Matthew Bishop, Inaugural Chair of the Sorenson Impact Center’s Global Impact Leaders
This year the Sorenson Impact Center launched the Global Impact Leaders, a diverse network of impact practitioners and thought leaders working toward positive social and environmental impact around the world. Invited based on a variety of factors — primarily the significance of their work’s contribution to the space — the inaugural members of the nascent network will help shape its future by developing membership criteria, identifying initial and long-term goals, and nominating future members.
Matthew Bishop is a Sorenson Impact Center Senior Fellow and the Global Impact Leaders Inaugural Chair. In this Q&A, he reflects on his hopes for the group, the urgent need for collaboration to scale impact, and how leadership must transform if we hope to achieve real progress.
Sorenson Impact Center: Please describe the impetus to create the Global Impact Leader network and what you hope this group can achieve.
Matthew Bishop: The idea came out of my conversations with Sorenson Impact Center CEO Geoff Davis, who over the years has been a great thought partner on how to develop the impact space. We felt that bringing together a diverse group of leaders in the field could help us better understand the key trends shaping impact and that the group could develop into a source of high-impact collaborations.
SIC: How do you see the Global Impact Leader group as different from similar leadership groups in the space? How do you envision it growing or changing over time?
MB: Our hope is that this will be more global and diverse than other groups in the space. We also want the Global Impact Leaders to take a broad view of the impact space rather than focusing on any specific aspect, such as impact investing. We intend for the group to grow significantly over the years as existing Global Impact Leaders nominate new members and the group builds a reputation for driving real impact. While the first cohort included many who have been leading impact work for years, the next cohort should include more of the next generation leaders who are driving some of the most exciting developments in the impact space.
SIC: Collaboration among multistakeholder coalitions on an unprecedented level is necessary to scale impact across urgent challenge areas — given your research around the SDGs, what do you see as the most critical issues to explore and address right now?
MB: The Social Progress Index, which I co-founded, calculates that if current trends continue unchanged, the SDGs will not be achieved on schedule in 2030, but instead will still be out of reach at the turn of the next century. We must change the trends and flip the system onto a different trajectory. Collaboration needs to play a crucial part in this as so many of the challenges are beyond any one entity (government, business, charity, civil society group) to address. Increasingly, everyone talks the language of collaboration and multistakeholder partnerships, but there are very few examples of successful collaborations at a big enough scale to make a difference. Figuring out how to collaborate effectively is one of the most urgent challenges facing the impact space.
SIC: How does the concept of leadership play into these collaborations? In your view, what should leadership look like on the global level today and how must today’s leadership differ from the conventional hierarchical model?
MB: If collaboration is the key to achieving faster progress, we need leaders who are capable of true collaboration. The top-down, command-and-control model of leadership needs to be replaced by one based both on convincing vision and high emotional intelligence. Authenticity builds trust. Unfortunately, the world currently has a growing number of authentically bad leaders and too few authentically good ones. This has to change.
SIC: As we develop new collaborative models, how do we facilitate ways of working that consider a diversity of viewpoints and experiences? How do we rapidly take collaborative efforts from ideation to large-scale action?
MB: One of the initiatives I have helped launch in the past couple of years is Catalyst 2030, a global network of proven social entrepreneurs focused on accelerating progress on the SDGs. We have found that the biggest problem in many ineffective collaborations is that the people doing the work on the ground, especially locals, are too often ignored and denied a seat at the decision-making table. Those in the collaboration with the most money and power too rarely place enough trust in those on the frontlines. The initial design of a collaboration, especially who brings what assets and takes on which responsibilities, is crucial to whether it will ultimately succeed in delivering impact, and if it is not a genuinely shared and inclusive effort it will probably fail.
