An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
As a part of my series about “Big Ideas That Might Change The World In The Next Few Years” I had the pleasure of interviewing David Erlichman.
David Ehrlichman is a catalyst and coordinator of Converge, and author of Impact Networks: Create Connection, Spark Collaboration, and Catalyze Systemic Change. With his colleagues, he has supported the development of dozens of impact networks in a variety of fields, and has worked as a network coordinator for the Santa Cruz Mountains Stewardship Network, Sterling Network NYC, and the Fresno New Leadership Network. He speaks and writes frequently on networks, finds serenity in music, and is completely mesmerized by his newborn daughter.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit. Can you please tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
My journey to this work starts about 15 years ago, when I was just figuring out what I wanted to do in life. I knew I wanted my work to have a purpose, to create an impact, but the question was how? So, I tried working at a nonprofit. This organization was doing really great work helping people without shelter get trained and find jobs in the culinary industry. They were making a huge difference in the lives of the people who participated in the program, but ultimately, they were dealing with the symptoms of a massive, broken system, rather than affecting the system itself.
That got me curious about how we could create change at a systemic level. I decided to work for a social impact consulting group, Monitor Institute, to learn what approaches were emerging. It was there that I discovered how some organizations were making a much bigger impact not by scaling up their organization, but by scaling out through connections. Rather than building a bigger organization, they were building a network — and not a social network, but a network for purpose. Some organizations were open sourcing their intellectual property and their programs so they could be provided through other groups under their own brand. These organizations were able to drastically expand their impact by putting their mission and their purpose at the center of their focus and scaling out by partnering with others, rather than growing their own organization.
I also learned about more formal networks that were forming to connect many organizations around shared goals. These networks were staffed to facilitate coordination between different organizations so that they could work together to affect the larger system in ways that no single group could by working alone. A case in point is the RE-AMP Network, a collection of more than 140 organizations and foundations working across sectors to equitably eliminate greenhouse gas emissions across nine mid- western states by 2050. From the time it was formed in 2005, RE-AMP has helped retire more than 150 coal plants, implement rigorous renewable energy and transportation standards, and re-grant over $25 million to support strategic climate action in the Midwest.
This was the lightbulb moment for me, and it inspired me to get involved in these types of cross-sector network directly and, ultimately, to dedicate my career to advancing the network approach to collaboration.
Can you please share with us the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
One of the moments that first inspired me to dedicate my career to this work was when I was in Fresno, California, where I worked for three years as a coordinator for a network that brought together more than forty leaders from across sectors to work together in new ways to help revitalize their community. It was there that I first witnessed the power of networks to connect people across boundaries on behalf of a common purpose. Environmental activists found common ground with developers. The county librarian teamed up with a Spanish-language radio host and the Fresno State business school to offer free citizenship academies in county libraries. A youth group joined forces with both a gang-prevention organization and the school district’s office of community and family services to advance discipline and restorative justice reforms.
It was also there that I witnessed the true power of relationships. Built on a foundation of trust, the network changed the way people engaged with one another. Two advocates, one promoting charter schools and the other supporting public schools, came into the network seeing each other as the opposition. But after taking time to hear one another’s motivations, they began to have more honest and open conversations about their vision for Fresno. From these experiences I saw how it was possible to bring people into a new way of relating and working with one another, and how relationships were at the heart of it all.
Which principles or philosophies have guided your life? Your career?
It’s all about relationships. Even though there might be a lot that divides us, and a lot of things we disagree about, if we can dig deep enough, we will find that there is a lot of common ground between us, and many common values that we share. And we can find those commonalities when we invest in relationships, first and foremost. When people share their stories and connect with one another at a deeper level than they ever have before, it transforms everything about how they are able to work together to advance common goals.
Ok thank you for that. Let’s now move to the main focus of our interview. Can you tell us about your “Big Idea That Might Change The World”?
We know we have to work together in unprecedented ways, and at unprecedented scales. Addressing social inequities, climate change, providing economic opportunity for all… these are issues that can’t be solved by working alone. To address systemic issues we have to work systemically. This means working across organizations and across sectors. There’s no single organization or institution who can do it by themselves.
People and organizations embark on collaborative efforts all the time, thinking they know how to do that. But typically, they are frustrated by the results. Why? What goes wrong? Often, it’s that they’re trying to structure the collaboration like they would an organization, as a hierarchy, with some central authority guiding the work and with people fitting into specific roles to move it forward. And they try to plan it all out in advance, identifying specific, measurable outcomes for the effort before people have even started to work together. But this only works if we already know what needs to do and how to do it.
