she does have responsibility.

USING VALUES TO ACHIEVE GOALS

People working at all types of organizations are likely to run into ethical conflicts. Think about the challenges of appropriately allocating donations to the projects they were intended to support when the organization is drowning in operating expenses. Or consider the nuances of framing advocacy arguments in a way that accurately conveys what we know when it would be easy to inflame public emotions and raise support for our cause with slight modifications. The tools and frameworks in this article can help everyone craft valuesdriven arguments to deal with these types of pressures.

But the more distinctive application of GVV for social innovators is to think of it not only as a method for resisting the pressure to behave unethically, but also as a set of tools that can be used in the service of a positive social goal for which you want to enlist others’ support. By focusing on creatively pre-scripting and practicing our positions, and using the many framing tools that are enumerated in the GVV approach,⁵ we not only increase our effectiveness when we espouse them, but also increase the likelihood that we will do so in the first place. By making values a habit, we engage our colleagues and our constituencies in doing the same.

Mary C. Gentile is a senior research scholar at Babson College. She is the author of the recently published book Giving Voice to Values: How to Speak Your Mind When You Know What’s Right (Yale University Press, 2010).

During her first week on the job, Morris learned that she was the organization’s fourth COO in a year and a half.¹ Morris was told that she would be responsible for human resources (HR), legal, technology, and board management, as well as responsible for managing everyone except the controller, who reported to the CEO (and happened to be the CEO’s sister). Morris felt that if she’d survived the rough-and-tumble world of investment banking, she could certainly tackle this challenge.

Over the next nine months, however, Morris learned that the dynamic CEO whom she had admired resisted processes and systems, asserted tight control over all details, avoided delegation, felt threatened by opposing views, and contributed to a negative staff culture. It seemed that the CEO was not prepared for a strong management team or aware of the opportunity that having a strong team would present. Although Morris felt that she contributed to the organization’s overall development, she decided that her skills could be better used elsewhere and left. By refusing to relinquish control, the CEO missed an opportunity to fully engage Morris and capitalize on her strengths.

Awkward leadership transitions like this one are not uncommon, particularly when an organization is young and growing fast. When this type of transition is handled poorly, it can cause high employee turnover, low morale, inefficient systems, loss of credibility with stakeholders, and decreased impact. When the transition is handled well, it can help vault a small organization into the high-growth phase.

Instead of resisting change, social entrepreneurs must embrace it at this critical inflection point by creating a leadership team of qualified and driven individuals. Ultimately, as a recent Bridgespan Group report put it, “augmenting the experience and capabilities of the senior leadership team is often the most visible sign of change in organizations that are becoming more strongly managed.”² With strong management come strong systems, infrastructure, talent development, programming, and, ultimately, meaningful impact.

To understand how social entrepreneurs can make the transition from running a start-up to creating an organization that is able to scale up, we interviewed dozens of social sector leaders. From these interviews we identified the steps that social entrepreneurs must take to build a team and the five leadership roles that an organization must have for it to be successful at this stage of its development: the evangelist, scaling partner, connector, program strategist, and realist. Before exploring these roles in detail, it is useful to look at one social entrepreneur’s successful effort to create a leadership team.

Vision Spring’s Experience

In 2001, Jordan Kassalow, a practicing optometrist, and business partner Scott Berrie formed the Scojo Foundation, a nonprofit organization that sells inexpensive eyeglasses to the poor, and Scojo New York, a for-profit optometry business. Five percent of Scojo New York’s pre-tax profits are directed to fund the work of the foundation (which in 2008 changed its name to VisionSpring.) Since its founding, VisionSpring has trained more than 5,200 entrepreneurs, who have sold more than 360,000 pairs of glasses. VisionSpring believes that it can help reduce poverty in the developing world by selling affordable glasses to tailors, mechanics, artisans, and other professionals who need to see well to do their work.

In 2003, when the Scojo Foundation was just getting off the ground, Kassalow and his then senior director, Graham Macmillan, created a strategic plan that wasn’t just about programs, but was also about people. “We tried to envision the organization five years down the road,” says Kassalow. “What management roles will we need at that point?” They drew boxes for each role—20 in total—and divided the roles between them. Kassalow’s positions included CEO, director of development, director of business development, and country manager. Macmillan’s roles included everything related to finance, sales, operations, and HR.

The two founders then began the process of shedding roles by asking which jobs we “hated the most and were least good at doing,” says Kassalow. Over time they chipped away at the boxes, erasing their names and putting in the name of a new employee with stronger skills in that particular field. The goal was to have Kassalow’s name in only two places: the evangelist box and chief fundraiser box. When Macmillan decided to leave VisionSpring last fall, the board pushed Kassalow and Macmillan to define the skills Macmillan’s replacement would need so that Kassalow could continue to shed additional roles. A job description for the position—now called COO instead of senior director—was created that highlighted deep financial, accounting, and people management experience, along with multi-sector experience and a certain gravitas. Government experience would be icing on the cake.

Kassalow filled the new position by hiring Sean Mayberry. Mayberry has senior executive experience at Population Services International, Intel Corp., and the U.S. Department of State. As Mayberry gets settled into his role as COO, Kassalow looks forward to replacing his name with Mayberry’s in a few more boxes.

Building the Team

It is rare for an entrepreneur to begin thinking about how to build a management team as early as Kassalow did. More often, entrepreneurs put off constructing a management team until they have no other choice. Kassalow provides a model for the steps that social entrepreneurs can and should take to create a strong leadership team that is capable of taking an organization to scale: Recognize that you can no longer do it all alone; hold frank conversations with your board about the transition; and hire strategically rather than opportunistically.

One of the remarkable traits about social entrepreneurs is their ability to play many roles. They care deeply about how their vision is implemented and feel personally invested in the outcome. Social entrepreneurs are often so involved in all aspects of the organization that they end up holding up decision making, losing talent, and creating bottlenecks. At some point, grumblings of dissatisfaction from employees or frustrating inefficiencies emerge and need solutions. To avoid getting to this detrimental stage, the entrepreneur must recognize that he can no longer do everything himself and preemptively prepare to let go. Before hiring any high-level managers, he needs to assess his own strengths and weaknesses honestly. Social entrepreneurs must ask themselves questions such as What do I enjoy doing? What am I really good at doing? What am I not good at doing? What kind of people do I need around me?

