The power of the Collective

From lone heroes to shared journeys

For a long time, the Hero’s Journey has shaped how we think about change and success. It describes an external journey: adventure, struggle, overcoming obstacles, and returning with a tangible reward. This narrative has helped us move mountains, but it has also normalised conquest, competition, and extraction.

The Heroine’s Journey tells a different, equally essential story. It centres on inner work: healing, self-discovery, reconnecting inner and outer worlds, and restoring meaning and relationship. Where the Hero’s Journey is about conquest, the Heroine’s Journey is about connection.

Systems thinking makes one thing clear: no single actor can transform a system. Not a lone hero. Not even a powerful organisation. Systemic change emerges through alliances, co-creation, and shared learning. Through an ecosystem of people, places, and practices. When the qualities of the hero and the heroine come together, individual action gives way to collective intelligence, and transformation becomes something we carry — and create — together.

For a long time, systems of change have been shaped by what we might call hero logic: direction, action, scaling, solving. It brought us innovation, progress and momentum — but also competition, extraction and a bias toward control.

What the Heroine’s Journey helps us see is not an alternative identity, but another organising force: one that values relationship, regeneration, context and long-term coherence.

Both logics live in people, organisations and investment strategies. When hero logic dominates alone, systems optimise for growth and efficiency, often at the cost of resilience and life itself. When heroine logic stands alone, systems may remain relational but struggle to shift structures at scale. Systemic change requires their integration.

In practice, this means combining direction with connection, decision power with shared ownership, financial sharpness with care for what sustains life over time. Alliances then become more than collaboration — they become the space where these complementary forces meet. Where action is informed by relationship, and where transformation becomes not the work of a lone actor, but the outcome of a system learning how to move as one.

If you want to learn more about this, our Explorer Corien Botman conducted a year-long inquiry into the Hero’s and Heroine’s journeys and the dynamics of masculine and feminine values. She interviewed the heroines within her investment portfolio and distilled all insights into the magazine Vrucht en Pit (currently only available in Dutch), created to inspire a new generation of investors.

Influencing systemic transitions 

Multi-stakeholder collaboration isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s how (in transition management) the six systemic lock-ins are actively challenged:

• policies
• practices
• resource flows
• relationships
• power dynamics
• mental models

It takes a coalition to shift all of these. That’s why our strategy is to actively look for existing and forge new alliances that span across sectors and silos, so that we can co-create solutions with the breadth and depth to match the challenges.

We do that by nurturing existing relationships, co-building collaborations, and supporing different solutions at the same time. It’s not so much about who’s more right, but about wanting to move in the same direction together, regardless of ownership of the solution.

Shared ownership, personal agency.

Cross-capital collaboration

Systemic investing means breaking out of our silos and pooling resources and expertise across sectors. This means impact funds partnering with governments on policy change, NGOs teaming up with corporations to reach communities, philanthropists co-investing alongside venture capital for blended finance, and so on.

It also means understanding and leaning into the idea that capital is more than financial leverage. Pooling resources and collaboration is all about understanding polycapital. In our Impact Explorers Club, we talk about financial, social, cultural and symbolic capital. By not only talking about how much we can deploy, but also what, where, when, in what way… you can open up the array of options we have together for supporting solutions and projects.

By actively exploring how to blend and mix these traditional boundaries, alliances can unlock a collective wisdom and shared capacity greater than any single entity’s contribution.

It’s as much about context as it is about content

In our Impact Explorers Club, we have brought together people with a lot of different perspectives on what impact is, or how to create impact, but they’re all trying to move things in a simlar general direction.

Our Explorers all hold different and diverse capital and intention, but intention is not action per se. This is our biggest challenge. Channeling that intention, not by focussing on output or content, but on dynamics and context.

There is not yet a shared framework for understanding what the current portfolio actually represents systemically, to identify where critical gaps exist, or to determine what new investments or solutions would strengthen system coherence and create emergence.

Additionally, there is not yet an infrastructure in action that enables collective investment decisions or capital coordination across the group in a way that respects member autonomy while reducing the admin burden and enabling concerted action.

The thing about emergence is that you have to give it space to emerge. And while that might feel like a very passive role, that making space part, designing the context for that, requires a very active, very conscious approach.

