If you love humanity and nature, aim high: your final goal is to put yourself out of business.

Learning from MAVA Foundation's Lessons from 3 Decades of Philanthropy

With this article I would like to share some learnings on how to strengthen impact with all those working in transitions and transformations centred in sustainability impact, and challenged by the cultural, operational, and systemic development required to achieve it.

The way I am going to do it is rather unconventional, as it takes inspiration not from classic authoring in business transformation, but from the philanthropic sector. With many of us initiating their business with the powerful intention to accelerate the positive impact of our clients on all planetary life, we need to start drawing lessons from those who have adopted consistently and experienced at large the practice that leads to the fulfilment of this intent: philanthropy (a genuine propensity of love towards humanity) is the spirit that is being called to attend the doings of the private sector now more than ever, in this historic moment when we all have to pull our efforts to find the way towards a complex evolutionary jump.

I had the pleasure of working with MAVA Foundation from 2018 to 2020, when with my colleagues at Circle Economy we pioneered Circular City Scans of the main Swiss cities, as well as the Circular Gap Report for Switzerland, projects whose findings became pivotal to the design of innovative circular solutions and, eventually, policy changes.

MAVA Foundation devoted passionately its people, vision and efforts to the conservation of biodiversity and the promotion of a sustainable economy. After 28 years of activity, with grant-making totalling to EUR 1.16 billion, covering grants implemented by over 500 partners, the foundation closed its doors in June 2023: this end date was set in stone since the establishment of MAVA by its founder, Luc Hoffmann, Swiss ornithologist and environmentalist, and co-founder of WWF (yes, I like the stories of people who start from a very personal love for something beautiful and very specific, and end up having a positive impact on the lives of millions - after all, love is an action). We will see in a bit how crucial setting an end date was to the design of a lifetime strategy for impact, and how this can motivate all of us to do the same, discovering why putting ourselves out of business is the best definition of success we can have.

With its typical bold generosity, MAVA decided that all the knowledge (impact reports, methodology papers, lessons learned) accumulated in its almost 30 years of activity will remain accessible, forever, on their website. While inviting all those who'd like to, to browse it often and collect its gems carefully, I would like to share here what I have learned, and I can bring to my own work in the private and public sector, as I help organisations change for the better, from MAVA's Lesson from 3 Decades in Philanthropy.

The 8 Lessons from Philanthropy to bring to your Business for Impact

1. INVEST IN COLLABORATION, CREATING PARTNERSHIPS THAT PURSUE COMMON GOALS

"Every organisation (and individual) has its limits, and for various reasons, may not necessarily fully understand or be equipped to address all aspects of a particular challenge". Competition often underlies the relationship between players in the private sector, but we can change this, and look instead at how we can add value to each other. Working in partnerships means co-designing starting from different strengths and capabilities, adjoining different perspectives and know-hows, and adding layers and spikes of value, but also building in time strong partners communities that feel ownership of the respective initiatives and therefore work together to see them accomplished, enabling a distributed ecosystem of accountability. I like the story of The Four Harmonious Friends, to illustrate the spirit of partnership and collaboration: it is a story of interdependence, explaining how there is no place for self-cherishing, but rather we need each other and we need to help each other.

2. CAPITALISE ON THE CLIENT'S KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERTISE

The importance of learning from our clients, before we try to teach (or offer) them something, is often underestimated. Leveraging knowledge and expertise from our clients is a smart and efficient way to gain insights into their very specific challenges and complexity: rather than building extensively on abstract solutions, we can sharpen the tools of our thinking and strategy directly with the client's actors. Systems change requires a keen understanding of the context and the levers within it, and our ability to design and deliver good change is only as good as our capacity to assume, beyond any doubt, that our primary asset in this work will be the client's existing knowledge. This may mean listening to the problem description a thousand times, from a thousand sources, before jumping to a solution. As M. Katselas e-closed for us, "Within the problem lies the solution", and stories, since immemorable time, contain their own resolution.

3. TAKE EVEN MORE RISK

This is a tough one, especially since in the private sector we are bounded by a very clear and at times dramatic awareness of cash flows and bottom line. Yet, we can always stretch our imagination: in your ecosystem of activities, projects, and programmes, relative to your service or product, identify a long term, longshot, high impact, initiative, and earmark the funding you will need to pursue it. Let time unfold, but do not loose traction on it, keep on massaging its coming into existence. My friend Ilco van Der Linde took a very long shot, and a big risk, with Masterpeace's initiative of a global concert for World Peace to be held in Cairo, that would bring on stage artists from "both sides" of very hot conflict areas, gaining the commitment from world leaders alike, to prove that peace is always possible. The project required immense funding and effort, especially for an organisation that at the time was literally a handful of quite optimistic people. Ilco launched it boldly, officially, on worldwide webcast, 5 years before it would take place, asking everyone to make it happen, together, 5 years later. Can you think of a single initiative that you could launch today and pursue on the long term, layering resources as you go, that would really signify impact, at scale? Then take the risk, "make people fall in love with your dream", and you might end up seeing it coming true.

