The Freshman members of the 115th Congress know something we all know; the 2016 election was marked by some of the coarser political rhetoric of modern history, and not surprisingly left our country feeling more divided than ever.
More uniquely, they have taken an important first step toward doing something about it.
Last week, 28 Republican and 18 Democratic Freshman Members — representing red and blue states from coast to coast — signed a Commitment to Civility and spoke on the House floor about why they made this commitment, what their constituents had sent them to Washington to accomplish, and how civility is essential to working together across the aisle to achieve those goals. In all, 46 of the 52 new members signed the commitment, which urges productive dialogue and rejects the idea that political rivals are enemies.
Their civility statement cites the “…coarsening of our culture fueled too often by the vitriol in our politics and public discourse. One result has been a loss of trust in our institutions and elected officials.” Understanding that they will not always agree on matters of policy, they nevertheless agreed to “…strive at all times to maintain collegiality and the honor of the office.”
By doing this they believe they can help work more effectively, and even begin to restore the public’s trust in America’s institutions.
The significance of their effort cannot be overstated. To succeed, they will be working against deeply ingrained trends not just in our politics, but in our culture.
At Democracy Fund, we are working to reverse the dynamics that drive the lack of civility these Members of Congress are working to address. Our systems map on Congress and the Public Trust identifies the role that the lack of bipartisan relationships, reduced capacity of Congress as an institution to legislate based on facts, nationalized campaigns, reduced capacity of the media, and the lack of shared information through regular oversight all play in driving the hyper-partisanship that has led to the breakdown of civil relationships and legislative debate.
Many are familiar with the 1901 speech of President Theodore Roosevelt at the Minnesota State Fair, in which he summarized his approach to foreign policy by quoting the proverb, “Speak softly and carry a big stick — you will go far.” But as Roosevelt went on to note, “If a man continually blusters, if he lacks civility, a big stick will not save him from trouble … It is both foolish and undignified to indulge in undue self-glorification, and, above all, in loose-tongued denunciation of other peoples … I hope that we shall always strive to speak courteously and respectfully…”
A similar message, more remarkable for its time, was an 1861 speech in Cincinnati, Ohio by Abraham Lincoln, who noted in speaking to Northerners, “We mean to remember that [Southerners] are as good as we; that there is no difference between us other than the difference of circumstances. We mean to recognize and bear in mind always that (they) have as good hearts in (their) bosoms as other people, or as we claim to have.”
While Lincoln steadfastly opposed slavery, he was making the point that humility would go a long way toward maintaining civility with his Southern fellow countrymen, and support the shared desire to live again “in peace and harmony with one another.”
While we believe our time is not as divisive as the Civil War era, the need for civility is no less urgent, as the constituents of these freshman Members have made clear to their representatives. The signing of the Commitment to Civility by more Members of Congress — but more importantly, the practice of it — could go a long way toward reducing the hyper-partisanship that so many Americans say they want Congress and our President to put aside in the pursuit of the common good.
Original reporting, informed dialogue, and sharp debate all contribute to a healthy democracy in local communities. But local news outlets are dwindling as audiences and advertisers shift to digital and mobile platforms, often with a smaller footprint — leaving media deserts in locations where coverage once flourished. At the same time, promising local journalism experiments are cropping up across the country. Foundations and for-profit players are investing in innovative outlets as well as tools and models that reduce reporting costs and support civic engagement around breaking news.
How can these promising “green shoots” be widely planted and fully cultivated? More broadly, how can we better understand and effectively address the dynamics that shape how people learn about local issues, and about ways to participate in the civic life of their communities?
We believe that using systems thinking to map the Local News & Participation system can bring new understanding to all who want to support active citizens and vibrant media as vital elements in a healthy democracy.
With input from local news analysts, editors, journalists, funders, and other stakeholders, the Democracy Fund has generated a map of this system — starting with the reality that the Internet is transforming the dynamics of local news and providing remarkable new opportunities for public engagement.
Version 1.0 of the map centers on the powerful economic shifts that have jolted the local news landscape, and on the innovative efforts to create and sustain digital approaches for reporting and public dialogue. The map is grounded in our assessment of the key factors that affect the health of democracy and the local public square.
Understanding Our Analysis
Local News and Participation: Role of the Public Square
In a healthy democracy, people need reliable information, a watchdog to hold the powerful accountable, and opportunities to express and compare opinions on the issues of the day. Original investigative reporting, informed dialogue, and sharp debate all feed democratic engagement at the local level. Together these form a public square – a venue for citizens to learn, organize, engage, and be heard.
The State of Local News in 2015
In the U.S., our public square sits at a crucial turning point – facing important opportunities and threats to the ongoing vitality of political participation in our communities and nation. The Internet’s massive disruption to local news ecosystems has produced both significant opportunities and real threats to the health of our democracy. As powerful economic shifts have jolted the local news landscape, innovative efforts to create and sustain digital approaches for reporting and public dialogue have also emerged. The Internet is transforming the dynamics of local news and providing remarkable new opportunities for public engagement. Promising local news experiments are cropping up across the country. At times, these new platforms are meeting community information and participation needs more effectively than legacy news institutions had been able to in the past. At the same time, local legacy news outlets are shrinking as audiences and advertisers shift to digital and mobile platforms – leaving news deserts in locations where coverage and vigorous conversation once flourished. How can we better understand and effectively address the dynamics that shape how people learn about local issues and ways to participate in the civic life of their communities? Mapping the dynamics around local news and participation brings new understanding to all who want to support active citizens and vibrant news media as vital elements in a healthy democracy. The Democracy Fund Engagement Program team has generated a visual map of the dynamics influencing the public, news outlets, journalists, and others concerned with community information needs. Our framing statement is: “You can’t understand how local journalism enables or inhibits a healthy democracy unless you understand ________.”
