The dream of many changemakers is large-scale societal transformation. To achieve this vision, it is often imagined that we need similarly large systems change initiatives.
In this view, lack of progress on the hardest to solve social problems is a lack of investment in big visions, big initiatives, and big grants.
But what if there’s a more promising way to make a big impact?
Kirsten Moy’s work has a compelling alternative to top-down change. She has written that:
“Virtually all the outcomes we seek to achieve in communities are emergent phenomena and cannot be designed and engineered top-down. Instead, we should focus on creating the conditions from the ground up for the outcomes to emerge.”
I think she’s right. I first met Kirsten in a meeting hosted at Domini Investments in New York City in early 2020, just before the pandemic. She had convened the meeting to explore how the science of complexity can be applied to work in the social sector.
Kirsten was the first director of the Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) Fund, a new program created in the U.S. Department of the Treasury under the Clinton Administration. Since then she’s been a Policy Program Director and Senior Fellow at the Aspen Institute, an independent trustee of Domini Impact Investments (one of the first socially responsible mutual funds), and a practitioner member of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation. While never formally affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute, Kirsten has partnered with the Institute to convene a meeting of community development practitioners, funders and complexity scientists. She has also spoken about community development to students in programs organized by the Institute’s Education Department.
I recently reached out to her to learn more about what she calls “an ecosystem approach.”
Bryan Lindsley
How do you think about community development with a complexity lens?
Kirsten Moy
People often think that community development is something that is done to, or even done for, a group of people. But with a complexity lens, we can see that community development is actually something that emerges when there is social capital, cohesion, the necessary resources and freedom. A community itself is a complex adaptive system where there is no simple cause and effect. That means that the reaction of the system to interventions and stimuli cannot be dependably predicted.
Bryan Lindsley
That makes sense. But if cause and effect can’t be linearly predicted, how should practitioners approach change?
Kirsten Moy
The insight from complex systems is that change cannot be designed and engineered top-down.
Instead, I recommend working from an ecosystem perspective. What that means is paying attention to history and culture, identifying community assets, and building or strengthening key networks and relationships.
It means seeking to understand the dynamics of the ecosystem in question, like tipping points and feedback loops. In that way people can try to address root causes rather than just symptoms. And they can commit to and operationalize community engagement from the ground up.
Bryan Lindsley
That’s a very different approach than most large-scale systems change initiatives because it doesn’t predetermine the desired outcome or how you get there. How and when did you start using the complexity frame in your career?
Kirsten Moy
I would say it wasn’t intentional. It was more emergent based on a handful of insights over the years about ecosystems and scale.
What first got me interested in complexity was looking at the future of community development finance after I left CDFI Fund in 1997. I had seen so many issues in the hundreds of CDFI applications I had reviewed. One of them was that despite the fact that achieving scale was an aspiration for many of them, there was a lack of focus on infrastructure. I didn’t know it at the time but that wasn’t a word that people were using in community development. Foundations funded short-term programs. They rarely funded infrastructure. Since I had come from the private sector, that seemed a very weird thing to me. It was like building trains with no tracks.
During my research I worked with Alan Okagaki, a highly regarded community development consultant, and Dan Leibsohn, the founder of the Low Income Housing Fund (now called the Low Income Investment Fund). Dan is brilliant and usually way ahead of his time, and I recruited him to help me look at the state of affordable housing around the country.
Dan would remark to me that in places like San Francisco, the success isn’t random. Rather, there’s a system that has developed over five or ten years or longer. We didn’t have a word for it at that time, but it was an ecosystem: developers, attorneys, architects, appraisers, city and state government, community-based organizations, property management people.
His point was that where you don’t have all the pieces, you don’t have a vibrant system and you can’t build at scale. And, if localities would work in this systems fashion instead of just focusing on individual projects and programs, they could have developed a lot more housing.
Bryan Lindsley
So instead of just doing more of one thing, like running bigger programs, it was about seeing a system of interconnected parts?
Kirsten Moy
Yes, a more holistic vision. But also a different perspective on scaling.
When I was at the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program, everyone was talking about scaling in the nonprofit world. Everyone was concerned about how to grow small pilots into large-scale initiatives. But there were a lot of issues about scaling. For instance, if a nonprofit is successful in a specific neighborhood, scaling to a state level may not make sense. And some things suffer when you scale using technology.
