Wouldn’t it be nice if, just like magicians waving their wands, you could solve the world’s most intractable problems with the snap of your fingers? What if wishful thinking were all it took to turn a small pilot project into achieving your goals at scale a reality? Can you imagine if we could rid the world of all its evils with a few silver bullets?
Unfortunately, the real world is more complicated than that, and achieving big goals in complex systems certainly is. In his seminal book, The Reflective Practitioner, Donald Schön wrote about a “high, hard ground where practitioners can make effective use of research-based theory and technique” and a “swampy lowland where situations are confusing ‘messes’ incapable of technical solution.” Schön concludes that
“In the swamp are the problems of greatest human concern.”
Most of the world’s most vexing problems present incredibly difficult challenges to solve. But nonprofit organizations and philanthropies often deliberately choose to work in the “swampy lowland” on the “messy” problems precisely because they are of greatest human concern. Examples of these problems include trying to conserve vital ecosystems, halt global warming, combat poverty, overcome racial inequity, solve complex scientific questions, and reduce medical error.
Tackling the world’s most difficult problems does not lend itself to quick-fixes or wishful thinking. It takes clear analysis, effective organization and collaboration, hard work, perseverance, and adaptive management – what the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation refers to in one of its core values as a “disciplined approach.” And yes, it also requires a bit of luck.
As difficult as it is to accomplish our goals addressing messy problems in complex systems, it’s not impossible. There are some tangible actions we can take to increase our likelihood of success:
- Be clear on purpose.
- Apply systems thinking.
- Use pathways.
- Employ models.
- Think about scales.
- Tap into and generate evidence.
- Seek collective impact.
- Act under uncertainty.
- Adapt and learn.
Below, I elaborate on each of these actions.
Be clear on purpose
This may seem obvious, but the first and often underestimated step in determining the best way to achieve your goals is, well, to be clear about your goals! What is the situation you want to change or improve? What is the intended purpose of your work? Are you primarily concerned with conservation? Community health? Economic development? Building a community of practitioners or researchers? Do you have multiple goals? If you do, be prepared because it is often difficult to maximize success among two or more goals. Trade-offs are usually required. The clearer you can be about the purpose and goals of your work, the easier the rest of your planning journey will be.
Apply systems thinking
Once your purpose is clear, understanding the system within which you are working helps you figure out the best action to take. Systems thinking embraces the complexity of messy problems found in the swampy lowlands and provides a tool to help groups understand and even embrace the complexity. Consider the boundaries of the system, the specific issues you want to address, and the people with whom and for whom the work will be done. Also, identify the most important factors that directly or indirectly influence what you want to change in the system. These factors are what you will ultimately target when you decide what action to take. But not all factors are created equal; some provide more leverage than others to change the dynamics of the system, enabling you to achieve your goals.
Use pathways
Pathways lead you out of the swamp. Cause-and-effect pathways run through the system in which you work and describe how you think your planned actions will achieve the goals you’ve set out to accomplish. Pathways connecting actions to outcomes are sometimes referred to as theories of change. They are called “theories” precisely because they represent your best, most educated guess of how you think the intervention you have identified will ultimately produce the results you want, leading to the achievement of your goals. So, pathways help you articulate and test assumptions, not necessarily codify what is real. And because these are assumptions and not known facts, you will need to set up your monitoring to collect the data required to test your assumptions.
Develop models
The development of models in project and program design involves depicting your systems analysis and pathways in a clear and concise form, and in a language everyone involved can understand. Often, models are represented as diagrams. The challenge when developing models is to include what is important and resist the temptation to show that everything is connected to everything else in some form or fashion. Models captured in written or illustrated form are vital to creating a shared understanding among collaborators so that everyone is clear about purpose, issues to address in the system, required action, expected outcomes, and roles and responsibilities. I sometimes hear criticism that pathway models – especially those depicting theories of change – are too simple and linear, but, as George Box said, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” What Box means is that models cannot perfectly capture every variable, connection, or subtlety in a system or pathway, but they can help you make sense of the complexity in which you work. A good model helps focus on what is most important (without over-simplifying) to help make sound decisions.