Critical Dynamics
In many places, news outlets are shrinking, disappearing, or splintering into disparate units. However, at the same time, some outlets and individuals have successfully built new business models that have not only helped maintain a flow of quality, relevant news and community information, but also helped increase civic engagement. This successful experimentation has bolstered the viability of some news organizations and encouraged other outlets to experiment further. This is the core story that emerges from our map and to understand it, we explore a number of related topics that we believe the media field must grapple with if we are to address the challenges facing our communities:
The Public as Publishers
Through technology, the financial barriers to entry into the media landscape have come down, and pathways for two-way communication between content producers and consumers have opened up. Internet technologies have increased the ability of individuals to create and distribute their own content as well as the content of others, fueling new interest and opportunities for civic engagement and increasing the amount and range of information available. At the same time, however, this has increased overall noise and raised new concerns about verification.
The Rapid Adoption of Mobile
Consumer practices and preferences, including an explosion in the use of mobile devices, are changing how news is produced, packaged, and promoted.
Shifting Economic Models for Local News Providers
Local news outlets used to have an overwhelming advantage in attracting and retaining local advertising dollars. This has shifted in the Internet era. Large digital platforms are pulling advertisers and advertising dollars away from local outlets and becoming increasingly adept at personalizing advertising in ways that cement their hold on the marketplace. Mobile technologies also have led to changed advertising and distribution models that are driving a decrease in the level of resources available for local reporting, ultimately reducing the quality and coverage of local topics.
As the traditional advertising-based model of revenue has been dismantled for local news outlets, new sources of financial support have emerged. Individual subscriber/membership models, the backbone of public radio, are becoming an increasingly attractive option for other types of local news outlets, especially new nonprofit outlets. In addition, philanthropic support is becoming an increasing part of the revenue stream for local news via online nonprofit outlets. While government support is primarily used for infrastructure such as physical plants and broadcast equipment, occasionally public broadcasting funds are also used to support specific content including local or regional beats. Taken together, however, these new sources of income are not adding up to replace previous levels of support.
Ongoing Disruption of the Industry Players
Innovative outlets are replacing less nimble players who fail to maintain audiences or seize new opportunities. In this environment, new as well as established organizations find they must evolve rapidly or experience deep decline. In response to these trends, new entrants and incumbents alike are experimenting furiously with new revenue models and only sometimes succeeding; all but the largest face steady erosion of their viability.
Maximizing the Impact of Journalism and Government Transparency
As the quantity, quality, and relevance of local news increases, so does the production of news that exposes corruption. Access to more government data and records, for example, can expose corruption and increase public interest in open data. When this is done in a way that also provides solutions and actions to resolve a problem, public engagement in civic affairs is increased. When this output fails to provide solutions to problems, however, the public becomes more cynical and less engaged.
Partisanship in News Production and Consumption
Audiences are now increasingly able to select news that matches their own biases and beliefs, a behavior encouraged by the ability of large sites and social feeds to target content specific to these interests. In turn, outlets become more polarized and specialized to build and retain their audience base, increasing engagement among hyperpartisan audience members while making more centrist and undecided audiences more cynical about news and politics.
Newsroom Isolation and Community Disengagement
Journalistic practices can sometimes isolate newsrooms. In particular, journalists can appear detached or insensitive to community priorities when seeking a measure of objectivity or asserting independence.
Newsroom diversity, however it is defined – in terms of ethnicity, gender, age, ideology, or other factors – also matters to an outlet’s ability to engage the public. Having a range of perspectives and experiences within any news organization is vital to the generation of new ideas and connection with new sources, but diversity efforts have been a casualty of economic decline in much of professional news media. At the same time, the rise of digital media has created new ways for a wider range of community voices to be heard.
As the diversity of sources, stories, and staff decrease, so do the quantity, quality, and relevance of local journalism. This diminishes the engagement of the public in civic affairs and newsrooms. As the public becomes less engaged with the newsroom, it becomes more isolated, and diversity of sources, stories, and staff continues to dwindle.
Conversely, newsrooms that are more diverse and able to connect with and report on different constituencies increase their engagement with community, which contributes to better reporting, editorial, and accountability practices. These contribute to an increase in the quality and sometimes quantity of information.
New Priorities in Communications Policy
Public interest media and communications policy encompass a variety of issues and structures related to the ability of citizens to communicate with one another, express their own perspectives, access communications technologies and services at a reasonable or even subsidized rate, and protect themselves from libel or slander. Communications policy also regulates many of the actors who provide civic information and spaces for public dialogue, including Internet service providers, the owners of newspapers, radio and television stations, public access media facilities, cable companies, and others. Media and communications policy has a significant influence over the ability of local news ecosystems to support civic information and participation. For example, policy encouraging an open Internet and access to high-speed broadband can further increase the creation and sharing of user-generated content and lay the groundwork for experimentation in local news, while policy supporting local public media can strengthen state and local news media organizations with direct dollars for infrastructure and beats.
