Leadership for Large-Scale Change
Distinctive Challenges, Emerging Responses
Real-world lessons and evidence-based insights to inspire a new path for social impact leaders.
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Who Is Leading Large-Scale Change?
Humanity faces a host of problems—the climate crisis, wealth inequality, global pandemics, and more—that are beyond the capacity of any one leader to solve. Addressing such issues requires engaging with large, complex systems across government, civil society, and the private sector.
Large-scale change is deep and durable, spans many local and regional contexts, and yields benefits across human populations or natural ecosystems.
The most effective leaders of such causes are those who drive transformation within a broader network, recognizing that lasting impact requires collective effort.
Why It’s Different
When working across multiple complex systems, familiar leadership challenges are magnified.
Moreover, new hurdles arise because the size of the problem far exceeds the resources available to a single team or organization.
How can leaders of large-scale change simultaneously expand leadership participation, attract new resources, and collaborate with diverse actors?
What to Do About It
Leaders of large-scale change have deployed pragmatic strategies to address such distinctive challenges. In our report you’ll learn how to:
Attend to the dynamics of change by articulating both a long-term moral vision and a practical path towards it.
Allocate limited current resources for short-term progress while building capacity for larger-scale future transformation.
Manifest an ever-expanding spiral of collaborative engagement while keeping coordination costs manageable.
How to Use This Site
Whether you’re looking for a quick overview, want to dig deep into a single topic, or prefer to read it straight through, this resource was meant for flexible use.
Each chapter of our report, “Leadership for Large-Scale Change: Distinctive Challenges, Emerging Responses,” is available as an individual download and includes references to sources that expand and deepen the ideas we address.
A library of case profiles is available separately, to reinforce and supplement the report content, and with the intention of growing over time.
Who We Are
To help expand capacity and increase effectiveness of leadership for large scale social impact, we formed a collaboration to produce and manage the resource you see today.
