Wrestling with the Impact Paradox

My good friend Jorg recently responded to one of my newsletters with some very smart thoughts:

“A question I keep asking myself concerns your "BCG style" impact matrix. How can I make an impact that will affirm a positive new vision for our society and communities instead of reinforcing the basic laws of a malfunctioning system? Or put differently: is my impact initiative helping a malfunctioning system to sustain itself or is my impact designed to lay the ground for a completely new social model?”

This is a great question, one that Anand Giridharadas asks to some extent through his bestselling book ‘Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World’. The basic premise is that elites – the 1% percent who have greatly profited from a system that is exploitative, extractive and oppressive for the majority of the world – have recast themselves through philanthropy as saviors of the world, but will only take actions and give to solutions that provide marginal change and do not in fact threaten the overall system so that they can ultimately continue to profit from it and stay on top. This is not a new argument per se, for example Leon Tolstoy:

 “I sit on a man's back choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all means possible....except by getting off his back.”

 Anand’s book comes alive through recounting his experience attending lots of social impact get togethers with the who’s who across the world. He even has a full Chapter devoted to the Clinton Global Initiative, where I worked for almost 5 years, as Director of Program, criticizing my team’s choice of speakers being too conforming to corporate interests.

Anand’s book hits a nerve for most of us who work in social impact.

There is an impact paradox as my friend Jorg is positing; there is real cognitive dissonance.

Galas (pre-COVID at least) where you drink champagne in ballrooms while listening to the plight of refugees (with not someone who has the lived experience of being a refugee in sight). Courting oil tycoons who made their money in ways that are clearly extractive and exploitative but whose check you need to do your work. Working as one of two people on the Corporate Social Responsibility team of a multi-national oil company who put your department under branding because well – it’s clearly just about greenwashing to them.

What Anand does not do though is offer solutions, and fundamentally, I am about problem-solving.

For me, the paradox comes down to this – to be able to change the game, you almost always need to play the game too.

Yes, you can be an activist, an agitator, and protest and shout and point out the problems. This is a critical part of all social change movements. 

Most often though, to effect real change, you also need people to offer real new solutions, to innovate, but then also to understand and work within the system, to work and compromise with those who do have the money and power and influence them to change and get things done. Even an activist has to sit down at some point to suggest how to and help re-write laws and effect policy change.

The trick or the difficulty is to know where your red lines are – who will you work with and who will you not? Where will you compromise and where won’t you? 

This paradox can present itself in big and small ways – Is it ok to fly around the world to climate conferences and more broadly continue to lead a “Western” lifestyle of consumption? Or are you like Greta and will you only use trains, boats and electric cars?  Is it ok to take money from an oil company to promote women’s empowerment? Is that better or worse than taking money from them for environmental conservation? Should you work with governments which are not democracies? 

It would be reductive to say there are easy answers - we all need to think about where working within or outside the system makes the most sense compared to our values, skills and experience. I would make for a poor activist and I am not a purist. I am a pragmatist who likes to get things done, who can bring lots of people together to move things along, and a human who does take airplanes (probably too often pre-COVID) and who does eat the occasional steak (I am French even if that is not an excuse).

It’s also crucial to not get lost in the game.

Even if you accept to play the game to get things done, you have to remember you are there ultimately to change its unfair rules, and dismantle systems of oppression.  

Regardless of where your red lines are, and how you wrestle with this impact paradox, we need everyone to get in the game, to use their skills and superpowers to work together – that’s when we can change it for good.