Tools & Resources

This resource introduces 3 tools from service design, evaluation and start-up thinking that can be important in creating sustainability in the long term: Theory of Change; Business Model Canvas; and Service Blueprint.

This tool will help you to identify how ready your system (group, community or organisation) is for collaboration and adaptation. It can also be modified to help you assess readiness for tackling complex challenges.

This tool will help you to map and interpret stakeholder dynamics in your initiative. This tool can be useful at the start of an initiative when you are working out the ‘lay of the land’, if things go wrong, if there is conflict, or if you are not making progress.

This resource articulates four steps in aligning collective effort.

This resource provides an introduction to social innovation processes that will help you rapidly test your assumptions in a cost-effective way.

John Kania shares insights into why Collective Impact and Systems Change efforts are most powerful when they are conducted at a place-based level. This is an excerpt of a video interview in 2020 with John Kania by CFI Director, Kerry Graham.

John Kania introduces the six conditions of systems change framework. An excerpt of a video interview in 2020 with John Kania by CFI Director, Kerry Graham.

This resource provides practical guidance on how to and when to engage in horizontal management, which is concerned with working collaboratively across organisational boundaries.

This resource identifies 13 principles for challenging, altering and replacing our dominant ways of doing, thinking and organising in order to bring about social change.

This resource uses a basic matrix to distinguish between simple, complicated, political, complex, and chaotic issues and challenges, and the types of intervention most appropriate to each.

This resource explores what the spread of social innovations looks like in contexts that go beyond organisational growth, such as replication and dissemination. 

This resource explains that big visions can be too generic to develop actional strategies around, and thus advocates breaking them down into several smaller goals.

This resource is a video that explains pivoting as changing strategy, not changing your vision, much like changing your route if you encounter an obstacle while driving.

This resource describes six conditions of systems change: policies; practices; resource flows; relationships and connections; power dynamics; and mental models.

This resource helps individuals think systemically about social change, explore what is happening below the surface on issues they care about, and determine how they and their organizations can pursue large-scale change in a disciplined and holistic manner.