I am writing this blog posting in early 2014 to re-introduce myself.  It has been great to have attracted so many readers and follows in 2013.  Yet, I also worry that I might be taking for granted an understanding, by many new readers, of the core drivers of my work.  The term “introduction” is a misnomer since I’ve met, collaborated with and shared correspondence with many of you.   My work and I have been enriched by these relationships, so I view this brief overview of my work as part of an on-going effort to do my part in assuring mutual benefit.  Here, briefly, are my three interrelated areas of competency: 

At the core of my work, over the past 15-plus years, has been the achievement of broad-based community OUTCOMES.  I’ve applied this to subjects as varied (yet interconnected) as health care, poverty reduction, education and economic development. Postings on my blog – www.workingdifferently.org -- and the Vibrant Communities website have relayed stories and best practices from these efforts.  In the time before “collective impact,” I spent much of my time researching and disseminating information on how this can be accomplished (see my 2003 book: Community Visions, Community Solutions.)  With the boost of the galvanizing frame from the Collective Impact article published in 2008 in SSIR, I have be freed up to move to concentrate on implementation and the design of sustaining tools.

At the core of implementation for me is broad COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT.  This is the area that most distinguishes my work from that of FSG and their approach to community impact.  I have not seen an example of sustainable community change that did not require changed behaviors on the part of broader community members and not just a re-stacking of activities done by service providers.  In order to accomplish this, the ownership for the outcome has to be invested in the community and not in a set of collaborative programs and agencies.  I look forward to exploring, with you, the implications of this throughout the coming year.

My third area of value-add – and perhaps the area that promises to have the most lasting impact – is my growing focus on EDUCATION and the design and development of tools to sustain this work cross-sector, cross-community.  I have written quite extensively at www.learningovations.com and at http://www.workingdifferently.org/learning-ovations.html.  We will be featuring many of these tools in upcoming blogs under the “Learning Ovations” tag. 

I am committed to making myself open to all members of the various working differently communities so please stay in touch: [email protected]; on twitter at https://twitter.com/jcrubicon; and on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/jcrubicon/

Today’s businesses are confronted with the NEED to act in order to significantly change the trajectory of 3rd Grade Reading outcomes or in many ways face the consequences like the proverbial boiling frog – slowly being boiled alive.  As the proverb goes, if a frog is placed in boiling water, it will jump out, but if it is placed in cold water that is slowly heated, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death.  McKinsey Consultants, by demonstrating that business has already accepted a permanent recession due to its failure to act, is clearly showing that the water is uncomfortably hot.  But will your business act?

Here are examples of what businesses have done in communities working with Learning Ovations … for specifics on their actions see: www.workingdifferently.org

1.              Focus Community Attention on the economic pivot point of 3rd Grade Reading.  Don’t sit on the sidelines and blame the schools, the parents or the nonprofits.  Use your strategic skills to clarify targets, measure results and get the barriers out of the way.  Insist on results.  Your livelihood depends on it.

2.              Establish “Pay it Forward” Implementation Funds to assist budget-strapped school districts.  Where done in concert with Learning Ovations, these school districts pay back the dollars through significantly lower remediation costs when ALL children are reading at grade level.

3.              Align your Employees Volunteer Efforts to Improve School Outcomes.  This could range from reading volunteers, to providing books to rehabbing libraries.

4.              Connect Early Education Success to Health Outcomes and Poverty Reduction.  Hospitals, in concert with health departments, are leading the way, here.

5.              Realize that nearly every one of your employees is a parent or guardian.  Here’s just a short list of what we have seen businesses do: give employees time to go to parent teacher meetings, put kindergarten readiness checklists in your employee newsletter, make books available for employees to take home, be more career-focused on bring a child to work day, support their literacy efforts so they can read to their children.

6.              Require better connection between schools and after-school programs.  With Learning Ovations individualized reports, these after school programs become integral assets in providing the type of activities that will propel a student to strong literacy outcomes.

7.              Model Careers.  Be available to schools to help introduce students to the opportunities AND demands of choosing a career in your field.  STEM careers require the significant increase in advance reading skills as delivered in Learning Ovation classrooms.

8.              Be more demanding of your Community Foundations, United Ways and other local philanthropies.  With your contribution dollars, require them to be less fragmented and more focused on YOUR company’s future by targeting 3rd Grade Reading.  

9.              Most Important! Re-Think of how you view third graders: in just over ten years they will be your employees and customers.  Don’t value them lightly.