Journalism Practice in Transition
Changes in the journalism environment drive new priorities for continuing journalism education. The decline of traditional print and broadcast newsrooms and the rise of both small online newsrooms and even more decentralized citizen reporting via social platforms, has chipped away at the overall level of journalistic professionalism and integrity. Up-and-coming and citizen reporters are learning the trade from scratch, and are not necessarily aware of existing resources and institutions, while reporters trained for print and broadcast are struggling to adapt to the ever-quicker and more porous practices of producing online news. Skills once transferred through informal mentoring and on-the-job training, or through more formalized journalism education are now either missing, or being reconstructed so that they can be applied in a more participatory media environment.
Communications and Network Plan: A defined approach to connecting with people and organizations to foster collaborations, coalitions, and partnerships that align and advance action across a system.
Complexity: A situation that defies predictability and makes linear planning and replicating successes difficult. Often found in contexts where the complex interrelationships of many factors and the dynamics between these factors and their wider environment make it necessary to understand not just individual elements, but the larger system itself.
Core Story: The overarching narrative that responds to the framing question for a system map. The most powerful dynamics driving the system.
Dynamic Relationship: The causal connection between two factors, demarcated by an arrow. Arrows are accompanied with “+/–” demarcations, which indicate the direction of change as the first factor affects the second. For example, “A+ ¬ B–” will be read as “As Factor A increases, Factor B decreases.”
Factor: A node on a system map that represents a quality or condition in a system that is increasing or decreasing as part of a feedback loop.
Framing Question: A guiding question that is used to focus and bound the analysis of a system in order to enhance an organization’s ability to positively affect that system.
Learning Agenda: A plan to better understand a system and strengthen change strategies over time. A learning agenda contains research questions to expand knowledge of the system, as well as questions aimed at monitoring our impacts on the system, reflected through the indicators of progress of the results framework.
Leverage: The ability of interventions in a system to have disproportionately large impacts. Leverage opportunities are made up of a collection of related factors, connections, and dynamics that together can impact the equilibrium of a system.
Loops: The representation of cause-and-effect within a system captured as a complete feedback cycle. Loops can be vicious (leading to ever worsening outcomes), virtuous (improving outcomes over time), stagnating (keeping things from getting better), or stabilizing (keeping things from getting worse).
Regions: Clusters of loops organized around major themes within a system map.
Results Framework: A set of measurable indicators designed to track whether progress is being made in changing a system. A results framework is central to a learning agenda and underpins monitoring and evaluation plans.
Stakeholder: An individual or organization that seeks to influence, and/or is influenced by, the dynamics of a given system.
Strategy: A plan for the set of activities that aims to shift dynamics within a system to produce positive change. Activities might include grants, advocacy, research, partnerships, communications, and other approaches.
System: A diverse set of parts that interact with each other and their environment in ways that are dynamic and often hard to predict — and that can be studied, mapped, and influenced. In systems mapping, the boundaries of a system are shaped by a framing question.
Systems Map: A visual representation of a collection of patterns of behavior in the form of causal loops that are interconnected and illustrate why a system currently operates as it does. The systems map represents the most significant dynamics driving a system. While no map is ever considered “finished” (because a system is constantly evolving and any group’s understanding of a system is always partial), a systems map represents our best understanding of a system as it currently functions.
Our democracy is a complex political system made of an intricate web of institutions, interest groups, individual leaders, and citizens — all connected in countless ways. Every attempt to influence and improve some aspect of this complex system produces a ripple of other reactions. While some of these reactions may be predictable, many are not. This reality makes it difficult to anticipate what will happen when we try to help U.S. democracy work better.
Systems thinking can offer insight into the dynamics of the various fields where the Democracy Fund is active. It is a methodology used to gain a deep understanding of a given field or topic within the whole. By supporting comprehensive analysis, systems thinking offers a way to better identify the root causes of problems we want to address, and to find intervention points that offer great opportunity to advance change. This approach has a long history in fields as varied as ecology, engineering, urban planning, family therapy, criminal justice, organizational development, and conflict analysis and resolution. Systems thinking employs a variety of tools and frameworks for analysis, most notably systems mapping. In 2015, we began mapping several of democracy’s component systems related to our programmatic priorities. Each map is developed in collaboration with stakeholders in the field being examined — and each welcomes continued input and improvement from an ever-wider circle of participants who bring new perspectives.
The Democracy Fund exists to help ensure that our political system is able to withstand new challenges and continually deliver on its promise to the American people. In short, we work on things that make democracy work better. Embracing systems thinking can assist us and our partners in this activity. Just as we know that democracy will face new challenges, we know that any systems map will change — becoming more accurate as new stakeholders add their perspectives, taking new form as evolution, or disruption shifts its factors and their relationships.
Context: Our Mission And Measures
In the near-term, we will measure success based on modest changes in the areas where we focus, particularly those parts of a system where we believe we can move quickly. In the process, we will capture knowledge based on both intended and unintended outcomes. Over time, and with our partners, we expect to leverage short-term wins and lessons learned to create needed motion in other parts of the system. We hope these changes will cumulatively advance how our democracy serves the American people.