Board members play a particularly important role at this stage of the process. They should instigate conversations with the social entrepreneur about building strong, talented management teams, preparing for leadership succession. To ensure that this happens, entrepreneurs should fill their board with opinionated members who bring skills, networks, and experience to the organization. Entrepreneurs must use the start-up stage as an opportunity to build trust with board members and ensure that board members are invested in the vision and long-term sustainability of the organization. This trust enables entrepreneurs to heed advice that can often feel personal or be difficult to hear. Strong boards help entrepreneurs grow comfortable with dissenting voices, challenged ideas, and evolving roles.

Entrepreneurs should map out their senior management hires ahead of time. Too often, they see an oncoming cash flow crisis and hire someone with an accounting background, or decide they are overwhelmed with direct reports and hire a COO. “Social entrepreneurs are often encouraged or forced to get a person or a skill set in immediately,” says Sally Osberg, president and CEO of the Skoll Foundation. They “often go into it feeling cornered.” Kevin Flynn, director of client services at Commongood Careers, sees this behavior frequently. “We hear, ‘I need someone who is an entrepreneurial CFO and can do technology and fundraising and also code in Java,’” says Flynn.

The Leadership Team

Once the social entrepreneur has spent time in honest self-reflection and frank board discussions, it’s time to create a new leadership team. The entrepreneur must approach leadership team development with the same thoughtfulness and determination that he applies to creating his vision or he risks making the wrong hires. Our research indicates that there are five essential leadership roles in an organization that is ready to scale up. These roles may or may not be filled by five separate people; in some cases multiple roles can be filled by one person. The five roles are the evangelist, scaling partner, connector, program strategist, and realist.

Evangelist

The most important member of the leadership team is the evangelist—the person who is deeply passionate about the organization’s mission and convinces others to help fulfill it. When the founder is still at the organization, he is the person who fills the role of the evangelist. If the founder has been replaced, it is the entrepreneur who is running the organization (often with the title of CEO, president, or executive director) who becomes the evangelist.

The evangelist has a number of responsibilities. First, he is the organization’s visionary, continually refining its mission and strategy and making sure that priorities are established and met. He needs to share his vision with people inside and outside of the organization, especially with the leadership team. Willy Foote, president and founder of Root Capital, explains that the evangelist is going to see new opportunities that may not fit with the current organization’s strategy, and his role is to “get the team to believe in the value of disruption, while being very cautious to court disruption not destruction.”

The evangelist also maintains the organization’s culture. For example, when Mike Feinberg, cofounder of the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), served as CEO of the KIPP Foundation, he ensured that each conference room held the name of a children’s book that held significance on the KIPP school campuses. All new hires learned the symbolism of these books and embraced the metaphors associated with them. For example, The Polar Express represented the message that all “KIPPsters” (students who attend a KIPP school) can “hear the bells” even when naysaying communities, peers, or adults try in vain to convince them that college is not an option. Each evangelist will choose a different way to keep the organization’s culture alive, but he needs to be the person who constantly reminds others of the importance, characteristics, and values of the organization’s culture.

The evangelist is also the external face of the organization. People want to understand the evangelist’s underlying motivations for leading the organization and be captivated by the organization’s founding story and long-term vision. The evangelist can skillfully weave together the organization’s mission and programs with stories that express it in personal terms in order to truly “evangelize” and convert nonbelievers.

Scaling Partner

The second role that is required is the scaling partner. This person is the organization’s pragmatist, someone who can think strategically and make the evangelist’s vision a reality. Sometimes this position is called the COO, and other times the deputy or managing director. The scaling partner must enjoy creating and managing systems that improve organizational efficiency, as well as creating systems that allow staff members to enjoy their jobs and feel valued and rewarded.

“A lot of organizations are looking for entrepreneurial people who can build the plane while flying it,” says James Weinberg, founder and CEO of Commongood Careers. “But at [the scaling] stage, they actually do need someone to just build the plane.” Or as Osberg says, the scaling partner is “someone who can unleash the productivity of the organization by ensuring that people spend their time in the right way.”

Erin Ganju, former COO and current CEO of Room to Read, is a good example of a scaling partner. In 2001, Ganju first offered to help founder and executive chairman John Wood manage his burgeoning organization. Wood recognized right away that Ganju was a good potential scaling partner because she could think big, yet was also detail oriented and enthusiastic about tasks that he didn’t like doing. Before joining Room to Read, Ganju had worked as a product line manager at Unilever and as a financial analyst at Goldman Sachs. She immediately put her strong project management skills to use at Room to Read. She helped develop a strategy for entering new countries, formalized program design, and helped channel Wood’s fundraising talents into specific programmatic areas. Ganju enjoyed managing operations, talent, and processes while Wood preferred public speaking, fundraising, and building a worldwide network of allies. Ganju was the perfect scaling partner for Wood.

As crucial as the scaling partner position is, it is also the most delicate and controversial of the five roles. At its worst, the position can become what Gretchen Anderson, former director of business development for On-Ramps, calls “a dumping ground for the CEO.” The role of the scaling partner works only when it is a yin and yang match with the founder, a true partnership stemming from trust and leadership. The scaling partner should be the first person the founder hires on the leadership team so that he can be a sounding board for all future hires.

Connector

The role of the connector is to fill in the gaps left by the entrepreneur as he focuses on being the evangelist. Traditionally, this position might be called a vice president or director of development. It is also akin to the role that the chief of staff plays for a politician, maximizing the politician’s time and ensuring access to important people. The connector makes sure that the evangelist is speaking to the right audiences at the right time and capitalizing on all opportunities. In addition, the connector ties development efforts to programs and manages existing funding relationships, freeing the evangelist to spend time on other activities.

Even with these clearly defined responsibilities, the connector role can conflict with the evangelist, particularly in the area of fundraising, and cause tensions if the roles aren’t clearly defined. Donors are the lifeblood of the organization, and having more than one person manage those relationships is risky. Even though it is difficult to divide these roles, it is important that it be done so that the organization can grow.

Jeff Berndt, a partner at New Profit Inc. who oversees investor relations, communications, and fundraising, is a good example of a connector. Berndt has four primary responsibilities. The first, which he describes as “wearing out the soles of my shoes,” is meeting regularly with a variety of constituents to build the New Profit network and deepen its long-term relationships. The second task is to make sure that Vanessa Kirsch, New Profit’s president and founder, meets with the right people. “Vanessa is gifted and has great instincts; our team has to Navy SEAL her in and out to maximize her impact.” The third task is to make sure that the management team, and ultimately the entire staff, has the tools they need to sell the organization. The fourth and final task is to build the fundraising team, a complex operation that caters to the needs of the entire organization.

