Living Design Capacity Builder

Build the capacity to accomplish what your grant is designed to make possible.

Funding can provide the resources to undertake important work.

But resources alone don't necessarily create the relationships, coordination, knowledge flows, distributed capabilities, learning systems, and adaptive capacity required to accomplish it.

The Living Design Capacity Builder allows mission-aligned organizations to incorporate BILD into an external grant proposal as a capacity-building partner.

Your organization remains the grant applicant and lead organization.

BILD works alongside the initiative to help the people and systems carrying the work become increasingly capable of accomplishing its intended outcomes.

What could that include?

There is no single Capacity Builder package.

We begin with the outcome your grant is intended to make possible.

Then we ask:

What system needs to become capable of producing that outcome?

What's happening now?

What's getting in the way?

What capacities already exist?

What's missing?

Where are knowledge, information, relationships, resources, responsibility, and other forms of capital flowing—or getting stuck?

What could we do during the grant period that increases the system's capacity to accomplish the work?

From there, we develop an appropriate Living Design Capacity Builder scope.

Living System Assessment

See the system you're actually working with.

Map the relationships, capacities, resources, exchanges, constraints, information flows, stakeholders, and larger systems affecting the initiative.

Useful at the beginning of an initiative—or when a persistent challenge suggests that the apparent problem may not be the actual limiting factor.

Possible outcome: a shared Living System map, clearer understanding of limiting factors, existing capacities, and potential leverage.

Living Design Workshops

Bring a real challenge. Discover opportunity. Find leverage.

Bring staff, partners, community members, or other stakeholders together around a meaningful question arising from the funded work.

Rather than beginning with predetermined solutions, participants learn to see the challenge as a living system and identify possibilities already present within it.

Possible outcome: shared understanding, previously unseen resources and capacities, promising relationships, leverage opportunities, and practical next moves.

Living Design Strategy Labs

See → hypothesize → try → notice → adapt.

Take a significant challenge or opportunity through a deeper Living Design process.

Participants identify constraints and capacities, develop hypotheses about potential leverage, design practical experiments, observe what happens, and adapt.

Rather than trying to design the entire solution in advance, the initiative develops through learning.

Possible outcome: an adaptive strategy grounded in real-world experimentation rather than assumptions.

Team + Leadership Capacity

Grow the people carrying the work.

Develop the ability of staff, leaders, partners, or community participants to navigate complexity themselves.

Living Design can help teams become better able to:

see systems;

recognize constraints;

identify leverage;

work with multiple forms of capital;

distribute knowledge and responsibility;

develop complementary capacities;

experiment;

learn from feedback;

and adapt as conditions change.

Possible outcome: capacity that remains in the organization after the grant ends.

Partner + Ecosystem Development

Grow what becomes possible between organizations.

Many mission-driven outcomes cannot be produced by one organization alone.

Living Design can help identify:

who is already part of the system;

who is missing;

what different partners can contribute;

where relationships are weak;

where resources or information aren't flowing;

what needs to be coordinated;

and what can remain distributed.

The question becomes:

What could this ecosystem become capable of that none of its members could accomplish alone?

Multicapital + Resource Flow

See more of what the system already has.

Money matters.

It is rarely the only resource determining what's possible.

Living Design can help an initiative recognize and activate multiple forms of capital:

knowledge;

relationships;

trust;

skills;

access;

infrastructure;

institutional capacity;

community knowledge;

land;

technology;

reputation;

time;

creativity;

and financial resources.

Possible outcome: more of the resources already present in the ecosystem begin flowing toward the mission.

Community + Stakeholder Labs

Bring people closest to the system into the work.

Rather than treating stakeholders only as sources of input, Living Design can create structured opportunities for people throughout the system to contribute knowledge, identify constraints, surface capacities, develop possibilities, and participate in experiments.

This can be particularly valuable where different participants experience the same system very differently.

Living Design Learning Cohort

Develop capacity across a network.

Where a grant involves multiple organizations, sites, leaders, or community partners, participants can move through a shared Living Design learning process while applying it to their own part of the larger initiative.

Each participant works on a real challenge.

The cohort becomes a distributed learning network.

Patterns discovered in one place can illuminate another.

Possible outcome: the grant develops not only individual organizational capacity, but greater capacity across the network.

Living Design Reviews

Regularly zoom out, look again, and adapt.

Periodic Living Design Reviews create structured opportunities to examine:

What has changed?

What have we learned?

What surprised us?

What is working?

What isn't?

Has the limiting factor moved?

What new capacities have emerged?

What has become possible that wasn't possible before?

And:

What should we try next?

These can occur throughout the grant period so capacity building evolves alongside implementation.

Documentation + Learning

Capture what the system is teaching us.

Living Design Capacity Builder engagements can document the initiative as a living case study.

Not simply:

Did we execute the plan?

But:

What changed?

What became visible?

What capacities developed?

What relationships formed?

What experiments were tried?

What failed?

What adapted?

What became possible?

This can support organizational learning, funder reporting, replication, future grant development, and the continuing development of Living Design itself.

The program is modular.

A Capacity Builder might be relatively focused:

Assessment → Workshop → Strategy Lab → Review

Or it might accompany a multi-year initiative:

Assessment → stakeholder/ecosystem mapping → leadership development → partner Labs → experiments → Reviews → adaptation → documentation

Or a grant might support a distributed cohort:

Living Design learning → local application → cross-site exchange → experimentation → shared learning → continued adaptation

The right structure depends on the system.

We don't sell the organization a predetermined package and then fit the problem into it.

We ask:

What is this grant trying to make possible?

Then:

What does the system need to become capable of for that to happen?

And we design the Capacity Builder from there.