Finding balance: Maintaining momentum in an emergent strategy
Emergent strategy is one of the new buzzwords in philanthropy. Not surprisingly, emergent strategy is a lot easier to imagine than to support and implement.
When we talk about emergent strategy in philanthropy, often we’re talking about setting the conditions for an ecosystem of organizations and individuals with agency to act together, seek opportunities in complex environments, and learn from them in order to adapt. Just as often, we’re struggling with the practical reality of working emergently.
Fifteen years into designing, facilitating and learning alongside emergent strategies intended to effect systems change amid complexity, I have come to the conclusion that two things are inevitable:
- Emergent strategy is messy; and
- Emergent strategy generates conflict.
Neither are bad things. When we decide to solve a complex problem together, chances are we aren’t headed in a transformative direction if we resolve the mess quickly, figuring out where we’re going and how. And if we manage to do the work with little to no conflict, chances are we aren’t pushing boundaries, taking risks, and scaling or adapting the work in ways that will have significant impact.
Yet, even if messiness and conflict are inevitable and are good signs that the work is doing what it’s supposed to do, that doesn’t mean we want to get stuck in either one. Many emergent strategies seeking to change systems do exactly that — allow interpersonal and inter-organizational conflicts to triumph over the ability to drive change. And as that conflict is building, sometimes the participants double down on the need to find a clear goal, a clear outcome — the proof of agreement on where they are headed — and the emergent part of the strategy gets lost in the attempt to find harmony.
Leaning into Ambiguity and Conflict: Balancing Four Elements
How can we turn the ambiguity and conflict inherent in emergence into positive drivers of change, and avoid the habit of eliminating both to make the work more comfortable? One way is to be careful about where we focus our energy. Based on the many initiatives I’ve worked with, I’ve come to believe groups need to attend to four things in a balanced way over time in order to progress through messiness and conflict productively.
Untangle
That vision statement or problem definition that brought the group together is rarely enough to really understand the opportunity. Even early in a group process, most initiatives can benefit from untangling the problem and opportunity more fully. They can leverage the insights from participants at the table, but also can benefit from external knowledge being brought in.
Techniques like systems mapping, review of similar initiatives, influence mapping, storytelling, yarning and more can help untangle a problem. Futures approaches like Causal Layered Analysis, scenario mapping, and the Three Horizon’s framework can help make sense of the potential for change.
Regardless of the techniques being used, if the goal is to drive systems change, taking the time to understand the past, present, and future nature of the problems in the system, the ways the system is fragile to intervention, how the world is and may be changing, and discovering new ways to act can be invaluable.
Experiment
Even before the untangling has begun, and certainly while it’s underway, groups can begin experimenting. Experimentation can be as simple as finding small things to do together that are different from what has been done before.
Early on, experiments are often low stakes, quick to implement, quick to learn from, and relevant to the larger vision or direction of the group. They do not need to be planned with specific outcomes in mind, particularly early in the process, as sometimes the attention to defining outcomes can hang up newly forming groups that are learning to work emergently. As the work progresses, however, experiments tend to become more formally defined and attempted with specific desired outcomes in mind, even as they attend to emergent outcomes.
Learn
What’s the point of untangling and experimentation if the group isn’t engaging in learning? Even if outcomes are not articulated for experiments, you can learn from each experiment — what impact did they have on the system? The people in the system? The participating organizations? What did it take to implement it? What did we learn about what is possible and what excites us as a group? What does it tell us about the direction we might want to go (or not go) in the future?
As a group begins to implement experiments with greater scale, more risk, and greater reach, the learning may go further into exploring what is happening in the system, discovering hidden dynamics and unintended impacts, and finding new places to act.
Sometimes the learning also focuses inward, helping to explore group dynamics, discover the strengths of the group, identify gaps, and surface opportunities to act together in new ways.
Structure
Many groups start here — spending a great deal of time planning their structure. They fall into the habits of creating structures that are more like how you govern and manage an organization, instead of the looser structures that work well for collaborative, networked efforts and emergent stragies.
In emergent strategy, loose coupling can be more powerful at times than a heavy-handed model of leadership, decision-making, and governance. In fact, taking time to decide how you’re going to make decisions for the long haul can be counterproductive at the beginning if the initial decisions are relatively low stakes (e.g., low resource intensity, easily ended, reputational low risk, and unlikely to cause harm). It is likely that decision-makers will need to change as a direction begins to emerge over time and future decisions will require more formalized processes to be accepted by the organizations affected.
Allowing a looser process for decision-making earlier can free the group up to be experimental and have fun. Yes, I said “have fun.” This is hard work and getting people excited and maintaining excitement and momentum is critical. The commitment to setting up the best possible structure tends to kill that excitement pretty quickly. Yet, absent any attention to structure, it becomes evident that even the fun decisions are hard to make.
Most groups are familiar with these four elements, but often get stuck focusing on some of them for extended periods of time, which at best can lead to poor structures or poorly thought-out experiments, and at worse can lead to spinning wheels and burn out.
The Consequences of Being Out of Balance
I’m going to describe some scenarios that I’ve observed in action over the years — examples of imbalance and their consequences. For each, I’m thinking about specific initiatives (typically more than one!) who have gone down the same problematic road. Let’s explore what imbalance does to a group’s ability to drive change.
Deep work to Untangle, without concurrent Experimentation
This is one of the most common things I’ve seen with new initiatives. They deploy systems mapping processes that take 12 or 18 months and are sometimes deeply participatory, perhaps also with a foresight process and some storytelling, collection of secondary data about the system and its outcomes, and more. It feels meaningful to pull all this together.