Program Strategist

All organizations—whether they are focused on education, health, or climate change—need a program strategist who is an expert in that particular field and whose role is to ensure that the programs achieve the desired outcomes. The program strategist not only has issue area expertise, but also understands how the programs are implemented in the field. This role brings credibility and expertise to the organization and its programs that may not have existed. The program strategist not only looks at how programs are running day-to-day, but also thinks about how the innovation can be scaled up, diversified, and perfected. Foote describes the program strategist as the “sacred flame” of the organization, responsible for creating a bridge between the reality of the programs and the vision of the evangelist. Without a program strategist with a strong voice on the leadership team, an organization can stray from its mission and end up scaling programs that do not produce the desired outcomes.

Ajuah Helton, the first chief program officer at BUILD, a fouryear college preparation organization, is a good example of a program strategist. In 2007, BUILD evaluated a student’s performance solely on his grade point average (GPA), dismissing students below a certain threshold. The policy was intended to honor the program’s academic rigor and motivate students to perform better in school. The problem with this policy is that it often ended up dismissing the very students BUILD was designed to help, sometimes in their senior year of high school. As chief program officer, Helton analyzed data and collaborated with staff to create a new way of evaluating student performance. The result was the BUILD score. Instead of judging students solely on their GPA, the team also began evaluating students on other characteristics, such as commitment and passion, which served as strong indicators for longer-term success and better supported BUILD’s theory of change. Without Helton’s extensive experience in education, credibility with the team, and overview of trends, BUILD ran the risk of scaling efforts that would have reduced the organization’s impact.

Realist

Every organization needs someone on the leadership team who plays the role of the realist, the person who keeps the organization grounded in financial reality. This person is often called the chief financial officer (CFO). Placing the financial function on equal footing with other senior management roles ensures consistency, practicality, and coordination within the organization. “The finance person is the bedrock position,” says Jim Fruchterman, founder and CEO of Benetech. “He or she inserts a culture of frugality and ethics, accountability for financial results, and reality.” The realist is more than a financial officer, he is also the person rolling up his sleeves and “minding the store.”

The importance of having a strong and skilled realist is demonstrated by the traumatic series of events that a New York-based nonprofit recently underwent.³ The organization had 26 international offices, almost 90 staff members, and only two accountants. The board, evangelist, and scaling partner all understood the need for a realist, so they hired an executive from a leading New York law firm. The person had experience managing financial operations at a for-profit, but he was not a certified public accountant (CPA), had never run financial operations at a nonprofit, and had never directly managed accounting. For almost a year he claimed to be revamping the financial systems and yet very little changed in practice. Because of a host of internal oversights, the organization did not have the systems to distinguish unrestricted from restricted funds, double-dipped into reserves because of inadequate and decentralized expense management practices, and raised new grants without having adequate overhead to meet expenditures.

In February 2009, believing that the organization was $5 million in debt, the vice president of finance finally explained the financial crisis to the president of the organization (the evangelist). In short order, an interim CFO who had a CPA and strong accounting skills was hired. She personally audited the organization’s books and traveled to every regional office to fix financial systems and expense practices and to institute cost-cutting measures. A recent external audit shows that the organization is about $2.5 million in debt. The organization will likely survive because of the strength of its programs and reputation, new leadership and systems, and committed and generous donors. Its long-term future will be decided by how the board and management team navigate the next six months. As this example shows, organizations with world-class programs, visionary founders, and strong partners can suffer dramatic setbacks without a talented realist.

Other Considerations

The five roles describe the skills needed in a successful leadership team. These roles may overlap, however, and may not always be held by a single person. For example, Julie McGuire, director of development at Spark, currently plays both the realist and connector roles. By owning cash flow and revenue projections for the organization, McGuire is able to connect development directly to the internal functions of the organization. Another example is Mayberry, who plays the realist and the scaling partner roles at VisionSpring, responsible for all internal operations, including managing talent, performance, financials, and operations.

There are other roles besides these five that may be needed in a leadership team as the organization grows. Marketing officers, chief technology officers, or chief people officers often appear in organizations that have passed the first major inflection point and are embarking on another scaling push. These roles are valuable, but can be combined with other positions or outsourced until the organization can afford to have unique positions created. The five principal roles, however, can’t be outsourced or compromised when developing a leadership team for an organization poised for growth.

Although our research and interviews focused on social entrepreneurs, many of our findings can also be applied to for-profit start-ups. Google’s Eric Schmidt, for example, could be described as a scaling partner to founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, even though Schmidt’s official title is CEO. Schmidt brought sound business practices to complement the creative and technical genius of the founders. The connector role at a nonprofit, to cite another example, is similar to the vice president of marketing and sales position at a for-profit. Both require someone with extensive networks and the ability to help strategically position the organization and its CEO. And it goes without saying that the realist plays a critical role in the for-profit sector where the bottom line is measured in dollars and cents and serves as the ultimate indicator of a company’s success.

When social entrepreneurs understand their strengths and priorities, and develop a leadership team composed of people with disparate and complementary skills, it creates what Wood calls “the perfect combination.” In a note of caution, however, Wood points out that “if you only have a lot of corporate refugees who know strategy and process, they can scale like champions, but you won’t have deep programs. Conversely, if you only have a lot of programmatic specialists with nonprofit backgrounds, your programs are incredible, but they don’t scale.” The solution, Wood continues, is to “find your perfect combination and scale the heck out of it.” When social entrepreneurs stop thinking of leadership positions as simply a solution to an immediate problem, and begin to create roles and hire talent with the same vision and foresight that they use to perfect their idea and mission, scale becomes a natural progression rather than an elusive goal.

Chantal Laurie Below is managing director for strategy, talent, and operations at Teach for America-Bay Area. She began her career as a Teach for America corps member in Washington, D.C. Below then served as the manager of fellow programs at the KIPP Foundation. After KIPP, she joined BUILD, where she launched the organization’s first expansion site and served as its West Coast regional director.

Kimberly Dasher Tripp is a program officer at the Skoll Foundation, where she manages grant relationships. Before Skoll, she served as program officer on the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation’s entertainment media partnerships team. Tripp began her career as a member of the policy studies team for the United Nations Association of the United States of America, building its program on postconflict peace building and the rule of law.

