A New Tool for Complex, Multi-Stakeholder Global Networks: The

A New Tool for Complex, Multi-Stakeholder Global Networks:

The Managing from Clarity Framework

By:

Luz Maria Puente, Vice President James L. Ritchie-Dunham, President

Institute for Strategy Clarity

A joint paper of The Institute for Strategic Clarity and NetworkingAction.

Institute for Strategic Clarity www.instituteforstrategicclarity.org

NetworkingAction Working Paper #2

www.networkingaction.net

March 9, 2010

From time-to-time NetworkingAction produces working papers. These are papers that are neither final reports nor published articles, but which draw from NetworkingAction associated activities. For more information about this paper contact: Luz Maria Puente [email protected]


Luz Maria Puente et al. 1

A New Tool for Complex, Multi-Stakeholder Global

Networks: The Managing from Clarity Framework

Traditional Approaches to Global Issues Youth employment, water sanitation, environmental sustainability, and poverty are examples of many issues that require more effective strategies. Past strategies have proven unable to address these issues to the point that they are being successfully managed and there is increasing competition for public dollars to address these issues.1 International aid organizations, governments, private businesses and numerous NGOs are working on these issues. Traditionally, each of these stakeholders addresses them in isolation, but the problems continue to worsen.2 Working in isolation is not working. These problems require a systemic approach that integrates the stakeholders, connects the issues, and builds relationships to address them at the local-to-global levels. But such a systemic approach requires new organizing strategies, and new tools to support them.3 A new strategy represented by Global Action Networks (GANs) has emerged over the last 20 years.4 In GANs governments, the private sector, and civil society organizations come together to address issues at local-to-global levels. Today over sixty GANs are addressing issues like microfinance, corruption, water, forests, climate change, social injustice, and tuberculosis. A GAN’s ability to deliver results is based on the structure and strength of the partnerships among the main stakeholders (government, private sector and civil society organizations) locally, nationally and globally. The challenge is how to further strengthen the ability of these partnerships to deliver even greater results. One limitation for the GANs is the lack of tools to help them visualize their complexity in ways that can identify strategic priorities and inflection points. There are four dimensions to the complexity they face:

1. Spatial: The GANs must be able to work at the local-national-regional-global levels.

2. Dynamic: There are many organizations that are taking lots of actions that influence the developments in the issue arenas.

3. Cultural: Cultural issues include ethic and linguistic, belief systems, and the differences between business, government and civil society.

1 The UN Millennium Development Goals (UN, 2002) focus specifically on these goals, which despite decades of efforts globally have not been met. 2 Collaborative efforts to address global issues have become to form in the past twenty years, making explicit that their individual, isolated efforts have been unsuccessful at addressing these systemically complex issues, thus the need for collaboration (see Countdown 2010, ClimateWorks Foundation, aids2031, and every GAN). 3 For an example of a systemic approach to poverty alleviation, see (Ritchie-Dunham, 2008). 4 For more on GANs, see (Waddell, 2003, 2005; Waddell, White, Zadek, Radovich, & Khagram, 2006).



4. Temporal: There is a time-lag of years between the actions of a GAN and when they have impact on the scale and depth they aspire for – in some cases such as climate change the lag is decades.

An applied-research project focused on developing such a tool in order to sharpen GANs’ effectiveness. The project was undertaken with the Latin American network of Youth Entrepreneurship and Sustainability (YES). The tool applied was the Managing from Clarity (MfC) framework.5

The Network YES is a global campaign of action-oriented initiatives operating in 55 countries. Although the issue of jobs for youth is global, in Southern countries it is particularly acute since in many over half the population is under 25 years old. For governments of these countries, the issue is not only livelihoods but also the tremendous potential for social unrest.

YES was founded as a project of the Education Development Corporation (EDC) in Boston and had its first global summit in 2002 in Alexandria, Egypt. YES initiatives are developed with a youth-leadership and enterprise-based model. This model is driven by four main objectives: (1) convening stakeholders to set global agenda for youth employment; (2) building leadership and entrepreneurship capacity of youth; (3) promoting in-country youth employment linked to development challenges; and (4) building multi-sectoral, in-country coalitions to develop national strategies for widespread youth employment. They summarize their strategy at a local and global level with the “3 Ps” of policies, partnerships, and programs. The rest of the paper presents the application of the MfC strategic framework to the (YES) network in Latin America and investigate its usefulness as a strategic visualization and planning tool. We describe the process, resulting systems maps, and insights during the process, and the impact this process has had on YES. Finally, we make some summary suggestions about the value of the MfC framework for GANs more generally, its limitations and outstanding questions.

