Capacity building

John Esterle is an unassuming man who runs the Whitman Institute out of an apartment in San Francisco's Embarcadero neighborhood. He's been at it for twenty years, though the foundation has become better known since it shifted from being an operating to a grantmaking organization just a few years ago.

This tiny foundation is at the leading edge of supporting the development of capacities the individuals and institutions addressing our most pressing social problems need. But he is very much alone in this task. While "capacity building" is the concern of the hour in the foundation world, most foundations define it much more narrowly and only in conjunction with their own grantees.

Here is the Whitman Institute's mission: "promotion of open-mindedness, cross-perspective dialogue, and engaged communication to improve the process and quality of public and private decision-making. Our ultimate goals are to broaden the public conversation about the importance of critical and collaborative thinking and to link that deepened awareness to effect individual and social change."

More specifically, the foundation is committed to the following capacities (from their website: www.thewhitmaninstitute.org:

• exploring diverse viewpoints broadly and deeply
• engaging across difference, discipline, sector, and geography
• discovering how language affects perception
• approaching problems and decisions from multiple perspectives, particularly perspectives that may challenge their own
• recognize and question assumptions underlying their beliefs and action
  test the logic behind their thinking
• become aware of, and learn from, the interplay between thinking and feeling
  develop a capacity for empathy
• creating sustainable processes for inquiry and reflection

As Esterle says, there are really no other players in this field currently. They hope that there will be more. All of the foundations are in perpetual strategic planning mode, he said. They are struggling for a new paradigm. What could that mean? Something is changing in philanthropy, and focus on capacity as a primary grantmaking area, not a secondary one, is critical.

In our discussion we realized that there are three pieces to getting unstuck: changing incentives; making the time for a different kind of decisionmaking; and tools for shifting our habits of decisionmaking.

Imagine, I said to him, that we are now at the point regarding tools-for-thinking and decision making --call these social technologies -- that information technologies were in the early 1980's before PC's and the internet penetrated and shifted every aspect of our individual and organization lives. He and I are betting on the idea that ten years from now, every educational program, every organization, every political campaign, will have integrated the available tools to the point that they can barely remember life without them.