From a group of 400 social entrepreneurs, SVN executive director Deb Nelson and I selected 75 members for me to interview. It was a diverse group of entrepreneurs: 66 percent had founded a forprofit and 40 percent had founded a nonprofit; 60 percent were male and 40 percent were female; and 89 percent were white and 11 percent were racial minorities. All of them had experienced the challenge of scaling.

Surprisingly, our research of best practices and common obstacles revealed that scaling challenges rarely rose from financial limitations, but were generally due to a lack of leadership skills. To successfully scale up, these entrepreneurs needed to think differently and lead differently from their peers. They had to understand that social entrepreneurship is not just a form of entrepreneurship but rather an instrument for social change. They needed to define their businesses less in terms of products or services and more as vehicles for personal, organizational, and global transformation—a transformation they realized must begin with themselves.

Our research indicated that to make that transformation from entrepreneurial founder to successful leader depended on leading more like a monk, an architect, and a diplomat. As monks, these social entrepreneurs become more mindful of their leadership role in the company and their impact on people; as architects, they spend most of their time on the immeasurable process known as company culture; and as diplomats, they become expert collaborators inside and outside of their organizations. Let’s look more closely at these three transitions critical to leading for scale.

BE A MONK, NOT A FATHER

Monks invite you to become spiritually engaged in your work. They do this by subtly modeling the values they want to impart. They listen carefully, never direct you paternalistically, and always strive to help you find your way.

Successful social entrepreneurs recognize that their primary role is to turn the organization’s mission and values into practice. Like monks, they know that everything they say and do—and don’t say or do—sends signals through the company about what values are important.

So be mindful of your powerful effect on people in your organization. No matter what the formal company documents say, you make values visible. If respect for others is an important company value, what do you do when you, the CEO, walk into an office where two co-workers are engaged in a business conversation? Do you interrupt them because you and your agenda are more important, or do you wait your turn until they are finished? Gun Denhart, cofounder and former CEO of children’s clothing company Hanna Andersson, responded by saying: “I wait until they’re finished. If it goes on, I’ll leave and come back. I don’t break in and interrupt their work. Unfortunately, I’ve seen that rudeness too often from ‘important people.’”

Don’t feel you need to know everything. If you did, there’d be no room for anyone else to contribute. Admit to “not knowing,” even as you help others develop their competence. This creates an atmosphere of honesty and transparency, where employees share information and responsibility, accept doubt, and expect help in finding sustainable solutions to business challenges.

Another way to lead like a monk is to incorporate spirit into your work. At RSF Social Finance, a San Francisco-based socially responsible financial services organization, when monthly financial statements are sent to investor clients, each client’s company representative personally initials each page of the statement. In these moments, they are mindful of their client’s situation and of communicating that attention simply. Over the last 60 years, that one practice has received more positive response from investors than any other of the bank’s client services.

Entrepreneurs can extend that mindfulness beyond traditional company boundaries, too. One CEO, for example, after recognizing how her seasonal business affected the working hours of her distributors’ employees, shared her market research with her distributors so they could better predict work cycles and not increase seasonal employee stress.

BE AN ARCHITECT, NOT A CAPTAIN

“Who’s really the head of a ship?” a CEO once asked me. He answered by saying: “It’s not the captain. It’s the designer. The captain manages through the design. Don’t dazzle everyone with your performance. Ask yourself how you can build the team.”

Too often, social entrepreneurs never make what is likely the most difficult transition of them all: moving from addressing a social cause personally to creating a social enterprise to address that cause. The reason? They took their company culture for granted, interviewees said. That culture is the foundation of organizational effectiveness.

On the day he sold the company, Jay Coen Gilbert, cofounder and former CEO of AND 1, a basketball footwear and apparel company, told me: “Never underestimate the things you can’t count. The most important thing you have at your company is your culture; through it you engage your values, build commitment, and inspire action.” AND 1’s founders had lost control of the company culture. Intoxicated with their recent rapid growth, an aggressive internally competitive culture developed that eroded AND 1’s employee relationships. The founders couldn’t imbue new hires with their foundational collaborative culture in time.

Becoming the architect of a leadership-distributive culture—a culture of shared leadership—is challenging. Founders typically try to control everything. But they must find a way to let go of control while remaining involved. If they don’t, they minimize the opportunity for others to grow into leadership roles. Not only does growth make this less possible, but it also makes good people leave and others never graduate into leadership roles.

Before its sale to FedEx, for example, copy giant Kinko’s consisted of 128 separately owned corporations under the umbrella of Kinko’s Service Corp., each with its own leadership team. Each team was responsible for its operating results and strategy consistent with corporate values and goals. A state-of-the-art voice mail system complemented training; the 128 teams of 23,000 co-workers could share leadership strategies and tactics at any hour of the day.

Kinko’s CEO and founder Paul Orfalea put a premium on personal growth. The service corporation offered many services company- wide, including monthly professional development through Kinko’s University. Programming at all Kinko’s educational retreats ended at 3 p.m. each day to allow time for personal balance. Orfalea explained his job as helping people develop their intellectual competencies and become more compassionate and balanced human beings: “If I take care of our co-workers, they take care of the product, the product serves the customer, and that takes care of the profit.”

Successful social entrepreneurs have redefined corporate growth as this less measurable process, their people’s personal growth. As one CEO put it: “We have changed our measure of success away from continual material growth, to internal growth. We can create both more personal and social change by deepening our relationships. We are growing consciousness and relationships—all the things that make life interesting—in a way that is sustainable and enjoyable for everyone.”

BE A DIPLOMAT, NOT A DICTATOR

The finding we found most surprising during our research was the extent to which successful social entrepreneurs collaborate. They consider themselves compassionate diplomats and create collaborations that defy traditional boundaries, so they can share their business advantages with other companies. Sometimes they even give their advantages away to competitors.

Judy Wicks, founder and former CEO of Philadelphia’s White Dog Cafe, focuses on her brand’s success and on creating an industry model for social change. “Our relationship with people, animals, and nature is more important than dollars,” Wicks proclaimed. “That’s why I’m happy not only to give my advantage away to my competitors, but I’ll even educate them.”

