By Rohini Nilekani (Chairperson, Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies) & Donald Gips (CEO, Skoll Foundation)
If you happen to drive along the highway connecting Guwahati and Shillong in the Northeast of India, you may want to stop at a few of the 350 rural Primary Healthcare Centres (PHCs) and interact with the healthcare professionals. These centres are a thriving testament to the systemic transformation in progress.
Nurse Joyce would explain how she can ensure proper maternal care of the most vulnerable rural women because she has access to uninterrupted power and functional medical facilities such as baby warmers. This is no accident; it’s a thoughtful system orchestration by SELCO Foundation, a 2018 Skoll Awardee and co-traveller with Centre For Exponential Change.
Bringing together state government resources with private players to ensure reliable operations, maintenance, and building capacity of primary healthcare staff is no easy task. Systemic change is underway to make PHCs and other crucial health service points no longer just functional, but resilient and self-reliant. Isn’t it remarkable that such a model of exponential change is emerging as a blueprint for 50,000 rural PHCs across India?
Human history is peppered with long periods of small changes that were disrupted by compounding big shifts. We are living through such a transition, where both our problems and our ability to respond are multiplying at an unprecedented pace. This moment compels us to pause, reflect, and reimagine our response to social problems with exponential thinking. Would linear solutions that may have worked in the past be adequate for the future?
How can we learn from exponential thinking and action in progress? Most successful social innovations scale because of the collective work of many problem solvers across communities, civil society, government, and private sector (Samaaj, Sarkar, Bazaar). One example is the global financing and professionalization of frontline Community Health Workers (CHWs), the backbone of community health services in many countries. A more professionalized workforce active hand-in-hand across communities, civil society, government, and business, is key to responding to public health outbreaks and developing strong health systems.
But much more investment is needed to unlock the full potential of CHWs and to ensure communities have access to professionalized, trained, compensated, and integrated CHWs. Within the Skoll community, we see locally-based partnerships and coordination successfully happening with multiple governments to develop national community health strategies and financing pathways. The Africa Frontline First Catalytic Fund is an example that has already secured $100 million in funding as it seeks to scale-up and sustain 200K professional CHWs across 10 countries by 2030, expanding healthcare coverage to 100M people. But this work takes a specific profile of innovator to build, coordinate, and activate this type of exponential change over time.
What type of innovator does it take to catalyze such exponential change? This requires system orchestration: connecting the dots, fostering partnerships, and driving whole ecosystems forward. Working behind the scenes, system orchestrators bring about transformational social change by knitting together key actors, providing resources and digital infrastructure, and mobilizing collective change efforts. They shape a new paradigm, leverage systems’ resources, navigate complexity and persist with authenticity to create impact at societal scale.
When system orchestrators are networked and resourced, they are able to “conduct” social change symphonies that trigger positive domino effects of change. While not always at the center, or even out front, their coordinating and activating capabilities are critical.
System orchestrators exist and have existed for years. They continue to do influential work behind the scenes that often does not get the public spotlight. By no means is this journey of system orchestrators an easy one. These endeavors are very complex, extend over long periods of time, and bridge many chasms on the way. Does it not behoove us to do our best to unlock their imagination, reinforce their capabilities, and reduce the friction they face?
Can all of us focused on impact at scale come together as an enabling force for them? Can we ensure that knowledge is reused, reimagination is encouraged, prototyping is celebrated, and self-efficacy of leaders is reinforced? Can we join hands to catalyze positive change by accelerating the work of the social innovators who are tackling our planet’s most existential challenges, and provide a network of support for system orchestrators? That is the vision with which we are establishing the new Centre For Exponential Change.
In the Skoll community and across the network of Centre For Exponential Change, we continue to see system orchestrators emerge. Many started with social innovations they were scaling within their organizations and over time their credibility in the space led to a system orchestrator role. Other social innovators are system orchestrators from the start.
