DEEPER DIVE INTO PRACTICE OF PANDO FUNDING

Hello! This is a Pando Funding deep dive; one of several concepts where we dig deeper into a critical aspect of Pando Funding. To explore why we believe it matters and to share what we’ve learned while leading the New Capitalism Project, a US-based system change network to transform the economic system so that it works for all people and the planet. These deeper dives are offered as tools to help you adapt Pando Funding to your context – to animate Pando Funding as a shared, living practice rather than a fixed model.    

BALANCING Outcomes & Opportunities

A healthy system change network—when well-supported—creates powerful, layered effects. These effects ripple through individual organizations, collaborative projects, and the broader system it aims to shift.  For funders and stewards of capital, understanding and supporting this complexity is essential. So is learning how to assess progress and get better without oversimplifying it.

Pando Funding is designed with this complexity in mind. Its approach to outcomes needs to reflect the holistic nature and value of a system change network; and at the same time, needs to match the right tools and expectations with the right parts of the work and the functions needed.

This entails valuing and attending to three interconnected types of outcomes, each with different indicators, timeframes and type of information. And with each, offering a different window into the health and effectiveness of a system change network:

  • These outcomes measure the network’s internal capacity to learn, adapt, and act in coordinated, purposeful ways, and include:

    • Trust and mutual accountability among members

    • The quality and speed of shared information; and its ability to serve as an input to inform strategy and action

    • A collective understanding of the system being changed

    These conditions don’t show up as “results” in a traditional sense, but they are what make sustained, strategic action possible. In fact, they are leading indicators of resilience—withing the network and across the broader field.

  • These are the tangible outputs of specific projects that emerge from clusters. They are important because they:

    • Provide timely insights and feedback for iteration and learning

    • Help test hypotheses about what works in the current context

    • Can generate momentum, credibility and immediate value.

    But on their own, these outcomes don’t tell us whether deeper transformation is underway. They’re essential signals—but only part of the story.

  • These are the most complex and long-range outcomes. They reflect whether the network is:

    • Influencing key dynamics that shape the overall system in meaningful ways (eg narrative change, power redistribution, institutional norms, individual mindsets)

    • Contributing to shifts that no single actor can claim, but that matter deeply for systemic transformation.

Together, these three outcome types form a dynamic, adaptive approach to monitoring and accountability—one that reflects the nature of transformation itself: unpredictable, emergent and relational.

Pando Funding’s unique strength lies in enabling groups of organizations to collaboratively manage this uncertainty by:

  • Investing in deep relational trust and systemic understanding among diverse organizations -- as a first-order objective of their work together

  • Creating adaptive strategies and aligned portfolios of projects designed to evolve as context shifts.

  • Prioritizing the interplay (and relationships) across projects and clusters rather than isolated project achievements.

This approach is easier said than done. “Outcomes” and the mindsets and practices they invoke around resource allocation, governance, accountability and incentives are fraught for those seeking to do transformational work within networks.

Traditional funding approaches often narrow in on individual project metrics and short-term outputs – but the paradigm they embody for what success looks like goes much deeper. That might work when proving and scaling solutions—but it doesn’t work when you’re trying to shift a system.

In fact, that kind of reductionism is one of the key risks that funders and network members need to monitor and manage when doing Pando Funding. It undermines the diverse, adaptive capacities that a network needs to respond to complex challenges.

In a system change network, the real risk is not uncertainty of its project portfolios or their outcomes. The real risk is in the breakdown of trust, the fragmentation of collaboration, and the retreat to isolated, status-quo work.

Pando Funding’s layered outcome approach, and it’s honest embrace of uncertainty in the face of complexity, protects what makes systems change possible, while staying focused on what makes it effective.

Guideposts in Practice

Layering Outcomes to Unlock Network Funding

At the heart of the New Capitalism Project (NCP) lies a long-term commitment to building the root enabling conditions that allow leaders to collaborate in deeper, more adaptive, and more transformative ways. Over time, this commitment has helped clarify a core insight: root enabling conditions are not just foundations for change, they are critical outcomes in their own right, and the necessary preconditions for more visible, systemic impact.

NCP’s approach has evolved around a layered understanding of outcomes—one that has reshaped how we do our work, how we evaluate success, and how we invite funders to engage. That layered approach tracks the three essential types of outcomes we discuss above and share with a bit more detail here:

Root Enabling Condition Outcomes: Over years, we’ve invested in trust-building, shared visioning, information flows, and strategic alignment--not as a means to an end, but as a systemic intervention in its own right. These are early indicators of resilience and readiness within the network. They allow us to hold complexity, move with agility, and act with coherence.

Project Level Outcomes: As these enabling conditions took root, the network began generating distinct, ambitious, and network-born initiatives defined by Clusters. These cluster living project portfolios are not isolated interventions; but rather they emerge from shared sensemaking, build on existing trust, and adapt based on real-time learning.

System Health Driver Outcomes: Finally, over time, NCP is positioned to engage in the deeper drivers of economic system health: shifting power, reimaging narratives, transforming policy environments. These impacts are long-range, emergent and often un-attributable to a single organization or initiative, but they are the signals of real transformation.

This layered view of outcomes has not only guided NCP’s evolution, it’s forced us to rethink how we steward capital. We are now moving toward larger, more public-facing Cluster interventions that directly engage how the economy works. But the success of these projects depends on continued investment in the root enabling conditions that sustain coherence, alignment, and adaptability within each cluster and across a range of clusters NCP hopes to support.

NCP is working against a real challenge: current philanthropic norms often separate infrastructure from the outcomes they seek to achieve. These norms treat the former as a mere input to the latter. They evaluate network health and project performance by different standards, tolerate different levels of uncertainty, and often fund them through separate channels.

Our aspiration is that Pando Funding bridges this gap by bundling outcomes and investments. Then we can enable funders to support the full architecture of system change: the conditions, the experiments, and the long-term levers of transformation for what they are--three inseparable dynamics that result in system shifts not in a production line with the desirable outcome pumped out “at the end.” Without this integration, any network risks fragmentation—and risks losing the collective power it was designed to unleash.

GUIDING QUESTION

What are the different, valuable effects that your system change network has and who gets the value from those different sources? What would need to be true for more stakeholders to get value from the same sources?

Each deep dive offers a guiding question, as a jumping off point for exploring a particular aspect of Pando Funding in your own work and context.