How a transformative approach to collaboration and finance
supports citizens, governments, corporations, and civil society to
share the burdens and the benefits of solving wicked problems.
CONTENTS
Each year hundreds of millions of people work in tens of millions of organisations, and
deploy trillions of dollars in an effort to solve the most pressing challenges of our
time.
Yet despite this vast commitment there remains an estimated $50 trillion funding gap
required to address the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs, or Global Goals) - the
most comprehensive, cohesive and coherent description of these wicked problems to
date.
The existing approach presumes that a multitude of entities addressing some part of
the greater challenge will, without appropriate incentives and mechanisms, selforganise
themselves into an effective, efficient, and scalable solution. This is
dangerously and wilfully naive. By comparison, the International Space Station (ISS),
the largest multi-lateral project, and the single most expensive construction project in
history, came at an estimated cost of only $150 billion. The ISS would never have been
launched without clearly defined incentives, and a coordinated pathway to success -
so what makes governments, corporations, and civil society actors believe they can
solve trillion dollar problems through a piecemeal, incremental approach?
Over the past three years we have consulted with many of the world’s largest and
most active public and private institutions that are deploying significant levels of
capital towards the resolution of the Global Goals. Without exception, while those
we’ve connected with all consider the resolution of the SDGs to be a moral imperative,
none of them genuinely believe that the Global Goals will be achieved by 2030.
We beg to differ.
On the face of it, the bottom line is depressingly simple - there is no single entity with
either the cash or the capacity to invest or deploy the requisite capital to achieve one,
let alone all, of the Global Goals. And there are currently no incentives rewarding
outcome over effort, or mechanisms for collaboration at the scale necessary to
actually solve the SDGs.
In that challenge also lies the opportunity: the constellation of entities working to
address these issues require financial incentives, operational infrastructure, and no
small measure of humility, to transition from organisation-centric behaviour, to
mission-centric behaviour.
From our perspective, this is the only way in which human society can move from
treating the acute problems the SDGs represent, towards the systemic resolution of
the underlying chronic issues.
We believe that not only can the SDGs be solved by 2030, but that it is the single
greatest moral imperative of our time that they must. Further, we believe that the
primary impediment to their resolution is rooted not solely in resources, technology, or
intent, but primarily in a combination of ineffective systems design, and intransigent
human behaviour driven by short-termism, fragmentation, and counterproductive
incentives.
What follows is the distillation of decades of combined thinking and acting in service
to global change. Rooted in both philosophy and practice, this document is a roadmap
we are already executing against. Our execution partners are organisations that agree
that global infrastructure is the missing element necessary for not only the resolution
of the Global Goals, but for each successive wave of global issues that humans will
continue to face as we continue to evolve.
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Cameron Burgess, Astrid Scholz, Arthur Wood & Audrey Selian
San Francisco, CA | Portland, OR | Geneva, Switzerland
1.2 NOTES
Billions to Trillions is less of a white paper, and more of a roadmap. It articulates
and builds upon concepts and perspectives developed by a vast network of
individuals and organisations.
We have not thoroughly footnoted this document, as we are not so much seeking
to make an argument, as to issue an invitation.
Our intention is to stimulate action, and as such we welcome the opportunity to
discuss the contents in order that these ideas may be further refined in service to
the common good.
This document pays particularly close attention to digital technologies and
systems — not because we believe that technology in itself is a silver bullet, but
because it is the foundational infrastructure necessary for mobilising all forms of
capital at scale. A theory of change that cannot be executed against is a fantasy,
and we are nothing if not pragmatic.
Of note is our use of the catch-all ‘world-positive’ to describe the constellation of
individuals, organisations, and networks who are working for the common good.
We reject the false-dichotomy of non-profit and for-profit, and further reject the
way in which the various players in this space are separated by who they serve,
and how they serve them.
1.3 GLOSSARY
One of the greatest challenges in developing documentation is the proliferation of
terms, acronyms, and internal ‘short hand’ we use to describe our work, much of
which has divergent meaning.
Countries, cultures and contexts all determine our use of language, and so, for the
purpose of this document, we considered it essential to define in advance what
we mean in our use of some terms.
Of specific note is that we are using the United Nations’ Sustainable Development
Goals solely as an organising principle for wicked problems. That is not to say that
this work is focused exclusively on the Global Goals, simply that they represent a
near term opportunity for global coherence amongst world-positive people and
projects.
A clickable chart of these goals, with links to their descriptions on the United
Nations website, appears on the next page.
2.1 OPPORTUNITY
The business of change is the biggest business there is.
Solving trillion dollar problems is not achievable by any one entity in isolation,
however. As such, the opportunity is for all citizens, across all sectors, engaging in
any behaviour that contributes to measurable and often monetisable beneficial
outcomes, to:
A. participate in the funding, design and deployment of core infrastructure.
B. connect their current digital systems to backbone systems such that the value
they already hold may be more effectively mobilised, and compensated.
C. be appropriately compensated for the value they create
Our model combines outcome based financing - a methodology by which funders
fund on the basis of success - with the financial, legal, and technical structures to
incentivise and operationalise collaboration at an unprecedented scale.
The core question we are answering is:
What could be not only more urgent, but more
rewarding, than solving the greatest challenges of
the 21st century?