The Framework Traditional tools for analysis of networks tend to focus at either the local level or the global level, but not both simultaneously. The MfC framework looks at YES network as a system that is working on youth unemployment. MfC is designed to bring out the local dynamics, within the global context. Moreover, the framework integrates the local and global rationales of the system, so that each stakeholder can more accurately see how they affect and are affected by others in the network. The framework facilitates understanding of how the system works by showing how the key stakeholders interact on the same issue. By showing this, key insights can be drawn on where the stakeholders can work together in new ways that generate greater impact than they can independently. The MfC framework provides five principles that are critical to

5 The Managing from Clarity tool has been applied in a wide variety of settings (Ritchie-Dunham & Puente, 2008; Ritchie-Dunham & Rabbino, 2001), in many countries.



describe a complex issue system: Goal, Resources, Actions, Structure, and People (GRASP), as seen in Figure 1.

• Goal: Why does the network exist? • Resources: Which resources drive value for stakeholders and which enable work to

be done that creates value for the stakeholders? • Actions: Which actions most effectively leverage the enabling resources? • Structure: What are the linkages among the goals, resources, and actions? • People: What do people care about in this system?

Figure 1: Managing from Clarity Framework The MfC framework describes systems in terms of their global goals and strategic resources. The global goal defines the purpose or reason for the different stakeholders to come together, such as reducing poverty, improving potable water, and promoting youth employment. This is the “why” of the system.

To describe “how” the system works, the framework analyzes resources. There are two types of resources: enabling and value-driving resources. The enabling resources (ER) are the basic resources used in a system to create value for its stakeholders. Some of the enabling resources seen in many systems are, financial resources, human resources, relevant skills, physical assets, and technology. Crucial to the sustainability of a system is identifying and making explicit what stakeholders expect from the system – what satisfies them. These are the value-driving resources (VDR). Not always obvious is what the stakeholders want. Some stakeholders participate in a system because they support the global goal, but, in order to keep them involved, they must obtain value from their participation.



Key characteristics of resources are that they accumulate over time and they are dynamic (have inflows and outflows). Moreover, resource levels can only change by taking actions that affect the inflows and the outflows of the enabling resources – the places we actually work. Managing the level of the enabling resources will allow the value-driving resources to accumulate; this leads to stakeholder satisfaction, which is a condition of their continued participation in the activities of the system. The structure is what connects the actions, the resources, and the global goal. MfC maps are comprised of arrows that connect words, such as in Figure 1. These arrows represent causality, or a cause-effect relationship, between two or more variables. Following the chain of connections often leads back to the initial variable, forming a “causal loop.” These loops show the many ways the different resources influence each other both directly and indirectly across the system. In these maps, there are both reinforcing loops and balancing loops. These loops are like engines in the structure: the reinforcing loops promote growth, and the balancing loops contain the growth. There are many loops, or engines, in every system.

Organizations do not exist on their own. People bring the organization to life and bring meaning to the work of their organization and their networks. Through understanding what people want, their personal and professional motivations, MfC facilitates designing stakeholder incentives in a way that satisfies stakeholder and the network’s goal (the “global goal”). In the case of GANs, the issues they tackle are global challenges that are not linked solely to financial gain. Therefore, most participants in GANs are volunteers. As such, engagement in a GAN must be linked to the personal passions of the participants.

The MfC YES Process The YES process included stakeholders from twelve Latin American countries. Latin America is a “region” within the YES network. To overcome the challenge of the geographical distance among YES stakeholders, we did phone interviews instead of face-to-face interviews to gather and validate the necessary data. These interviews were conducted with each participating country’s YES leader and some government, and NGO representatives. An interview protocol, based on the five GRASP principles, was created for the interviews. The interviews lasted one and a half to two hours. Twenty interviews were conducted with twelve YES network leaders, six NGO and government representatives, the regional coordinator and the president of the YES network. The expert knowledge of the leaders was made explicit using causal maps, as described earlier. The maps make explicit each leader’s understanding of the network, what they contribute, the value of the network, and his/her vision for YES in his/her country. Each leader was interviewed a second time to validate whether his/her map captured correctly the information they provided. This both produced a revised description and introduced each country leader to the systemic MfC view of their YES country network. These individual country maps were integrated to create a single regional map. The most interesting and challenging part of the process produced a way to see archetypal behaviors



across the global network. This map had to be sufficiently detailed for each country leader to see his/her network represented in the map, and not too detailed to be overwhelming.

