Monitoring what matters in complexity

Philanthropy today operates, both through grantmaking and its own initiatives, in complex systems. The challenges it seeks to address are rarely clear-cut. They are interconnected, dynamic, politically charged, and deeply shaped by context, relationships, and feedback loops. Threats to democratic space, social polarization, multiple crises, or the erosion of trust in institutions are not problems that can be addressed in a linear way. They are deeply interconnected and need to be understood and addressed as such.

Foundations increasingly recognize this in the way they design their funding. Many are shifting from a narrow search for attribution toward a more realistic understanding of contribution. Yet many still encounter the limits of what a more classical understanding of impact and outcomes can offer in such realities. If philanthropy wants to remain relevant to the changes it seeks to support, it needs to widen its understanding of how change happens and how it is observed.

A different stance

In complex systems, impact-oriented work is not only about implementing activities and measuring results. It is about learning to observe systems and to act within them. This is not a matter of “learn and apply,” but of ongoing practice: noticing, interpreting, nudging, responding, and readjusting.

For philanthropic organizations, this requires more than a methodological shift. It requires a different stance. The idea that we can know enough in advance to act in exactly the right way is only partly sustainable in complexity. Monitoring therefore becomes less a backward-looking exercise in control and more a practice of attention. It asks us to hold orientation while remaining flexible, to engage with uncertainty without losing strategic intent, and to stay alert to how our impulses interact with those of others.

This also has a political dimension. Many foundations and their partners now operate in environments where democratic values, civic space, and long-term work are under pressure. In such contexts, monitoring is not only about proving effectiveness. It is also about understanding what helps actors remain capable of acting at all. In some cases, preserving the ability to collaborate, to learn, or simply to continue working may already be a meaningful outcome.

From static indicators to progress markers

In complex systems, indicators are often most useful when treated as progress markers: graduated, observable signs of movement rather than definitive measures of success. They help us notice early, partial, and sometimes uneven developments that suggest change is taking shape.

This perspective is closely aligned with Outcome Mapping, which defines outcomes as changes in the behavior, relationships, activities, or actions of the people, groups, and organizations with whom a program works directly. As an understanding that puts people at the center of the changes that affect them, it remains an important foundation. But in complex systems, monitoring efforts should also account for the interconnectedness of relationships and actions, as well as the conditions that make collective change possible.

Toward relational infrastructure

This is where an expanded understanding of outcomes becomes necessary. Conventional outcome thinking often asks whether knowledge, behavior, attitudes, or policy have changed. These dimensions remain important, but they do not fully capture what matters in complex adaptive systems, where change often emerges through relationships, coordination, trust, and shared learning.

The key question, then, is this: do our monitoring approaches take into account the development of relational infrastructure, the connective tissue of communities, networks, and relationships through which actors move and change unfolds? Or do they leave invisible precisely those shifts that make collective effectiveness possible?

Outcome Mapping focuses on the people and organizations a program works with directly—its “boundary partners.” Once we extend our focus beyond them to include the qualities of relational infrastructure and ecosystem conditions, changes such as new connections, stronger trust, better bridges across sectors, denser exchange, and reduced fragmentation take on additional significance. They are not only outcomes at the level of specific actors and their relationships, but also indicators of how the connective tissue of a wider ecosystem is developing. In this sense, they become meaningful outcomes in their own right, because they strengthen the conditions under which coordinated, adaptive, and lasting change can emerge.

This is especially important because system-level shifts, and noticeable changes in people’s lives, often become visible only later, while changes in networks, relationships, and patterns of coordination tend to appear earlier. To understand progress in complexity, we need to take these early signals seriously.

An expanded outcome perspective might therefore pay closer attention to at least four dimensions of change in relational infrastructure as connective tissue:

Relational outcomes such as stronger trust and new bridges
Collaborative outcomes such as improved coordination and shared narratives
Adaptive outcomes such as faster learning and greater ability to adjust
Ecosystem outcomes such as lower fragmentation, stronger circulation of knowledge and resources, and more selforganization across the field

An ecosystem perspective on outcomes

This wider lens helps us see that outcomes do not emerge only at the level of direct partners. They also emerge at the level of the ecosystem. In fields such as peacebuilding, democratic resilience, or women’s land rights, change does not unfold in a neat sequence from intervention to result. It develops across multiple levels through feedback loops.

What we have learned while supporting the Women’s Land Rights Initiative offers a good example. Its contribution does not lie only in discrete activities or directly attributable results, but in the intentional building of relational infrastructure across institutional, sectoral, and geographic boundaries. By connecting grassroots organizations, civil society actors, national focal points, UN secretariats, and funders, it strengthens coordination, shared language, access to knowledge, and collective capacity in a highly diverse field. Of course, some changes related to this initiative may be observed in the behavior of participating actors. However, that would severely limit our view and understanding of the factors that matter for change, since the existence and quality of the infrastructure between actors are themselves key outcomes and enablers of change. In this case, co-creation, solidarity, and grassroots leadership are not only participatory values; they are part of the initiative’s theory of change. Desired change becomes more likely when the ecosystem itself becomes more connected, resilient, and capable of acting.

What this means for philanthropy

For philanthropy, this has practical consequences. It means creating more room and providing funding for seemingly less “tangible” outcomes such as learning, exploration, and course correction. It means recognizing network-building and ecosystem stewardship not merely as supporting processes, but as relevant dimensions of outcomes. It means complementing established outcome frameworks with an explicit focus on relational infrastructure and ecosystem dynamics. And it means using progress markers to observe meaningful movement, even where long-term impact cannot yet be clearly identified.

This does not make philanthropy less rigorous. On the contrary, it makes it more realistic—and better able to act with inclusive rigor, meaning a form of rigor that takes participation, context, and diverse ways of knowing seriously. It shifts the question from “What did we directly cause?” to also asking, “What conditions are we helping to strengthen so that change can emerge, spread, and endure?”

That, perhaps, is one of philanthropy’s most important roles today: not only to fund change, but to help build the relational and ecosystem conditions under which change becomes possible.

Special thanks go to Gesa Bent for her contribution to this text.

We would like to acknowledge and appreciate the work of the colleagues and communities of practice which has informed this reflection: