About PI-SQUARED

Prof Anita McGahan has spent her whole adult life in teaching students and conducting research on how leaders in the private sector engage taken on the most critical challenges around us to improve lives, but it wasn’t until she engaged with Beth Noveck’s Governance Lab that she truly understood how completely this agenda overlapped with priorities in the public sector.   Through that engagement, she and her colleagues at the Governance Lab – and now the Burnes Center for Social Change – began the decades-long collaboration that has led to the Pi-Squared project.    The purpose of this project is to pull together the best insights available on what we need to accomplish to tackle this century’s greatest problems, including climate change, biodiversity loss, human-health issues, authoritarianism, corruption, ineffective education, and inaccessibility in health systems (to name just a few).   This work is grounded in the belief that finding sustainable solutions to important public problems is going to require an all-hands-on-deck effort from motivated and inspired leaders from both the private and public sectors who are prepared to work together to accomplish things that cannot occur any other way.

The framework that Anita uses to guide the conversations that are available on this website reflects long-standing ideas from the field of Strategy on how to design organizations so that they are effective over the long run.   The first step is to identify a compelling aspiration that is narrow enough to be actionable but broad enough to be inspiring and important.  The second is to identify exactly which stakeholders are touched by the aspiration, and the third is to get concrete about how to create value for them with excellence.   The fourth requirement is in pulling together the resources to demonstrate proof-of-concept and scalability of an innovative solution, and the fifth is to scale the approach in ways that make it sustainable on a range of levels:  financially, organizationally, and culturally.               

The conversations here also emphasize the importance of feedback loops between each of these stages.   When the five elements of effective Strategy are complementary and reinforcing, then the system sets off a flywheel effect that makes an innovation coherent and effective.  Each of the conversations that is available here brings fresh and penetrating insights to each component of the Strategy process as well as on the links between them. Together, they show how breakthrough innovation depends on a shared commitment among partners to the hard work of building something important together over time. The Pi² project was inspired by the potential for accomplishing this work.