Business Commons^™

Through The Looking Glass: Foundation Evaluation And Learning And The Quest For Strategic Learning, Suzanne Kennedy Leahy, Sandra Wegmann, Lexi Nolen

The Foundation Review

Strategic learning, a critical if relatively new lens for philanthropy, is neither simple nor efficient to institutionalize or practice yet — foundations are still figuring out how to do it well. In 2015, the Episcopal Health Foundation launched a project to distill lessons about how leading foundations configure evaluation and learning, and how they allocate related responsibilities in support of strategic learning.

This article addresses different models that foundations use to establish and staff evaluation and learning functions, what other organizational considerations they should take into account in order to prioritize strategic-learning work, and what tools and approaches can be …

Getting Real With Strategy: Insights From Implementation Science, Douglas Easterling, Allison Metz

The Foundation Review

Foundations are increasingly coming to appreciate the importance of strategy. But simply having a strategy – even an explicit strategy – does not guarantee that a foundation will actually achieve its goals.

To implement a strategy effectively, a foundation needs to operationalize it in the form of specific functions that staff will carry out and needs to create an organizational infrastructure that supports the strategy. The field of implementation science offers a set of tools for helping foundations address these tasks.

After introducing some general principles of implementation science, this article describes in depth the concepts of practice profiles, which …

Emergent Learning: A Framework For Whole-System Strategy, Learning, And Adaptation, Marilyn Darling, Heidi Guber, Jillaine Smith, James Stiles

The Foundation Review

The field of philanthropy is exploring what it takes to achieve impact in complex environments. The terms “adaptive” and “emergent” are beginning to be used, often interchangeably, to describe strategies by which funders can tackle complexity. This article proposes distinguishing between the two and explores more deeply how the research into complexity can inform philanthropic practice.

While approaches like systems mapping, scenario planning, and appreciative inquiry have been put forward as useful approaches to expanding perspectives and seeing whole systems, the field needs a framework for going beyond these planning tools in order to actually create the conditions in which …