See our companion piece: Business and Education: 3rd Grade Literacy Inextricably Binds These Systems Together.

There comes a time in each broad-based community action where the necessary changed behaviors have to be envisioned, designed, supported and guided by all sectors of the community and not just those community members willing to sit around committee tables.  In fact, the earlier in the process that this realization occurs and is acted upon, the more likely true transformative change can take place and be sustained.  Because fundamentally success is driven by changing behaviors (habits) across the community.

Many collective impact initiatives stumble at this point.  Usually because they take the eye off a fundamental dictum of working differently: its all about the outcome.  Instead, blame for prior bad behaviors creeps in and the discussion falls back into accusation or constraint ("we can't achieve the goal because these people won't __________________.")   

This point of transition to community action to support changed behavior can turn into a cul de sac of blame or shame unless there is crisp focus on the desired outcome.  To minimize this from occurring, I think the key is "loose-tight."  That is, you want people to be creative and feel they own the work but you also want to be prescriptive enough that the result is far closer to the transfer of action to the community versus lowered expectations or more committee work.

Using parent engagement as an example:  the goal is not shaming or blaming -- assume a proper intent; i.e., those parents you are going to move DO care deeply about their children and either don't have clarity as to what they need to do or have impediments (like two jobs or negative feelings about education from their own experience).  Therefore, the community actions - to be outcome focused - need to be about moving those two "drivers" of suboptimal behavior.  Here are examples from several communities that maybe relevant:

- Employers agreed to give parents time-off to go to parent/teacher meetings or at the minimum go to the phone if the school calls about their child.

- Schools have understood that some parents first met failure at the school (sometimes the very building where their children are).  Thus they have been open to meet parents at a "neutral" setting: community center, etc.

- Employers (and other gathering place for parents, like stores and churches) have provided books for parents to take home (or other supplies).  In some cases they modeled skills of how to read to their children.  If you were never read to, it could be very hard to know the best approaches for reading with your child.

- Use the K-ready checklist and other parent-tips in employee, church etc., newsletters.  Have them posted on community bulletin boards at the supermarket, etc.

- UWay's, CATs, Schools, Action Teams have provided "Checklist Classes" where best practices and skills are discussed about what parents can do to help move a child along the k-ready checklist.  We've seen these classes be done in employee break rooms, in church basements, and in vacant stores at the mall.

- Local Arts organizations have offered traveling Art Together classes where parents (many of whom were never introduced to even the rudiments like finger-painting by their own parents) are given the chance to "play" with their children.

- Some of the reasons why parents don't attend is as simple as child care.

All of the above assume a desire on the part of the parents and help either remove impediments or bring knowledge to parenting for which they have no role model.

Depending on your desired other "outcome community action areas," I think you and/or the Action Teams can think through a no blame - no shame approach to mobilizing community action. 

To be tweeted links to my new posts -- blog, book reviews (both nonfiction and fiction), data or other recommended tools -- either go to Twitter.com and follow me @jcrubicon, or just go to my Home page and click on the Twitter button on the right, just above the tweet stream, and follow me @jcrubicon.

Let's stop simply trying to solve all of the problems we have in communities!

In the work of sustainable change, I have developed a growing understanding of the distinction between problem finders and problem solvers. In a community context, a problem solver may say that we don’t have enough funding to do what our programs need in order to accomplish their goals, whereas, a problem finder may see that the issue isn’t doing more of what we are already doing and failing but the need to work in completely different ways. 

Here is the central core lesson of what it means to be creative in our communities – to truly work differently: a whole line of research has found that people, most disposed to creative breakthroughs in art, science or any endeavor, tend to be problem finders. (See: "To Sell is Human").  Problem finders sort through vast amounts of information and inputs, often from multiple disciplines or sectors. (See: Habit # 4).  They experiment with a variety of different approaches. They are willing to switch directions in the course of a project and they often take longer than their problem solver counterparts. But in the end, the progress is faster AND a transformative outcome is achieved.   

Think of the George Bernard Shaw quote (famously attributed to Robert Kennedy): to see those things as they are and ask why (problem solver), or see things that never were and ask why not (problem finder). In the  nature of "working differently" to achieve collective impact, we rely on the creative, heuristic, problem finding skills of artists more than on the reductive, fragmented activity bias of problem solving technicians.  In community engagement, this means going beyond the usual suspects.

