Governance in and for complexity
Part 1: collective governance within intermediary organisations
A three-part series
At Griffith Centre for Systems Innovation (GCSI) over recent years we have supported numerous teams tasked with developing organising infrastructures and intermediation for achieving bold ambitions, including:
- standing up national sector development bodies;
- establishing intermediaries that are holding systemic change agendas — locally and nationally; and
- creating field-building organisations tasked with everything from growing capabilities to building markets .
We have also evaluated and catalysed ecosystem approaches to collective action and investment, and tested governing infrastructures for Challenge-led Innovation that aim to support steps towards complex goals such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s).
These experiences have led us to reflect deeply on how governance arrangements of complex, multi-stakeholder intermediaries, platforms, organisations and/or initiatives could better support bold ambitions and create real and robust foundations for collective action.
We’ve distilled these reflections into a three-part exploration of governance in and for complexity.
- In the first of this three-part series we explore how these reflections translate into organisational landscapes — what we’ve learnt about modelling collective governance within intermediary organisations.
- Part two will explore governing beyond intermediary organisations — where there are no formal structures, but governance functions across ‘ecosystems’ or ‘portfolios’ that encompass diverse actions and stakeholders are still essential.
- Part three will dive into whether and how new technologies could support governance in and for complexity.
Collective governance within intermediary organisations
The quest to catalyse large-scale change or shift systems often begins with or is supported through organisations — that is, containing structures that enable a group of people to work collectively in a coordinated way for a shared purpose.
With coordination at the heart of these efforts, increasingly, many of these organisations are taking on ‘intermediating’ and/or ‘platforming’ roles, with some combination of the following aims:
- providing the mediating and organising mechanisms needed to draw together diverse groups of people,
- catalysing collective sensemaking and initiating collaborative action;
- increasing the flow of resourcing (funds, etc) across ecosystems; and/or
- generating learning, knowledge and other forms of resourcing across an ecosystem to support transformative change.
Though some may consider it the ‘boring’ part of transformational work, our observation is that often governance is the element that ultimately enables or undoes collective action initiatives. In complex change contexts, the governance of these entities needs to be acting as both the glue and the compass guiding the collective action.
The role of Intermediary Organisations as catalysts for innovation and transformation
Intermediaries are entities that can take a variety of forms (e.g. organisations, support services, initiatives or bodies), and are essentially focused on enabling the formation of collaborative ecosystems. In this role, they are usually charged with initiating and/or maintaining infrastructures that support ecosystem actors to more effectively work towards transformational agendas.
Intermediary organisations are widely understood as essential infrastructure in commercial and financial landscapes (see Vaughn Tan’s great analysis here.)
More recently they have attracted attention as core to effecting systemic transitions towards sustainable and regenerative futures (See for example Ehnert, et al. 2022 & 2023). While they have received less attention in the space of catalysing social transformation, they are increasingly becoming part of the landscape of practice in spaces like ‘field building’ (see Cabaj, 2021; Hussein et al, 2018; SVA, 2022). Below we have illustrated various roles we’ve seen intermediaries playing to support innovation towards regenerative and distributive futures.
All intermediaries aim to serve the ecosystem — but diversity and ‘right fit’ are key to effectiveness
Here at GCSI, we have been drawing from work undertaken in sustainability research (see particularly Kivimaa et al, 2019) to unpack the beginnings of an intermediary typology — aiming to make more visible the different kinds of intermediaries that are working to support systems transformation, particularly around social innovation, place-based work, service transformation, and social justice fields.
Intermediaries in the space of sustainability transitions and systems shifting are starting to proliferate across many ‘change agenda’ spheres of activity. But (in Australia at least), to date we have not reached a level of maturity around this work where we differentiate, distinguish, and otherwise make clear the diversity of forms and approaches that can and are being taken. This can mean we expect all intermediaries to do ‘everything’, and/or that we fail to recognise the many different ways that intermediation can support transformation.
