Project Origins & Goals
As advisors, educators, and developmental evaluators supporting leadership of social innovations, we have had a growing sense that large-scale change initiatives pose distinct leadership challenges, both by intensifying familiar, complex dynamics and by introducing new ones: It’s not the same.
In the spring of 2024, we began a collaboration to harvest learning from our diverse experiences, with the goal of identifying useful ways to help leaders expand their capacities to address these challenges. We found considerable resonance in themes that emerged, so we have launched a broader effort to catalyze and share learning on how leaders can boost their effectiveness.
This site, including a report and a series of cases, is an initial result of that effort. It is intended to spark a broader dialogue and fuller exploration. We hope you find value in these observations and, even more, that you will join is in the learning journey.
Partner Organizations
Two organizations have joined forces to lead this project:
The Aspen Institute is a global non-profit organization committed to realizing a free, just and equitable society. Its purpose is to ignite human potential to build understanding and create new possibilities for a better world. It drives change through dialogue, leadership and action to help solve the most important challenges facing the United States and the world. The Institute’s educational, policy, and leadership work is based on a belief in the criticality of enduring values and the need to promote civil dialogue across differences in a respectful, nonpartisan venue.
“The Alliance” is a community of CEOs and organizations with a mission to help purposeful leaders build higher performing organizations and a better world. Higher Ambition organizations take a long-term, people-centered, multistakeholder view and create both economic and social value. The Alliance seeks to identify and spread principles and practices for expanding leadership capacity and increasing effectiveness for large-scale impact. The Alliance also draws on the work of an affiliated nonprofit organization, the TruePoint Center, which has supported over 150 social innovators on their scaling journey.
The Authors
Mark Cabaj
Strategy and evaluation for social innovation and systems change initiatives. President, Here to There Consulting, Inc.; Associate, Tamarack Institute for Community Engagement.
Alexis Ettinger
Cultivating leadership and human connection for lasting change. Social innovation, cross-sector collaboration, and organizational design. Managing Director, Strategy, Aspen Institute.
Nathaniel Foote
Helping leaders, organizations, and learning communities achieve their full potential. Co-Founder and Board Chair, Higher Ambition Leadership Alliance and TruePoint Center. Board Chair, Tools of the Mind. Senior Fellow, Harvard Center on the Developing Child.
Jamie Gamble
Evaluative thinking for innovation and complex systems. Principal, Imprint Consulting; Associate Consultant, Higher Ambition Leadership Alliance.
Jasmine Lam
Sustainable impact at scale through partnerships with innovative and purpose-driven leaders. Senior Program Manager, TruePoint Centre and Higher Ambition Leadership Alliance.
David Langstaff
Global business and community leader. Values-based leadership. Experienced CEO and Director of advanced technology and professional services companies. Moderator, Senior Advisor, Aspen Institute.
James Radner
Collaborative learning for scaling up programs and policies. Assistant Professor, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto; Research Director, TruePoint Center; Senior Fellow, Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University.
Lindsay Tuthill
Research, facilitation, partnerships with Fortune 500 companies, foundations, and not-for-profit organizations. Director of Operations and Practice Management, TruePoint Center.
Methodology & Inspiration
This work was inspired by hundreds of leaders we have been privileged to support in tackling major social and environmental problems.
The diversity of approaches our colleagues have taken underscores that there cannot be a single answer to the question of how to catalyze large-scale change. In attempting to harvest some lessons from these diverse experiences, we know we can make only an incremental contribution in this large domain. Often the odds against large-scale change seem daunting, yet we do find hope in stories of leaders coming together and finding paths to overcoming those odds. Looking across such examples, we have a sense that there are some approaches—not grand solutions, but questions to ask, tools to apply, ways to focus resources—that can help shift the odds.
In all our work we have also drawn on the large volume of documented experience with the challenge of leading system change. Based on decades of such experience, the field has developed a series of helpful comprehensive frameworks, principles, and practices to guide leaders. For an excellent synthesis see the recent Harvard Kennedy School report “Systems Leadership for Sustainable Development.” Other useful sources and authors include, for example, Adam Kahane, Bridgespan, Centre for Exponential Change, Collective Impact Forum, FSG, John Kania, the McNulty Foundation, Donella Meadows, Reos Partners, Peter Senge, and the Skoll Foundation.
The authors also reviewed the following information while writing this paper:
Becton Dickinson: Opportunities and Challenges on the Road to the "Envisioned Future" (see also Becton Dickinson)
Leadership Case B-Lab (see also B-Lab)
Leadership Case High Resolves (see also High Resolves)
Scaling Up Whole Child Development Initiatives: Lessons from the Early Journey of Life Program in Vietnam (see also Early Journey of Life)
Sustainable Palm Oil / Unilever (see also Unilever)
Additional sources are cited throughout the report.
Acknowledgements
Many friends and colleagues have supported us on this journey. We wish to thank:
team members who joined us in the initial case review and early conceptual formulation, Bianca Bozzone, Russ Eisenstat, Patricia Guzman, Max Klau, and Malcolm Wolf;
Aspen policy program leaders who shared their experiences and insights at an early, formative stage, Greg Gershuny, Jamie McAuliffe, Anne Mosle, Steve Patrick, María Ortiz Pérez, and Ida Rademacher;
colleagues in our discussion group on scaling social innovations, Mark Bonchek, Peter Dunn, and Michele Zanini;
others who read and provided valuable comments on prior versions of this material, including Andrew Bollington, Paul Born, Tim Draimin, Jayne Engle, Janet Froetscher, Kerry Graham, Nathan Koblintz, Michael Quinn Patton, Monica Pohlmann, Darcy Riddell, Liz Skelton, Peter Tufano, and Ravi Venkatesan;
our copy editor, Elizabeth Segal, and our graphics design team, Shelley Steigerwald and Alyssa Moore;
colleagues at the Harvard Center on the Developing Child, Grand Challenges Canada (GCC), Porticus, and other organizations and foundations who have shaped and invested in large-scale change initiatives in early childhood development and our work supporting them;
leaders and sponsors of the Aspen Institute;
the Higher Ambition Leadership Alliance Board and supporters;
and, most importantly, all the leaders of large-scale change we have worked with and whose work has inspired us, including the examples discussed or referenced in the text, the GCC Saving Brains Learning Community, the Aspen Fellows, and the members of the Higher Ambition Leadership Alliance community.