6-6+Draft+Working+with+a+Network+Mindset

=WORKING WITH A NETWORK MINDSET= To catalyze networks for good, funders themselves need to work with a network mindset—a stance toward leadership that prioritizes openness, transparency, relationship building and distributed decision-making. According to Tom Kelly of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, “This is the way the world is working. Grantmakers are no longer on a mountaintop. If you don’t adopt a network mindset as a grantmaker, you are not going to have the impact you intend.”

Working with a network mindset means operating with an awareness of the webs of relationships you are embedded in, and listening to, engaging with and cultivating these networks to achieve the impact you care about. The Community Foundation for Monterey County (CFMC) is doing this by a strategic focus on “convening diverse interests around issues of common concern.” They’re coordinating a network of providers and funders focused on adult literacy issues, they’ve helped government, nonprofit and school leaders working on youth development better align their efforts, they’re building relationships among leaders at the neighborhood level– to name just a few of the efforts to weave network connections. Throughout they’re applying insights from social network theory to build capacity for social change county-wide. As former CFMC senior program officer Jeff Bryant explained, “[understanding networks] gave us a new vocabulary—a new way of articulating and being intentional about what we’d already been doing for years.”

Working with a network mindset also means finding where the conversations are happening and taking part, rather than one-way broadcasting. It means exercising leadership through active participation and pushing power to the edges. For example, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) is listening to, actively participating in and sparking field-wide conversations about health and health care. RWJF, established in 1972, has developed a trusted reputation for rigor and accuracy. Now they’re experimenting with a different way of working that reflects the changing environment for social change and challenges established norms. They’re intentionally embracing “Web 2.0 principles:” working in ways that are more collaborative and participatory, faster moving, distributed, open and transparent. In practice, this means staff are engaging in open online conversations and they’re experimenting with new strategies for achieving impact by stimulating distributed activity, as in the case of PreventObesity.net.

Last, by not least, it means acting transparently by sharing what you’re doing and learning along the way, not just in a final report packaged for public consumption. The Organizational Effectiveness team at the Packard Foundation is experimenting with being transparent about what they’re learning and doing through their “see through filing cabinet”—a wiki where they’re sharing resources and learning, like helpful capacity building tools and articles, insights from across their grantmaking and research in progress. Now, a year into the experiment, they’re finding that transparency holds them to a “higher-level of accountability, quality, learning and vulnerability.” And, through the simple goal of working transparently they’re opening up to new inputs and starting to more actively seek engagement.

Why working with a network mindset is tough and critical?
Can funders afford not to work with a network mindset? One in ten people in the world is on Facebook. Top headlines are now breaking on Twitter well before official announcements from a trusted authority. Tapping into network connections is becoming the norm for social change makers, whether they’re coordinating a protest to fight climate change or spreading an approach to community engagement, as Kaboom! has done with their freely available DIY toolkit for playground builds. For funders, working with a network mindset is a prerequisite to remaining relevant in world of fast moving information, ideas and complex persistent problems.

Of course, working transparently and sharing leadership isn’t always easy. Basic grantmaking structures and mechanics, like siloed program areas and static application requirements, inhibit working with a network mindset. Plus there are many open questions about how working with a network mindset will interface with the current way of doing business. Here are a few common concerns:


 * There’s not enough time. I’m dealing with information overload already. My in-box is overloaded. I have a backlog of requests from current and potential grantees. How could I possibly make the time to make connections for the sake of making the connections?
 * Compliance with my foundation’s communications protocol. We have a clear set of guidelines for how to talk about the foundation’s work and set expectations. I need to work within these guidelines and I genuinely don’t want to send mixed messages to grantees. Clear communications is something we pride at our foundation.
 * Privacy. I pride myself on trusted relationships with grantees and leaders in my field. I don’t want to violate confidentiality by getting caught up in the transparency fad.
 * Misuse of information. What if information openly shared by the foundation is misused? Will it reflect negatively on foundation’s reputation and my own professional image?”
 * Concerns about accurate and quality outcomes. What if the “crowd” doesn’t get it right? Because I openly posed a question, do I have to act on the responses?
 * Accountability. If leadership is distributed, what if no one steps up to own the results? Aggregating the input and talent of lots people seems like a sensible path to scale – in theory. But how do you know the work is getting done and the results are what we want?

Questions and concerns such as these don’t have straightforward answers. In many cases, institutional norms based on a “hub and spoke” model with the funder at the center controlling relationships, information flows and decision-making will have to unlearned in favor of more open and distributed ways of working. Uncertainty and ambiguity will need to be embraced in favor of experimentation and a “learn by doing approach.”

Making this shift will require a change in perception and trying out an alternate “network lens” for understanding how people and organizations relate, how funders can make a difference and how change happens.

It’s our natural tendency as humans to project what we already know onto what we’re trying to understand. When we talk about “networks” and “working with a network mindset” in a social change and capacity building context, we typically apply today’s dominant frame: organizations. As Roberto Cremonini, who pioneered network grantmaking at the Barr Foundation said, it’s reminiscent of the early images of flying machines at the turn of century. They all looked like ships held aloft by balloons.



Although people have been doing work, learning together, spreading ideas and influence, and coordinating large-scale action through networks for centuries, if not millennia, our default is to understand networks through an organizational lens. It’s time to create a new dominant frame—one which reflects network dynamics and allows us to see novel possibilities that break away from our prior experience and mental models, like airplanes with propellers and wings must have seemed to people at the turn of the twentieth century.