We have not named individual intermediaries in this typology — but we have a hunch that in Australia, most are probably primarily either ‘field-building’ or ‘grassroots’ focused — meaning we likely have a predominance of types in a couple of areas and little intentional focus in other activity domains.
Systems change often requires multi-pronged approaches, and so skewing and gaps in the intermediary space could have significant impacts on progress towards transitional objectives.
Below we translate and reframe some of the latest sustainability research on intermediaries (eg. Janssen et al, 2020; Ehnert et al, 2022; Kivimaa et al, 2019) to refine and focus understandings and so begin to generate a more nuanced typology for intermediaries. Of course, in practice, the boundaries around these roles may be somewhat porous — with some entities sitting across more than one type and/or engaging in a mixture of roles that draw on some portion of the characteristics within any one type. Nevertheless, as this sphere of activity is at a nascent phase of development, at least in terms of ‘thinking frameworks’ that help to progress effective action, we think it’s a useful exercise to tease out some of the nuances.
We offer this as a ‘first cut’ typology to support the development of more nuanced thinking and practice about the roles of intermediary entities in the space of systemic social change; including around what the ‘right fit’ types may be for a given context, and to improve understandings of whether a ‘right mix’ of functions is developing to support any particular ‘shift’ agenda.
For example, do we have multiple of one type and none in other crucial areas? These are good questions for those establishing and those resourcing intermediary functions to — collectively — consider.
As always, we welcome input, debate and discussion from colleagues around the usefulness of developing this kind of typology and on how to further refine it — including what other kinds of intermediaries may warrant surfacing in the context of shifting social systems.
Governing intermediaries for System Shifting: Possibilities, Constraints and Learnings
In this section we draw on the typology outlined above to sharpen our thinking around two key issues we have identified that intermediaries — and those who support them — face in effectively performing their roles around enabling systemic social change. But first, let’s be clear what we mean by ‘governance’.
The Landscape of Governance — foundational concepts
Governance includes all the structures and processes undertaken across an organisation or initiative that support and enable people to work together towards shared or aligned outcomes (see this description from the Governance Institute of Australia). Some suggest that governance includes both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ elements (see for example, the fabulous work of the Futures Centre).
Elements of governance themselves stretch and evolve in context, and our view is that all these elements include both hard and soft aspects which become more or less visible in different situations or contexts. Below we illustrate key elements of governance.
The remit of intermediaries — to support and enable diverse actors and stakeholders to achieve complex and ambitious goals — necessarily requires working across multiple functions as illustrated above.
There is often some blurriness around these functions, including in the boundaries between. As a result, in practice, traditional governing infrastructures can be stretched a long way beyond what they were originally designed or envisaged as containing.
In the remainder of this piece, we explore two particular ‘stretches’ that we’ve experienced working with and on intermediaries.
Biodegradability, Composting + Shape-Shifting
Systems shifting work is both generative and generational — it does not progress through or within programmatic, political and predictable approaches or timeframes. So, it is unlikely that singular intermediaries will be able to play anything but a part in a much bigger process (despite rhetoric to the contrary!) Understanding the generational nature and the horizons of transformation (see: https://tinyurl.com/3pxuahk2) can help us appreciate that such change requires an ecology of intermediary actors — and that this ecology will shift and change over time. Ultimately, we think this means we need to understand not only the structure and roles of intermediaries, but their lifecycles over time.
Unfortunately, intermediaries in the social change landscape are susceptible to becoming institutionalised at different points in their life cycles — slipping into a focus on their own survival rather than on their overall purpose and as part of a larger ecology. Within the broader system, this can also lead to competition between intermediaries emerging, which can over time impact progress towards broader change goals:
“When a transition progresses it is likely that less intermediation will be required and many actors performing such roles become redundant. This expectation is likely to create battles within and between intermediaries, taking attention away from their intermediation activities, with potential consequences on the speed of the transition” (Kivimaa et al, 2019;p.1073).
