Where you choose to stand can profoundly influence your understanding of the world around you. Just ask the astronauts of Apollo 8 or Apollo 17, who took the perspective-altering photographs “Earthrise” and “Blue Marble” from space in 1968 and 1972. Or, if you could, ask Copernicus, who in the middle part of the 16th Century changed forever our distinctly narcissistic view of the Earth at the centre of the universe, by publishing his heliocentric hypothesis.

We’ve been wondering a lot about Copernicus lately. Mainly because when you spend time thinking about systems, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that organisations can be as guilty of what we might call Copernicus Syndrome (or, perhaps, more properly, pre-Copernicus Syndrome): seeing themselves at the centre of the universe, as anyone belonging to social-media-fuelled ‘generation me’. We’ve noticed that whenever you see a chart of connections, organisations like funders put themselves in the centre with lots of radiating lines of connection to the groups they fund. Often too, we’ve noticed that’s how relationships, learning and money are organised. Typically, for example, learning is commissioned by a funder (often via independent evaluation), which flows back to the funder to decide what to do with it (often via publishing; too often headed for a pdf graveyard). Money typically has the same story: finance flows radially outwards to organisations backed by the funder; any repayments are collected back in by the funder, which is the arbiter of what happens to it next. The funder is the centre of the universe. All very pre-Copernicus. What would happen if, for example, instead of the money flowing back to the funder, the rules said the organisation that received it had to lend or grant it to another charity or social enterprise? Part of what we like to call the switch from capitalising the social to socialising the capital; maybe a new economic imagination.

Here’s an alternative perspective, from the point of view of individuals supported by myriad local services. It’s called Life Journey Maps and reimagines the universe with individuals at the centre, and the multitude of siloed professional services orbiting them instead of the more usual vice versa. It shouldn’t sound surprising but, as we have found, it’s rarer than you might think… scroll to about half way down this page https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/measurement-learning-methods-tools-enable-improvement/

As a riff on the same theme, we’ve begun experimenting with an organisational-centric view of the money flowing from trusts and foundations in the UK, by looking at a set of charities in an area and the multiple streams of finance flowing through each of them. Here’s a snapshot of one example, which is helping a new foundation take an intentionally outside-looking-in, Earthrise, perspective on where it can do the most good for the charities it wants to support by intelligently joining the foundations already in orbit around them.

[Some extra reading if you’d like an example…

We’ve seen (pre)Copernicus Syndrome cause some dramatic consequences. For example, a sizeable renewable energy investment a few years back involved three main sources of support: some government subsidy through one of the capacity-building grants of the day, one of the social banks, and some community share investors. Since the deal was a few £m, the bank not unreasonably wanted some due diligence doing but (slightly less unreasonably) didn’t want to pay for it in case the deal didn’t happen, so the renewable energy organisation had to magic-up a six-figure sum to pay the specialists the bank wanted. Never mind what that did to the viability of the project, the other part of the story was that, from the point of view of the bank, the capacity-building grant provider and the community share buyers, this cost was invisible because it landed outside the project. You might say it was outside their universe. Here’s the problem with that… the surplus from each and every renewable energy installation went to projects for people in energy poverty, which meant less energy poverty reduction happened because of the invisibility of the costs caused by everyone taking a pre-Copernicus view of the universe. When the story of this project was told by each of the protagonists, it looked great: grant subsidy was low but created a big project with lots of renewable energy; bank investment was protected through plenty of headroom by funding less than two-thirds of the value; community investors headed for 5% return. On an ordinary day, this would be no more than a story of the players passing costs around until the music stops and they see who’s left with the due diligence bill. But it’s more Blue Marble than that: if you can capsize the natural propensity to see yourself at the centre of the universe, you could end up seeing something much more beautiful than you could have previously imagined.]

Do we have Copernicus Syndrome?

Putting your cards on the table

Evaluation is dead. Viva evaluation!