Strategy, Structure, and Governance Community of Practice

Creating complex inter-organizational systems is an increasingly common strategy to address concerns of the common good such as poverty, environmental degradation and human conflict. How to develop such strategies is the focus of the Strategy, Structure, and Governance (SSG) Community.

Effective strategies commonly must address several types of complexity:

• socially: they come from the three key organizational sectors of business, government and civil society;
• spatially: they involve actors that are local, regional and global;
• temporally: actions and desired results are separated by long periods of time;
• dynamically: the participants in the system are taking actions that impact others in the system in hard-to-predict ways.

Our current state of knowledge about how to strategically address such complexities is inadequate. "Organizations", "partnerships" and "networks" are distinct types of structures that are part of the solution. However, large system change goals require both new capacity and knowledge to develop coherent strategies, effective decision-making forums and processes, and fair governance structures.