Third in a series about investing strategically in generative networks.
In earlier blogs we described three conditions for a funder to decide to invest in a generative network approach:
- The funder’s goal is system change.
- The funder is simultaneously pursuing multiple challenging strategies for achieving system change.
- The system’s situation involves a great deal of uncertainty, and solutions are not known.
In this blog we focus on the second condition.
The funder is simultaneously pursuing multiple challenging strategies for achieving the system-change goal. When it comes to large-scale system change, funders’ strategies tend to fall into one or more of five strategy pathways.
Five Basic Strategy Pathways for Systems Change
| Strategy | Description |
| Enact Public Policies | Develop, advocate for, and implement new or revised government policies—laws, regulations, mandates, taxes and fees, appropriations, tax incentives, and more—that affect the behaviors of individuals and organizations. |
| Foster and Sustain Communities of Practice | Assemble and mobilize practitioners to develop innovations and best practices that improve the performance of their organizations and profession. |
| Promote Behavior-Changing Information | Support research and develop and distribute information that will lead people to change their behaviors or take certain preventative actions in certain situations. |
| Tap Markets | Develop and take to market products and services that enable people to undertake activities that promote a social goal. |
| Restructure Decision-Making Authority | Change in the public, private, or nonprofit sectors who is involved in decision making. (In many cases, this may involve public policy change.) |
Any one of these strategies can be quite complicated to design and implement and typically will play out over many years. Quite often more than one strategy will be used to achieve significant change in a system.
Not all funders engage in system-change with multiple strategies such as these, but when they do, investment will most likely benefit from access to and alignment of the novel capacities of a generative network.