Next, they spend a couple months afterwards coming up with a plan on how to act. But by the time all this happens, even if the description of the system and its needs is still true (after all, many systems only change quite slowly), what has shifted more quickly is the participants and their understanding. As they do this work, they develop new mindsets, new understandings, new perspectives, and new networks that influence them. Those beautiful, complete pictures of the system can feel like old news by the time a group is ready to experiment, which also means it can feel like wasted effort. And the experiments themselves will drift from what is written down about the system, making it harder and harder to use all that precise, detailed work to help with ongoing learning.
Attention to Untangling and Structure
Also very common is the habit of focusing on building governance while learning about the system, without any early action. Talk about a buzz kill! Attention to two things that take a great deal of time and energy, feel “processey,” and are rarely inspiring can keep a group from ever getting to action.
The structure we develop to focus on untangling is rarely a structure that helps us to experiment in ways that maintain an emergent approach. By jumping to the structure we need later in the initiative, we not only do work that we don’t need yet, we also trigger upfront conflict. Trying to decide who will have power over decisions before any high stakes decisions are being made is a good way to escalate power dynamics before the group has had time to build respect and trust through shared action.
Attention to Structure and Learning
I’ve worked with a few groups who engaged an evaluator (often a developmental evaluator) from day one and then worked for months on their governance structure. In these examples, the evaluator plays a role initially in helping engage in internally focused reflection and learning.
Absent something to work on together that is outside their governance process, the groups often struggle to develop a structure and experience the early conflicts described above. The risks feel bigger than they may really be once the work begins and the struggle for equality of power can become intense and frustrating.
Trying to engage in learning at this point ends up laser focusing attention on the conflicts as there is nothing to learn about except the people, process, and organizational dynamics. Very little about this type of learning feels rewarding or inspiring.
Attention to Experimentation and Learning
This sounds good! Rapid deployment of experiments with concurrent learning and adaptation in response to feedback is critical in any systems change effort!
Yet, without untangling the problem, over time the experiments may come to feel less and less rewarding as they aren’t driving toward systemic and significant change. We also tend to replicate our past approaches and areas of focus when we haven’t looked deeply at the system in new ways. This results in a sense of stagnation — why are we working on collaboration only to do what we’ve always done?
Additionally, lacking a functional structure at this point in the work, even if we begin to find places we want to scale, it may be very difficult to switch from this type of loose experimentation to more intentional, higher stakes experiments.
What about defining a clear vision? Does that belong at the beginning?
You may be wondering at this point where vision and goal setting fit into this description of these core elements. Even when we’re intentionally deploying an emergent strategy, we find ourselves wanting to build clarity from the beginning — what is this thing we’re doing together. Yet, I am going to make a bold suggestion: setting a clear vision, defining the boundaries of our work, and orienting together around them should not be a priority at the beginning of engaging in emergent strategies designed to influence systemic change.
Emergent strategy needs space to emerge. Sometimes in the process of structuring, a clear vision or goal naturally emerges. Often in the process of untangling, a set of defined changes emerge. Experimentation can surface mechanisms to drive change. A learning process can gradually surface the underlying theories of change and clarify the actual causal pathways in the system. Allowing this type of direction setting to emerge naturally over time frees groups to try things in new ways. Forcing a clearly defined vision early on can create similar dynamics to the challenges explored above, creating conflict in the attempt to eliminate ambiguity.
Now, the reality is that groups engaged in emergent strategy will always operate with a theory of why the actions they take matter, however loosely thought through (and often not articulated), and there may be value in taking time to surface the operating theories tied to various actions. But, trying to define THE theory of how these actions will drive systems change is often counterproductive during emergent strategies, as this takes away the emergent nature of the strategy and leaves the group back where they started: implementing the strategies they can think through at this time, based on their current knowledge and experience. Innovative, transformative work requires giving ourselves more time to emerge into a new level and type of understanding before we define how change happens.
Finding Balance
I’ve shared many examples of what does not work. Now let’s imagine a group that is in balance and allowing emergent strategy to unfold naturally:
Early in their process they agree to work collaboratively and allow any two partners to initiate an experiment together, without group consensus being needed (Structure, Experiment). They retain a learning partner with methods, systems thinking, and facilitation skills to help them learn from the experiments and untangle the larger problem and its systemic drivers (Learn, Untangle).
As they learn more about the problem, their experiments begin to align with specific drivers and become increasingly innovative. They also begin to see, as a group, some potential areas of focus where they feel positioned to make a significant difference. However, there is still some push/pull tension and even conflict about the focus. So before they try to resolve this tension, they decide to develop a more formal structure, setting in place a consensus decision-making process that requires organizational sign-off, not just the individuals in the room (Structure). They also dig in deep on two specific drivers to understand how they can act on them (Untangle). One of their early experiments is proving to have significant impact (Learn), so they make the decision to experiment next by expanding its scope and reach (Experiment).
At a pre-planned reflection moment, they look at their work and realize they are no longer implementing a fully emergent strategy. Rather, the goals for some aspects of their work are becoming increasingly clear and agreed upon, as are strategies they can deploy. By giving themselves permission to operate amid ambiguity and work through conflict, they have arrived at a place within the work where they are ready to focus and tackle complex, systemic work in a way they have never done before. At the same time, other parts of the work continue to feel very emergent, full of exciting uncertainty (Learn).
The group agrees to pursue both the more stable, defined work and the emergent work together, but splits out the governance and decision-making structure so that the needs of one do not limit the opportunities of the other (Structure).
This type of progress through an emergent strategy is not easy work and it does not (and should not) eliminate ambiguity and conflict. It can turn ambiguity and conflict from barriers to emergent strategy into productive elements of strategy when groups give themselves permission to remain emergent and balance their focus on structuring, learning, experimentation, and untangling.
