In 2017, when Captain Jim Gordon joined the New Leadership Network (NLN) — an experiment in changing local systems in California’s Central Valley — he had been with the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Office for more than 25 years and had trained hundreds of police recruits over the years. He was looking for new ways to tackle a longtime challenge: how to improve relations between law enforcement and minority communities and build trust on both sides.
Many leaders grapple with similarly complicated challenges. As a society, our solutions aren’t scaling as quickly as our problems, whether it’s income inequality, gun violence, homelessness, or climate change. We’re beginning to realize that individuals, organizations, and sectors can’t work in isolation in solving complex problems. Leaders like Jim Gordon understand that today, social change is systems change. But the real question is: How can leaders help transform systems so they work better for everyone? And what skills, tools, and approaches do these leaders need in order to create systemic change?
These questions are the focus of our book, Leading Systems Change, which tells the story of the NLN, a program that ran in California’s Fresno and Stanislaus counties for the past six years, with funding from the James Irvine Foundation. The network brought together diverse leaders — from different sectors, issues, ages, racial backgrounds, and political persuasions — to convene three times over six months and design solutions to community problems. For example, Jim’s team worked on cadet training and building empathy between law-enforcement officers and the communities they serve.
Through the NLN, we trained nearly 100 community leaders, who started more than 80 collaborations, bringing together people from different professions and perspectives to pursue a common goal. The projects included:
- a kindergarten-readiness program in Fresno’s low-income neighborhoods
- a downtown-revitalization project to attract new businesses to the region
- a program to give mentally ill homeless individuals the support they need to get off the streets.
The network also helped elevate emerging leaders to positions of greater influence, create a pipeline of potential members for local boards and commissions, and form a continuing “civic innovation” engine in both counties.
We’ve learned a lot about what it takes to develop cross-sector leadership to tackle complex community challenges. Here are the most important takeaways:
Start by understanding local leaders and community needs.
A program to foster systems change must emerge from local needs. Before starting the network, we spent months researching the region and conducting more than 40 interviews in each community to assess local needs, determine whether a leadership network could take hold, and identify issues that local leaders wanted to address. Like many other communities in the Central Valley, those in both Fresno County and Stanislaus County face challenges — high concentrations of poverty, environmental challenges, struggling schools, racial segregation — that make them ripe for collective action.
More important, we learned that power dynamics had kept local leaders from tackling these challenges. For example, we discovered that leaders in both counties were remarkably disconnected from one another, even when doing similar work. Worse, many emerging leaders felt cut off from established sources of power, which remained mostly white, older, and male. Both places boasted a vibrant set of emerging leaders who included women, millennials, and people of color working to improve their communities, but they had no seats at the decision-making tables. The New Leadership Network helped people make connections and introduced established leaders to the next generation.
Get the right people in the room.
In building social-change networks, the who matters just as much as the what and the how. To change the way systems run, it’s important to form a group that represents the whole community. Participating leaders will assess a network by the people who participate: the other leaders, the facilitation team, and the “backbone organization” supporting the work. An important part of our success was the diversity we cultivated in each cohort and throughout the whole network. We defined diversity broadly:
- people in positions of organizational power as well as those working directly with the community
- people with ethnic, racial, and gender diversity
- professionals from different sectors working on varied issues
Use a mash-up of tools, frameworks, and content.
What do leaders need in order to change systems? What competencies will help them build their capacity to lead collectively? In our book, we introduce five foundational theories or approaches for creating collaborative networks capable of systems change. They are:
- systems thinking
- network theory
- human-centered design
- leadership/coaching
- equity
For example, in Fresno we originally held a half-day session on design thinking. However, when we realized that this training led to a number of organic collaborations among participants, we decided to expand it in the Stanislaus program. We learned that design thinking — besides offering a great way to solve problems — helps simplify complex systemic problems and set the stage for civic innovation.
Work on multiple levels (I/We/It).
To change complex systems, you must work on the individual, collective, and systemic levels all at once. To simplify our “theory of change,” we adapted the “I-We-It” framework. It helped us form a curriculum to influence individual leaders (“I”), working in collaborative ways (“We”), to reach the larger goals of systems change (“It”). We believe the three levels are nested and must be aligned. Leaders need to be aware of the systems and networks in which they sit and begin to change beliefs and behaviors at that level in order to create greater impact.