But complex issues are experienced very differently by different people. People are affected by the issue in different ways, and they’ll see things very differently depending on where they stand. In our work to address complex issues, we can’t plan it all out in advance. Instead, we need to bring different actors together to make sense of the issue, and then to strengthen their ability to share information and resources, coordinate their work, and collaborate together to affect the whole system in ways that no group could on their own. This is what it means to build a network, for impact. The big idea here is that we can and must move beyond the paradigm of command and control and top-down decision making to address complex issues by cultivating vibrant, self-organizing, decentralized networks that have the potential to create real impact.
How do you think this will change the world?
By embracing a living-systems approach to organizing, impact networks bring people together to build relationships across boundaries; leverage the existing work, skills, and motivations of a group; and make progress amid unpredictable and ever-changing conditions. As a powerful and flexible organizing system that can span regions, organizations, and silos of all kinds, impact networks underlie some of the most impressive and large-scale efforts to create change across the globe.
For example, 100Kin10 is a massive collaborative effort that is bringing together more than three hundred academic institutions, nonprofits, foundations, businesses, and government agencies to train and support one hundred thousand science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) teachers across the United States in ten years. Founded in 2011, 100Kin10 recently achieved its ambitious goal and has since expanded its aim to take on the longer-term systemic challenges in STEM education. In another example. the Justice in Motion Defender Network is a collection of human rights defenders and organizations in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua that have joined together to help migrants quickly obtain legal assistance across borders. Throughout the ongoing family separation crisis created by US immigration policies, this network has been essential in locating deported parents in remote regions of Central America and coordinating reunification with their children.
Or consider a network whose impact spans the globe, the Clean Electronics Production Network (CEPN). CEPN brings together many of the world’s top technology suppliers and brands with labor and environmental advocates, governments, and other leading experts to move toward elimination of workers’ exposure to toxic chemicals in electronics production. Since forming in 2016, the network has defined shared commitments, developed tools and resources for reducing workers’ exposure to toxic chemicals, and standardized the process of collecting data on chemical use.
Networks like RE-AMP, 100Kin10, the Defender Network, and CEPN — along with many others mentioned in my book — were not spontaneous or accidental; rather, they were formed with clear intent. These networks deliberately connect people and organizations together to promote learning and action on an issue of common concern. We call them impact networks to highlight their intentional design and purposeful focus, and to contrast them with the organic networks formed as part of our social lives.
Can you share with our readers what you think are the most important “success habits” or “success mindsets”?
Most organizations and leaders tend to see themselves at the center of universe, with many potential stakeholders situated around them that they can collaborate with to help further in their mission. However, the essential shift is to see ourselves as part of a larger, interconnected system of different actors and organizations. We are not the sun at the center of a solar system. Instead, we’re one star in a huge, diverse constellation. So rather than putting yourself at the center, put the shared purpose at the center — what is a core issue that many other groups also care about? Then, when you find the purpose or purposes that connect different groups together, work to strengthen the connections and flows of information between them. This is what it means to build an impact network.
Because hierarchies and networks are so different, working with networks calls a different form of leadership, different forms of participation, a totally different mindset — which we call the network mindset shift. This shift can take some getting used to, particularly for those of us who spent the majority of our lives and careers being trained in hierarchical environments like schools and offices.
When you embrace a network mindset, you stop working in isolation. Instead, you turn your focus toward cultivating connections. You start to notice more intently how your efforts are related to others. Rather than trying to scale up an individual organization, you seek to scale out, increasing your impact through collaboration.
Some very well known VCs read this column. If you had 60 seconds to make a pitch to a VC, what would you say? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂
To address the challenges of our time, we must embrace complexity and work collaboratively across systems of diverse stakeholders, even and especially when the path forward is unclear. It is not an overstatement to say the future of civilization and the planet depends on it. In our era of complexity, we need ways of working together that span our traditional boundaries. We need collaborative structures that are flexible enough to shift on a moment’s notice, that are resilient enough to withstand turbulence and disruption, and that bring people together as equals to share leadership and decision-making.
Fortunately, whether we are aware of it or not, we have already evolved methods of coordinating actions across many different stakeholder groups: all around the world, impact networks are being cultivated to address complex issues in the fields of health care, education, science, technology, the environment, economic justice, the arts, human rights, and others. They mark the next evolution in the way humans are organizing to create meaningful change. The choice in front of us is clear: either we can let networks form according to existing social, political, and economic patterns, which will likely leave us with more of the same inequities and destructive behaviors, or we can deliberately and strategically catalyze new networks to transform the systems in which we live and work.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
You can follow me on Twitter at @davehrlichman and on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/davidehrlichman
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.
Converge: David Ehrlichman’s Big Idea That May Change The World In The Next Few Years was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
