An impact does not stand alone in the world. It interacts with other impacts. Our approach stays with the impact itself, close to the people and the projects. As an institute, we want to make better use of the interplay between impacts and look towards the possible cooperations for transformation in systems. This page tells why an institute grew out of this.
From impact outward
We work with people who want to make a difference in society through their work, and we align ourselves with them around the impact they are pursuing. This alignment with impact is our craft – and we are not alone in that. Impact Up exists because we see a gap at a particular point.
Impact orientation has a reliable base: with the impact staircase and the IOOI logic, PHINEO (Kurz & Kubek, Kursbuch Wirkung) has shaped a standard with which organisations can plan, observe, and demonstrate their impact. We build on this tradition – and at the same time we see where it ends: at the individual initiative. The question of what happens when many such impacts meet each other and become a shared impact in the field is rarely asked; approaches that think impact under complexity – such as Michael Quinn Patton's Developmental Evaluation – have so far barely been received. This gap is precisely the reason why Impact Up exists. What makes it up in substantive terms, and how field impact can be described, we unfold on the page about systemic impact orientation.
From this follows a stance that carries our work. We want to contribute – as part of a larger whole, in which one person's impact connects to another's. And we stay close to the people and their projects: for us, the path to systemic impact runs through the concrete impact someone is working on right now.
The constructivist core
Our work has an epistemological core: how we describe the world shapes what we can see and what becomes available to us as action. We share this constructivist premise with systemic consulting. Ruth Seliger (Systemische Beratung der Gesellschaft, 2022) applies it consistently to society itself: a society in crisis-laden tensions between ecology, economy, and democracy – and we, who work on it, are part of it. It can be changed from within, above all through organisations, because that is where societal action is organised.
This is why our theory pages are called constructs. The name is meant seriously: they are deliberately built thinking tools – descriptions that make shared work on impact possible and that we examine and develop further together with you. For us, a construct is good when it opens up action.
We call ourselves an institute because that is where theory and practice may come together as equals: we bring theory into practice and practice into theory – undogmatically and open in many directions. Jascha Rohr, in Die große Kokreation (2023), formulates the yardstick we follow in doing so: what matters is what we want together – the methods follow. In this sense, beyond consulting, we also understand ourselves as an organising actor in the system, one that builds networks and takes part.
Our home
Between what is visible about an organisation and what changes only slowly, there is a middle level: the relationships and power dynamics between the actors. Cynthia Rayner and François Bonnici capture it in The Systems Work of Social Change (2021) through three dimensions: context, connection, power – it is through them that a system's patterns change. This is where it is decided whether change holds or disappears again. This relational level is our home – methodologically and biographically.
We bring it from two sources: from civil peace service, where relationships, power, and conflict dynamics are the central level of work, and from systemic organisational development, which understands systems through their patterns and interactions. Both work in a conflict-sensitive and participatory way, both take power seriously and do not smooth over differences.
With us, the topic and the concern pave the way to the method, not the other way around. We look together with you at your impact and accompany it to where there is space for it – in connection and coherence with the impacts of others. For this work there are nameable approaches; Systems Change is one of them, which we work with.
Where this leads
From this stance emerges a professional discipline. We call its overarching concept systemic impact orientation: the craft of thinking impact systemically and aligning initiatives so that many individual impacts can become a shared impact in the field. It has two directions, which carry equal weight for us: impact orientation as a core task, shaped systemically – and the orientation towards systemic impact in society. It gives the gap we have named here a precise description and a method – and beneath it stand concrete approaches that can be worked with.
→ Systems Change as one of the approaches → to the perspectives → to the offerings
Sources
Further foundations – the PHINEO impact staircase, Developmental Evaluation – are documented on the page on systemic impact orientation.
