The Institute team possesses a deep grounding in the basics of strategy, organizations, networks, and social change approaches, as well as in the fundamentals of effective consulting, project management, facilitation, and intervention. But we have come to understand that this essential know-how is necessary but not sufficient for pursuing our mission of helping innovative leaders develop and achieve sustainable solutions to significant social and environmental challenges. We also need to be able to help leaders master a range of new competencies and strategies that will allow them to adapt to and succeed in the emerging realities of tomorrow’s social change landscape. 

Since 2000, through our own work and Monitor’s close partnership with New Profit Inc., we have had the privilege of sitting at the intersection of the dynamic forces shaping the future of social change:

• the rising generation of social entrepreneurs, new philanthropists, and social investors in the United States and around the world committed to having an impact in their lifetimes;
• the new determination of important social movements battling for the rights of people and the survival of the planet; and
• the new and emerging technologies that will soon change as many rules of the game for the social sector as they already have for business.

This experience has helped us understand how the terrain for leadership is shifting, and we have published and spoken widely about many of the changes that may be coming down the road. We are often called upon for our expertise in helping leaders understand the shifting context for their work.

Our positioning has also allowed us to develop distinctive expertise in helping innovative leaders respond to these changes. We are supplementing the conventional organizational consulting toolkit with new knowledge and tools in a set of cross-cutting areas that are fashioned to meet the needs of innovative leaders. We believe that these areas constitute a “new literacy of social change.” The elements of this new literacy are still being discovered, but our work to date has focused on several key areas: Scaling & Growth, Network Effectiveness, Market-Based Solutions, Social Innovation, and Impact Assessment.

 

Scaling & Growth
Through our consulting experience, our partnership with New Profit Inc., and our collaboration with Fast Company magazine (conducting due diligence and managing a selection process for the Social Capitalist Awards), we have developed intimate knowledge of numerous leading nonprofits that are determined to increase the scale of their impact by growing their organizational capacity and the number of people they serve. Together with New Profit, we are developing a suite of tools and approaches to help organizations navigate the predictable challenges of various stages of growth.

Over the past year, Monitor Institute has also conducted an in-depth study of a diverse array of examples, models, and experiments on scale and scaling. Our evolving toolkit draws on this research, presents illustrative cases, and provides a methodology for asking and answering the following questions with clients and partners: What are we trying to scale? What is the real potential for scale? What are the best models for scale in this case? What is needed to make the model(s) successful? How do we assess and improve impact at scale?

Many of our clients and partners are also coming to the realization that the concept of scale can go beyond what a single organization is able to achieve by growing its individual impact. In order to pursue sustainable solutions to today’s most challenging social and environmental problems, we will need to consider the scale of the problem rather than the scale of the organization. Appropriately scaled solutions will often come from networks of organizations and individuals, working in concert. We have therefore conducted an extensive review of historical and current efforts to build cooperative strategies for networks and groups of organizations, and are engaging in select experiments that move beyond proving small-scale models to developing larger solutions that are truly matched to the scale of the problem or issue.

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Network Effectiveness
New strategies and tools for working through networks—collections of people and/or organizations connected to each other through purposeful relationships—are creating exciting opportunities for breakthroughs in the way we produce social change. New technologies and social media tools are engendering networked ways of behaving that are characterized by principles of openness, transparency, decentralized decision-making, and distributed action. The approaches are already demonstrating tremendous potential for increasing social impact.

Over the past two years, Monitor Institute has been working in partnership with the David and Lucile Packard Foundation to explore the implications of network-centric strategies and tools for philanthropy. In addition to helping funders understand the potential for using and supporting networks, we have been piloting efforts to test networked approaches—from wikis designed for open and collaborative strategy development to social network maps that help like-minded individuals visualize and weave more powerful networks focused on shared goals. Drawing from these activities, we are developing a suite of services and interactive tools to help leaders build their capacity to develop, diagnose, support, and strengthen networks in order to increase their social impact. For more information about our work on network effectiveness, see our report, Working Wikily 2.0: Social Change with a Network Mindset, or visit our blog, www.workingwikily.com to check out other network-related resources.

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Market-Based Solutions
Much of the work of social change and the social sector in the past has been designed to deal with market failures—with large social needs that businesses create, cannot solve, or cannot make money solving. Given the size and complexity of many of today’s challenges—from climate change to new diseases to the need for clean water for billions of people who don’t have it—there is growing interest in how markets and businesses may be part of the solution.

Monitor and the Institute share this enthusiasm and have a growing portfolio of projects in this area. The Monitor Inclusive Markets practice in India, for example, is leading one of the most in-depth studies ever conducted of new, for-profit business models for solving enduring social problems, such as providing low-cost, high-quality education and finding effective ways of engaging the poor in job markets, and is now piloting efforts to use market-based approaches to develop affordable housing for slum dwellers in India. The Institute has also partnered with the Rockefeller Foundation, financial institutions, individual investors, and other funders to catalyze the development of the impact investing industry, which is rapidly becoming a complement to traditional philanthropic approaches to creating impact. (To learn more about this work, see our report, Investing for Social and Environmental Impact.) And we are working to accelerate the development of inclusive businesses—companies that integrate low-income communities into their core strategies, as suppliers, employees, distributors, and consumers—in Latin America.

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Social Innovation
As the pace of change in and around the social sector accelerates, there is a very real danger that by just continuing to do philanthropy and social activism the way we do them today, our efforts will no longer match the emerging realities of tomorrow. There is a need to identify and pioneer innovations in practice that will fit the challenges and opportunities of the future.

But the inspirational flashes of creativity that we typically associate with innovation are unpredictable and often difficult for an organization to manage. A growing body of literature and practice from the corporate and public sectors now suggests that innovation does not have to be such a mysterious and uncontrollable force. It can be a rational management process with its own distinct set of processes, practices, and tools. And by becoming more systematic about innovation—using well-managed and repeatable processes—funders and activists can yield more productive, scalable, and sustainable ideas over time.

In collaboration with our partners at Doblin, a world-class innovation strategy firm, and Clohesy Consulting, the Monitor Institute has begun to translate corporate innovation processes to fit the work of funders and activists and to explore the potential for developing more-effective innovation systems for the social sector. To learn more about some of the Institute's work on social innovation, see our report, Intentional Innovation.

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Impact Assessment
Much energy and many resources are expended each year on program evaluation for social change efforts of all types. But the field of evaluation is rife with conflict (between academics and business thinkers, and among loud proponents of one methodology or model over another) and limitations (such as the challenge of demonstrating causality in complex systems). Evaluation reports are rarely shared and are almost never rolled up into a system-wide picture of what is being attempted and achieved by all of the various funders and actors. As a result, our view of what works is fragmented, and very little real learning takes place at the level of the system. In the face of these challenges, many have thrown up their hands, feeling paralyzed by the difficulties and missed opportunities for learning.

A breakthrough in perspective is desperately needed. Monitor Institute is committed to helping innovative leaders de-mystify the work of assessing impact and to changing the frame from a methodological debate to a conversation about what is important to know that would improve results. Over the last year, for example, the Institute has worked with the Hawai’i Community Foundation to develop a “Field-Level Scorecard” that helps a network of youth development grantees collectively select meaningful indicators, track trends against those indicators over time, and see—clearly and unequivocally—whether the needle is moving on their issue.

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