Passing in the dark, 2024 (Jewlya Lynn and Julia Coffman) – Alan’s highlights

While the need for philanthropy to focus on systems change as a way to scale and sustain impact is now widely accepted, we see the sector largely failing to recognize that there are different mental models for how to change systems. Sometimes the approaches foundations use are based on competing mental models or models that are not a good fit for the systems, problems, strategies, or practices they are using.

We see two mental models for systems change being used in philanthropy: systems dynamics and systems emergence. Strategies that use the systems-dynamics mental model aim at points of high leverage in a system and predict the kinds of changes that will occur. Strategies that use the systems-emergence mental model look for parts of the system that are under-resourced and experiment with ways to disrupt or reinforce them.

Our mental models have implications for our effectiveness. We need to be aware of which models we are using and why, and to build our capacity to match our strategy, grantmaking, and evaluation approaches to the nature of the systems we are working in, the size of the problems we are addressing, and the systems holding them in place.

This article explores these two mental models, provides examples of foundation strategies that use each, and offers tools for aligning mental models with philanthropic practice.

Some foundations are adopting one-size-fits-all approaches to systems change without first understanding the systems in which they are working and without making explicit the mental models they are using. As a result, foundation staff, consultants, and those working in systems can approach change in counterproductive ways.

We need to make our mental models visible so that we can address conflicts in our thinking and align our tools, organizational requirements, and ways of working with mental models so that we do not undermine the possibility of our desired changes.

While the two mental models may describe the features of systems in similar ways, their respective approaches to how and why systems change differ significantly.

The sections that follow: • Identify elements of systems change that are in common across the models. • Describe each mental model in more detail, including their differences and implications for philanthropic practices. • Pose questions to help reveal the mental models being used in systems-change work. • Offer an example of when philanthropic practices are mismatched across two models. • Offer two examples, one for each model, of when philanthropic practices are aligned.

The Systems-Emergence Mental Model – taking a holistic view of a system and not trying to parse or simplify it

acknowledging the need for adaptability and the self-organizing nature of systems; • recognizing that there are many systems and that they interact, not trying to bind thinking to a specific or very visible system, or to tightly define a system’s boundaries; • pattern finding, seeing the past, present, and future as deeply connected; and • bringing decision-making about the system to the community — that is, localizing change (Common Ground, 2022; Goodchild, 2022; McIntyre et al., 2023).