If we are to truly transform or transition systems, then we need to understand the role of single intermediaries within a broader ecology of intermediation — for example, drawing on our ‘straw man’ typology, the overall mix and the nature of relationships becomes more visible.
In addition to greater clarity around role type/s, to really attune the governance function to long-term change ambitions, the Boards of intermediaries must really grapple with what governance means in the context of generational change. Practically, that might mean that the governance of intermediaries needs to include intentional and ongoing consideration of:
- Balancing internal and external focus — i.e. between organisational and ecosystem responsibilities — including keeping a close eye on whether the intermediary they are governing continues to be delivering the ‘best benefit’ into the ecosystem, and whether the trajectory or direction of travel towards ambitious goals continues to make sense;
- Building biodegradability into the design — including processes for monitoring and identifying when ecosystems have evolved, and so when different kinds of intermediation and shifts in intermediary types and/or functions may be needed. Boards of intermediaries need to encourage not only growth and innovation, but also address purposeful decline and ‘excavation’ that enables the ecology to flourish, even if that means individual intermediaries ‘compost’ their learnings and transform into new ways of working.
Using the intermediary typology provides language and a lens that the intermediary itself and its ecosystem stakeholders can use to probe for ‘right fit’ and ‘best benefit’ at various stages of the lifecycle.
Where needs and/or context have shifted, we think this may make it easier to explore what organisational design features could be evolved to better serve the overall change agenda — so as not to get distracted by maintaining the entity’s status quo or become ‘stuck’ in one approach.
Engagement, Representation + Power
“All governance involves power: more powerful actors receive more favourable outcomes than less powerful ones; equality and fairness are rare” (Morrison et al, 2019; p.2).
As the quote above suggests, acknowledgement of power flows and relations in governance and the consequent implementation of processes aimed at addressing structural inequities is a constant issue raised across research and practice — particularly in initiatives that are committed to social or transformational agendas.
The design of intermediary organisational structures that effectively support transformational agendas requires both collaboration and collective action inside the organisations, as well as external support from ecosystems that are critical to moving in the direction of their bold goals.
To achieve this, the governance of these organisations needs to demonstrate true multi-stakeholder engagement in action. Very often the default approach to engagement in governance is ‘representation’, so that multiple stakeholder groups have a representative either on the board or at certain forums, committees or other venues where decision-making processes occur. However, there are also a range of other ways in which multiple stakeholder groups can be engaged — as members (and particularly voting members, as often they are the purpose ‘keepers’) — as illustrated below.
Where Members are part of the organisational design of a socially focused intermediary — voting members are often those who are closest to and impacted by the purpose of the work. When the purpose includes shifting power relations (a common aspiration), this is often approached through seeking to improve the participation of people and communities who have previously been excluded through the election of ‘representatives’ into the governance function (such as a Board). However, in the whirl of daily operations it can be easy to forget that voting members can and often should hold power and decision-making authority beyond that of voting for elected board members.
The critical thing is not ‘what’ form the engagement takes, but rather, how it is resourced, made meaningful, integrated with decision-making, and transparently communicated to all actors involved with the initiative. This always requires a deep exploration of power. This is not only critical, but also complex and (usually) long-running and ongoing work.
Intermediary goals around improving participation and/or representation should trigger thoughtful and ongoing reflections on who the ‘owners’ of the purpose and the outcomes are, how they are participating, and what that means for governing structures and processes over time. We outline some of the key questions we asked of one intermediary grappling with these issues in the figure below.
One of the key tensions in governing for collective outcomes is centred on how principles are reflected in governance behaviours and how these evolve over time as context shifts — particularly if there are multiple stakeholders involved.
For example, if one of the principles is that governance practices should reflect and embody the intent of equity principles, how this is reflected in and demonstrated by the processes, responsibilities, culture and behaviours of the governing bodies should be a key concern of the intermediary. This requires active resourcing — by all those with an interest in the outcomes, but also through allocation of resources to specific roles, communication platforms, rhythms and time.