It’s our believe that, by facilitating this process of systemic investing, and making it easier (without simplifying it!), these alliances will outlive whatever structure we can dream up now and understand on a deeper level how collaboration works.

Co-investing and resource pooling

Building alliances often translates to co-investing and pooling capital toward shared missions. Rather than ten investors running separate projects, we prefer a joint portfolio: shared risk, bigger scope, more learning.

This way, risks and rewards are shared, and projects can be larger-scale or more experimental than any investor would attempt alone.

With the Explorers Club, we strongly believe in this. Co-investing brings fresh perspectives and more daring strategies. By combining funds, knowledge, and networks, we can punch above our weight.

It’s the financial equivalent of a potluck dinner: everyone brings something, and we all get together.

We Share Forward Foundationoffers a practical example of what shared risk, shared learning and shared capital can look like. Rather than funding ventures in isolation, they bring together a community of funders who support early-stage social initiatives collectively. Through their revolving model, both financial and non-financial support circulate across the ecosystem, allowing success in one place to unlock opportunity elsewhere.

In a similar spirit, Good Investors demonstrates how pooling capital and perspective can enable bolder strategies than any single actor might pursue alone. By sharing not just financial resources but also insight, network and experience, these approaches turn co-investing into more than a financial mechanism —they make it a learning infrastructure for systemic change.

The Catalytic Capital Consortium (C3) also offers an interesting model for what co-investing can look like at a larger scale. Built around a coalition of major foundations, C3 starts from a simple but powerful premise: some capital needs to accept higher risk or lower returns in order to unlock flows of investment that wouldn’t otherwise move. By pooling this “catalytic” capital and sharing learning across a growing community of investors, C3 builds infrastructure for a different kind of capital market altogether.

Orchestration and governance

Effective alliances and co-creation don’t just happen. collaboration needs orchestration. Aligning vision, facilitating communication, managing friction, sustaining momentum.

Who takes on that role as orchestrator can vary. The key is that someone (or a team) is looking after the health of the collaboration itself.

Sometimes, We Are Impact Collective acts as that glue. Creating trust, ensuring learning flows across the alliance.

Good governance structures (shared decision-making, clear roles, trust-building processes) are essential. And that’s why real collaboration is built through real interaction. In real-life. By meeting up and getting to know and trust each other.

Emergent networks & mutual reinforcement

One exciting aspect (the most exciting aspect?) of alliances is the possibility of emergent effects. When people and projects are intentionally linked up, the impact can be enormous.

Alliances enable synergistic portfolios. A living network of interrelated investments and projects that spark action in each other. We embrace complexity not just as the reality of the world, but also as a guiding principle when looking for solutions. Complex challenges deserve complex answers.

Infrastructure gets reused. Insights travel faster. In systemic change, everything is connected, so we might as well design our interventions to be consciously connected too.

Commons as alliance infrastructure

For a long time, “the commons” were framed as something that inevitably collapses (the tragedy of the Commons). Too many users, too little (shared) responsibility. But that story mostly describes ungoverned open access, not real commons.

Historically speaking, commons are governed spaces: with boundaries, shared rules, monitoring, and collective decision-making. In other words: alliances with infrastructure.

What often failed was not the commons themselves, but the governance around them (or external forces that dismantled them).

This matters for systemic investing as well. A systemic portfolio is not just a collection of projects, it’s a shared space of relationships, knowledge, trust, dealflow, tools, and narratives. Left unmanaged, it fragments and ultimately falls apart. But when it’s designed consciously, it can become a commons layer: a coordination where value circulates instead of being extracted, where learning compounds, and where collaboration becomes easier than working alone. A true Commons.

In the Explorers Club, the commons is made very tangible through:

• Our shared language and models
• We Diligence approach
• These Fieldbook chapters
• The relationships between explorers
• Platform infrastructure
• An emerging portfolio seen as a system

These commons are not privately owned but they are not random either. They are co-governed in a way that hold individual agency and collective intelligence at the same time. Orchestration then becomes less about control, and more about caring for the health of the commons.

Seen this way, alliances are not just partnerships between actors. They are temporary constellations in a larger shared infrastructure. The stronger that commons layer becomes, the easier new collaborations form, capital aligns, and systemic coherence can emerge.