Given the scale of impact system orchestrators are helping drive, it’s hard for us to imagine a scenario in which the big, audacious goals that we have set for ourselves can be achieved without them. Yet the common theme we hear from them is that raising funds for what they do is challenging, even when most have lean budgets ($5M annually) and staff (~10 or less). Through surveying the field with Bridgespan, we’ve found that most system orchestrators have severe finance gaps, on average between half to 2x their budget, or about $2.5M. The Centre for Exponential Change is designed to build a community of enablers, including funders, for system orchestrators, so they can flourish and consistently leverage critical networks.
Nilekani Philanthropies works closely with system orchestrators, such as EkStep Foundation and many others engaged with Societal Thinking, and has experienced not only many successes but also setbacks. Some lessons from these experiences have become the guideposts for how philanthropy is practiced. One of them is that we need a new lens to reimagine the way we look at and solve social problems – going beyond plucking out the weeds, instead digging deep to the intertwined roots of a problem. This means opening up a space to reimagine the way we look at problems and our role in solving them, a space for experimentation, and a space for diverse actors across civil society, government and markets to come together to solve.
In the journey towards systemic change, the triad of Samaaj (society), Sarkaar (government), and Bazaar (market) plays a pivotal role. Through successful cross-sector collaborations, we’ve seen firsthand how the synergy between these sectors amplifies our collective impact. For instance, initiatives that bring together the grassroots innovation of Samaaj, the regulatory framework and resources of Sarkaar, and the scalability and efficiency of Bazaar demonstrate the power of united action. This collaborative ecosystem is at the heart of the mission for the Centre for Exponential Change, leveraging the unique strengths of each sector to foster exponential change.
It is with this vision that the Centre for Exponential Change is emerging as a co-creation space to bring together diverse enablers that support the journeys of system orchestrators in solving social problems faster, sooner, and at scale. Skoll Foundation and Nilekani Philanthropies are co-founding the Centre For Exponential Change along with New Profit and Instituto Beja with a shared vision and aspiration. Conceived as a global action network, the Centre for Exponential Change (C4EC) and its Global Members will offer:
- Exchange of open and practical knowledge on how to induce exponential change
- Actionable advisory for deep design and prototyping to explore new pathways
- Paradigm grants to unlock the imagination of validated system orchestrators
- Hands-on experienced mentors who can help navigate challenges with insights
- Spaces and communities to reinforce the self-efficacy of system orchestrators
When catalyzing positive exponential change, it’s possible to inadvertently perpetuate existing disparities in our society that harm marginalized populations. What may seem ambitious from a dominant paradigm may have hidden costs for the vulnerable, if not empathetically considered from their lived experience. With the right values, design principles and approach, social innovators can balance innovation with responsibility. Founded on core values of restoring agency, nurturing dignity, and empowering choices for traditionally marginalized and underrepresented groups, the Centre For Exponential Change will co-travel with system orchestrators to actively integrate and elevate voices from multiple axes of difference, lend fresh perspectives, surface blindspots and nourish equity.
Like the attention we pay to conserve and regenerate the systems in nature that preserve and rejuvenate our ecology, such as coral reefs and rainforests, we must pay similar attention to system orchestrators in our society that are essential for rapid progress towards a sustainable and equitable future. It is our responsibility to engage, listen, learn, and strive to improve our systems to reduce the friction these actors face and bridge the chasms they must cross. That commitment is at the heart of the Centre For Exponential Change.
We invite you to join this movement, reach out to become an active member of the emerging C4EC Global Network, extend your financial support or expertise with system orchestrators, share your journey and insights, strengthen the narrative, or collaborate on existing or new exponential change journeys. Visit us at the Centre for Exponential Change, and get involved!
MILAN – How to strike the right balance between the state and the market, and ensure the proper functioning of both, has been debated for centuries. But Indian author and philanthropist Rohini Nilekani offers an answer that focuses on neither. As the title of her 2022 book, Samaaj, Sarkaar, Bazaar (Society, State, Markets): A Citizen-First Approach, suggests, society comes first.