To apply systems thinking in our work at the Democracy Fund, we will listen, examine, and learn and adapt.
The Systems Approach In Action
Listen: With the stakeholders involved in creating a map, we seek to hear and capture the story of how a system works. Together, we can try to make sure the map is comprehensive and reflects the nuances and intricacies of the system it describes. As a result, we believe mapping is best done with a broad and inclusive set of players and perspectives.
Examine: We study a map’s factors, their relationships, and the dynamics in play. We can then pursue questions that will allow us to identify areas where there is the potential for high leverage in the system. We will also consider where the system might “push back” on efforts for change, and explore potential unintended consequences of our actions. This analysis will lead to a program plan that addresses our role at the Democracy Fund in tandem with others working to move the system.
Learn and adapt: In collaboration with our partners, we will implement strategies over several years and track progress against the map. We can identify indicators to measure impact, and build in regular points for rigorous reflection. We will compare our lived experience to the map and to our plan, aiming to quickly identify lessons learned and adapt our approach for greater results. As we learn more about a system and how change occurs, we will update its map to reflect new knowledge and emerging realities.
At the Democracy Fund, we believe there are three primary benefits from systems mapping:
Communicating and collaborating. First and foremost describing a system can generate shared language as well as rich content for stakeholders — creating new opportunities for dialogue, negotiation, and ideas that can improve outcomes in a given field. This shared understanding can clarify the perspectives of others and reveal new possibilities for effective collaboration.
Making sense of complexity. We want to capture the elaborate set of relationships and dynamics that characterize a field. We recognize that changemaking is not a linear process, and we want to gain deeper understanding to make informed decisions about our investments and interventions.
Building a basis for action and adaptation. A map’s content informs how we strategize and implement approaches within the Democracy Fund and in conjunction with our partners. The map is a tool that helps us challenge and test our assumptions as well as track and learn from our actions. It serves as a living frame that we revise and build on as we gain insight over time.
Democracy Fund’s President, Joe Goldman, recently wrote on our blog about some of the benefits and difficulties our organization has found while integrating a systems lens into our work. He noted how systems thinking, designed to help us grapple with complexity, can at times be awfully complex itself. As a member of the Impact and Learning team, I’ve been helping Democracy Fund make sense of what it means to be systems thinkers, and Joe’s words rang particularly true for me.
Working with the incredible systems and complexity coaches at The Omidyar Group, the Impact and Learning team has been supporting program staff in developing their systems maps, and shepherding their systems-based strategic planning processes. We’ve been alongside the teams grappling with what’s been hard—but we’ve also had a front-row seat to see the wins. Like our evaluator, I’ve seen our teams’ pride in their work, and try everyday to help the teams further recognize how much we’ve learned and how our systems skills have developed.
I had a strong moment of recognition of this progress recently when Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) released their Guide to Systems Grantmaking. This resource is designed to provide grantmakers and nonprofits a toolkit of essential systems assessment tools, frameworks, and best practices—and it is yet another piece of evidence of the growing community of philanthropies taking an interest in systems thinking. As it does on other topics, GEO can continue to be a convener for this group, collect our stories, and help us share our lessons learned.
GEO’s Systems Grantmaking Resource Guide suggests, just as we’ve found, that it takes time to understand and internalize a systems mindset. At first glance, I was overwhelmed by the wide variety of tools and practices it recommended. I learned of several new approaches I’m eager to play with in our work, augmenting the causal loop systems mapping we’ve started with. But, after I dug a little deeper, what struck me more was the complementarity and interconnection of these tools. I realized that we’ve already been engaging in many more systems practices than I’d been aware. SAT analysis, leverage points, and systemic action research are already part of our approach, flowing naturally from one another as we mapped systems. Even aspects of our grantmaking approach I had considered distinct from our systems work—our interest in scenario planning, for example—are logically tied to the systems thinking frame.
When introducing new staff to Democracy Fund’s systems practice, I describe it as fundamentally a sense-making process. While systems mapping is a great tool for new learning—particularly when designed, as our process has been, to be deeply participatory—it has also been powerful in helping to bring into sharper focus what we already knew and to align assumptions across our organization and with key partners. GEO’s Guide to Systems Grantmaking, it turns out, served the same purpose for me. It brought to life what has been hard to see in the sometimes tedious day-to-day of map-building: just how strong our systems muscles are becoming.
We’ve got a lot yet to learn to get to “expert” level on GEO’s self assessment, and I know the challenges our evaluator observed will continue into the future. But, armed with new tools and deeper connections to others in the field, I’m all the more confident we’ll get there.
In my years of service on Capitol Hill, I saw first hand that Congress is full of good people driven to make our world a better place. Yet for far too many Americans, Congress is not fulfilling its responsibilities as a representative body. Why? And can it be helped?
The Democracy Fund’s Governance Initiative spent much of the past year seeking to understand how Congress could better respond to the needs and demands of citizens. To explore how we might better understand the systems that drive Congress, we began with the framing question, “How is Congress fulfilling or failing to fulfill its obligations to the American people?”
It didn’t take long to conclude that the institution is failing to do so.
Using the work of our funding partner, the Madison Initiative of the Hewlett Foundation, as a base, we pursued the broad and substantive question of what dynamics are the most significant in contributing to this dysfunction. Through that understanding, we can start to piece together what can be done to address them.