Wicks was referring to her cruelty-free menu. When she discovered that the factory farm system treated pigs inhumanely, she took pork off the menu. She then found a local farmer who raised free-range pigs. She not only purchased pork from his farm, but also lent him $30,000 for a larger refrigerated truck so that he could deliver to other restaurants in the city. Wicks went on to provide consulting for other restaurants interested in buying from local farmers, leading to an increased demand for humanely raised local pork and other healthful farm products as competitors followed her example. She then helped increase the supply of pork by raising $40,000 to help four more local pig farmers switch to freerange practices. The press, politicians, consumers, and other business leaders commended Wicks publicly, and more customers flocked to her restaurant.

Wicks concluded: “How can my business be based on the suffering of other creatures? Constant growth for increased profits is destroying life. We must build an economy based on compassion for all of life.”

Social entrepreneurs are as passionate about their work as anyone. Yet leadership is an act of liberation, not of control, and it starts with unleashing your passion and finding your way. Paradoxically, this will happen only when you help others reach their full potential and uncover their passions—when you inspire them to dream more, do more, and be more.

Mark Albionis a former Harvard Business School professor who cofounded six organizations, including Net Impact, and was the first social entrepreneur to receive the distinguished entrepreneur of the year award, presented at Indiana University, in 2010. This article is based on his book True to Yourself: Leading a Values-Based Business.

Before joining Mercy Corps, Keny-Guyer spent more than a decade working in the social sector, first with at-risk American youth at Communities in Schools, then with Southeast Asian refugees at CARE/UNICEF, and finally with war-torn Middle Eastern communities at Save the Children.

Mercy Corps’s guiding principles are that those affected by a crisis are always the best people to direct their own recovery, and that in most cases the best way to do this is to help local people create market-based solutions. That’s why you will find Mercy Corps assisting local farmers and merchants as they reopen food markets or paying cash to local workers who are helping clear their streets and rebuild their homes.

In this interview with Stanford Social Innovation Review Managing Editor Eric Nee, Keny-Guyer explains why disasters can create opportunities to change society for the better, why Mercy Corps spends as much time making plans to exit a country as it does getting ready to enter one, and what steps he is taking to turn Mercy Corps into a learning organization.

Eric Nee: Your 2008 annual report is headlined “Turning Crisis into Opportunity.” Why did you pick that phrase?

Neal Keny-Guyer: We focus on countries in transition—the fragile states where there has been a crisis of some sort, either a natural disaster, a political or economic collapse, or a war or conflict. We believe that a crisis often opens up opportunities for profound changes that can be harder to accomplish in a normal situation. Sometimes a crisis can remove a corrupt government or unfreeze bureaucratic inhibitors and enable fresh ideas to take over.

Is a country ever too unstable for Mercy Corps to enter?

I can’t think of a situation in which we chose not to go in because it was too unsafe. Just look at the countries we operate in now: Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia. If you are operating in Somalia today, you probably have a high threshold for risk.

In Somalia, where there’s almost no functioning government, there is plenty of opportunity for relief, but how much development work can you actually do?

You clearly have to take a longer-term view in a situation like that. We are there because there is a compelling humanitarian need, and we have some amazing Somalis who know the country and who are social entrepreneurs in the best sense of that word. By working in Somalia now we can lay a foundation for community mobilization, so that when there is a local or a national government that citizen groups can work with, these communities will be more prepared.

Were you in Haiti before the earthquake?

No.

Wouldn’t it have been better to be in Haiti before the quake helping to build better homes and create more jobs, rather than trying to deal with the crisis after hundreds of thousands of people have died and a million or so people have become homeless?

Absolutely. Haiti was one of two high-poverty countries we weren’t in that we wanted to be. The other was Yemen. We had sent assessment teams into both countries and we were looking for an opportunity to become engaged. It was about that same time when the earthquake hit. So we were fortunate in that we had already done some prep work. That’s why we were able to move in very quickly. And because the earthquake was so severe and so many NGOs that were already on the ground lost staff and offices, this may be the first time I can think of when not already having a presence in a country struck by a major disaster was not a bad thing.

But you’re exactly right. Disaster risk reduction is critically important, and we wish there were more donors that would fund us and others to go into vulnerable communities that we know are at risk, because there’s a lot you can do before a disaster.

Now that the earthquake has happened, this crisis may have created an opportunity for significant change in Haiti.

It does present some new opportunities to address the underlying causes of Haiti’s poverty and poor governance. If there’s anything redemptive to come out of the earthquake, it will be that. It can also shake up the community of aid actors. It’s not that anybody there was necessarily doing bad work, but a crisis can spawn new thinking. It can help create new ways to invest in the countryside, new economic opportunities, and new ways to engage citizens to make the Haitian government more accountable and less corrupt.

Aren’t the skills required to provide relief quickly to a devastated area very different from the skills required to help rebuild a country’s civil society?

Yes and no. Yes, there are some specific skills and resources required for relief. For example, you need warehouses with standing emergency relief supplies and well-developed logistical networks and capacity, and the ability to provide immediate emergency health care.

The reason I say no is that not every organization needs to develop those capacities to be effective in providing emergency relief. Almost from day one there are elements of relief, recovery, and long-term development. For example, there have been enough studies that suggest that the extent of the recovery of the local private sector will determine how successful and how rapid the whole recovery is. From the beginning you can purchase local food and help organize local businesspeople. Local businesses can often provide food more quickly than outside actors who ship in food. You can almost immediately start paying cash for work to those affected by the crisis. If you can get money into people’s hands, they don’t feel totally helpless and it helps maintain their dignity. The money also helps rebuild the local private sector.

Why are market-based solutions central to your approach?

Market-based solutions are a bit of a proxy for demand-driven solutions. It is a way to tailor your solutions to what people want that’s culturally appropriate and that makes sense from a local standpoint. That’s in contrast to a solution being created from the outside and then imposed on a community. It ties into another principle of ours, that those most affected by a crisis or a challenge are always the best agents of their own recovery and development.

When you look at microfinance intervention, health intervention, or many other types of interventions, the evidence is clear that if you don’t have community participation in the design and implementation, it’s not going to work as well. People are always the best agents of their own change. Even in the evaluation phase, whatever the impact indicators are, they’re not going to be as strong if you don’t have community engagement.

The tougher thing to measure, for Mercy Corps and for the whole relief and development community, is whether we really move the needle in countries where we operate. In the communities where we invest we can create change, but that’s a microcosm of the whole country. How can we evaluate the overall economic impact of our programs? Those are the hardest indicators, because you need to do the evaluation longitudinally, something we don’t always have the resources to accomplish.

