The Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) posted on its blog in late March talking about when and how foundations are responding to the moment by making public commitments to action to protect and support their vulnerable nonprofit partners and speaking out in defense of the sector. Some responded quickly and boldly; other foundations now seem to be starting to make public changes; others may still be reticent, “perhaps worried about taking risks that might jeopardize their institutions.”
In naming the Emergent Learning principle of Maximizing Freedom to Experiment, we were addressing both the how – what it takes to make the space to experiment and to learn from it, and the why – to unleash the wisdom and resourcefulness that will help our teams and organizations creatively respond to our important opportunities and challenges. But, also, to respond to the reticence and attendant constraints that come from our collective concerns about taking risks.
We don’t want to gloss over this moment. The whole sector is in shock. We’ve never been here before. Whether our organizations are choosing to take big, bold actions or just trying to test the waters, we want to make a pitch for the importance of conducting small experiments around how our work is changing, and learning from the results as quickly as possible. Rinse and repeat; learn and adapt. Being deliberate about experimenting where we can and learning as much as possible as quickly as possible is hugely important to mitigating risk in a volatile environment.
In any big strategy or action we take as an institution, there are many small steps that need to work in order to succeed in our larger goal. Each piece of a larger strategy might be owned by a different individual or team. During the pandemic, funders deployed rapid response grants to their grantees to help them respond to rapidly changing community needs. To deploy those funds, organizations needed to shift their existing priorities and expectations. They needed to quickly design and implement new, simpler application processes. Funding decisions needed to be made quickly and, in many cases, traditional reporting needed to adapt or be scrapped entirely.
We talk about these small steps as the building blocks of our work. Each building block may be something we are already very skilled at, but maybe some are completely new, or are things we know how to do when the environment is stable, but need to be tweaked to match the times. Where could we stumble? If we can anticipate those important but small building blocks and deliberately experiment and learn quickly, the chances of our overall success increase and our risk falls.
The value of deliberately experimenting around crucial building blocks goes beyond mitigating risk in this particular situation. If we can draw on what we’ve learned in the past about a particular building block and then use what we learn in this moment going forward – in other words, if we can steward our learning over time, we can build our collective skill and increase the likelihood that we will succeed in the future.
In chapter 4 on experimentation in the Guide to the Principles of Emergent Learning, Lauren Gase talks about “bounding the solution space,” which helps us be deliberate about what building block(s) we are focusing on. EL practitioners know a lot about how to turn the work into an experiment using Framing Questions, Hypotheses, BARs and AARs. Lauren offers ideas about how to bound an experiment to learn as much as possible from it. She observes that, “without boundaries, diverse experiments working to pull different levers across a giant system may be too diffuse to foster change or support learning.” If the framing question is more bounded, she argues, it can create “a shared ‘design space’ that foster[s] greater learning.”
The language we use when we talk about “freedom to experiment” is also important. Communicating clearly that we are inviting partners (team members, grantees, intermediaries) to bring their best thinking to the moment in this particular piece of work creates more agency and empowers partners to experiment together.
“Here’s what we are trying to achieve (line of sight) and here’s the space where we need everyone’s best thinking. Try something! Help us learn!” A corollary, of course, is to be open to hearing the results and being willing to adjust. Without that, it’s not an experiment!
These are the times we are in. Being deliberate about experimenting and adjusting in small ways along the path can help manage the risks inherent in responding to this moment.