The Maps Each country map looks different, because each country has a very unique way of doing its work. For example, some countries focus on increasing youth technical and business skills; some focus on develop the internal side with entrepreneurship courses; some focus on strengthening the incubator infrastructure to help youth create new business. The information obtained from the interviews showed that even though each country might have the same objective of creating youth employment, each approaches it differently. While some focus only on youth with no education or with criminal records, and some countries connect job creation with environmental focus. A Systemic View at the Country Level The following figures describe how a map of the YES network started to emerge. Starting with the YES leader, who in many cases is the convener, diverse stakeholders come together in a partnership to form the network in each country (see Figure 2). The main stakeholders are the government, NGOs, civil-society associations, private-sector organizations, and universities.

Figure 2: Stakeholders

The stakeholders provide the resources necessary for the various activities. The MfC framework calls these enabling resources. “Who” provides “what” may be different in each country and with each program, but the key is that the network has the resources it needs to carry out its particular strategy. The main enabling resources for the programs are financial resources, materials, facilities, teachers or trainers, trainers’ relevant skills, and youth (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: Enabling Resources



The network uses the enabling resources to offer different types of programs, courses and workshops in order to create jobs, self-employment, or new business opportunities for the youth (see top of Figure 3). Some countries, like Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras and Peru, focus on training, so youth can increase their technical skills to qualify for a job. Other countries emphasize developing entrepreneurial skills, so young people can start their own business, by providing them support through an incubator system, as in the case of Mexico and Chile (see Figure 4).

Figure 4: Job and Business Creation

How to read causality: Reading these “causal diagrams” is straightforward.6

Direct causality: A → B if you increase A, it will cause an increase in B if you decrease A, it will cause a decrease in B

Inverse causality: A →- B if you increase A, it will cause a decrease in B

if you decrease A, it will cause an increase in B Some examples of how to read the causality in the map (see Figure 4):

• If the number of teachers, teachers’ skill level and number of youth stay the same and you increase the financial resources, you can provide more courses or workshops.

6 For an introduction to causal mapping, see (Senge, 1990). For a more advanced use of causal mapping, see (Sterman, 2000).



• If the number of youth and the financial resources stay the same and you increase the number of teachers, you can increase the number of courses you can offer.

• If you increase workshops, you will increase youth’s technical skills and you will increase the number of jobs.

• If you increase offering productive business projects to the youth, business skills and entrepreneurial spirit will increase.

• If you increase business skills, more business projects will go through incubation to create new businesses.

• If you increase the number of courses and programs, you will increase the culture of success, personal development and empowerment, which will lead to an increase in the number of jobs, more self employment and new businesses.

In all the cases the opposite applies. For example, if you decrease business skills, less projects will go through incubation, and less businesses will be created.

By creating new jobs and new businesses, YES enriches the economic cycle in each country, and these new jobs and businesses are indicators of a country network’s effectiveness and socio-economic impact (see Figure 5).

Figure 5: Economic Cycle

Examples of how to read the causality in the map (see Figure 5):

• If the number of self-employed and the number of jobs stay the same, and you increase the number of new businesses, the effectiveness of the YES network will



increase. If the number of self-employed and the number of new businesses stay the same, and you increase the number of jobs, you will increase the effectiveness of the YES network.

• If the number of self-employed and the number of jobs stay the same, and you increase the number of new businesses, the support to the economic cycle will increase.

• If you increase the effectiveness of the YES network, the socio-economic impact will increase.

• In all the cases the opposite applies.

When the network produces the desired impact, the stakeholders keep their commitments and continue the collaboration, allowing the network to continue doing what it does, creating a reinforcing loop. This is the expansion engine of the network (see Figure 6).

Figure 6: Expansion Engine of the Network



Examples of how to read the causality in the map (see Figure 6): • If the effectiveness of the YES network increases, the socio-economic impact

increases and the stakeholders’ commitment increases. • If the commitment of the stakeholders increases, their collaboration increases. • If the collaboration increases, the stakeholders’ partnership increases creating a

stronger YES network. • In all the cases the opposite applies.