I agree with what you are probably thinking: the terminology is awkward ... I think this framing is trying to play off the historical valuing of a "problem solver" and in fact saying that most of those who in the past were lauded as problem solvers were in fact simply "band-aid appliers."  To systemically and forever solve a problem you have to be sure that, in fact, you are addressing the right problem.  Are you seeing the right problem?  Thus, the "new" value of problem finder.

At its core, any organization, be it business, nonprofit, governmental agency, school district or cross-organizational cooperative is simply the application and management of resources to solve problems in the creation and delivery of value for their respective stakeholders.  We are conditioned – cognitively and managerially – to solve problems. Most managers would prefer binary decision-making versus ambiguity and uncertainty. Keep it simple. Don’t question authority. Solve the problem – there’s got to be an answer! – and move on.

However ...

Creativity and innovation are different. “A question well put is half resolved,” contends Paul Souriau, 
a French philosopher known for his works on invention theory and aesthetics, “True invention thus consists in posing questions. There is something mechanical, as it were, in the art of finding solutions. The truly original mind is that which finds problems.”

Thus, a successful community process requires an engagement across sectors and the time and inclination to ask questions of the "givens."  Much less focus should be on the oft-unquestioned time spent building trust and much more on building clarity around what are actually the drivers of the present, suboptimal methods of working and how can we change the frame to achieve something lasting.

This insight  -- if it rises to that -- of seeking out the "problem finders" among us has powerful antecedents in the understanding of what it takes to accomplish transformative change:  

Voltaire, for example, called us to "judge a man by his questions rather than his answers."

Einstein and Infeld: The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution … To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old questions from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

Evans and Deehan: Creative people do not only solve problems. They also find problems to be solved.

Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi: The central question: "How are new problems discovered?" rather than the more usual question, "How are existing problems solved?" The first step in creative activity involves the discovery, or formulation, or the problem itself.

But, if we are conditioned to mechanically solve problems (think: IQ testing), how do we seek problems? A.F. Osborn contends creativity is activated when we bombard the imagination with queries, stabs such as, “what if…” “what about…” “what else…” And, I would add, “Yes, and …” or review our earlier posting on "The Why Test."

Imagineer a problem, frame a riddle, or construct a puzzle. Then, solve it.

Thinking about editing a movie scene that isn't working, a problem solver might edit longer or shorter or cut the scene out all together.  A problem finder might instead realize that the scene isn't working because the narrative flow is off and this problem finder then might say the the scene would work much better if it came earlier in the film.   

Those organizations or communities that achieve formidable results find the tough questions, and then, instead of being afraid to ask them, eagerly decide to seek out the answers. They dig in deep to the details that matter and ignore the ones that merely distract. The art is in knowing which is which.  

A first step in eliminating the details that merely distract, may be to use recent meeting agendas as filters -- if we have struggled achieving our aspirations, those agenda items are probably not central to the real problem.

I've been a fan of IDEO and Design Thinking for some time -- no doubt, amplified by my daughter, Jessica's, great internship there seven or so years ago while she was pursuing her Masters in Engineering at Stanford.  Much like our Working Differently focus on the outcome, design thinking is precisely focused on what it is you are trying to accomplish.  While, IDEO, and it's charismatic CEO, Tim Brown (pictured) have had profound impact in the business sector and have brought its organizational tools to the nonprofit sector, I see his message as having powerful lessons for our cross-sectoral work in community.  

IDEO, as you may know, is one of the world's leading creative consultancies: beginning with their founder David Kelley, they have been willing to show how they build their design thinking methodologies: the careful defining of problems and targeting their solutions.  And fittingly enough, Brown says innovation requires a certain passionate curiosity -- to move from problem to solution.  

In this Working Differently blog, we have described this type of design thinking methodology or process as it applies to large community systems.  The best "executive summary" would be in the blog posting: "Seven Habits of Highly Successful Communities." 

Jonah Berger has given us a very good read that builds on "Switch" and "The Tipping Point."  In essence we are introduced to a means to put into practice what were simply observations in the Heath's and Gladwell's separate takes on how to influence others.  Those of us who work across sectors in community are always trying to find the magic formula for engaging and moving our respective audiences to action.

For Berger, there are six essential factors that contribute to contagious ideas: think of them as the STEPPS to having your ideas catch on.  A quick look at some of the most successful viral campaigns reveals each of these elements at work.  Not all elements are necessary for an idea to catch on, but a combination of some or all these elements would certainly increase the likelihood. (A key note here is that this is not all about virality in an Internet context -- according to Berger only 7% of real world contagion occurs on the web; the vast majority of ideas that catch on are still transported word of mouth.) 

