Todos Modos

A question every leader in the social sector needs to sit with — and answer honestly.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from working too hard, but from working without building anything. You run the campaign. You host the convening. You publish the report. You send the email blast. And then you start over.

In the social sector, we have become very good at mobilizing. We are less good at building.

Marshall Ganz, the legendary organizer and Harvard Kennedy School lecturer who spent decades working with the United Farm Workers and training leaders from the civil rights movement to the Obama campaign, puts it plainly: unless you are building at the same time you are fighting, you wind up with nothing. A campaign is not an organization. A rally is not a movement. A coalition email list is not a community.

Building means creating something with enough shared ownership, structure, and commitment for it to continue without you.

The question Ganz poses is, “Are you building something?”, which is deceptively simple. But sit with it long enough, and it starts to feel uncomfortable. Because for many of us leading organizations, running campaigns, and facilitating collective work, the honest answer is: sometimes yes, sometimes no, and often we are not sure.

The Field Problem

I have spent nearly 6 years leading KConnect, a collective impact backbone organization in Kent County, Michigan. That work, connecting people, organizations, and data across education, housing, arts, and civic life, made me a systems thinker before I had language for it. When you sit at the intersection of 130+ housing partners, a countywide cradle-to-career continuum, and a 200-member collective, you stop seeing problems as isolated events and start seeing them as patterns inside structures inside mental models. You learn, slowly and sometimes painfully, that changing an outcome usually means changing something much deeper than the initiative you designed to address it.

But systems thinking can also be a trap, because complex systems are endlessly fascinating, and it is easy to confuse understanding a system with changing one.

That is where Ganz’s question lands hardest for me: Are you building something, or are you just mapping the terrain?

I have led convenings that generated beautiful insight and zero durable infrastructure. I have published data reports that informed rooms full of people who then left the room and did the same things they had always done. I have facilitated strategic plans that sat on shelves. None of that was wasted; learning accumulates, but it was not building, not in the way Ganz means it.

Strategy Is Not Habit

One of the sharpest things Ganz said in a recent interview with the Stanford Social Innovation Review stopped me mid-read: “There are so many tactics in search of strategy. ‘Let’s have a rally!’ Why? ‘We always do that.’ That’s not strategy. That’s habit.”

I printed that and put it on my desk.

Strategy, in Ganz’s framing, is creative and dynamic. It calls for two things working together: the mountaintop view of a big-picture theory of change, and the valley’s intimate knowledge of real conditions on the ground. Neither alone is sufficient. The leader with the long view and the community member with the lived experience need each other to see anything close to the whole truth.

For those of us in backbone roles, this means resisting the pull toward busyness. It means asking, after every major initiative: Did we come out of this stronger or weaker? Did we build capacity, or did we consume it? Did we develop more leaders, or did we inadvertently centralize power in our own organizations while calling it coordination?

These are not abstract questions. They show up in how we design convenings, how we share data, how we structure governance, and who gets invited into decision-making rooms.

The goal is never to be the smartest person in the room about the system. The goal is to help the room become smarter, more connected, and more capable of acting together, with or without you in it.

De Todos Modos – By all means, build. 

When I founded Modos Consulting, I chose that name deliberately. Modos, from the Spanish De Todos Modos, means by all means — a commitment to finding the way through, regardless of what stands in the way. But persistence needs direction, and in this work, that clarity is the hardest thing to hold onto. There is always another urgent thing, another funder priority, another community crisis demanding immediate response.

Through KConnect, through Modos, and through my time as a Harvard EdRedesign Cradle-to-Career Fellow sitting in rooms with backbone and systems leaders from across the country, I have come to understand one thing clearly: building happens inside the urgent work. The two are not sequential. They are simultaneous, or building does not happen at all.

Every facilitation engagement is an opportunity to leave a team more equipped to lead their own hard conversations. Every data story is an opportunity to build a community’s capacity to tell its own story next time. Every convening is an opportunity to deepen relationships that hold weight long after the room clears.

Ganz defines structure simply: the commitments people make to one another about how they are going to work together. How will we make decisions? How will we hold each other accountable? How will we organize the work? It is harder than it sounds,  because it requires saying the quiet part out loud, making implicit things explicit, and keeping agreements even when it is inconvenient.

That is the work.  

The Question I Keep Coming Back To

Ganz argues that after any campaign, any initiative, any major effort, you have to ask yourself: What did we build? Did we come out of this stronger or weaker as a community? Did we come out with more shared leadership or less?

I ask myself some version of this regularly. Not always comfortably.

There are initiatives I am proud of at every level — the early childhood leadership table we launched that now has six cross-sector leaders meeting monthly, the Housing Stability Alliance that has grown to 130+ partners and now functions with its own governance and momentum, the Arts and Culture Collective that gave Grand Rapids’ creative community a shared infrastructure it did not have before.

And there are things I have poured energy into that dissolved when the funding cycle ended. Coalitions that were really just convening lists. Strategies that were really just documents.

The difference, I have come to believe, is almost never resources. It is almost always commitment — the kind Ganz describes, where people make real agreements with each other about how they will show up, hold each other accountable, and keep going when it gets hard.

The social sector needs more builders. Ganz is clear that fighting and building must happen at the same time. What we cannot afford is to keep mistaking mobilization for infrastructure, or activity for power.

So I will close with the same question Ganz leaves us with, because it is the one I keep returning to:

What are you building?

And the harder follow-up: Will it still be standing when you are gone?

Salvador López is the founder of Todos Modos, where he writes about systems change, community leadership, and social narrative. He is President & CEO of a systems “think and do” tank, a Harvard EdRedesign Cradle-to-Career Fellow, and Chair of the Grand Rapids Community College Board of Trustees. He lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with his wife and three children.