For Nilekani, a stable, well-functioning, and inclusive society is essential, first, as an end in itself. But it is also crucial for another reason: a healthy civil society is a prerequisite to effective governance and beneficial market outcomes. As she explains, the state and markets carry out important functions but are vulnerable to errors, imbalances, inefficiencies, and failures, such as capture by special interests. This can result in myriad problems, from rising inequality to shortfalls in the provision of public goods.
That is where society comes in. According to Nilekani, the only effective responses to government or market deficiencies come from civil society, including the values, relationships, and organizations that underpin it. When society is “malfunctioning” – for example, owing to deep polarization or fragmentation – that response mechanism is disrupted, and can even stop working altogether.
Nilekani’s argument evokes insights from two other thinkers: the economist Albert O. Hirschman and the political scientist Robert D. Putnam. Hirschman’s influential 1970 book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States argued that actors express their dissatisfaction with underperformance in two main ways. They can “exit” (in favor of an alternative) or use their “voice” to apply pressure for change (such as by highlighting their concerns, proposing solutions, or even threatening to take action that would undermine performance further).
But while it is probably relatively easy to “exit” a firm that is not meeting one’s needs as a consumer – especially if alternatives are readily available – exiting a country is not always a realistic or attractive option, nor equally available to all. More affluent or educated citizens generally have an easier time leaving their country and entering another. People without such advantages might also try to exit a bad situation, but it is likely to be much more difficult; in certain cases, they might even have to risk their lives.
This might help to explain Nilekani’s focus on the fine detail of the institutions whereby civil society exercises its influence over the state and markets. In her view, one can assume, voice is a more powerful, effective, and broadly accessible response to organizational underperformance than exit.
Likewise, Putnam focuses on civil society and community in America. In Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community and The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again, he analyzes the multidimensional decline of community in the United States, providing a detailed account of the deterioration of civil-society institutions in the Gilded Age (from the late 1800s to the early 1900s), their reconstruction in the interwar period, and their decline again 2-3 decades after World War II. These institutions, Putnam argues, must be built from the ground up yet again.
Despite their differences, Nilekani, Hirschman, and Putnam all seem to share the belief that a healthy and cohesive civil society, supported by effective institutions, is a prerequisite for effective governance, market regulation, and necessary reforms to the state and the economy. For this mechanism to produce truly effective governance, however, citizens must also understand their own civic responsibility, as well as what it takes for the state (or other organizations) to deliver on their priorities. And, as Nilekani’s work shows, this is far from guaranteed.
When Nilekani surveyed Indian voters about what they wanted from their elected representatives, their responses always focused on local-level outcomes, especially with regard to reform and service delivery. Not one person mentioned anything about legislation. But well-crafted, forward-thinking legislation is essential to promote the kind of long-term inclusive growth that benefits all citizens.
Indians, in particular, should recognize this. India’s activist Supreme Court has used its authority to enforce citizens’ rights to advance consequential environmental and other reforms. Moreover, its public sector has created what many (including me) regard as the world’s best digital financial architecture, comprising a biometric identification system and a “unified payments interface,” administered by the National Payments Corporation of India.
This architecture – accessible to all citizens – enables not only instant payments, but also direct financial transfers from the government to poorer segments of the population in real time with no intermediaries and thus no “leakage.” It also provides for data mobility across multiple entities, from banks to digital wallets. This process is guided by legislation dictating that all data flows require permission from individuals who are the subjects of the data. Once permission is given, all data must flow, by law, directly from their location to their intended destination. This explains why there are no significant monopolies in India based on control over data.
The lesson is that laws and regulatory structures are critical to state activities that produce local-level benefits. If citizens are to push for reforms and interventions that increase efficiency, promote inclusion, and enable entrepreneurship, innovation, and long-term growth, they need to recognize this. The kind of effective civil society Nilekani envisions thus requires civic engagement, empowerment, and education, including an understanding of the rights and responsibilities implied by citizenship.
In a world that is becoming fragmented within and across countries, it is easy to lose hope for social and economic progress. Nilekani does not, and her thoughtful, realistic, and cautiously optimistic blueprint for a healthy society is worthy of attention, reflection, and debate.