To that end, we’ve published the first public iteration of our systems map, Congress and Public Trust. We have been gathering feedback from a wide-range of stakeholders, and welcome additional thinking and ideas.
Mapping Congress and Public Trust
Last Spring, we convened a group of experts on Congress—scholars, former members of Congress and staff, and active supporters of the institution—who helped us explore the key narratives that drive the system. A ‘core story’ quickly emerged.
With expanded access to and use of the Internet by the public, communications to Congress have dramatically accelerated. The money infusing politics intensifies the pressures on an institution ill-prepared to process, let alone interpret and meet them, further weakening congressional capacity and reducing satisfaction of both among members and the public at large. This has contributed to trust in the institution falling to an all-time low.
With growth in dissatisfaction, some citizens “double down” to increase pressure on leaders, but the public is increasingly “opting out” and disengaging from the system—leaving only the loudest, shrillest, and most polarizing voices to feed the hyper-partisanship characterizing our current politics. Congress, conceived in Article One of our Constitution as the leading branch of our federal government, is becoming irrelevant to an increasing number of Americans.
Our Congress and Public Trust map describes the factors that are intensifying this process, inside and outside the institution. A long stretch of voter dissatisfaction and important demographic shifts within the two-party system have led to increasing intensity of competition for majorities in Congress. This historic level of competition has led the parties to stake out more stark ideological differences, driving their partisan constituencies further apart philosophically. As the parties and their constituents have fewer ideas in common, hyper-partisan behavior within the electorate and among those elected to Congress increases, winnowing the possibility for compromise and dragging down congressional function.
At the same time, the institution’s ability to formulate thoughtful, cooperative policy solutions has diminished. Some members (and many challengers) have responded to decreased public satisfaction by running against Washington, demonizing the institution, and reducing the institution’s resources to the breaking point. Loss of institutional expertise exacerbated by increased staff turnover has weakened policy-making capacity and increased the influence of outside experts, some of whom also proffer campaign donations. In fact, money flows throughout our systems map, depicted by factors with green halos. Further research through creation of another systems map focused on money and politics is forthcoming and will be aimed at deepening our understanding of this phenomenon.
Where do we go from here?
OK, you say. We know Congress isn’t working well; public dissatisfaction is at an all-time high and politics is as nasty as it has ever been. This map basically depicts a death spiral. What do we do about it?
A systems map helps identify leverage opportunities—places where smaller levels of effort lead to disproportionate impact. And leverage opportunities inform strategy. As we work to identify leverage opportunities and develop strategy, several themes are emerging.
First, despite this story of profound dysfunction, there are bright spots within the system. Many members of Congress and their staffs still possess what we call “servant’s hearts,” meaning they are driven by a call to public service. We know staff and members want to be effective, despite being stuck in a cycle of diminished resources. We also see a bright spot in the ability of outside partners to help Congress become more efficient and effective—to “work smarter.” As a result, we are thinking about how we can best support and empower servants’ hearts across the institution by more effectively enabling substantive work and deliberation.
Second, we believe that the institution’s failure to respond to increasing communication is driving public dissatisfaction and disengagement. We cannot simply invite greater public engagement without making sure Congress has strengthened its ability to respond. Without these investments first, we risk further alienating those we are trying to re-engage.
We have to ask, therefore, how we can help Congress develop more efficient tools to listen to the public, process the overwhelming amount of information, and invite more interaction from constituent groups, all while better managing the volume of communications from advocacy groups.
Third, once Congress’s capacity to listen and respond to the public is increased, can we help members and staff build a more functional culture that responds less reflexively to fear, elevating the leadership strength of members and staff? Members currently have too little incentive to act beyond partisan teamsmanship. Are there interventions we can make to help alleviate some of the political pressure members feel and encourage them to better withstand hyper-partisan heat? Can we help them find courage to cooperate across the aisle and strengthen bipartisan relationships that offer a foundation for institutional progress?
Finally, the cost of running for office has risen exponentially, driven by pressures from the political system we call the “Political-Industrial Complex.” Our map clearly illustrates how the need to raise campaign funds ripples across the congressional system. Reducing the amount of time spent by members fundraising would free them to focus more on legislation and remove some partisan invective from their messaging. We also see a potential bright spot using emerging campaign techniques that rely on cheaper media, and are considering exploring whether, if accelerated, they could disrupt the dominance of the political-industrial complex by reducing money on the demand side of its predominant business model.
We are knee deep in strategy development work and have some distance to go. We expect that as we continue to learn our analysis will evolve. In fact, learning and evolution is the essence of understanding the system, because by definition, it is always changing. It is our hope that by collaborating with partners across the field, existing grantees, and most importantly, with Congress itself, the Democracy Fund can play a constructive role in helping strengthen the institution and our democracy as a whole.
You can explore the map and its elements here. As you do, we hope you will tell us how to better describe and illuminate the dynamics of the Congress and Public Trustsystem. Please email us at congressmap@democracyfund.org to share your feedback or related resources.
“Systems thinking” and the practice of mapping complex systems increasingly looks like the next big trend in philanthropy. Popping up at conferences and in reports from respected experts and leaders, a systems view has the advantage of recognizing the inherent complexity of the topics that philanthropy often attempts to address.