To share these ideas I co-authored a paper in 2004 called New Pathways to Scale for Community Development Finance with Greg Ratliff. Greg led the development of the MacArthur Foundation’s PRI and impact investing practice for many years. It was all about why it may or may not make sense for nonprofits to try to scale, the true costs (financial and otherwise) of trying to get to scale, and the many steps or stages that needed to be pursued. One issue is that most pilots are designed to be small, not to work at a larger scale. And also, unlike the private sector, there never was a perfected prototype to be replicated. In nonprofits, the pilot to be copied remained a work in progress.
As part of our scale research we did 10 case studies, among them the creation of the Visa network as described by Dee Hock in his book Birth of the Chaordic Age. He built the Visa model on complexity thinking. It was not a top-down initiative. Rather, they put out some simple criteria – classic complexity thinking – and people signed themselves up. It grew like crazy.
When Langdon Morris of InnovationLabs looked through our paper on scale including the case study on Visa, he said, I can summarize your whole 40-page paper about change in different scales in one graph. That was a big insight for us, even after we’d written the whole paper.
The picture which we used in presentations showed three layers. You can focus on funding individual organizations and that will get you some results. You can fund networks and that is going to get you a bigger scale. But the only way to truly get to scale, assuming that’s what you’re trying to do, is to change the industry as a whole. Basically, an ecosystem approach.
The paper was subsequently published by the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank, then shared through a series of convenings hosted by several of the Banks, first at the Chicago Fed, then San Francisco and Boston, Cleveland, Dallas and New York. The participation of the Banks was critical in bringing credibility to the complexity research when it was a brand new idea.
Then, for roughly two years between 2016 and 2018, I was a Visiting Scholar at the San Francisco Federal Reserve and explored the applicability of complexity science to community development.
Bryan Lindsley
I could see the ecosystem approach in your paper about Annie E. Casey’s role in the expansion of EITC. I thought the maps you included were very instructive about the many different, often small actions needed to create system-wide impact.
Kirsten Moy
Yes, many small things add up. As I said earlier, one insight from complex systems is that there is rarely a linear connection between cause and effect. Therefore, my co-author Steve Holt (who is a noted historian of EITC) and I didn’t evaluate the effect of Casey’s role per se, but conducted more of a case study of how their work influenced the EITC ecosystem as a whole over twenty years. We were aided immeasurably in the presentation of our findings by Bryan Coffman, an artist at InnovationLabs who was well-acquainted with complexity science.
Our top learning was that Casey’s many actions over the years changed the ecosystem. They did get to scale, but it’s important to note that there was no set map for the end result. No one would have mapped or guessed what happened ahead of time. The end result, as the map shows, was like a plate of spaghetti.
And I’m not sure why, but Casey never tried to coordinate its EITC grants. So there were many different program officers funding different aspects of this.
Bryan Lindsley
I did love the finding in the paper that uncoordinated grantmaking can lead to more desirable results than larger grants.
Kirsten Moy
Exactly. Big bets are risky because things change. Lots of smaller bets without a central coordinator increase the chance of success.
Amy Brown, a colleague who was involved in the EITC work, later applied this insight to her portfolio when she became a Senior Program Officer at the Ford Foundation. Working with a complexity lens, she didn’t focus on individual organizations or projects but sought to build effective ecosystems. It was gratifying to hear how her approach of providing support but not dictating actions enabled her grantees to build organic connections, collaborate and accomplish even more.
Bryan Lindsley
Who else is doing this type of work with a complexity frame right now? It seems that people often don’t look for or even see bottom-up approaches.
Kirsten Moy
Most of the attention goes to big systems change initiatives. But there are a lot of complexity-informed and bottom-up things going on that I’m heartened by.
There are practitioners like you writing about subtractive change and how to do bottom-up systems change like a startup.
There’s the rare practitioner like Alex Alsup who is trying to address a real-world issue like the epidemic of foreclosures in Detroit using complexity thinking as chronicled by the New England Complex Systems Institute.
Alex is a VP of R&D at Regrid and the head of the company’s Data with Purpose program. They are a leading provider of land parcel and location data in the US, one of the few companies that could have supplied the data for the Detroit analysis. The Data with Purpose program is trying to put Regrid’s data into the hands of researchers, academics, nonprofits on more of a “pay as you can” basis.
Systems change and ecosystem mapping is now enough of a recognized phenomenon beyond fields where it was initially employed that the School of Systems Change, Illuminate Network and ecologist Eric Berlow have collaborated to create an online, interactive map of systems change practitioners.
And then there’s Complexity Weekend, a global community of practice, that started in 2019 with just a handful of people interested in Complexity Science. Complexity Weekend notes that the initiative itself is a Complex Adaptive System.