Speaking of moving the needle, one thing I am struck by is the large number of countries where Mercy Corps operates, some of which—like China, India, Indonesia, and Pakistan—are among the largest in the world, representing close to 50 percent of the world’s population. If you want to have an impact on an entire country and not just on a small locality, shouldn’t you focus on fewer countries?

You sound like our board, Eric. Here is how we think about that. We want to be considered one of the leading international relief and development organizations in the world. To be in that group you need to have sufficient presence in Asia, Africa, and to a lesser degree South America. That translates to around 30-plus countries, but you don’t need to be in 80 or 90 countries as some of our colleague organizations are. To be invited to the forums and to be at the leadership table, you need to have a sufficient presence in those 30 or so countries.

The reason we’re in China and India, frankly, is that sometime in the next 10 years those two countries are going to be major players and we’re going to be raising resources in those countries. So we need to be there building credibility now, and the best way to build credibility is to help them with some of their own development challenges. I wouldn’t consider either country a fragile or failing state in the way that the Central African Republic, Somalia, Afghanistan, or any number of other countries where we work are.

Mercy Corps engages in a wide variety of local activities—from setting up vaccination programs to building soccer fields and running agricultural training centers. Is there anything that you won’t do? And with so many activities, how do you take the learning that occurs in one country and impart it throughout the organization?

Let me start by saying that we’re not going to go off and suddenly become a health organization. We think there are a lot of other organizations that do a great job in health, and we wouldn’t add any value by being yet another one.

Most of the things that we do can be grouped around emergency relief—things like water and sanitation and helping children with their psychosocial needs—or around building civil society—such as creating sports organizations and microfinance institutions—which is where most of our work occurs. If you look at our in-house technical capacity that is top-notch and contributes to best practices, you will find it in those two general areas.

As for learning, when you find an organization that is doing a great job of capturing lessons learned and disseminating them throughout the organization, please call me. Let me tell you about a few things that we are doing. We created an intranet within Mercy Corps that has various communities of practice, such as agricultural development. Within these communities we have online chats or Skype rooms where folks who are doing that type of work around the world can contribute.

We have a design, monitoring, and evaluation team that is trying to build the capacity within all of our field offices to do good program design. It is hard to do an evaluation if you didn’t get the design phase right, because you don’t have the baseline data. We also have a digital library that everyone has access to where we post every evaluation, examples of great and poor proposals, and other materials.

One thing we’ve done as well as any nonprofit is to invest in management. Compared to the for-profit world, the nonprofit world underestimates the importance of management and leadership. We have put our major leaders through programs that are sponsored with the Center for Creative Leadership. We’ve had partnerships with a couple of universities where we really tried to invest in training our national staff. If you don’t create strong managers and leaders, it’s really hard to build a culture of learning.

One of the things that sets Mercy Corps apart is that you talk openly about leaving countries that you are in. You even go so far as to say you plan to exit most countries after 10 years. Why do you do this?

About seven years ago we first began explicitly talking about this in our own orientation and learning materials. We did it for a couple of reasons. We wanted to signal clearly that we’re not one of these organizations that sees itself staying in a country forever. And we wanted to signal to our teams, and in particular our country leaders, that it’s important to begin thinking about an exit strategy almost from day one. What that does is get you focused early on issues like sustainability, capacity building, and leaving behind a legacy.

In most of the countries we are in, it’s hard to create significant changes in anything like three to four years, or even five to six years. So 10 years seemed to capture our belief that there are no fast fixes or quick exits. But it also signaled that we’re not going to be there forever.

Last year we exited Bosnia and left behind two strong institutions. One is a local NGO that carries on development work. We had a five-year plan to create this organization. It started with building a governance structure that ensured the whole team was Bosnian, and laid out mileposts to reach along the way to localization. Now it’s a strong organization that has relationships with its own government and raises money locally, and a top-notch team of local leaders.

We also left behind a microfinance institution that makes money as a bank and has received awards for best practices in microfinance. Those two organizations alone are not going to solve all the problems of Bosnia, but having national institutions that operate with good governance, and with well-trained, local, talented team members, is a worthy contribution.

We have also exited from the Philippines, Serbia, and a number of other countries over the last 10 to 12 years. During that time the total number of countries we operate in has stayed between 34 and 40. Some fall off and then a Haiti comes on.

When you leave behind a local NGO, do they maintain an affiliation with Mercy Corps?

We try to do that. If they want to stay in touch with the learning that’s going on in Mercy Corps, they can do that; we encourage that very strongly. We invite our legacy institutions to our gatherings so that they can come and feel like they are a part of the team. But they are completely independent organizations. We don’t have any say in their running or management.

Much of your organization’s work is about getting people to help themselves. Yet the name Mercy Corps sounds like a religious organization that provides charity to the poor. Why is that?

Three or four years ago we brought in [the advertising firm] Foote, Cone & Belding to help us with a rebranding exercise. We were wide open to changing our name. They went around the world and interviewed our staff, the people we work with, the communities we are involved in, and our donors. They concluded that we’ve built up enough cachet with our brand that it would be dangerous to tamper with it. We brought together our global leadership and presented those findings, and there was general consensus to keep the name. We worked hard to build our name, and we’re going to let our work reshape the brand.

With police pressing for a confirmation, the boy identified Bain as his attacker—a claim that would later trump defense testimony that Bain’s blood type ruled him out as the rapist. In August 1974, Bain, just 19, was sentenced to life in prison. And in prison Bain likely would have died. But in the spring of 2009, his case caught the attention of the Florida affiliate of the Innocence Network, an international collaboration of pro bono legal and investigative organizations dedicated to righting wrongful convictions.

The Innocence Project of Florida had no idea if Bain was innocent, says Seth Miller, its executive director. They believed only that he had the right to a test that would add certainty to the verdict. With the project’s attorneys behind him, Bain’s years-long quest for DNA testing was granted. In October 2009, a lab examined sperm from the victim’s underwear. By December, results were in. Bain was not the rapist. Thirty-five years of wrongful imprisonment were about to end, thanks to a test that took two months to process.

On Dec. 17, 2009, Bain walked out of court a free man with a singular title—the person who had served more prison time than anyone yet exonerated by DNA testing. Otherwise, Bain’s story was alarmingly common. Since the first DNA exoneration in 1989, more than 250 people convicted in the United States have been cleared by DNA tests, a number that has risen faster as technology has improved. In 2009 alone, there were 22 DNA-based exonerations. “People are sort of enamored with the Bain case,” Miller says. “But I don’t know that his case is remarkable in any other way other than the length of incarceration.”