GANs like YES may pay insufficient attention to the needs of different key stakeholders and what they require from the network in order to keep them engaged and participating over time. The MfC framework specifically articulates stakeholders’ diverse needs and how they impact the rest of the network. If the network is not satisfying its stakeholders, the stakeholders will leave the network, limiting the network’s impact or even putting at risk its survival. Therefore, knowing what they require is critical. They are the MfC framework’s value-driving resources (see Figure 7).

Figure 7: Stakeholder Satisfaction (Value-driving Resources)



Each stakeholder can have more than one satisfier. The research showed that in this case government satisfaction comes from developing a sustainable environment and supporting the economy, poverty reduction and increased community well-being.

In this project, private-sector satisfaction comes from creating a sustainable environment, developing qualified job candidates and increasing security for themselves by reducing the number of youth involved in gangs (Peru and Panama have specific programs directed to youth in gangs).

One of the main network satisfiers is empowerment of youth. Having the relevant skills is necessary, but believing in oneself is just as important.

Examples of how to read the causality in the map (see Error! Reference source not found.):

• If the number of self-employed stays the same and the number of jobs of youth involved in gangs increases, the number of youth involved in gangs decreases. If the number of jobs stays the same and the youth involved in gangs’ self-employment goes up, the youth involved in gangs decreases.

• If the number of youth in gangs decreases, security increases. • If security increases, private businesses’ satisfaction increases and community well

being also increases. • If number of jobs, self-employment or new businesses increases the support for the

economic cycle increases, reducing poverty. • If poverty decreases, community well being increases and government satisfaction

increases. • In all the cases the opposite applies.

Integral Perspective of the Latin American Region The maps from the individual interviews were combined by identifying similar structures and putting them into an integral view of the YES network. This integrated map also includes how the regional coordinator and YES headquarters support the global network (Figure 8). For those who were not part of the process, this map may look overwhelmingly complicated. However, for those who participated in the process, their experience was otherwise. Some of the more compelling comments include:

• “By looking at this map and knowing how to read through it, which took surprisingly little work, I actually have greater clarity around my role in the network, what others are doing, and how I can improve the impact of my country in the YES network overall.”

• “This was the first time that I have ever seen how what I do affects others. It revealed to me that I had real opportunities that I had not seen before.”

• “With this information, I can go to donors and really explain what the 3 Ps are, what YES is about, and how the donor’s participation will truly make a difference.”

Developing the integrated map provided a deeper understanding of the different elements of the GAN, as well as an increased appreciation of the dynamics that hold the GAN together.



Figure 8: Integrated View

Systemic View of the Stakeholders Sometimes the incentives or satisfiers that drive one stakeholder conflict with incentives of another stakeholder. This is one of the reasons civil-society organizations, NGOs, government agencies, and local businesses often have a hard time working together on the same issue. They are focusing on different aspects of the network. Each stakeholder’s incentives depend on the organization they represent, some of these incentives are aligned with what YES wants to accomplish. For example, the government wants to reduce poverty, increase employment, increase economic growth, and increase social responsibility in the private sector. This might increase the number of private organizations involved in the YES activities. Interestingly, the majority of private-sector companies participating in YES do not use their collaboration for social-marketing purposes.



However, some incentives might be in conflict with the network goal or they may limit the stakeholders’ contribution. For example, one incentive of the private sector is profitability, which might go against giving time, money or in-kind donations to the network. One way to overcome this challenge is to show how these stakeholders’ contributions synergistically leverage the whole network’s ability to serve the greater good.

One of the network’s greatest challenge concerns the youth as stakeholders in the network. The current level of youth entrepreneurship today, across the developing countries where YES operates, is low. In the majority of the cases, the youth have grown up in an environment of very limited resources and even fewer possibilities (even among those who grew up with greater resources). They do not believe in themselves as skilled employees, nor do they see themselves as entrepreneurs who can create new businesses. Even if the whole network is in place to help the youth, if the other stakeholders do not understand and focus on raising the level of self-determination and empowerment of the youth, very little progress can be made.

