Giving Compass' Take:

• This research brief focuses on how nonprofit organizations can innovate using generativity as a means to understand an organization's capacity to respond to challenges. 

• How can this research help inform nonprofits of alternative paths for social change?

• Learn about building nonprofit resilience in times of crisis. 

This workbook provides an overview of generativity and how it could be implemented by nonprofit human service providers to better confront the complex challenges and opportunities that are pressing the field. Through our research, we sought to identify a framework for assessing organization’s capacity to innovate while identifying characteristics of generative organizations.

Kenneth Gergen coined the term “generative capacity” as the “capacity to challenge the guiding assumptions of the culture, to raise fundamental questions regarding contemporary social life, to foster reconsideration of that which is taken for granted, and thereby to generate fresh alternatives for social action” (1978, 1,346).

Generativity focuses on the capacity of a field, through organizations, to respond to challenges and changing contexts both positively and proactively. Generativity is central to the process of paradigm change. It signifies a field’s capacity for developing promising new ideas. With the concept of generativity, then, we can better understand how “big bang” shifts occur in systems and organizational fields. Generativity is an essential asset of a system that indicates the potential for transformative change to occur.

Generativity is simultaneously an organizational and system capacity. Much of the adaptation and change in a field is autonomous—led by individuals and organizations—and constrained by institutional, structural, and market forces. The principal contribution of a focus on generativity is to draw attention to the link between organizations and wider systems and fields and the flows between the two spheres by highlighting how an organization’s ability to adapt and innovate can shape the actions of their broader field.

Human services nonprofit organizations need to find new organizational forms, funding patterns, and programmatic pathways to confront the complex challenges and opportunities that are pressing the field. The field, saddled with greater competition and fiscal strain, is increasingly characterized by vulnerable organizations serving increasingly vulnerable populations amidst political and institutional environments that emphasize evidence-based practice and results. Amidst these challenges, human service nonprofits face increased demand for services as economic transformations increase income inequality and raise the risk of poverty for millions of Americans in addition to the need to adjust services to be suitable to meet the needs of people from varied ethnic, cultural, and religious backgrounds; different age groups; alternative family structures; and varied lifestyles.

Read the full article about generative organizations by Shena Ashley at Urban Institute.