The Democracy Fund adopted systems thinking when it launched last year and has spent the past year experimenting with a methodology to map the dynamic patterns and causal relationships that shape how systems involved with local journalism, elections, and Congress are influencing the health of our democracy. Our efforts have born significant fruit, but it has certainly not been easy.
In the spirit of collaboration and transparent learning, we thought that it would be useful to share some of the things that we’ve experienced during the process of developing system maps.
In an earlier blog post, I shared a bit about why we chose to adopt a systems approach. Our hope was that this orientation would help the Democracy Fund to avoid the trap of oversimplifying the challenges facing our democracy and provide us with tools to have greater leverage in strengthening it.
We recently published our first systems map focused on the health of local news and participation. As we continue to refine this and other maps, we are beginning to think about what they can tell us about finding leverage to change important incentives that are driving behavior. You can learn more about our approach to systems thinking here.
When we began the process of developing our systems maps, we hired an external evaluator (the wonderful Robin Kane) to travel with us on this journey and help to identify major learning along the way. Robin has so far produced two interim reports to help us check in on how our experience with systems mapping is lining up with what our initial expectations had been when we went into the process.
Several major themes jump out from Robin’s reports:
Shifts in Perceived Outcomes: As we wait to see other benefits of the process, our team has increasingly seen the value of our mapping exercise in its ability to provide us with a sophisticated means to communicate with our board and external partners about the environment in which we are working. The complexity of the map helps us to explain that there are no easy answers and that responses require multi-pronged approaches. It exposes the underlying logic of our strategies and helps to reveal where there are gaps in our analysis. The maps have also helped us to communicate with potential partners who can see their own work in the maps. We continue to hope that the mapping will help us to more effectively identify potential leverage to create change in the system, but the jury is still out on that front.
Interrogating a Map: We have been surprised how difficult it is for board members and other advisors to dig into and learn from a map outside of the context of a proposed strategy. Without the outline of a potential strategy, it is hard to know where greater detail or a narrower “zoom” is required because so many subjective choices are made during a mapping process about what to include and what to exclude for communication purposes. As a consequence, we’ve had to rethink the sequencing of our process and how we engage with our board around both the maps and our emerging strategies.
Confusion and Doubt: Ongoing questions and doubts about whether mapping will yield significant new insights have dogged our systems mapping from the beginning. More art than science, the process requires a faith that the time put in will yield more new insights than other approaches to strategy development. As we have been “building the plane, while we fly it,” we have had to cope with not having a clear road map about how to get to the next phase of our work.
Progress and Growth: While the process of developing maps has been time consuming and difficult, it has forced each of our program teams to think hard about the problems on which they are working and the solutions that they have pursued. Each team has consulted with dozens of experts and leaders, sharpening our overall understanding of the issues on which we are working. A strong sense of pride on what has been accomplished came across strongly from staff interviews by our evaluator.
In the coming months, we will complete additional maps on Congress, our election system, and other key topics. From each map, we will develop and approve strategies for the Democracy Fund’s work in the coming years. As we do so, our intention is to continue to learn from the process and share our learnings with you as we do.
This week we released a visualization and accompanying narrative that seeks to represent the dynamics facing local news institutions and levels of participation of the public in civic affairs.
Original reporting, informed dialogue, and rigorously argued differences of opinion all support engagement in our democratic processes in communities across the United States. Over the past decade, however, local news outlets have struggled. Audiences and advertisers have gravitated to digital and mobile platforms — and the economics of local news has declined. We are being left with media deserts in locations where coverage once flourished.
At the same time, promising local journalism experiments have cropped up across the country. Foundations and venture capitalists are investing not only in individual outlets, but in tools and models that can cut reporting costs and support civic engagement around breaking topics. How can such promising innovations be seeded widely and cultivated fully? These are the issues that the Democracy Fund’s Engagement Program has been grappling with.
Our Journey
Over the past year, we have consulted dozens of journalists and scholars of media and communications in an ambitious effort to create a map that reveals the many dimensions of local journalism’s disruption.
This process flows from the foundation’s larger commitment to understanding democracy as a complex system. At the core of our process is an extensive process of analysis and graphical mapping of the dynamics facing this space. As Democracy Fund President Joe Goldman explains “a systems map describes the dynamic patterns (or feedback loops) that occur in a system, whether they are vicious or virtuous cycles of behavior and reaction.” It is not, as Joe writes “a network map that describes how different individuals or organizations are connected to one another.”
The process of identifying and vetting such loops has been both long and profoundly iterative. Participants in the initial workshop held in March 2014 sketched some 43 loops representing different dynamics surrounding the failure and success of local news outlets to adequately inform and connect with their communities. Over a series of internal and one-on-one meetings, the Engagement team — Program Associate Paul Waters, Graduate Research Fellow Jessica Mahone, myself, and a dedicated set of fellows and consultants — winnowed the map down to tell a “core story” about key factors and connections.
Like panning for gold, these multiple conversations allowed the team to sift through many different layers of the problem to identify valuable elements. The result is not a picture of the optimal local news environment that we might want, or the debatably better environment we might have once had. Instead, it’s a multi-dimensional model of the intersecting forces that shape the markets, missions, and practices of outlets seeking to provide coverage that can help to drive democratic decisionmaking by both audiences and policymakers around the country.
