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We work with innovative leaders of organizations and networks who are interested in pushing the frontier of practice and have high aspirations for maximizing their impact. That experience has taught us that leaders make progress most rapidly when they experiment boldly while recognizing and building on what others have done and are doing.
That means understanding best practice: building on the best of the past and present so that they don’t duplicate mistakes others have already made. It also means challenging old ways of working when they believe they can do better given the changing context for their work. We call this pioneering next practice.
The Institute works with our clients and partners to utilize best practice and invent next practice in three interrelated and sometimes overlapping ways: consulting, experimenting, and knowledge building. We learn from and with our clients and partners and then hope to serve a much larger number of leaders by making what we know widely available.
Consulting
We are prepared to deal with the characteristic strategic and structural issues our clients frequently bring us, and have specialized expertise in the areas most critical to helping the innovative leaders who are core to our mission. We have helped launch new foundations and worked with promising social entrepreneurs to take their organizations from the chaotic start-up stage to a mature phase of growth. We have helped a government international development agency figure out how to reinvent its model for very new times, and then written the business plan—not to scale the organization, but to spread the idea it had spawned and tested for many years. We have even worked on the strategy for a whole industry—the emerging arena of investing for impact. And much more. Like many strategic consultants, we have the capacity to do rigorous data collection and analysis. But unlike many consultants, we believe that finding answers isn’t enough. We also work closely with our clients on breaking down the barriers to implementation that exist in their organizations, their leadership teams, and their own leadership approach. There is no “typical” engagement for us; our work with clients can take place in a few weeks or months, or it can extend much longer. We design the work based on client need, not our own set engagement model. For a list of our clients, click here. Contact us for a more detailed introduction to our consulting services.
Experimenting
We identify high-priority opportunities and barriers to impact and then work with partners to launch experiments or entirely new initiatives that directly address critical challenges, and, in the process, prove new models. Several of these are highlighted below:
The Social Capitalist Awards program was launched with Fast Company magazine in 2003. We developed a rigorous framework and process for analyzing the effectiveness and impact of today’s leading social entrepreneurial organizations. These organizations were then highlighted on the pages of Fast Company . The Awards serve multiple objectives: (1) to contribute to the growth and quality of the social entrepreneurship movement in the United States; (2) to introduce a new population of business leaders to the principles of social entrepreneurship and the compelling results being achieved; and (3) to develop and hone, in a practical laboratory, an analytical approach to the comparative assessment of nonprofits. We are now exploring ways that the methodologies created for the Awards can be used to stimulate broader efforts to develop a more effective social capital marketplace.
The Philanthropy and Networks Exploration is a partnership with the Packard Foundation launched in early 2007 to understand how new and emerging strategies for using networks and social media might offer a source of decentralized creativity, knowledge, and action that the foundation can tap into. The initiative has focused on piloting new approaches and tools, ranging from wikis to social network analysis, that the foundation and its partners can use to catalyze, understand, and strengthen networks of people and organizations to better accomplish shared goals.
The Inclusive Business Accelerator is being designed and launched in partnership with SNV, the Netherlands Development Organization. This innovative, market-based effort is aimed at reducing poverty and inequity in the Andean region of Latin America. Similar in concept to an incubator, the Accelerator will work with a small cohort of mid-size, for-profit companies over a two-year period to achieve three primary objectives: (1) to meaningfully enhance the economic performance and stature of the participant companies; (2) to help the businesses integrate inclusive business practices—approaches that bring low-income communities into core business activities (as employees, suppliers, distributors, and/or consumers); and (3) to create a cadre of new leadership in the region that is focused on inclusive business practices and the welfare of the poor.
Knowledge Building
The Institute already has a track record for scanning, analyzing, and anticipating important external trends and shifts that are changing the context in which innovative social change leaders do their work. As our colleague Eamonn Kelly, CEO of Monitor GBN, puts it, “It has been obvious for more than a decade that we live in an age of change; today, it appears that we are also living through a change of age.” That’s why new ideas are particularly important today to leaders who want to enhance their impact. And it’s why we conduct original research and analysis that explores the changing landscape for public problem solving and examines promising new approaches and innovations in practice.The Institute also captures learning from across our consulting work and initiatives on social change, looking for patterns, for best practices that can be made explicit, for the emerging needs of innovative leaders, and for new ways of helping them.Whenever possible, we share what we learn by doing speeches and developing publicly available documents, articles, and books.
© Copyright 2008 Monitor Institute