AN ADAPTABLE MODEL

Exonerations like Bain’s have made the Innocence Network a media darling. Books, films, and TV shows have covered its dramatic work, making wrongful convictions one of the most talked-about criminal justice issues of our time. But less attention has been paid to the network’s organizational style, which has enabled it to grow rapidly and flexibly. Over the past decade, the Innocence Network has multiplied from eight projects to a collection of nearly 60 projects spanning three continents.

The Innocence Network stands out as one of the most successful examples of the affiliate model of nonprofit growth. Most nonprofits follow the branch model, which concentrates control at a central headquarters. The less popular affiliate model favors decentralization, uniting loosely bound groups under a common cause. Some network members are 501(c)(3) organizations. Some are located within public defenders offices or private law firms. Most are part of law schools. Some take only cases with DNA evidence; a few take only those without it. Most pursue cases through legal services, though a couple approach them as investigative journalists.

“This model allows each project to adapt its service delivery method to the resources and needs of each local community,” says Keith Findley, president of the network and a law professor at the University of Wisconsin.

The network’s affiliate approach is less the result of well-honed strategy than of happenstance in the organization’s earliest beginnings, Findley says. In 1992, Manhattan defense attorneys Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld founded the first Innocence Project at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, tapping into the energies of students eager to help at a law clinic focused on using science to free the convicted.

At the time, forensic DNA was still a fledgling idea. But the men saw its unparalleled power not only to undo injustice in individual cases, but also to expose systemic conviction problems. Their hunch was right. A year after the Innocence Project’s start, Kirk Bloodsworth, a Maryland man convicted of raping and murdering a 9-year-old girl, became the first death row inmate exonerated by DNA fingerprinting. DNA not only freed Bloodsworth, it later established the real murderer, a man Bloodsworth had come to know in prison.

As awareness of DNA’s power to expose wrongful convictions expanded, Scheck and Neufeld recognized they couldn’t take on cases across the country and began assisting others to form similar groups. In 2000, eight of the groups—including the Innocence Project in New York and two successful projects at Northwestern University—formed the Innocence Network, a collaboration of like-minded organizations that could lean on each other for assistance and know-how across professional and geographic lines.

Membership since then has exploded. The network celebrated its 10th anniversary in April with groups in practically every state along with Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. The growth has stemmed in part from Scheck and Neufeld’s Johnny Appleseed approach, in which they encouraged professors, public defenders, and students to get involved. Theresa Newman, a clinical professor of law at Duke University and former president of the network, says the North Carolina effort began after Scheck and Neufeld lectured before law students who then rallied professors to the cause.

In other instances, new laws and increasing demand for DNA testing practically forced the creation of a local Innocence Project. The Florida project that helped exonerate Bain, for example, started in 2003 with guidance from New York to handle an onslaught of petitions to meet a state-mandated deadline for post-conviction DNA testing. Still, network members are only loosely tied. It wasn’t until 2005 that the network created a board of directors, whose 18 members meet twice a year, mainly to discuss ongoing cases, review new members, and plan an annual conference, says Maddy deLone, executive director of the Innocence Project in New York. No group is legally bound to another.

Yet there’s no doubt the groups help each other. The network serves as a way to pool resources, connections, and expertise. Professors share lesson plans. Attorneys tracking down witnesses may ask for recommendations for investigators. And in crunch times, the network can offer backup support. Jeff Chinn, assistant director of the California Innocence Project in San Diego, recalls when Innocence Project New Orleans sent an emergency request for help meeting a filing deadline with the Louisiana Supreme Court. The California project relayed the call to two San Diego appellate lawyers, who jumped in. “I can’t imagine doing this work in the relative darkness of our home states without communication with each other,” says Newman.

Although collaborative, each network member is responsible for raising its own money. Law schools, with their institutional support and tradition of legal clinics, have made natural homes for Innocence Projects. But other models also have thrived. The New Orleans project, an unaffiliated nonprofit, has freed 15 prisoners, one of the best records in the network. Yet deLone says that starting such independent groups can be financially tough.

“If you can start a project at a law school with the support of the administration, you are halfway there,” she says. “If you are constantly raising your operating budget, it’s putting a burden on yourself before you open a letter from the first client.”

Ultimately, new applicants must satisfy the network’s board of directors that they have the necessary resources. If a university wants to start a project, for example, there has to be faculty support that will outlast the interest of any one group of students. New members also must reach agreements with existing projects in their region to determine how they will divvy up cases. Applicants receive provisional membership at first; then, after 18 months, the board can vote on a project’s permanent status.

A COLLECTIVE VOICE

The network’s board also puts its combined heft into filing “friend of the court” or amicus briefs, using a collective voice to ask judges to consider issues in a case’s background, such as the fallibility of confessions. Perhaps the network’s greatest impact has been to identify errors before they become courtroom evidence. Eyewitness identification, for example, is particularly problematic. Bain went to jail for three decades because of an eyewitness mistake. Bloodsworth almost died because of it. According to the Innocence Network, erroneous eyewitness identifications contributed to more than 75 percent of convictions later overturned by DNA evidence.

Led by the Innocence Project in New York, the network uses these data to push for reforms, such as blind administrations of police lineups, in which the officer in charge is unaware of the suspect’s identity and therefore can’t accidentally steer results. Since 2000, network members have helped convince legislators in New Jersey, Ohio, North Carolina, Maryland, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Georgia to implement changes in eyewitness policies.

As important, the network’s lobbying efforts—and its track record of success—have pushed states to pass laws granting access to post-conviction DNA testing. In 2000, only two states had such laws, according to Eric Ferrero, director of communications for the Innocence Project in New York. In 2010, 45 states and Washington, D.C., have such statutes.

The ideal, though, would be to go out of business one day, says Findley. But improvements in technology mean there will always be cases where DNA can be tested when once it couldn’t. There will always be cases where the defense didn’t think to look for DNA in trial. And there will always be mistakes that have nothing to do with DNA. “As much as we’d like to work ourselves out of a job and have a perfect system, it’s a human system and humans make mistakes,” Findley says. “Those mistakes will continue.”

Sam Scott is a San Francisco-based freelance journalist. He was formerly a reporter for the New York Times Regional Media Group. Jessie Speer is an attorney and freelance writer based in Tucson, Ariz.

