It’s easy to see why collective impact—the commitment of a group of important cross-sector actors to a common agenda for solving a specific social problem—caught fire in 2010. During an economic downturn, when few new resources were available, a voice said there was a way to do more with what we already had. The concept offered hope for achieving results at the scale we desired, even though we were feeling constrained. And thank goodness. Collective impact both validated work that had been underway for years and prompted innovative efforts to address complex social challenges. It gave a name to work that goes beyond traditional collaboration to understand the impact of working together in measurable ways, generating a host of new insights that would not have emerged otherwise.

But for all these benefits, as numerous articles have rightly noted, collective impact is not without significant flaws. Among them, the original article about it—which outlined conditions for collective impact, drawing from the success of a local cradle-to-career partnership in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky—was overly technical, focusing on turnkey solutions instead of examining the adaptive challenges that can impede progress, such as how to build ownership among all partners for change, especially community members. The best example is the idea of a backbone organization—the organization and staff that coordinates collective impact efforts. Most people believed backbones could achieve collective impact on their own, not realizing that their role was supporting community leaders and members to use data of all kinds together to change everyday behavior.

[For more of this article by Jeff Edmondson & Parvathi Santhosh-Kumar, go to https://ssir.org/articles/entr...ot_collective_impact]