The ideas and insights inspiring us

We stand on the shoulders of giants: we have benefited deeply from so much work before us and that continues to emerge. Below are a small selection of the ideas, approaches and experiences which have powerfully enriched our thinking.

Collective Leadership

Collective leadership emphasizes developing a critical mass of purpose-driven leaders with strong relationships, capacity to do collective work and the spaces, processes and culture to do so. Applying the collective leadership lens to the education, the Missing Piece provides a useful framework on leverage points in the education system to act on the system’s purpose (shifts in the goals, beliefs, and values orienting the system) or power (shifts in how power is shared and exercised across the system

Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation

The landmark approach to change at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government with a strong practice applying their thinking and tools, codified in their toolkit, with thousands of bureaucrats and a great review of the lessons and insights emerging from that practice.

Winning Together

Working in development, we are often taught to shirk politics but actually we must embrace political imperatives as a critical part of the motivation and impetus for change in government. Seminal work from Mushtaq Khan on political settlements and on the elite bargain by Stefan Dercon are important contributions in trying to marry politics and development, to operate in the world as it is not the world as we wish it to be. And Co-Impact calls this the winning coalition - an essential step in systems transformation.

Similar ideas permeate thinking around collective impact or impact networks. The idea of backbone leadership – working entirely in service of sustaining the collective – is a powerful reminder to dedicate resources – human and material – to things that matter.

Systems Orchestration

System orchestrators weave people together to mobilize collective change but are often undervalued. Similarly, systems convenors lead by knitting together informal authority, lived wisdom, and collaborative will, rather than by directive and help people reimagine themselves – tell a new story about themselves, but their roles are often unrecognized, and uncodified. The Convergence Foundation provide a comprehensive dive into the Indian system support landscape.

Pluralism

Powerful and practical tools on how to engage across difference in today’s polarized world from the Obama Foundation and an inspiring case for why we cannot afford not to do so.

The Bureaucracy

An evidenced and emotive case for an overhaul of management practices in public institutions to allow autonomy, cultivate feelings of competence, and create connection to peers and purpose. (The book is for sale but this interview provides an overview of the key insights. The Centre for Innovation and Public Purpose provides some interesting case studies of public agencies from around the world coming together around a mission to drive large scale change. This diagnostic of US state capability  is sharp, comprehensive and intuitive, describing pace problems and result problems – the outcomes being different than expected from the actions taken – which beset the US and many other bureaucracies.