Many-to-Many System
aims to support collaborations tackling complex, entangled challenges where disrupting norms and values, ownership, and power is essential.
Who is it for?
Governance Practitioners
who are already working in complex collaborations and struggling to find or create suitable governance and organising structures for their complex work and/or who want to disrupt norms around value, ownership, risk and power.
Funders
especially those seeking to disrupt these same norms or invest effectively in systemic change initiatives.
Legal and Financial Professionals
including lawyers and accountants, whose expertise is vital for societal transformation, particularly around governance, legal structuring, and contracting.
Brief Introduction
The Basic Idea
The Deep Code Shifts
Solving today's complex, interconnected problems requires what we term “complex collaborations”? - bringing together many diverse groups (public, private, civic) with many new perspectives, including future generations and the natural world.
While many collaborations are already doing great work, we believe that finding better ways to support how they are structured and organised them could unlock more effective, system-level change.
The Many-to-Many System is focussed on unlocking the governance, organising, legal, and learning structures of complex collaborations to enable many resources – not just money, but also knowledge and relationships – to flow more freely, and to foster many ways of working that embrace diverse value exchange.
For each and everyone of us, our fundamental understandings of the world are influenced by ‘deep codes,’ often invisibly embedded within our creations, frameworks, and rules.
The Many-to-Many System explored how these codes shape collaboration and governance, aiming to understand if they could be reimagined and how those within complex collaborators themselves can embed them into their collaboration’s infrastructures.
of Value
Through
Learning
Risks
and Harms
UNFURLING
BALANCED POWER
HOLISTIC VIEW
MINDFUL ENDINGS
MISSION LED
RISK OWNERSHIP
RISK MITIGATION
PROPORTIONATEExploring the
Many-to-Many System
The Many-to-Many System distills two years of learning, prototyping, research, and practice. Here we offer a blend of elements: a core framework, practical insights and learnings, illustrative models for complex topics, and tools developed along the way.
Our aspiration is to provide a range of resources that can help others embed the Many-to-Many deep code shifts into their own complex collaboration work.
Discover the System
Navigate Challenges
Tools and Examples
Legal Architecture
Learnings from the Field
Journey and Team
“What we’re really doing is removing the barriers of collaboration”
Zahra Davidson
Huddlecraft
“Many-to-Many is a vehicle for deploying multiple technologies that make complex collaborations possible”
James Lock
We Are Opus
“I just say to people it’s collaboration contracting”
Matt Bell
Plymouth Octopus
Still curious?
beyondtherules @ darkmatterlabs.org
Thank you
Thank you to all the Partners who co-developed, tested or provided input to the Many-to-Many work.
This includes David Hunter - Bates Wells and the Many-to-Many Learning Network James Lock - We are Opus, Kathleen Kelly - Local Motion, Leah Black - Regenerative Futures Fund, Lisa Clarke - Lankelly Chase, Matt Bell and Karen Pilkington - Plymouth Octopus Project, Zahra Davidson and Dan Ford - Huddlecraft and our Lead Edge Testers of Andy Crosbie - Collective Impact Agency, Guppi Bola - Decolonising Economics, Jowe Harfouche - Network of Arab Alternative Screens, Irene Lopez de Vallejo - DisCo, Lucas Counter - Space of Urgency.
Also a huge thank you to all the Partners who laid the foundations for this Many-to-Many work as part of the work on Beyond the Rules including Democratic Society, Lankelly Chase, York Multiple Complex Needs Network's (MCN) Enabling Team, Black Thrive and Bates Wells.
Finally, thank you to the generous resourcing support and deep collaboration from Lankelly Chase, Arising Quo and Laudes Foundation.