Something old, something new: Let’s skip the debate and reimagine the system.

How happy was I to see that the day after I talked about a potential generational disconnect in social sector leadership, Tactical Philanthropy tackled the old-new relationship in a great post. I love the thinking:

I don’t believe that “old philanthropy” needs to be replaced by “new philanthropy”, rather I think that Arianna Huffington got it right during the Morphing Media session when she said that we need to bring together wisdom and innovation. When the wise and the innovative are brought together, the positive outcome is not a result of each side politely acknowledging each other’s strengths and then going their separate ways. Rather the two sides are best served by engaging in verbal combat, where the weaknesses in each side’s point of view can be exposed and the strengths revealed.

Innovation needs wisdom so it may be properly cultivated. Wisdom needs innovation so it can continue to have meaningful relevance. And if I take it one step further, progress is the application of experience in innovative models… which is why I continue to think that this is about more than traditional development within the sector… it’s about intersecting the assets of old and new in a way that evolves thinking, practices, and social investment.

But does this happen only through “verbal combat,” as Tactical Philanthropy and other blogs have suggested? Hmm. I’m not sure that competition or controversy are best suited to prompt the intersection of innovation and experience. Perhaps a certain amount of competition or verbal combat helps make a relevant case where the new and the old can merge… I can’t ignore that this has happened somewhat in my experiences.

Yet I wonder if philanthropy will evolve to a point that it does not require the spark of debate to leverage what I view as the inherent assets of the new and the old. The benefits of innovation and experience seem so connected to me that no debate is needed to create their synergy.

Instead, I imagine that organizations will begin to change and be structured in a way that receives and appropriately allocates the resources of innovation and experience for the greatest impact. I’m getting systemic, but I think this is about reinventing the work of philanthropy (and the framework of how decisions are made) so that the new-old debate does not happen at the surface… instead, it’s acknowledged somehow in the infrastructure and leveraged when appropriate.

I think we are expecting the new and the old, or the innovators and the experienced, to carry too much weight via “verbal combat.” Instead it is the institution of philanthropy itself that must evolve to carry the merger of innovation and experience.

There is not a universal answer for how this could be achieved. I expect the field to keep changing, and perhaps new organizational models will emerge. I just don’t think traditional organizational hierarchy can accommodate this sort of thinking… where does the organic intersection of innovation and experience fit in a large, traditionally-structured organization? And furthermore, how do we honor the success of established organizations while migrating them to more relevant models… before jumping to the conclusion of simply creating new philanthropic organizations?

And what does this mean for donors, volunteers, nonprofits and funders? Is there any way to anticipate how much additional impact we’ll achieve if thinking like this is somehow operationalized? What’s the result: more effective programs, streamlined services, greater competency, more efficient investments, the attraction of new people to the sector?

After all, at the end of the day, philanthropy is about impact, and these days, it’s particularly about measurable impact. Of course, we sometimes only apply that expectation to our funded partners–they have to worry about systemic change all the time these days. Is this old-new issue an opportunity to be accountable to the sector in the same way?

Perhaps this is why we can’t move beyond “verbal combat”: it’s too challenging to quantify a case for why more systemic change is needed, and without identifying a clear, in-demand outcome, where’s the sense of urgency to move from verbal combat to a new model?