The approach, which the authors developed from work done by Tufts University nutrition professor Marian Zeitlin in the 1980s—has roughly three steps. First, engage the people needing change in the process; they must take part in discovering answers to their problems to adopt changes. Second, identify “positive deviants”—people who seem to have succeeded compared with others, despite having the same resources. Finally, work with communities to pinpoint what the positive deviants do differently, and figure out how the whole community can adopt these successful practices.

The authors’ tour starts in rural Vietnam, where they explore how households there might use existing resources to feed their children more nutritionally. Then it’s on to Egypt, where they look for ways to change opinions and practices on female circumcision. Back in Pittsburgh, they examine how doctors and nurses working in hospitals might wash their hands more often. And all the while you feel like you’re sitting at a dinner table as three engaging people recount their round-the-world adventure and quest to improve the quality of life around them. The authors describe their locations wonderfully and keep their prose crisp and to the point.

I’m always happy, too, when advocates for a particular policy are realistic about its limitations, and these authors put forward two clear limitations: Positive deviance works only to change existing behaviors—not to introduce new technologies; and specific lessons learned in one place sometimes don’t work elsewhere.

By the end of the book I felt hopeful of positive deviance’s future success and glad that the authors reached thousands of people during their journey, possibly starting them on a trajectory of success. And yet I was left hungry for more. I wanted to stay at that dinner table even though the stories were over, and say, “We can take this to the masses and get more facilitators doing this only when you’ve shown that positive deviance truly works.”

The evidence the authors put forward typically consists of “here is where folks in our study were before” and “here is where they are afterward” (sometimes referred to as before-and-after studies). Other things are happening at the same time that can cause trends to occur, and the people who participate in programs often tend to be different: They are likely striving to succeed and searching for ways out of their problem. In social science, we call this a selection bias, and we are certain that it wreaks havoc on knowing whether the positive deviance approach worked, or if the individuals who participated would have experienced better outcomes anyhow—because of either their environment or their spirit to succeed.

To illustrate this evaluation challenge, let’s go to the opening story on nutrition in Vietnam. Some parents, just as poor as everyone else, were feeding their kids crabs and shrimp that they collected daily from rice paddies and added to the soup. These kids were not malnourished. And so the authors identified them as the positive deviants, others adopted their practices, and then lots more children escaped malnourishment. But this was part of a larger program, run by the same organization, in which parents and caretakers were also given tofu and eggs to feed their children. So what caused the reduction in malnourishment—the little shrimp and crabs that positive deviance told them to feed their children, or the free handouts of tofu and eggs?

In another story, the authors used positive deviance to help identify why some salespeople at a pharmaceutical company sold a lot of one particular drug while others didn’t. The authors tell us that a sign of positive deviance’s success was that sales increased on average for everyone. But three tidbits give me pause. First, the drug was upgraded, so perhaps sales increased in response to the upgrade. Second, even in the later time period, the positive deviants were still deviating. Maybe positive deviants kept some ideas to themselves or discovered new ones, or the mimicry didn’t work: Sometimes an apprentice can mimic but still doesn’t get it quite right. Last, we learn that the pharmaceutical company did not continue with the positive deviance approach, despite the before-and-after increase in sales. I had to wonder: Would the pharmaceutical company have been more likely to adopt this if it were faced with evidence more akin to randomized trials—what companies usually use to determine if something works or not?

I also wanted answers about how to truly identify the behavior that causes the positive deviation. This identification may not be simple in many settings, and in the book, it felt as if community members were being asked to conduct complicated econometric, analytical, or theoretical exercises that would establish causal relationships between behaviors and outcomes.

And last but not least: What will positive deviance cost if implemented on a large scale, such as an entire region or a country? How many failed attempts occurred (e.g., when no positive deviant behavior was identified or adopted) for each of the success stories we heard about? I want answers not because I’m an accountant or an economist, but because I want to support the ideas that are the most effective per dollar donated or invested.

Ultimately, I’d recommend that proponents of positive deviance apply a bit of positive deviance to positive deviance itself—a meta-study, so to speak. Is positive deviance the approach that works best, compared with other approaches? Setting up randomized evaluations and comparing positive deviance with other methods (or nothing at all) would help us know if positive deviance is indeed a positive deviant. With clear, concrete evidence, people hoping to solve social problems could listen, learn, and adopt positive deviance themselves. In which case this book can serve as a great starter kit, whetting their appetites and generating the enthusiasm for further exploration.

Dean Karlan is a professor of economics at Yale University and president and founder of Innovations for Poverty Action. His research focuses on design and evaluation of programs around the world, on topics including microcredit, microsavings, voting, charitable fundraising, health behavior modifi cation, behavioral economics, community-driven development, and microinsurance.

The usual answer would be that it’s the context of the organization that matters—if you know something about where a group is working, you have a good handle on whether or not it’s going to be successful. But Andrews, along with Marshall Ganz of Harvard University, who co-led the 2003 study, also sought to identify what organizations actually do to make a difference. They conducted extensive interviews and surveys of every group and chapter of the Sierra Club, gathering information about each one, the communities in which they are based, and the leaders directing them.

Good leadership at the local level had a more profound effect than any external factor. “How the leaders of civic associations organize themselves to carry out their work makes a big difference for their own experience and learning, for how well they’re able to engage the members of the organization, and for how visible the organization can be in the community,” says Andrews. What makes a civic association effective is not so much the resources and opportunities available to it, but the leader’s ability to make the most of those resources and opportunities.

One of the most important aspects of leadership development is interdependence, or how well leaders work as teams. “Some groups have a culture where the group is a clearinghouse for people to pursue their own interests or objectives, [and] go out and advocate on behalf of whatever their pet issue is,” says Andrews. Those groups miss the point. “Being able to come together and formulate some common plans is really crucial for getting the benefits of an organization” whose collective voice is much louder than that of any individual.

Leadership isn’t easy in a civic association, “where you can’t draw on paid incentives to get people to do things,” says Andrews. Groups of people with no reason to be there (except that they want to) have to come up with collective solutions to a wide range of problems. They have to work together, hold each other accountable, and sustain their commitment. But it pays off.

“The commitment to invest in developing leaders, to identifying them, nurturing, training them within the grassroots structure, was a monumental shift,” says Lisa Renstrom, former president of the Sierra Club. “I’m proud to say we’re still seeing results.”

Kenneth T. Andrews, Marshall Ganz, Matthew Baggetta, et al., “Leadership, Membership, and Voice: Civic Associations that Work,” American Journal of Sociology, 115, 2010.