Three Design Principles for Impact Ecosystems

Introduction

As the world becomes increasingly interconnected, driven by ever-increasing rates of change, it follows that to solve complex societal problems, we need to plan, act, and learn at the ecosystem level, not just within our individual organizations. To illustrate what this looks and feels like, this article tells a fictional story.

Unemployment, climate crisis, youth mental health, chronic poverty, malnutrition, unsustainable food systems, political polarization, biodiversity loss; all deeply interconnected. In order to address these problems, we study how the different forces in society may be causing them.

Ecosystems are a powerful mental construct that allows us to think about the sum of all the forces that interact and produce results in a given context. For natural ecosystems like a rainforest, we think of forces like wind, water, sunlight, and the living beings in the rainforest.

For ‘impact ecosystems’, we are concerned with all the forces producing the results in a human context. To be effective at the ecosystem level, we need to work differently from the way we normally work, namely within our distinct organizations. Primary among the new requirements for effectiveness in today’s fast-changing, interconnected world is a new and higher level of collaboration. Moreover, knowing that we should collaborate more is not sufficient. We need to change the decision-making architecture of the ecosystem to produce collaborations.

This is the story of a high-impact ecosystem that arises to end gender-based violence in a city. It shows through a series of simple steps how a new decision-making architecture made it possible for one city to come together and act effectively to tackle this universal modern problem. Through the story, we learn how it is possible and impactful for organizations to operate in greater concert to achieve lasting impact.

The article concludes with a summary of three new design principles for effective impact ecosystems.

Ending Gender-Based Violence: A Humanville Case-Study

Welcome to Humanville, a fictional port city of 1.15 million. After COVID, a generation of early and mid-career women professionals mobilized, raising awareness about gender-based violence (GBV), particularly sexual harassment. They engaged with police, social services, HR departments, and academics to gather and share accurate data. With the help of solutions journalism* they highlighted the work of organized civil society to address the problem, stirred public consciousness, and gradually, over a decade, political parties began paying attention.

The tipping point came with the election of Mayor Blessie Makoni, a champion of the cause. She convened a Citizen Assembly* on Violence Against Women. Citizens were randomly selected to capture the variety of perspectives in the city. They met over six weekends and ultimately agreed that only coordinated, cross-sector action, centered around prevention, victim care, and legal remedies, could end GBV.

Mayor Makoni embraced the recommendations and brought together leaders from government, education, business, civil society, and academia. She tasked them to reimagine Humanville as a living ecosystem and to identify the principles and capabilities needed to implement the Citizen Assembly’s vision. She said:

“Above all, I invite you to step out of the little boxes of your organizations, see the whole problem of GBV, and come together to make recommendations that reach all of the root causes of the problem.”

The leaders struggled and often relapsed to their partial perspectives. Good facilitation helped them spot competitive and transactional habits. The example of the Citizen Assembly, a group of normal people from all walks of life deliberating and reaching an agreement, inspired them. And maybe most importantly, the many hours of conversations where they began to know each other as complete people, allowed them to step into a new mindset of trust, collaboration, and co-creation. The mood was celebratory on the day that they formally agreed on the framework of capabilities needed to end gender violence; the three ‘core capabilities’ of the framework are collaboration, co-creation, and mutual accountability.

Using the leadership summit’s capabilities framework, Mayor Makoni launched two pivotal public-private partnerships: one to measure progress and one to fund change.

The first task went to two local universities: Create and maintain a gender-based violence scorecard, prominently displayed on a digital wall at City Hall. The data wall, sponsored by the company that held the contract to maintain Humanville’s bus stops, made trends and insights visible to all.

To finance the Citizen Assembly’s recommendations, Makoni established the Changemaker Fund* to End Violence Against Women. Seeded with public funds and bolstered by corporate and philanthropic contributions, the Fund had an independent, multi-sector board. Its mandate: apply the leadership summit’s capability framework to implement the Citizen Assembly’s plan.

The Fund rejected the traditional competitive grant model. Instead, it promised support to any organization meeting a minimum threshold of agreed GBV capabilities, measured via a maturity index. Funding levels and timelines were based on capability scores, organization size, and alignment with one of three ecosystem “sub-funds” focused on prevention, care, and legal remedies.

To assess capabilities, the Fund used an independent specialist. Organizations received confidential diagnostics: capability scores, insight into likely outcomes, and detailed improvement suggestions. Assessments occurred four times a year and when funded organizations dropped below the qualifying scores, they were given one quarter to bring up their scores before their funding was reduced. These assessments were treated as public goods, paid for by the Fund.