4. STAY TRUE TO YOUR ROOTS AND GROW YOUR BRANCHES

Consistency is not necessarily something that is accomplished once but that grows organically with us. While it is important that we know what scope we serve, we are to be intentionally driven towards extending our reach. The consistency of focus forms the basis for building trust with clients and partners alike, while enabling them also to position and onboard clearly in the strategies they pursue with us. Branching out is more about this activity of staying put in a network of networks, and doing our specific job well, while we source from and produce enhanced quality across the connections. It's evolutionary and holistic.

5. BE FLEXIBLE 

Now that we know more about roots and branches, we can take a closer look at what flexibility ends up meaning in this context. My take on this is that you can always flex, as long as it is to deliver the impact and the goals in your mission. In this sense, any kind of tactic is valid, and space should be granted to our collaborators, partners, clients, to explore different routes, which will require ourselves to ply in order to pursue them, as long as these transmutations are clearly in the direction we want to walk to, and not a mere diversification that will disperse, rather than consolidate, our focus.

6. BE AN OCTOPUS!

"‘Being an octopus’ implies using all levers at our disposal to support our partners". How does this look?

1. pre-competitive: have the courage to bring your competitor to the client, if you know that they will serve their impact better. You can agree on a referral scheme, or on any kind of "gentle(wo)men" agreement, but the point is to stay loyal to your cause. Does the cause require the competitor? Smart up to make it happen. As The Art of War teaches us, "If you know the enemy and you know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles".
2. personally engaged: the levers might be closer to us than we think. They might involve having to rethink our service, learning faster, going not just forward but further, entering a level of communication and co-creation that is novel to us. Does this go in the direction of the impact we want to see? Then we do it.
3. community: if you can do nr.1 then you can do this too (and this is the reason why I placed them in this order). Think of connecting your clients to each other, your clients to your partners, your clients to your audience and in general always bring together people who have affinities, individually, invite them to meet and introduce each other. This is the power of a village, the foundation of commerce and progress: we can bring together people who we know should be together, from all walks of life, and systemically multiplying the opportunities for impact they can have.

7. BE BOLD AND ACT SYSTEMICALLY

"Embrace systems complexity and design a holistic approach to addressing issues and multiply impact by using different levels of intervention" sounds complicated to the untrained private sector actors. Years of work in impact have taught me that there isn't a better tool to plan success than doing exactly that: plan it. My first long term plan was with Unisys, engineering the achievement of cross-continental, cross-programmatic, and cross-team objectives spanning multiple phases, each with different added complexities and stakeholders, for our client Ciba, now BASF. Yet designing the plan took a few days (and later many many revisions) but it served as a central piece to drive vision, conversations, improvements, optimisations all along the programme's 3 years execution. Back then I was adopting Prince and PMP, but later I started enclosing these within wider methodologies, more appropriate for the greater architecture of change, taking into account behavioural changes, and outcomes, not just results, like Logical Framework (still used by the European Commission) and TOC. Doing this often, about our entire business as well as the single projects, really trains the mind to think in impact terms and articulate our activity and its progress in coherent ways. As a result, collaborations are also streamlined efficiently, we don't lose sight of strategy and tactics, and we can easily connect to others' work for systemic efforts. Do you have a TOC for your business? What stops you from sitting down and making one?

8. AIM TO PUT YOURSELF OUT OF BUSINESS

And now we end at the very core of every single effort we should put in the cause of Impact for Sustainability (and what I personally define as the core of Compassionate Leadership): putting ourselves out of business. Yes, a life work, as an individual contribution to the whole, as well as the vision and role of an organisation, can deploy creating a cultural shift where others are willing to pick up matters where we left them and continue independently, and with their own resources, to move forward. My goal is making sure clients do not need me anymore, or anyone like me, and this result could take 2 forms: I (and my business) have become something else, so what defined "me" or "my service" is now obsolete and has been replaced by a much more evolved form, responding to very novel challenges, or the client has evolved, and is now capable of producing qualities that do not rely directly on the same external sources as before. This can be expanded to entail that we have contributed to innovation, intrinsic sustainability, and that our actions have made the same actions no longer needed.

In short, we have had an impact.

Want to design the impact theory of your business or organisation, identify the tangible and intangible outcomes you want to influence and the strategies, partnerships, alliances and activities to get you there? Want to start transitioning in line with the Sustainable Development Goals? Or you just like what you read and want to know more? Reach out today.

Access here the full library of learnings of MAVA Foundation.