Field work — an international democracy foundation
Choosing what to build next
Three months, nineteen stakeholder interviews, a systems synthesis, and a prioritisation tool the leadership team used to pick its next bets, then kept.
The situation
An international democracy foundation runs a peer network of more than a hundred member organisations across five continents. From the centre, the network looked alive. The group chat had a steady feed, events filled up, new members kept joining. But members were not actually learning from each other there, and when we asked the strategy lead what the network's platform should look like, the honest answer was "I honestly don't know." Before building anything, someone had to find out what was really going on.
The listening
Over seven weeks we ran nineteen interviews: the foundation's own staff, member organisations on five continents, funders, and peer networks that had tried to build something similar (including one that had died, quietly, with no post-mortem). Alongside the interviews, we researched thirteen comparable platforms to see what survives and what does not.
The synthesis
We spent a two-day sprint turning the interviews into a systems picture: personas, causal loops, and iceberg analyses that traced surface behaviour down to mental models. Two findings reframed the work. First, the quiet channels were not a tech problem. Leadership saw the feed and assumed it worked, while members told us they did not use it to share knowledge. Second, the fragmentation was not a bug to fix. Civil society organises loosely on purpose, so the job was to serve that federation, not centralise it.
The decision
Then came two days with the leadership team. Six concepts, storyboarded and pinned to the wall, dot-voted and critiqued one by one. On the second morning we built a small scoring tool overnight: everyone rated each concept on their phone for impact and effort, and the results landed live on a shared matrix (do first, big bet, park, kill). The team left with chosen bets, named assumptions to test, and a five-point action plan. We handed them the tool so they could keep prioritising with it.
"I definitely have the clarity I wanted, and I love that we have action."
What changed
The team told us the missing ingredient had never been ideas, it was technical capacity, and that having it inside their workflow was "a massive opportunity." Within a month, the first bet was live: a working funding hub carrying real data on the network's full member directory, on track for its public launch.
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