Question: “A group of community partners has come together with the idea of working collectively but while we have a general agreement on direction, we are having a hard time narrowing down to a specific focus and goal for our effort. What advice would you have that would help us get into greater alignment on our goal / common agenda?”
Question: “Our goals are so broad, it feels challenging to move forward. How do we narrow our focus so that we can get to work?”
Answered by: Paul Schmitz, Senior Advisor, Collective Impact Forum, and CEO, Leading Inside Out
These questions are ones that my colleague Dominique Samari and I encounter often in our consulting with collective impact efforts. We see many groups who struggle because their common agenda is not built with clear population-level goals and measurable strategies that add up to achieve them.
The first question raises a concern we see often with groups who treat collective impact as the goal instead of seeing collective impact as the means to achieve a goal. People should not come together because they want to collaborate or do collective impact, but because there is a community problem they want to solve together using collective impact as the approach. You do collective impact because you want to, for example, increase grade level reading or affordable housing production or decrease infant mortality or teen depression.
So you begin by deciding what population-level goal or result you all are committed to change together, and convene the right set of people to help you work on that problem. I prefer the word “result” as it describes what you will accomplish versus a goal which is something you hope to accomplish.
A good community result for collective impact should be one that:
(a) you feel a sense of urgency about, that the present state and trend lines are unacceptable;
(b) you understand that doing more or better of what you are already doing will not be enough – this result will require new solutions and new work (everyone’s current best efforts is producing the result you have right now);
(c) can’t be accomplished by just one organization or government agency, but will require collaboration among many partners to make a difference;
(d) can be measured regularly at the population level to assess overall progress, and disaggregated so you can better target and coordinate work your work.
It is also important to note that once you are clear what result or results you are trying to achieve, you have to get the right people in the room who have the expertise, experience, and ability to align their efforts to move that result. We always say “You build the table around the strategies, not the strategies around the table.”
This brings me to the second question. I would first ask if the population-level goal you are pursuing meets the above criteria. It is also important that the strategies you are advancing together to achieve that result are sufficient to move that result and are measurable so you can manage and coordinate partners to achieve them.
For example, let’s say you are trying to increase grade level reading in your community from 60% to 80% which means moving 300 more kids each year to that result. In addition, there are 18 schools where fewer than 50% of children are reading at grade level. Your strategies would need to be sufficient to move at least 300 kids to that result. And you might specifically target strategies at many of those 18 schools (and with disaggregated data perhaps to certain other sub-populations within those schools or across the district who experience disparities). Too often, we see a mismatch between the scale of the result groups are trying to move and the scale of the strategies they are advancing to achieve it.
To prioritize strategic options for an initiative, we often ask:
- Which ones, relative to each other, would have the greatest impact on our result;
- Which ones, relative to each other, could we have the most influence on with our network influence and capacity;
- What metrics will we be able to regularly collect to assess progress (outcomes not just activities), manage, and coordinate partners to make sure we are making sufficient progress?
Establishing a clear result and building clear, sufficient, and measurable strategies will give your collective impact the focus it needs to align and coordinate partners effectively.
Related Resources to Explore
In our consulting practice, Dominique and I use an adapted version of Results-Based Accountability. This approach was initially offered in the book Trying Hard is Not Good Enough by Mark Friedman and has been promoted by his company, Clear Impact.
The Annie E. Casey Foundation has also been building this approach for more than 30 years through their Results Count initiative.
My article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, “The 10 Dangers of Collective Impact,” also speaks to the common danger of unclear strategies.
Dominique Samari and I wrote the report “Backbone Leadership is Different: The Skills and Mindset Shifts Needed for Collective Impact,” which emphasizes the importance of holding the result and strategies central.