Figure 9: Systemic View of the Stakeholders

Another powerful use of the MfC framework is to show that these different stakeholders are connected in service to the same global goal. The Systemic View of the Stakeholders map is created by identifying which variables in the overall map correspond to each of the



different stakeholders and once the variables are arranged in a specific area, a color is assigned to identify that specific stakeholder (Figure 9). The implications for strategy of this map are that the different stakeholders understand how important their contribution is to creating a coherent whole and that working alone won’t have the desired level of impact. New understandings emerge as to how and why they could work together more effectively.

For many YES leaders, this was the first time they could see how all the stakeholders contribute in different ways to accomplish the global goal.

The Findings This project highlights several significant insights into the life cycle and survivability of YES that are more broadly useful for GANs. Working on their own to improve youth employment, stakeholders have limited impact. Working as a GAN effectively will increase this impact, because the collaboration brings forward each group’s opportunities, possibilities, and strengths. A GAN is very hard to develop without a sense of cohesiveness among the stakeholders. Understanding what each stakeholder needs from, and offers to, the network is fundamental to the impact and sustainability of the network itself. Taking a systemic approach is a powerful way to make explicit these needs and contributions. Using MfC as a systemic mapping tool allows GAN leaders to integrate the local actions they perform within the context of the region and see how the region’s work connects to the global goal of YES. It was both inspiring and clarifying for the leaders to see how they contribute to the whole. Most importantly, a few leaders shifted their thinking from “what can they give me” to “how can what I do make them successful as well?” This significantly improved the possibilities for more powerful partnerships. This shift in thinking is also the first step in addressing the long-term sustainability of the network. As the leaders shift to more of a win-win mindset, the probability that the stakeholders will want to more fully participate increases. This will bring more resources to the network, increasing the success and impact of the network. In fact, this reinforcing engine defines the network, what it can accomplish, and the impact it can create over time.

The MfC framework also helps to address issues of complexity. Bringing back in the four dimensions of complexity, we see that it can help in the following ways:

1. Spatial: The integrated map shows how the local network, the regional network and the global network interact to achieve the global goal. It also shows how the local actions affect the regional and global outcomes across the network.

2. Dynamic: If each stakeholder acts in isolation their impact is limited by their capacity to provide all the enabling resources for a specific program, i.e. teachers, youth, physical location, materials, etc. If each stakeholder provides what it does best and they all come together as a network, the potential impact is exponential. When each stakeholder understands how it contributes, the level of coherence of the network increases. The MfC framework makes explicit how each stakeholder contributes and how the contributions combine to produce overall outcomes of the network.



3. Cultural: The MfC framework and the mapping process itself generate a common language and meaning of key elements, ideas, shared by the stakeholders of the network. It creates an objective platform to talk about emotionally charged issues among the stakeholders. In addition it ensures that the higher purpose of the network is the focus of the outcomes of the interaction. This provides the opening for new opportunities and solutions to arise that no single stakeholders would have developed on their own.

4. Temporal: The systemic approach provides a clear line of sight to critical delays that affect long-term outcomes. A shared understanding by the stakeholders of the feedback loops helps them grasp the sustainability of the network by linking today’s actions to long-term network results.



References Ritchie-Dunham, J. L. (2008). A Collaborative-Systemic Strategy Addressing the

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Ritchie-Dunham, J. L., & Puente, L. M. (2008). Strategic Clarity: Actions for Identifying and Correcting Gaps in Mental Models. Long Range Planning, 41(5), 509-529.

Ritchie-Dunham, J. L., & Rabbino, H. T. (2001). Managing from Clarity: Identifying, Aligning and Leveraging Strategic Resources. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Senge, P. M. (1990). The Fifth Discipline. New York: Doubleday Currency. Sterman, J. D. (2000). Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex

World. Boston: Irwin McGraw-Hill. UN. (2002). Implementing the Millennium Declaration: The Millennium Development

Goals and the United Nations Role (Fact Sheet). New York: United Nations Department of Public Information.

Waddell, S. (2003). Global Action Networks: A Global Intervention Helping Business Make Globalisation Work for All. Journal of Corporate Citizenship, 12, 27-42.

Waddell, S. (2005). Societal Learning and Change: How Governments, Business and Civil Society Are Creating Solutions to Complex Multi-Stakeholder Problems Sheffield, UK: Greenleaf Publishing.

Waddell, S., White, A., Zadek, S., Radovich, S., & Khagram, S. (2006). The Future of Global Action Networks: The Challenges and Potential -- A Report to USAID – GDA. Boston: Global Action Network Net.

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