Social currency. We share things that make us look good or help us compare favorably to others. Exclusive restaurants utilize social currency all the time to create demand.  In community: involvement in an effort to solve seemingly intractable problems would provide social currency, but if jargon makes it too hard to explain either the issue or the solution we preclude virality.

Triggers. Ideas that are top of mind spread. Like parasites, viral ideas attach themselves to top of mind stories, occurrences or environments. For example, Mars bar sales spiked when in 1997 when NASA's Pathfinder mission explored the red planet.  In community: think of how to frame your ideas in order that they might have triggers for the larger community.  For example: your work on poverty reduction might have more triggers if you were also able to talk about it in economic development or community betterment terms.

Emotion. When we care, we share. Jonah analyzed over six months of data from the New York Times most emailed list to discover that certain high arousal emotions can dramatically increase our need to share ideas - like the outrage triggered by Dave Carroll's "United Breaks Guitars" video.  In community: we've been fairly adept at the first part of the equation - care - but we have had more difficulty with creating the vehicle for sharing, be it a video, website or story.

Public. People tend to follow others, but only when they can see what those others are doing. There is a reason why baristas put money in their own tip jar at the beginning of a shift. Ideas need to be public to be copied.  In community: the question should be: what is the behavior we want repeated and how to we publicly model it.

Practical. Humans crave the opportunity to give advice and offer tips (one reason why advocate marketing works - your best customers love to help out), but especially if they offer practical value. It's why we `pay it forward' and help others. Sharing is caring.  In community: have you provided your advocates with a story, checklist or tool to share that brings practical value.  Many communities have developed a "kindergarten-readiness checklist" for this purpose.

Stories. - People do not just share information, they tell stories. And stories are like Trojan horses, vessels that carry ideas, brands, and information. To benefit the brand, stories must not only be shared but also relate to a sponsoring company's products. Thus the epic failure of viral sensations like Evian's roller baby video (50M views) that did little to stem Evian's 25% drop in sales. 

As you are developing your marketing campaign or community engagement strategy, you should put it through the test of the STEPPS elements.  It will move you from your frame of reference to your audiences' and that is the beginning of being contagious!

Many of us have often heard the distinction made between a Community Foundation and a local United Way.  The United Way was a community's checking account and the Community Foundation it's savings account.

This parsing had elements of time horizon (immediate v. long term) and impact (activities v. structure).  But in reality, while source of funding were different, most Community Foundations and United Ways acted similarly to type and use of grant dollars...there was a tendency to spread grant dollars wide and thin.  "Let's give all the good people, doing good things, something."    What's been most interesting in these past five years is that BOTH local United Ways and Community Foundations have been redefining their roles in the face of growing number of examples of communities getting to solutions.  "Give everybody something" has morphed into "give to what gets results."

This reframing proved difficult in practice not only because there was vagueness around what constituted a result, but there was a growing understanding that the very community systems developed to do "good things" were not necessarily the same systems required to get "good results."  With Community Foundations designed around the "good things" mechanisms, many were feeling the frustration of "you can't get there from here."  It is not surprising, then, that many funders undertook a from ground up rethinking of their purpose and role in getting to good results.

This chart is from one such exploration.  It was developed by the Kalamazoo Community Foundation.  I'm not presenting it as the only model of this redefinition.  But I do think the core redefining point -- from transactional to transformational -- is a very helpful frame.  

The implications between a transactional role and a transformational role would be valuable discussion for any Foundation Board Meeting.  Let's look at a couple of points of comparison:

1.  Fund Individual Programs v. Fund Alignment.  There will never be an absence of good ideas in our community space.  Social Entreprenurism is the latest expression of this truism.  The harder, more demanding task is requiring that these actions get us to a successful result.  We have invested billions of dollars on good intentions in our communities across North America.  Can we afford to continue to be less demanding as to result than we are in almost every other aspect of our lives?

2.  Engage the entire community.  Community members are only unusual suspects from the point of view of traditional involvement in the activities of assistance.  From the point of view of behavior change and sustainable outcomes, they are the central constituent.  Working Differently requires that shift in perspective - in ownership.  The art of these cross-sectoral movements is in tapping into the mutuality of benefit that can motivate us all -- in our context -- to align our work.  

A valuable additional source for consideration would be our blog entry for Catalytic Leadership.  Do your own analysis.  What are the implications for your Foundation to move in this direction?  What are the implications of not?   