Today, social change is systems change.
For example, Captain Jim Gordon understood that despite his being a leader, he could not improve police-community relations alone. He acknowledged that his training, experience, and network were tied closely to law enforcement. His NLN experience helped him see himself as others see him, develop a deeper understanding of the minority communities, and gain a broader view of the system he occupied, so that he could begin to build the relationships and trust necessary to change it.
Put a premium on relationships and trust.
We structured the New Leadership Network program to provide the space to build deep, trusting relationships among participants. Without those, leaders can’t have the difficult conversations and take risks necessary to change systems. Having leaders exhibit serious emotions or even vulnerability right away — usually by telling stories on the first day of convening — serves as a catalyst for intimacy and trust during the rest of the experience. You can’t plan for it, but you can invite a group into feeling safe or brave enough to answer questions honestly, without fear of retribution. It helps to have facilitators participate in a few of the exercises, such as the personal introductions, and model vulnerability and trust for the group. At every convening, we balanced sharing content, peer learning, and experiential exercises with time to connect and deepen relationships and trust in the group.
Center conversations about race, equity, and power.
At the start of the Fresno program, we didn’t tackle issues of class, race, power, or equity head-on. And our initial facilitation team was all white. When we continued in Stanislaus, we addressed this imbalance in both the curriculum and in the facilitation team. The second iteration of the program more fully addressed how equity, power, and privilege manifest themselves in communities and in network itself. We learned that you cannot ask leaders to step into larger roles without addressing the impact of systemic racism on them and the communities they are determined to change.
Leading with and for equity means continually looking at the systems around us and asking: What does this have to do with equity, power, and systemic bias? It means disrupting inequitable practices, honoring the distinct contributions that emerge from each person, and removing any prediction of success or failure that correlates with social or cultural factors. It also means acknowledging the patterns of power, privilege, and oppression in a community, often in the very rooms we inhabit as we try to initiate change. Leaders need the space and support to face these hard issues of class, race, power, and equity; real change requires it.
Go slow to go fast.
We think that designing the NLN to go both slow/deep and fast was important. Most leadership programs take a year or more to complete. We worried that taking so long would impede momentum, and we wanted to bring urgency to this work. So we put leaders through an intensive six-month program. Each community network comprised 50 to 60 leaders; during its two-year run, four cohorts of about a dozen people each embarked on the program every six months.
Ironically, participants describe the experience as “going slow to go fast.” At each convening, we slowed things down and allowed leaders time and space to reflect deeply. The NLN program unfolded across the three convenings; each had its own purpose and design. Formal gatherings and design-team projects occurred between the three larger events.
Embed the work in the community.
How do you help members stay connected and productive once they have completed the formal program? Many networks skip this step and lose momentum. A few core steps help a network stay alive over time:
- create a board or steering committee to lead the network
- establish a “backbone organization” that continues to steward project teams
- host informal meet-ups
- facilitate peer learning
- support emerging collaborations.
Having a trusted “backbone organization” in the community is crucial to long-term success. In Fresno we didn’t have this partner, which made it harder to sustain momentum after the program ended. But in Stanislaus, the Stanislaus Community Foundation helped steward the network alongside the facilitation team during the start-up phase. The foundation intends to serve as the backbone for the long term.
Leaders also must embed their project work in the community to bring about real change. For example, getting to know other community leaders helped Jim Gordon understand how police recruits unconsciously pick up biases. So, he changed new officers’ training by engaging community members in it, and he invited community leaders to work with his team to redesign the protocols that officers use when they respond to a call. This work has received statewide attention and continues today, despite the captain’s retirement.
We hope stories like Jim Gordon’s, and the lessons we shared, will inspire other civic leaders, donors, and change-makers across the country. We have been honored to watch leaders in California’s Central Valley embrace new approaches and develop a renewed sense of collective empowerment. They show us the future: a world in which leaders link their passions, power, and perspectives to form networks committed to advancing the common good.
Heather McLeod Grant is a co-founder of Open Impact, a philanthropic advising firm, and served as managing director of the New Leadership Network. She is an author of “Forces for Good,” “The Giving Code,” and other publications.
Adene Sacks is a co-founder of the With/In Collaborative and program director of the New Leadership Network. She works with leaders, foundations, and organizations to increase the collective capacity to redesign social systems and create a more just world.