Where We Are
The current map, which comprises 17 loops, hones in on the powerfully disruptive economic shifts that have unsettled legacy journalism outlets, and the hopeful but still nascent creative efforts to build sustainable digital tools and platforms for reporting and civic dialogue. The map identifies Internet adoption and evolution as the key “input factor” disrupting this system, and pinpoints three key factors central to a healthy local information ecosystem:
The shift in audience attention;
The relevance, quality, and quantity of state and local journalism; and
The engagement of the public in civic affairs.
Several related loops hone in on economic dynamics. Perhaps the most important is the decay in income from advertising as a result of news outlets no longer able to obtain the same rates or deliver the same audience reach they once did. In addition, large digital platforms are more able to capture significant portions of the remaining advertising revenue with increasingly sophisticated targeting technologies. The result these dynamics is that membership and philanthropic support for small to mid-sized news projects is increasingly important as is the role government dollars play in maintaining public broadcasting.
Other factors are at work, however, including the rise of user-generated content, the strength of connections between newsrooms and community members, and the fate of journalism skills in an era of mass newspaper layoffs. The map raises questions such as, can audiences trust reporters to recognize and represent their interests, and uncover corruption without sliding into sensationalism? Will outlets with small slices of the public increase hyper partisanship with narrowly targeted content aimed at reinforcing viewpoints rather than informing?
The map also recognizes the importance of policy decisions around online access and how they have fostered the growth of the Internet over recent decades. All of these dynamics and others are captured in this system map, and each loop is bolstered with research, case studies and both supporting and countervailing evidence.
Overall, we have to recognize that the local public square, which has for decades been sustained by a small number of newspapers, television and radio stations, is in turmoil and though it isn’t clear what will replace what was for decades a stable equilibrium it is very clear that change will be a constant over the upcoming decade.
Looking to the future
Like the dynamics it captures, the map is not static. It is a work in progress, designed to serve as tool for discussion and strategy not just within the foundation, but across the field. With this in mind, the Engagement Program worked with the American Press Institute to convene another room full of news experts, editors and reporters this past October. Many had seen the map more than once in its various iterations; others were “map newbies.” We led the room through each loop—probing for points of confusion or competing interpretations of various factors and connections. For us this was just the first step towards more engagement with communities of experts seeking to better inform and engage the public at the local level in our democracy. Ultimately, we hope this contributes to a stronger shared understanding of the field.
How can you assist?
We recognize that as a relatively small organization we will gain a better understanding of the field by soliciting input from others. We also realize that this is a quickly shifting field and we intend to stay in learning mode as the map evolves. This prompts us to continue to engage with the widest range of people working in the realm of local news and participation: What else does the Democracy Fund need to know or understand to better illuminate the dynamics of local news ecosystems?
If your work relates to local news and participation, we welcome and encourage you to take some time to explore the map and dig into the definitions of the loops, factors, and connections. Help us improve its breadth and accuracy.
Looking back at my first year at the Democracy Fund, I can say working with a group of people truly committed to engaging the whole political spectrum is a remarkable and educational experience—beyond anything I could have imagined.
Since I joined the Democracy Fund, the Governance Program has been working to develop new approaches to understanding our nation’s system of governance as well as the forces of hyperpartisanship that currently render the system unable to function effectively. Nearly one year on, I can say working with a group of people representing all sides of the political spectrum has been challenging but productive.
For me, the chance to combine a quarter century of Hill experience with systems thinking to more deeply understand the system of Congress—and where the greatest opportunities to reduce dysfunction exist—has been unique. The space to build a team within the Governance Program of individuals equally committed to the more effective functioning of government has been rewarding. And the ability to foster collaboration among existing organizations, help new innovative organizations expand, and encourage them all to collaborate to deepen their impact in the space has been truly energizing.
Among the challenges we have faced has been developing a strategy that reflects our knowledge and our values while continuing our grantmaking practice in an effort to impact the urgent challenges we hope to address. Described fondly within Democracy Fund as “building the plane while flying it,” we are grateful to have metaphorically experienced pilots and mechanics on board to help us stay in the air. This infrastructure has enabled the Governance team to support our colleagues by attracting partners that reflect the ideological diversity of the American people, as reflected in their elected officials; develop and support new programs to help build relationships among members of Congress and their staffs; develop technology to enhance congressional constituent engagement systems; identify best practices and train congressional offices to more fully utilize them; and create strategies to advance efforts to “fix Washington” by creating more open and accessible legislative processes, all while developing and refining our strategic plan.
Looking forward to the next year, the Governance Program is working with a range of stakeholders to ask some hard questions. Specifically: How can we build on our existing approach to not only support existing organizations, but incentivize innovation as well? How can we support the institution of Congress by strengthening its operating systems and processes? How can we expand the ability of those who work in Congress to use those systems more effectively? And, how can we incentivize government officials, specifically members of Congress, to behave in ways that increase the functionality of government, support bipartisan working relationships, and reward civility?
We know the answers aren’t easy. But we’ve known that all along. It took us a generation to achieve this state of dysfunction; it will take more than a year and many voices, organizations, and public officials to solve the challenges. After all, the essence of systems thinking is that with so many variables, and so many interrelationships, the system is constantly changing and the work is never really done.
At the Democracy Fund, we are working to walk the walk when it comes to bipartisanship in our organization and in the field we are seeking to build as we work to strengthen our system of government.
