For as long as most of us can remember, social enterprises and social movements have sought to disrupt systems from the outside or to make fundamental policy changes from the top down. But while these tactics have often worked in the past, their increasing lack of efficacy in today’s world suggests the need to rethink their allure in favor of new strategies that leverage what already exists, in order to bypass the dysfunction that constrains change at almost every level.

To be honest, this realization was a surprise to us. Like so many others, the allure of disruption and systems change from the top down was hard to ignore, until the facts showed us something had changed. And it was undeniable.

It began when we at the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation saw that some of our most recent portfolio organizations were not only focused first on understanding the ecosystem surrounding the problem they were addressing (and specifically taking inventory of the existing infrastructure and distribution channels and repurposing them, as imperfect as they might be), but they were having greater success in creating lasting change. When we examined the impact of more than 30 of our most impactful portfolio organizations, the data was unequivocal: organizations focused on leveraging existing infrastructure and distribution systems had nearly three times greater direct impact than organizations focused on disruption as their primary lever. (In fact, the cost per direct life impacted by these “leverage-first” organizations was fifteen times less expensive than those who tried to disrupt the system from the outside.)

What became abundantly clear was that change from the top down—new policies, new programs, new funding—was simply unattainable in the toxic and polarized political environment that has become the new norm, inhibiting new social policies from being enacted (let alone the funding mechanisms needed to pay for them). And the same was true for organizations that tried to disrupt from the outside—they too often failed to attract adoption or capital to last long enough to see the disruption take hold.

Simply stated, government’s inability to create profound change requires both funders and the organizations they support to adopt a different way of thinking about problems and their solutions. It requires a new set of analyses to be done when considering solutions that address deeply rooted societal inequities: Instead of seeking to disrupt and radically re-construct the ecosystems, infrastructure, and co-dependencies that exist around the sectors you are focused on, we need to make an investment upfront in understanding them. In this way, we can understand where an innovation or solution sits in the broader system, what co-dependencies exist that must be dealt with, and what critical linkages and pathways between entities need to be made.

Read the full article about leveraging systems by Jim Bildner and Stephanie Khurana at Stanford Social Innovation Review.