I also think about bottom-up things happening in certain places. I found striking examples of organizations utilizing complexity thinking, even if they didn’t use the language of complexity, when I was doing my research at the Fed. For example, La Cocina in San Francisco, the Family Independence Initiative (now UpTogether), and Purpose Built Communities in Atlanta.
But for me, one of the best illustrations of complexity at work is Detroit. The most extraordinary happening things in Detroit aren’t and never have been, at least in my opinion, the top-down initiatives, no matter whether they are run by government or business or philanthropy. There has been a history of placemaking initiatives supported by organizations like ioby, a nonprofit with a crowdfunding platform who believes that small neighborhood-scale actions can have far-reaching and long-lasting impact on places and people’s lives.
A local urban agriculture ecosystem has developed and evolved under the leadership of local leaders such as Devita Davison, the Executive Director of FoodLab Detroit, an organization established to support independent food businesses and explore models to create a more equitable and sustainable ecosystem for employees, producers and residents.
Then there is the Equitable Internet Initiative that is trying to address the lack of access to broadband in Detroit neighborhoods through neighborhood-governed community wireless networks. The work of all these initiatives and networks have largely sprung from the ground up.
I wrote a case study and short history of community development in Detroit as part of my research for the Fed a few years ago. In the piece I featured the trailblazing work of Grace Lee Boggs, a nationally known human rights activist and feminist based in Detroit. Grace was a student of complexity. She wrote,
“We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. In this exquisitely connected world, it’s never a question of ‘critical mass.’ It’s always about critical connections.”
I think that’s so true and beautiful. And her legacy still lives on in Detroit in so many ways. For example, there’s Complex Movements, a Detroit-based artist collective that does performance work related to complexity science and social justice. The group was actually featured at the Santa Fe Institute a few years ago.
Bryan Lindsley
What practical recommendations do you have for people working on complex problems from the ground up?
Kirsten Moy
The first thing is really learning as much about the problem as you can. I don’t mean from a high-level, top down, or even an “I’ve-read-about-it” sort of approach. Rather, I like the expression “apprenticing with the problem” from Daniela Papi-Thornton’s work on Tackling Heropreneurship. Learning from people who have lived experience, who are “proximate” to the problem, is also crucial.
One of the best ways to keep in mind the complexity of the problems we’re trying to solve and the need to look at them from an ecosystem perspective is to talk to people with lived experience. Real people don’t separate the problems they’re facing in their everyday lives into silos. For example, their child care issues from their housing issues, their work issues and their financial issues. They know they’re all interconnected and related.
Bryan Lindsley
That makes sense to me. So often I see people trying to solve the problem before understanding it, or talking to the people experiencing it.
Kirsten Moy
That’s right. I’m a big fan of the Skoll Center for Entrepreneurship’s Map the System competition. It’s for teams of students at universities all around the world, and awards are given out not for solving the problem, but for understanding it better. And this includes developing an understanding of all the existing solutions that have been tried and why they may have fallen short.
Bryan Lindsley
They use a lot of ecosystem mapping in that competition, right? As you know, I’m a big fan of problem mapping and system mapping.
Kirsten Moy
Yes, they map the members of the ecosystem and how they interact as well as feedback loops and other system dynamics. I think it’s both an art and a science to be able to develop a map that accurately and sufficiently depicts the problem ecosystem without irrelevant and overwhelming amounts of detail.
Bryan Lindsley
But once they have a map, what should practitioners do next?
Kirsten Moy
Today my answer would be to stop the bad actions and disrupt the feedback loops that are clearly causing harm. It’s not unlike your recommendation about how to get more impact by doing less with subtractive change.
At some point, when you’ve dealt with all or at least the worst of the bad things and think you see something new that needs to be done, I like an incremental approach that recognizes the unpredictability of complex systems and allows solutions to emerge.
I look for people doing as Charles Marohn Jr. said in his book Strong Towns: Identify one small thing that can be done immediately to improve the situation, and if it works, do it again, then maybe again on a greater scale. No big leaps into the unknown based on a theory of change—after all, that’s all it is, a theory.
Bryan Lindsley
What you describe seems like an evolutionary approach: discarding what isn’t working, testing new approaches, and building on successes.
Kirsten Moy
Right, an evolutionary environment. Since I don’t believe complex systems can successfully be changed from the top-down, the alternative is creating the conditions that will allow the outcomes we want to evolve and emerge.
