While every team and context is unique, we have found that all social impacts require strong foundations, sound design, creative capacity, and efficient execution. To help leaders and teams realize their ambitions, we support and train them in these areas in the early stages and throughout the life of the project. With our help, projects are more resilient to internal tensions and more creative and effective in their work.

Foundations

The foundation of every project is its team — its people. But assembling competent people and sufficient resources is only the beginning. After that, teams often suffer internal tensions, power struggles, misunderstandings, and myriad forms of breakdown — and the foundations are thereby weakened.

Magenta takes special care to prepare, train, and support a team in its “building a container,” a robust, resilient, capable community that can quickly resolve tensions, support personal and leadership development, and continually up their game. This is the “inner work” of being an amazing team throughout a project’s inevitable challenges.

Without this work, the team can easily become fragile, inefficient, and fragmented — a condition that can last only so long before it ruptures. Want a strong team? Build strong foundations.

Design

Humanity’s toughest challenges are extensions of their ideas, beliefs, cultures, and histories, including their trauma. As every one of us is both a physical as well as an inner being, so social challenges are comprised of both visible and invisible aspects. In this sense, the complex social challenge is a society’s collective inner life writ large. Racism, poverty, violence, pollution — all this stems from what Emerson called “the master ideas reigning in the minds of many persons” — what systems thinking calls “paradigms.”

Well designed social impact projects must take into account the root causes of the challenge they want to address. Magenta specializes in helping leaders and teams identify the primary, invisible, and driving causes of their toughest challenges, and incorporate them into a sound project design. We use systems thinking, mapping, interviews, desk research, and prototyping to discover the “wholeness” of the problem, its entire taxonomy, and support the team to develop suitable approaches accordingly.

Capacity

Because our social challenges are as complex and alive as we are, they resist off-the-shelf solutions. There are no ready-made answers to social challenges; instead, they have to be developed, co-created — forged in the heat of the context by the people who live with them. Outside experts can support, but only the problem-owners can actually change the situation.

To navigate the enormous challenges and the accompanying uncertainty that comes with all creative work (and it IS creative work!), we help leaders and teams build the capacities they need to go the distance. Communication, collaboration, creativity, and other community-building, action-oriented disciplines can make the difference between good intentions and real results. Magenta offers a variety of custom in-person and online training programs to teams and helps them apply their learning in their context.

Execution

We all have our own ways of getting things done, and because social impact projects are often staffed by diverse teams, execution isn’t always straightforward. In our experience, each team has to develop its own culture and methods — and we bring some powerful, adaptable tools to support the work.

Magenta helps leaders learn and adopt agile methods, checklists, collaboration technology, design thinking, prototyping, and other management and execution practices that support tangible progress day after day.