All in all, a pretty good year, and even more exciting learning to look forward to.
Our democracy is a complex political system made of an intricate web of institutions, interest groups, individual leaders, and citizens that are connected to each other in countless ways. Every attempt to influence some aspect of this complex system produces a ripple of other reactions – some may be predictable, but many are not. This can make it difficult to anticipate what will happen when we intervene to try to make our democracy work better.
Our team at the Democracy Fund is not the first to find that it is easy to fall into the trap of oversimplifying the challenges faced by our democracy as we endeavor to strengthen it. While we all know that democracy is never fixed when a court case is won or a new law is signed, we have found that our strategies often fail to recognize how fixing one piece of the system will be inadequate for achieving our long-term aims. The passage of major legislation, whether it is McCain-Feingold or the Help America Vote Act, is usually met with legal challenges, loop holes, and resistance, which undermine our goals and can lead to unanticipated results that are sometimes worse than the problems with which we began.
Adopting a Systems Approach
The answer is not to give up hope or to abandon our cause. Instead, we believe that widespread system change calls for the humility to acknowledge that there are no simple answers or silver bullets in a complex world. We need to embrace the complexity of the problems we are facing, which requires that we experiment, learn, and iterate. Progress must be made through multi-pronged strategies that reinforce one another, are sustained over time, and reflect a more holistic understanding of the major forces driving and constraining change.
One method for avoiding the trap of oversimplification is called “systems thinking,” which refers to the practice of seeking to understand and influence complex systems. The Democracy Fund, along with some of the other organizations within Omidyar Group, is adopting an approach informed by systems thinking to improve our ability to achieve our goals of making our democracy work better. To this end, our team has begun a process of documenting our understanding of the dynamic systems in which we are working.
We are using a tool called “systems mapping” to make sense of the complex problems we are working on and to open ourselves up to new, creative solutions. A systems map is different than a network map that describes how different individuals or organizations are connected to one another. Instead, a systems map describes the dynamic patterns (or feedback loops) that occur in a system, whether they are vicious or virtuous cycles of behavior and reaction.
Take an arms race for example. In this type of vicious cycle, one party buys arms because it feels threatened by another. This leads the other to feel threatened and to buy arms, which in turn leads the first party to buy even more arms. The result is an endless chain of escalating reactions.
The stories we tell ourselves about the world around us determine how we try to act in it. At the end of the day, a systems map is really just a rich story that lets us see how our world is interconnected and helps us be more effective in our attempts to improve it. To better understand what this kind of map that focuses on dynamic feedback loops can look like, take a look at these maps created by the Hawaii Quality of Life initiative.
Iterative and Participatory Maps
As we apply systems thinking to our work, the Democracy Fund has decided to make our process highly participatory and iterative. We chose a participatory approach because we know that even with the expertise of our staff, our understanding of the systems on which we are working is incomplete. By engaging diverse groups of experts, advocates, public officials, and peer funders, we gain much broader insight into the systems on which we are working, which will hopefully allow for more creative solutions to emerge. Collectively, we can harness the power of systems thinking as a means of taking a step back and being more comprehensive in our depiction of both problems and opportunities. We at the Democracy Fund are grateful to all those who have already contributed their time and expertise to our process and look forward to engaging more voices in the months to come.
We also have adopted an approach that is deeply iterative. By definition, you can never understand everything about a complex system given the sheer volume of dynamic relationships at play. Perhaps, more to the point, a complex world is always changing. As the system changes, we need to change with it. We will need to regularly revisit our maps and our plans to reflect all that we learn as we experiment and intervene, making our systems maps adaptive, living tools.
Beginning to Map Our Systems
We are currently working on three initial systems maps—one on election administration, one on local journalism, and one on the legislative branch of our federal government. We expect these systems maps to contribute to smarter interventions and we anticipate that the maps will foster collaboration with our partners by transparently laying out our understanding of the problems on which we are working. In this way, each map will become a tool for telling a better, more comprehensive story about our strategies. The systems maps also have the potential to support greater opportunities for dialogue, negotiation, and insight. These first three maps will be followed by others that look at additional aspects of our political system.
We believe that the process of creating systems maps will help us challenge and test our assumptions, as well as identify areas where we want to learn more. Once the relationships and causal pathways are created, we hope to see the opportunities for engagement in the system more clearly.Moreover, through systems thinking, and systems mapping more specifically, we hope to focus on building a political system that is resilient to new and recurring challenges and shocks, rather than trying to find silver bullet solutions that give a false sense of fixing a problem.
We have only just begun this journey of ours, but we are excited about the potential of systems thinking to help reveal new connections, questions, and approaches to a set of challenges about which we care deeply. Over the next year, we look forward to hearing your feedback as we share our draft maps here on this blog.
Stay tuned for more to come.
(Special thanks to Tiffany Griffin, our Manager of Learning and Impact, for spear heading our work on systems thinking and working with me to produce this introductory post on our approach. I’d also like to thank Rob Ricigliano – Omidyar Group’s systems and complexity coach – as well as his colleague Karen Grattan for their guidance as the Democracy Fund has approached its systems work.)
Cookies Notice
This website uses cookies to provide you with an improved and personalized experience. By using this site you agree to our use of cookies. Please read our cookies policy for more information on the cookies we use and how to delete or block them.
