Impact Networks

CHAPTER 2

The Network Mindset

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

—BUCKMINSTER FULLER, A Fuller View

Once you begin to recognize the webs of relationships that make up our world, you will never go back. This is what we call the network mindset shift. To adopt a network mindset is to embrace the reality that everything is connected—that the actions of individuals, organizations, and sectors affect one another in profound and often-unexpected ways. The network mindset is, more than anything, characterized by “a way of looking at the world, a shift in perspective . . . to see it relationally,” Christopher Vitale writes in Networkologies.¹ Making ...