CI Guiding Principles

A dynamic, growing set of ideas that seem to indicate really effective Collective Impact work.  Based on experience and not yet comprehensive but worthy nonetheless.

Know Thyself

Honesty in the Best Policy

No, really.  You think you're ready for collective impact?  You're already in it and things are tough?  Check your Honesty Policy.  Communication is the beating heart of collective impact.  Having "tough conversations" about every facet of collaboration may be the greatest hallmark of doing CI work right.  Committing to compassionate honesty, both inward facing and among peers, will be the only way to find true change in your systems and meeting of your goal.  Without honesty, words become useless currency.

Check Your Biases, Always

Everybody comes to a collective impact project with a perspective, a lens, that aids them in making sense of the everyday.  People do this, organizations do this, programs do this, communities do this, leaders do this.  Everyone.  That lens is packed full of a slurry of observed and real learnings, assumptions, and biases about priorities, values, and "the way the world works."  In order to establish a shared, collective vision, those biases must be known up front.  This doesn't mean they have to change overnight or are bad or wrong.  It does mean you have to know what they are.  Here are some questions to consider in checking biases honestly:

• Do I have a "chip on my shoulder" about certain people, groups, programs, organizations?
• Do I know all sides to a story when I make decisions or assumptions?
• Do I operate on sweeping generalizations easily ("Women can't drive, Men are strong.)?  How does this way of action limit my ability to see what's real?
• Am I emotionally caught up in a past or present situation that is clouding my ability to see and hear the full story?
• Do I have an agenda in pursuing this?  What is my true purpose for being here?
• How are my feelings about past or present experiences directing my decision-making?
• Am I excluding people or a person from something because I "know how they'll act" when they get there?  Do I really know that?

This list could go on for days.  You get the point.  Know your story, as much of it as you can, before you show up and try to change someone else's.

Listen and Hear

If you're not catching the theme of "good communication" let me continue to elaborate.  Because CI work is so relational, the way we interact always matters.  If you need to check your biases, the best way to do it is to hear what other people have to say: what are their experiences that lead them to this place? How has life been for them?  What do they grapple with regularly? Where are the places I may experience something similar? Different?

The real key here, though, is truly hearing.  I've found that very often people are more than eager to listen.  "Let's do a focus group," they'll say, and bask in the joy of planning the focus group. Don't get me started on focus groups.  But they treat the activity as the end; they gather the stories but don't hear what people are saying and not saying.  They miss the meaning of the message.  They're on to the next thing.  Really hearing people means to listen for the story but to then fill in the context outside of that story and how it means something.  How do you play a role in that story that you should or should not? 

One of the most critical things here, very hard for many of the white people I know is to take people at their word without judgement.  If someone is telling a story of challenge and they indicate three things that are challenging, the worst thing we can do is invalidate that because "they should know better," or "they did it to themself," and then move on.  It may be surprising to know that the most invalidation they heap is on other white people.  Hearing is taking people at their word and trusting their version of their experience and finding meaning in it.  Nothing less and nothing more.

Not About Them Without Them

Good gracious.  This is SO IMPORTANT if your CI initiative goal is focused on equity or "righting the ship" in any way (and chances are, it is).  The whole reason we're in this inequity/inequality mess in the first place is that powerful people in one group decided something terrible about life for the less powerful people and then said, "go."  If we repeat that cycle in trying to fix things, we perpetuate the exact power differential we seek to undo.  No one should be making decisions about things for others within the context of social change.  We always talk about leveraging resources.  That means, those with power are consenting to use that power to re-set the power structures that govern life for people.  So do that.  And don't fool yourself into thinking your intention is enough to justify excluding everyone from being involved in that solution process.

This goes out to the people with power and privilege*: I have yet to meet a person not able to speak for themselves, especially when they meet life-threatening challenges for themselves and their families.  Bring them on board, treat them as equals, surrender some of that privilege and power to them and see what they do.  It'll probably knock your socks off. No need to decide for them.

*If you don't know if you're in this category, return to the "know your biases" section.  Also, you are 99% likely to be in this category if you're asking yourself this question honestly.

Embrace Your Role

Raise your hand if you hated group projects in the 9th grade?  Conclusion: that's everybody, unless you were the kid who, like a boss, just watched everyone else do the work and you got credit for it.  Congrats to you, Future CEOs of America.  The rest of us hated them why? Because in the 9th grade, executive functioning skills aren't fully realized yet: we had no sense of how to delegate efficiently nor know our roles.  Most adults still cannot do this.  It mostly goes back to being honest with yourself about the strengths and weaknesses you bring as a package to any work.