Some of the complexity of governing an organisation or entity that includes multiple and diverse stakeholders can be navigated with right-fit structures and rules. However, careful articulation of intention and a focus on more intangible infrastructures like culture, norms and behaviours also need ongoing attention and monitoring.
There are no easy answers — but there are many lessons to be learnt from intermediaries involved in governing various types of collective action that have sought to address these issues through governance structures and processes, working across social and environmental issues and in complex contexts.
Designing in different ‘choice levels’ is one way this has been approached — whereby different groups of people are involved in different types of decision-making” (see Sacks, 2024; p.34, and Sacks & Galabo, 2022, for examples from work around Commons governance) both for accountability purposes, but also to enable effective power-sharing.
We think that the draft Intermediaries Typology can help with thinking through what decision-making structures might be ‘best fit’ to support the purpose goals of the different types outlined — including who needs to be involved at different stages and in relation to different issues.
Conclusion: what it means for how to start, proceed and implement
Initiatives that seek to govern complex, multi-stakeholder actions will be most effective in making progress towards their transformational agendas if their governance structures and processes are intentionally designed for this purpose. We offer the thinking outlined here as a contribution to moving beyond ‘one-size fits all’ approaches to governance and towards adopting leadership principles that are not only able to engage with complexity but are purposefully designed to navigate uncertain conditions and evolve with shifting contexts.
Contributors to this post:
Prof Ingrid Burkett and A/Prof Joanne McNeill
References:
Cabaj, M., (2021) Evaluating the Results of Intermediary Organisations: A Paper for Intermediaries in Australia, Paul Ramsay Foundation: available at: https://www.paulramsayfoundation.org.au/news-resources/measuring-the-contribution-of-intermediary-organisations-e
Ehnert, F. 2023. Bridging the old and the new in sustainability transitions: The role of transition intermediaries in facilitating urban experimentation. Journal of Cleaner Production 417: 138084.
Ehnert, F., M. Egermann, and A. Betsch. 2022. The role of niche and regime intermediaries in building partnerships for urban transitions towards sustainability. Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning 24 (2): 137–159.
Janssen, M., Bogers, M. and Wanzenböck, I. (2020) Do systemic innovation intermediaries broaden horizons? A proximity perspective on R&D partnership formation, Industry and Innovation, 27:6, 605–629, DOI: 10.1080/13662716.2019.1618701
Miller-Dawkins, M. (2022) Growing fields, shifting systems A guide to effectively funding field-building intermediaries, Paul Ramsay Foundation, available at: https://www.paulramsayfoundation.org.au/news-resources/growing-fields-shifting-systems
Hussein, T., Plummer, M. & Breen, Bl. (2018). How Field Catalysts Galvanize Social Change. Stanford Social Innovation Review. Winter
Kivimaa, P., Boon, W., Hyysalo, S. and Klerkx, L. (2019) Towards a typology of intermediaries in sustainability transitions: A systematic review and a research agenda, Research Policy, vol. 48, pp. 1062–1075
Morrison, T. Adger, W., Brown, K., Lemos, M., Huitema, D., Phelps, J., Evans, L., Cohen, P., Song, A., Turner, R., Quinn, T., Hughes, T. (2019) The black box of power in polycentric environmental governance, Global Environmental Change, Volume 57, 2019, 101934,
Sacks, J. (2024). #commonize studio: Commons-making through studio experimentalism. [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Lancaster University, UK.
Sacks, J. and Galabo, R. (2022). A framework for Infrastructuring Commons Creation. In: Bruyns, G., Wei, H. (Eds) With Design: Reinventing Design Models. IASDR 2021. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4472-7_67
Sahni, N. Matsui, E. and Hult, L. (2017) When Building a Field Requires Building a New Organization, The Bridgespan Group, London, 26 May
Social Ventures Australia (2022) Insights on Australian field-building intermediaries and their funding journeys towards sustainable impact