"Vision without execution is hallucination."  This quote by Thomas Edison has particular resonance in our Working Differently / Collective Impact communities.  For in many ways, these communities seek to accomplish transformative change by building on two visions: the aspirational outcome and the cross-sectoral means of achieving that outcome.  For this reason, carefully considering "how" this can be accomplished is vital. 

Our work with multiple communities across North America has given us insight to the four steps required to assure community sanity in the midst of achieving sustainable outcomes.  Assuring execution across these four steps is the foundational requirement for any successful multi-partner endeavor.  It is all the more important when these partners are across sectors.  In that case, this is the core of what a community support organization, roundtable and/or backbone organization must deliver.

First, clarity on the target (see figure).  Where communities fail to to even get out of the gate to meaningful change is their failure to agree on a shared definition of what is the target of our collective efforts and how will we know if we are making progress to that result.  For many, there is a reluctance to make this goal concrete for fear of disengaging some partner or because it involves the tough work of getting beyond jargon and assumptions.  As I discuss in other blog postings (most particularly in the recent Understanding Measures), the reluctance to be crystal clear on the target quickly metastasizes into on-going debating societies among good people where much time is used but very little meaningful progress is charted.

Second, embrace the fact that activities beyond those being done by "the usual suspects" are vital to success.  (In a future blog posting, I'll discuss how the most significant player in a community achieving kindergarten readiness was the town's largest employer.) To truly engage the entire community in this effort requires the humility to understand that it involves so much more than mapping current activities (see figure).  We must begin with a comfort about "what we don't know."  An important test here is assessing the level of community engagement in the partnership -- if the vast majority of those organizations involved are in some way funded to be there, then you are not reaching far enough.

Third, create a means for all parts of the community to align to your efforts.  This is the core of execution in that collective space above the "command and control" structures of individual organizations and institutions.  Execution here moves from dictate to enable.  No community collective has (or should have) the power to force action, but they certainly have the ability to help organizations and individuals ask and answer the simple question: "what can I do?"  This aligning arrow (see figure) that you are creating is made possible by a whole series of resources from shared language, to shared measures, to supporting data and indicators to published checklists to communications to best practice case studies to training.  This step is particularly helpful when thinking about funding decisions: there should be less emphasis for this effort to fund activities (those have better sources of funds and tends to disengage non-funded, but vital community activities) rather here the need is to fund those things that allow disparate organizations to align, coordinate and manage to the shared outcome: e.g., universal assessments; common data systems, etc.    

And, fourth, recognize and salute the many community activities that have aligned on your arrow.  This will serve to model and induce broader community engagement to propel the outcome forward.  Communities have done this in annual gatherings, newspaper articles and tweets.  The key gravitational pull is the ongoing reporting on the progress to the shared target.  This brings us back to the importance of the first step to continually improving your execution.   

A tsunami of measuring things has hit our community efforts over the past decade.  For the most part, this "run it like a business" mantra has done little harm, but it also has not gotten us to the promised land of transformative change.

There have been critics on both sides of the exercise.  Some will talk about their belief that important things, by their very nature, do not lend themselves to be measured.  While others will identify the insufficiency of the measures chosen.  Still more have called it a distracting fad that takes providers away from the important work of good people doing good things.

Perhaps the best place to start our thinking about how best optimize and tame this measurement fever is the fact that 90% of what we are required to measure in community -- be it because of grant mandates, donor or Board requests, or other well meaning impositions -- fail to measure those aspects of our work, especially our collaborative work, which truly represents the path to transformative and sustainable outcomes.

This 2x2 matrix shows the four quadrants of types of measures available to monitoring our work and progress.  Measures can be thought of in terms of quantity or quality of the work being measured AND the amount of effort or effect such work requires or delivers.

The vast majority of the measures, indicators, mileposts that we have used in community are stuck in the first quadrant --  counting quantity and effort.  Here we look at number of clients served, seats available, units built.  We are focused on what we do, assuming that will be transformative in and of itself.  Most of the public policy and advocacy work in this quadrant is about access and funding more of these same types of activities.  

The dilemma here is multi-fold: 
(1) It tends to solidify our definition of success around what we are already doing, i.e., though, we've failed to achieve our desired outcomes over the past quarter-century, we would be successful if we only did more of it.  Einstien's definition of insanity certainly comes to mind -- doing more of the same, hoping for a different result.
(2) By emphasizing the count versus the result, we tend to heighten the competition around the action -- agency A is better than agency B because their overhead is lower.  
(3) It tends to crowd out innovation be it in activity, result or data because we built momentum around maintaining where we have already been, as opposed to where we want to go.  If fact, in most communities the definition of the ideal future is a better funded past.