3.1 CHALLENGE
The core of the challenge is simple. Despite their commitment to change, most worldpositive
entities are either unable or unwilling to move beyond competition, or simple
collaboration, in order to mobilise capital at the scale, and with the speed necessary,
to solve wicked problems.
Over time this has resulted in the mass proliferation of parallel organisations,
networks and initiatives that are frequently cited as evidence of ever increasing
market demand for world-positive solutions.
Unfortunately, despite the best of intentions, each new venture spawns a new set of
operational systems, and inevitably becomes constrained by organisational thinking,
jargon and process. As much as these entities may intend to support the resolution of
a mission larger than their own, they are often functionally unable to do so.
Further, the normative behaviours of markets have become the modus operandi for
any venture seeking to catalyse beneficial change. Through individual, organisational
and social spheres, we have become ensnared in Industrial Age metaphors, models
and missions, failing to recognise that our relative affluence and privilege is rooted in
an extractive economic system that is fundamentally unsustainable, and hence
antithetical to our ongoing ‘success’ or ‘progress’.
Funders of change are complicit in this state of affairs, rewarding novelty over utility,
competition over collaboration, and outputs over outcomes. This is further
exacerbated in philanthropy by the prevailing ‘two pocket thinking’ that typically
allocates 5% of capital to making world-positive change, while the other 95% remains
invested in the industries and practices that produced the problems we face in the
first place. We expand on the challenges exacerbated by the ‘golden herd’ on p. 12.
3.2 UNDUE INFLUENCE
While philanthropic capital is patently insufficient for achieving the SDGs, it is
nonetheless disproportionately influential in shaping how we go about addressing
wicked problems.
Networks of the richest and most influential funders and philanthropists tend to move
in ‘golden’ herds. The core differentiation between them lies in their idiosyncratic
networks of influence, and choices of the geographies and sectors in which they
operate, with brands often expressed in terms of the ‘theory of change’ against which
investments are made.
Those with the biggest brands and banners tend to set the development agenda in any
given sector. They provide the ecosystem gestalt, around which smaller entities
manoeuvre to either position themselves in partnerships for co-programming or cofunding,
or as direct recipients of capital in exchange for program execution services.
Typically these services are transacted on a the basis of efforts undertaken to achieve
an intended change according to the funder’s ‘logic model’, rather than an outcome
model where verified success is rewarded.
Unfortunately, philanthropists and foundations are ultimately answerable to no-one —
their results are as transparent or opaque as they choose to make them, and while
they ostensibly serve the public good, they are not governed by the public in the public
interest.
Financial capital is not, and should not be, the the sole determinant of influence in
addressing wicked problems. Neither should political capital. While there is no
denying the power of the intention and intellect these individuals and organisations
bring to bear on wicked problems, there is also no denying that the wealthy are not
imbued with superpowers.
Equating position, financial wealth, education, or convening power with the knowledge
of how best to address wicked problems is fundamentally the same thinking as that
which has created (and reinforced) the inequities of neoliberal economics.
If our current development wisdom is one that simply reinforces the status quo, and
ignores solutions that incorporate the knowledge and incentives of the affected
citizens, or ‘beneficiaries’ in the parlance of philanthropy, we unintentionally
perpetuate the extractive status quo.
By imbuing major foundations and philanthropists with unearned privilege and
unilateral influence on what is ‘important’, we unintentionally perpetuate the top down,
extractive nature of these interventions, as distinct to working on a basis of merit,
innovation, and above all, the cooperative logic that drives any successful endeavour.
The disclosures and transparency which form the very essence of being ‘public’ for a
company, are the same essential ingredients necessary to support responsibility and
efficiency in a global development marketplace where trillions of dollars are spent
each year on millions of service providers.
The bad habits we diagnosed previously are exacerbated by the habits of the golden
herd. Together, they result in a development industry marred by high operating
overheads and business model inefficiencies, market externalities and distortions, and
lack of transparency.
The resulting patterns (see over) have shaped
systems that serve neither people nor planet as
well as they could.
3.3 OBSERVABLE PATTERNS
Creating world-positive solutions at the scale required represents a great many
challenges. As impact investors, technologists, and systems-thinkers, we see
these challenges manifesting directly in the information systems and tools
(financial, legal, and social) that we use to conceptualise and operationalise the
3.4 DYSFUNCTIONAL SYSTEMS
As the previous slide indicates, scaling solutions to wicked problems is adversely
impacted by systems that have not been deliberately designed for this purpose.
These systems can be essentially broken down into three primary areas:
Social Systems
The patterned network of relationships constituting a coherent whole that exist
between individuals, groups, and institutions.
Technical Systems
The hardware, software, algorithms and processes that facilitate the storage and
transaction of data
Capital Systems
The instruments created for the purpose of valuing, storing and transacting capital
While there is no denying the impacts our social systems - informed by our values,
beliefs and behaviours - have upon systems design, the purpose of this document is
primarily on the latter two.
Frankly, our experience has been that, when confronted with the inconsistency
between their values and behaviours, most people opt to change their behaviour.
Repairing and redesigning the underlying technical and capital systems is no small
task - yet it is made substantially easier when we align on the importance of solving
the problem, as distinct to being the ones to solve it.