Think about scales
Large, complex, messy problems often require impact on a grand scale. But there is often a misconception that to achieve something “at scale” you need to work at that scale. Sometimes working at the highest level you want to impact is appropriate, like the 1987 global ban on ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). But most often, achieving success at a grand scale requires building on smaller successes at smaller scales. It’s unlikely that there will be a global ban on combustion engines anytime soon, but changing consumer preferences, restricting market offerings, and enhancing local and state regulations can all scale-up from relatively small actions to larger ones, impacting carbon dioxide emissions worldwide. Pathways are important here too because they can illuminate how seemingly small interventions can lead to broader impact.
Tap into and generate evidence
Carl Sagan said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Yes, true, but even ordinary claims require evidence. When addressing complex and swampy problems at scale, we can ill-afford to make critical decisions based merely on beliefs or unsubstantiated conjecture. The risks are too high, and the consequences of failure are too great. All too often, we make choices about actions without the evidence that we are, in fact, making the right choices. We chose how to intervene because we feel it in our hearts that it will work, it worked somewhere else, or it makes logical sense. Many times, organizations use the same tool time and time again without concrete evidence that the tool is truly working, especially under varying conditions. In this case, paraphrasing Abraham Maslow, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The key is to articulate key assumptions, assemble the existing evidence needed to assess these assumptions, and then determine how best to act and what additional information you might need.
Seek collective impact
Some organizations may think that the key to success is hiring a single superstar to get a job done. But I can count on one hand the number of people I’ve known in my life who can simultaneously think about everything that needs to be considered – systems thinking, problem diagnosis, strategy selection, pathways, measurement – and keep it all straight and organized. All the rest of us mere mortals need to rely on others around us, our team and partners. Working effectively on messy problems in the swamp absolutely requires getting the right team in place. But forming the right team to manage a project or program is only one small piece of a much larger puzzle. Collective impact requires coalitions of actors – implementing organizations, donors, governments, and, most importantly, communities that will be most affected by the intervention – to be clear about common goals and pull in the same direction. Collective impact requires mutually reinforcing actions by everyone involved. Strategic philanthropies, for example, can play a vital role by using their convening power to bring to the table the right constellation of actors to agree on common goals and design an effective program, and they can provide the financial resources required to make the program happen.
Act under uncertainty
You can never have all the evidence that would provide a 100 percent guarantee that your actions will achieve what you want. Yet, there is no way to achieve your goals if you do not take action! As such, you must always take action in the face of uncertainty; the only real question is, how will you manage uncertainty? Use your evidence to fuel adaptive management and reduce uncertainty. Use existing information to retrospectively test your claims and monitoring data from your program to test your assumptions prospectively. All these inputs will help manage uncertainty and enable you to make more informed decisions. But remember, there is no substitute for good thinking and as Voltaire said, “The perfect is the enemy of the good,” so don’t wait for perfect information to act!
Adapt and learn
If evidence fuels adaptive management, adaptive management is the engine that drives learning and improvement. Systematic learning – and documenting and sharing what you learn – is essential for internal management and propelling collective action beyond your own program. In the face of messy, complex, and swampy problems whose consequences may be dire, we cannot afford unnecessary inefficiencies or fail to capture lessons and learn from them. We often learn much more from failures than from successes, so it is vital we don’t run from failure but embrace and understand it when it comes our way.
I recently co-authored a book on these issues with my friend and colleague, Nick Salafsky. Pathways to Success: Taking Conservation to Scale in Complex Systems is focused on biodiversity conservation and other environmental issues, but we intentionally wrote the book so that the principles and approaches we describe apply to just about any other field that attempts to tackle big, messy problems.
So, as much as we would like magic to work and for there to be major shortcuts to how we tackle major challenges, it’s just not how reality works. In the foreword that Aileen Lee, head of the Moore Foundation’s Environmental Conservation Program, wrote for our book, she eloquently sums up the challenge:
[Pathways to Success] pushes us to take a hard look at the silver-bullet, leap of faith thinking that often stands in for the hard work of testing our theories of change about how interventions link to outcomes, and how that plays out as you move across different scales in the systems we are trying to navigate. Pathways reminds us that driving systems change isn’t about finding the magical start button in an elaborate Rube-Goldberg machine. Rather, it’s about taking the time to lay out our assumptions about how the system works and how it should respond, and then being methodical about learning and adapting based on the evidence of what actually transpires. Only in this way can we deliver conservation solutions at the scale required to shift complex systems.
Where Aileen talks about “conservation,” we can substitute any number of other areas of work that involve working in messy arenas. If we do, I think you would agree her words apply equally to many other fields as well.
May you find your own pathways to success!
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