Quadrant #2 moves us beyond counting activities, yet it is still limited in scope by framing what matters around the quality of those who are performing the activities.  Imagine: This community runs the very best "Dare" program!  Irrespective of whether there is any evidence that "Dare" programs causally impact teen drug use.

Quadrant #3, though back to counting, is at least looking outside the provider frame for an assessment of impact.  Unlike the first two quadrants, since we have now moved to the part of the matrix dealing with effect, we need to consider more directly whether our activities are in fact the path to improved outcomes.  The first two quadrants were about agency, we are now shifting to impact.  Yet, we are still a level removed from sustainable change.  We are taking a community vessel and filling it with good things without the ultimate connection between whether these "good" things create a good lasting result in the community.  "Self-Esteem," "High School Graduation Rates,"  "Worker Retraining Skills"  are all examples of Quadrant #3 measures, which are not sufficient to tell us whether we have achieve the tipping point in community success.

It is only Quadrant #4 measures which begin to outline the collaborative, collective impact our communities deserve.  The other three quadrants are about counting, whereas here we are measuring the heavy lifting of a community actually accomplishing something. 

As you move from Quadrant #1 to #4, not only are you shifting your collective focus from good people doing good thing to good people accomplishing good results, but you are also declaring what it is that you need all of those other quadrant measures aligning to.  This quadrant thus becomes the ultimate community accountability.

A very worthwhile test for your organization, partnership or community is to assess all measures you are presently using against Quadrant #4.  If you are NOT tracking measures here, you are simply being busy.  

Are you inspired by what you have read about Working Differently? Would you like to see your community achieve collective impact? Perhaps you are ready to be a catalytic leader for change.

The catalytic leader is the first to ask, why can’t we achieve what we want? The catalytic leader is the first to start working differently.

A catalytic leader is someone who can communicate across organizations and sectors to inspire a new way of working that will achieve the community’s highest aspirations. A catalytic leader knows how to hold the center [Habit #3] and put community outcomes before personal or organizational agendas.

Some catalytic leaders start the process by asking key questions and convening people to explore this new approach. Some catalytic leaders support the ongoing process of implementation. Catalytic leadership exists in individuals (for example, in executives or board members) and in organizations (for example, local companies, community foundations, county government, or chambers of commerce).

Though the primary motivation for becoming a catalytic leader should be to help your community solve problems and achieve its goals, you can expect some benefits from taking on this role. For example, you will gain a big-picture understanding of your community and connect to hundreds of people. You will help shape your community’s future. And your organization may reap financial rewards for ensuring that resources are solving problems.

Of course, becoming a catalytic leader also has risks. When you ask the community what it wants, you don’t know what answers you’ll get. Acting on those answers may require significant change in your organization’s operations.

Do you want to learn how to be a catalytic leader? Alas, you will find few tools to help. At least 90 percent of the books on leadership and management are about organizational leadership. But an organizational leadership model doesn’t serve us well when we are working at the community level.  The chart below contrasts the two type of leadership styles.  You will recognize the familiar characteristics of the "organizational leader style."  Now that you've deepened your understanding of Working Differently, you can see how so many of the leadership traits we took for granted are inappropriate for achieving collective impact.
(A great team or board exercise is to discuss the key differences in styles and check how you have been operating -- you will quickly see how the wrong leadership style will clearly undermine your ability to achieve collective impact). 

Organizational leaders are expected to take charge of processes, develop a strong sense of ownership, inspire others with their vision, answer the tough questions, and defend the organization’s interests.

Conversely, catalytic leaders let the process develop through community conversation, avoid developing a sense of ownership, help the community develop its own vision, and ask the tough questions. Most importantly, catalytic leaders must be and be perceived to be neutral about the agendas of individual organizations and people. They must also be and be perceived to be responsible for keeping everyone focused on the community’s outcomes and holding everyone accountable.

Catalytic leaders often convene meetings, get more people engaged, keep information flowing, and make sure tasks are completed between meetings. Therefore, they can be erroneously perceived as owning this community endeavor. But they must actively shun that perception. Community work needs someone to push and lead everyone forward, but the endeavor and the results must be owned by everyone. If an educated workforce becomes “the chamber’s pet project,” it will lose the necessary involvement of every sector. If ending homelessness becomes “the county’s shelter project,” the commitment to work differently across organizations is lost.