For funders, this many not mean dramatic change to grantmaking operations. Sure, there will be opportunity to try out new and transformative things, liking creating flying machines. But it’s mostly about applying a new mindset and set of assumptions that prioritizes relationships and embraces the complexity of networks and the systems in which they’re embedded to how grants are structured, impact is assessed and leadership is exercised.

In most cases, working with a network mindset in its extreme won’t be the answer, nor will holding onto organization-centric practices that favor centralized control be suitable in its entirety. What will be needed is an artful blending of the old and the new. The chart below outlines opportunities to experiment with shifting from a traditional “organizational mindset” to a “network mindset.” We’ve described the extremes and there are a range of possibilities in between. The art is in figuring what’s appropriate for your situation and challenging yourself to experiment with the “network mindset” end of the spectrum.



How to get started working with a network mindset?
While we don’t know all the answers to how to work with a network mindset, and artfully strike the balance between when to hold on and when to distribute ownership and control, progress can be made by trying out new practices. As the saying goes, “We need to act our way into a new way of thinking.”

Some basic common language and understanding is helpful to have within an organization or a group trying to work with a network mindset, but don’t let the semantics overshadow the practice. Focus less on making the case and creating the playbook, and more on doing it so individuals can co-create their own guides and make the case for themselves and their peers through personal experience.

To get started working with a network mindset, take the following two steps.

__Create environments that invite and celebrate working with a network mindset__ Model the change you’d like to see. At Robert Wood Johnson, top management, starting with the CEO, are tweeting and commenting on blogs; they’re modeling a ‘Web 2.0’ approach to exercising leadership, and as of spring 2011 about 80 percent of staff had a social media presence.


 * Connect what is new with what people are already doing. Working with a network mindset often means applying a new lens to existing practices. Recognize and celebrate the ways in which people are already weaving network connections, acting transparently and sharing leadership in their work.
 * Encourage foundation-wide experimentation and risk-taking. For most grantmakers, there’s no line in their job description that reads ‘work with a network mindset.’ Behavior change is rarely a formal responsibility. Plus, network work is typically considered the domain of the communications staff or, in some instances, the job of single program person with “network expertise.” These are starting points, but in order to be sustainable, weaving networks and working openly needs to be a shared responsibility.
 * Cultivate a learning culture. In addition to having support from above, it’s equally, if not more, critical to have genuine commitment at the individual level. Cultivating a learning culture can make is safer for staff to experiment and reinforce that it’s ok to start small and fail often. As Rafael Lopez of Annie E. Casey said, “There’s a very busy culture within foundations: we seem to be in constant crisis… We don’t give ourselves the space and time to talk with each other and to break down silos. We need to be very deliberate in setting up safe internal spaces for conversation and learning.” The Packard Foundation cultivated a learning culture and increased commitment at the individual level by providing social media coaching and peer learning opportunities. They invited nonprofit social media maven, Beth Kanter, to be a visiting scholar. During her time at the foundation she coached staff and facilitated a series of ‘Deeper Dive’ learning sessions for staff that were interested and modeled public learning by writing about the experiences on her blog.

__Experiment and learn in real-time__ Experimentation by individuals can set the stage for high profile institutional efforts. At the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation they’ve encouraged staff members to embrace ‘Web 2.0’ principles in their work habits. As staff gain their own personal experience it opens the door to riskier programmatic experiments. For instance, PreventObesity.net’s unconventional strategy to connect thousands of obesity prevention activists by giving them the services they need probably would not have resonated with the foundation if staff weren’t already experimenting with network-centric ways of working. Plus, the effort, which is set up to collect and mine user data, is also pushing institutional change because it is flying in the face of the foundation’s standard privacy policy. RWJF has had to revise their stance toward privacy for the experiment, weighing the risk of information misuse against the opportunity for new insight gleaned from the data about the network’s potential.

Here are a few experiments you can try as you get started working with a network mindset:
 * Understand the ecosystem and your position within it. Map and reflect on your position in the surrounding ecosystems, and the networks or communities you support. Consider the ways in which you can and do exert influence, and what’s constructive and what’s not about that power dynamic.
 * Listen to the community and act on this insight. Start by listening to the conversation surrounding the issues you can about. Get a sense of where they’re happening, who taking part and what they’re talking about. Next, openly ask questions, like the Peery Foundation did when they asked for input to their strategy development through Twitter. Then, synthesize what you learn and incorporate these insights into your decisions. As Knight Foundation president and CEO Alberto Ibargüen said: “Our biggest challenge is to overcome our instinct to believe that we know what to do and being open to ideas where we’re skeptical. The hardest thing in foundations is to not go out and look for your ideas, but to fund ideas that the community is interested in.”
 * Broker new and unusual connections. Funders are in a privileged position to weave networks themselves, by simply making introductions or implementing more ambitious efforts to bring people together. You have access to a wide range of stakeholders, and are well positioned to bring in fresh perspectives and bridge the network to unusual suspects. When weaving networks, move beyond the traditional sectoral distinctions and experiment with ways to engage important and unlikely network “nodes.”
 * Share responsibility. Open up and encourage participation from a wide range of people working on the issues you care about. The Wikimedia Foundation did this when they tapped their worldwide community of Wikipedians to participate in a strategy development process for the Wikimedia movement. All who wanted to help were invited to participate, in the belief that an open process that engaged a broad base would result in smarter, more effective strategy, while activating the community around agreed-on goals.

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