Organizations receiving funding agreed to share their capability scores publicly, contributing to citywide learning. This transparency allowed Humanville to explore which capabilities, in which organizations, working in which combinations, delivered the greatest impact.

In a surprising twist, many small community-based groups qualified for funding in the first year, while some large, well-known institutions did not. The outcome: twice as many groups received funding, while the average grant size halved. Time spent developing ecosystem objectives, strategies, and capability requirements brought GBV actors and allies together in a way that led to dramatically enhanced levels of collaboration, which resulted in a burst of innovation producing over a dozen novel strategies.

With new resources and insight, Humanville saw an initial spike in reported violence. This was anticipated because one objective was to reveal long-hidden harms. By year five, one of the key indicators, reported violence, started to drop. Research confirmed that the early surge was due to improved detection and reporting.

In the first two years, there was a lot of head scratching while everyone learned how to read the data wall at City Hall. The research teams managing it produced real-time insights on what combinations of capabilities and activities were most effective. By year five, everyone wondered how they ever managed without the three distinct data sets of capabilities, activities, and "the data wall on City Hall" had become famous! One of the most important achievements was to demonstrate how a capability-based funding model like Humanville's could, over time and once and for all, effectively address the root causes of such a stubborn problem. Conversely, it debunked the notion, with compelling data, that “quick-fix solutions” to GBV could ever be sufficient.

The Humanville model, as it came to be called, gained attention and funding from around the world. Advocates and impact funders everywhere studied it. By years four and five, other cities began adapting the framework to tackle their own entrenched issues. Humanville became a global reference point for solving complex social challenges, not just GBV.

And the personal impact? Profound. Mayor Makoni was elected president of her nation in year ten, and many summit leaders became prominent national voices. Their model, rooted in citizen assemblies, collective planning and action, capability-based funding, and transparent measurement, became a template for systemic change efforts tackling other difficult problems.

Key Takeaways: The Three Design Principles We Need Now:

Humanville found three design principles to create a new decision-making architecture to crack the three biggest challenges blocking human progress:

• Challenge 1: Mutuality between those with the money and power and those on the front lines
• Design Principle 1: Governance includes all constituents of the problem being addressed

Humanville’s changemaker fund was subject to democratic governance. There is a secretariat that coordinates facilitation and administration. The secretariat is governed by a council of all the constituents: funders, implementers, community, and government. The members of a changemaker fund collectively set their goals, agree on the required capabilities, and identify the allies required in the ecosystem to address all dimensions of the problem, from root causes to symptoms. Together, they answer two questions: What do we want to achieve? Who do we need to be to achieve it?

• Challenge 2: Grounding learning and improvement in objective evidence about the whole ecosystem
• Design Principle 2: Independent and public tracking of the agreed-upon indicators of the problem in real time.

The second structural innovation separates measurement of “the problem” from measuring what organizations working on the problem do. We measure both things, but separately and smartly. This enables all participants to see the whole ecosystem and to see their individual contributions in relation to the whole. Changemaker funds hire the most qualified researchers (for example at universities) to create a public scorecard of the state of the social problem or problems addressed by the fund. This research, continually updated, provides a living “state of the problem” that is used by all actors in the ecosystem to compare, on the one hand, demonstrated capabilities, activities and performance with, on the other hand, the changing state of the problem or problems. In this way everyone is incentivized to see the whole and learn what seems to be working well and to strengthen that.

• Challenge 3: The toughest challenge: Replacing competition for funding with collaboration for impact
• Design Principle 3: Fund allocation on the basis of independent measurement of the capabilities.

Changemaker Funds distribute money to organizations based on their demonstrated capabilities. These capabilities are decided and agreed in a participatry planning process alongside setting goals and implementation strategies. Once agreed, the capabilities are established through an independent and proven capability certification system. Organizations do not write funding proposals or write self-serving impact reports. They demonstrate their capabilities and set out their action plans. Capability certification is the primary accountability mechanism in the model and is based on regular (e.g., quarterly, semi-annual) assessments. Organizations that do not deliver will see their capability scores drop. This reduces their future funding. Capability assessment reports provide recommendations and insights to enable investments in improving failing capabilities, with special “capacity grants” available to help organizations regain required performance levels.

Conclusion

Putting this all together allowed Humanville to get out of the century-old rut of competition for funding and open the way for collaboration for impact. This “we are in this together” approach is urgently needed as the social glue of trust is at an all-time low across the world. The changemaker fund model recognizes that there can be no collaboration without trust, and it starts by building trust from the bottom up. It is the design reboot that we need now to re-discover our common humanity.