The Generative Network Difference

Networks have unique capabilities for achieving social impact that distinguish them from other forms of social organizing, and generative social-impact networks are particularly suited for addressing complex problems.

The urgency and scale of social problems, coupled with the limited results to date, cry out for new approaches.

— Jane Wei-Skillern, Nora Silver, and Eric Heitz, "Cracking the Network Code"

Many social-impact networks burst into life out of an unpredictable mash-up of like-minded people who share a problem, get together to see what will happen, and then invent a common path forward. They have an itch to do something, and they share a belief that pooling their resources and collaborating might get them what they want. But they don't know what they'll do together.

Just seven years out of college, Sadhu Johnston had become Chicago's chief environmental officer in 2005, appointed by Mayor Richard Daley to lead the greening of the nation's third-largest city. Two years earlier he'd started working on that goal as an assistant to the mayor, and found himself struggling to find out what other cities were doing. "I was cold-calling people in other cities and Googling to get information. I didn't know anyone in a similar position. It was really a vacuum. For several years this was the primary frustration of my job. What information you did get was largely spin—the positive stuff without any of the challenges. You learn as much from the failures as from successes, and it was really hard to get that."

Daley had announced that Chicago would become the nation's greenest big city, but no one was sure what that meant and how to make it happen. "Even most environmental groups were not seeing cities as playing a role when it came to climate change and environmental benefits," Johnston recalls. "Cities were still viewed as 'the evil city,' with pollution coming out and resources going in to be consumed." Gradually, though, the idea of urban sustainability, of redesigning urban systems for improved environmental and economic performance, especially reduced production of carbon emissions that triggered climate change, started to catch on. When Daley met with other mayors, Johnston compared notes with their staffers and found they too were frustrated by the lack of useful information. "A number of us thought we needed to be coordinated. But I realized I couldn't do it myself; I had a full-time job." There followed a period of false starts: one organization was interested in helping but didn't follow up; another proposed to help, but wanted far too much money; a gathering of people from a few cities didn't lead to anything. "I was casting about, trying to figure out how to get this done."

In an entirely different context, that of the American Jewish community, Rachel Levin also had an itch to organize something different. In Los Angeles she had helped establish Steven Spielberg's Righteous Persons Foundation and cofounded the Joshua Venture Group, a fellowship program for young social entrepreneurs. The daughter of a rabbi, she was looking for ways to engage young American Jews like herself with Jewish identity and community. Census data had found that a high percentage of Jews were marrying non-Jews, sparking national headlines that the Jewish community was marrying itself out of existence. Other research concluded that the Jewish community was irrelevant to many younger Jews. As a result, renewal and continuity had become a part of the Jewish American agenda. At the foundation, Levin recalls, "We were getting a lot of proposals from more established Jewish organizations, but they were based on how they had organized people in the past. It was not going to work with the majority of young Jews, who didn't want to be forced into a Jewish-only space." There had to be another way.

For Fred Keller, the itch was about securing the future of the $70-million-a-year manufacturing business he had started at the age of 29. He was worried about global competition. Cascade Engineering, Inc., had three plants in the Grand Rapids, Michigan, area with about 600 employees and a line of products for the office furniture industry. "We were doing well," Keller recalls. "But I was concerned." He had visited Japan a few years earlier, and what he'd learned had blown his mind. "I was in awe of what their manufacturers were doing. We had a lot to learn from these very disciplined Japanese companies. They had figured out how to be incredibly efficient; they focused on quality, and, as a result, they reduced costs." American firms—his and others he knew—hadn't figured out any of this. "Maybe for the first time in the history of manufacturing in the U.S., the competitor was not across town; there was international competition," Keller says. "I had a sense that we're either going to get this right or we're going to lose to them." He turned to his local competitors, talking to fellow CEOs of privately owned manufacturing companies. "I wanted to have a dialogue with some other folks," he says. "I didn't know all of them very well, but we all had a sense that we had to get better fast." So how could they do that?

When Keller, Levin, and Johnston scratched their different itches, each decided to work with peers to build a network.

In 2008, Johnston met Julia Parzen, a Chicago-based consultant, who expressed interest in helping. "We had worked together in developing Chicago's Climate Action Plan, and she seemed like the kind of person who could actually pull together a cohesive effort between cities' sustainability staffers. It would be about the members, not about her and her organization. She was open to listening to others and helping them pull something together. We started to pull in others to make it happen." And what was it? "I didn't want an association, because I knew I didn't want to start a big organization," Johnston says. Someone suggested that they hold an annual conference, but Parzen proposed instead that they form a set of ongoing relationships. "We needed to build relationships among folks in the emerging field of urban sustainability," Johnston says. "A network was the right approach." They started with a core group of seven sustainability directors, each of whom invited five peers to join the new network and attend its first gathering in the fall of 2009. "We called it the Urban Sustainability Directors Network."

Rachel Levin also spent time wandering in the wilderness before turning to a network approach. She, Roger Bennett, then of the Andrea & Charles Bronfman Philanthropies, and several colleagues designed an experiment. "We believed that if you bring smart, creative people...