CI puts this under a much more intense, complex microscope.  Now you're bringing yourself, you're multiple hats, your organization and staff to the table--an even more important reminder to know your role. Are you the facilitator here or the participant? Are you the resource to be leveraged or the leverager?  What can you offer to the question at hand?  What's the greatest gift you bring to this discussion? This decision? What gap is popping up here that I might be able to fill in way I'm not thinking about now?

The reality is, CI work often feels like trying to get in to a double-dutch jump roping turn.  You're in, you're out, you're almost in, you missed it, wait for it to come back around, I'm going now, NOW.  It feels like that all the time.  Plan your entrances and exits well and everyone will benefit.  Also consider whether you should be jumping the rope or turning the rope or watching experts at both really do their thing.

From another angle, embracing your role is ultimately showing respect to the experts who can accomplish something with skill, grace, and impact and taking your turn when you're the expert everyone needs.

Continuously Improve

I am a lifelong athlete, a culture that I'm sure has influenced me in this regard.  The truth I've learned is that everyone benefits when we decide to commit to being continuously better.  There's no doubt.  Now, what that means for each individual varies and that scale and pace is the individual's to own.  Continuous improvement takes different forms: increasing awareness, increasing education, increasing efficiency, increasing impact are all very different ways we can be better but the fact remains that increasing all of these requires us to look and what we're doing and change.

Logic dictates that if we want to be better than we are today we have to do something different: we have to buckle down, double-down, redirect, reinvigorate, redesign...something.  Data is essential to this process for a couple reasons.  First, it tells us if staying our course will head us to our goal.  If we've found the answer and we just need to commit to it long term, then by god, make the adjustments necessary to buckle down and do it.  If, however, data indicates our current path is off course then, second, we need a redirect, re-design, re-solution (see what I did there? That's a real thing...).  Nothing excited me more than using reliable, valid data to discover what we could be doing better.  There's so much promise in that process.  Commit to it and things will start to change.

Don't and you'll have to ask yourself, "What are we doing here?"

Strive for Better (Off).

I often find that if we run into a hurdle around "continuously improve," we have to back the truck up because we've missed something important along the way.  If we aim to continuously improve, we're in the land of process--how do we get better.  But if we're shying away from that, we have to ask ourselves about our corresponding value--Strive for Better.  This is a value that indicates a desire for equity.  Sure, we could bastardize it and say it's a version of "the rich get richer" but that's not a collective goal (except for the rich and, as I live and breathe, that's not everyone).  No, striving for better includes everyone and if we, as individuals and organizations, halt at that or put in qualifiers like, but not limited to: "as long as I don't have to change my everyday," "as long as I don't have to give something up," and "but I'm doing fine," then we've got a big value problem.  It's not wrong to not want that (no judgement) but it will torpedo collective efforts to make systems'-wide changes.  Everyone has to agree that better is something we all want to be both for improvement but also for conditions that are just generally better for all.  What does that look like?  That's the glorious work of your collaborative to decide.  But absolutely everyone has to be on board with this idea or things are going to get very difficult very quickly.  Your entire collaborative will be on tenuous ground without agreement here.

Don't Hide Behind Metrics

Every job title I've ever had, save one, involve the word "measurement" and I'll give you a little tidbit of gold I've learned from over a decade in the field: "Metrics" can be a buzzy-buzz word for "it looks like we're doing something."  I can't say how far it goes back but for at least 10 years, philanthropy has driven the idea of "impact" into the collective consciousness of anyone trying to get funding, and with "impact" comes metrics.

Now, I love the idea of linear progress as much as the next person and I also like the move away from stating that things are great as evidence of programmatic effectiveness.  That said, the demand for metrics has created the latent effect of making all parties really good at talking around real, honest metrics.  Let's not even speak the word "progress" right now.  A huge consequence of making a demand for "real" data without providing the know-how or resources toward developing that is that we have a lot of really shitty data masquerading as reality.  We spend 85% of our time "developing metrics" and why? So we can pacify the funders because god knows we're not using that data, nor should we because it's...problematic.  So we spend a lot of time worrying about something that's mostly a fool's errand.  Let's stop doing that.

I find nothing more infuriating than programs or organizations (or individuals, frankly...everyone) bringing questionably sourced "data," sliced and diced to culinary perfection that shows how awesome they are.  This. is. lying.  We have a better use of our time:

Let's build better data so that we can all play on the same field, for better or for worse.  Then we won't have to hide behind "goals" that are bizarrely lofty for the amount of resources we have to put toward them or talking about "process metrics" until we're blue in the face.  Let's agree to build better data.  Then we can start using metrics instead of hiding behind our language around them and pretending that's something real.

Race Matters