Many-to-Many System

aims to support collaborations tackling complex, entangled challenges where disrupting norms and values, ownership, and power is essential.

The System has a story...

The Basic Idea

The Deep Code Shifts

For each and everyone of us, our fundamental understandings of the world are influenced by 'deep codes,' often invisibly embedded within our creations, frameworks, and rules.

Solving today's complex, interconnected problems requires what we term "complex collaborations"? - bringing together many diverse groups (public, private, civic) with many new perspectives, including future generations and the natural world.

While many collaborations like this are already doing great work, we believe that finding better ways to support how they are structured and organised them could unlock more effective, system-level change.

The Many-to-Many System is focussed on unlocking the governance, organising, legal, and learning structures of complex collaborations to enable many resources – not just money, but also knowledge and relationships – to flow more freely, and to foster many ways of working that embrace diverse value exchange.

The Many-to-Many System explored how these codes shape collaboration and governance, aiming to understand if they could be reimagined and how those within complex collaborators themselves can embed them into their collaboration’s infrastructures.

More intentional and visible shifting of deep codes for governance and organising could help collaborations to better align with their systemic missions and offer approaches for rethinking core concepts like value, power, risk, and ownership.

many
actors
many
forms of
value
many
ways of
relating
Many form
of Value
Evolving
through
learning
Balancing
Risk
and Harm
UNFURLINGUNFURLING
BALANCED POWERBALANCED POWER
HOLISTIC VIEWHOLISTIC VIEW
MINDFUL ENDINGSMINDFUL ENDINGS
MISSION LEDMISSION LED
RISK OWNERSHIPRISK OWNERSHIP
RISK MITIGATIONRISK MITIGATION
PROPORTIONATEPROPORTIONATE

Exploring the
Many-to-Many System

The Many-to-Many System distills two years of learning, prototyping, research, and practice.

Our focus was to create a blend: a core framework, practical learnings and insights, illustrative models for complex topics, and tools developed along the way. The aspiration is that these elements will support others in embedding the Many-to-Many deep code shifts into their own complex collaboration work.

Discover the System

Here you will find an overview of the Many-to-Many System in it’s entirety and a downloadable Field Guide that supports governance practitioners.
Delve into the System

Tools, Case Studies and Examples

Here we’ve collected the practical tools we developed and created case studies and examples.
Explore the tools

Challenges that Many-to-Many aims to address

Have you got a specific governance problem that you need to solve? Explore how this system might help.
Check out the common challenges

Learnings from the Field

Join a community of practice and explore our collective learnings from the field as we continue to test and refine the Many-to-Many System.
See the learnings

How And Who Created This

Explore the journey of how this system was created and the partners involved.
Learn about the journey

Many-to-Many Legal Architecture

Find our learnings about complex collaboration legal architectures and tools and resources to help navigate the complexities.
See the Legal Considerations

Who is it for?

We believe there are three key audiences for the Many-to-Many System.

icon

Governance Practitioners

who are already working in complex collaborations and struggling to find or create suitable governance and organising structures for their complex work and/or who want to disrupt norms around value, ownership, risk and power.

icon

Funders

especially those seeking to disrupt these same norms or invest effectively in systemic change initiatives.

icon

Legal and Financial Professionals

including lawyers and accountants, whose expertise is vital for societal transformation, particularly around governance, legal structuring, and contracting.

“What we’re really doing is removing the barriers of collaboration”

Zahra Davidson

Huddlecraft

“Many-to-many is a vehicle for deploying multiple technologies that make complex collaborations possible”

Matt Bell

Plymouth Octopus

“I just say to people it's collaboration contracting”

James Lock

We Are Opus

Still curious?

We welcome insight, reflection and participation from anyone who feels moved by the ideas we’ve presented here.
If that’s you, there are lots of ways to get involved so please check out the options below. Alternatively, if you would just like to connect please reach out to:

beyondtherules@darkmatterlabs.org.

Thank you

Thank you to all the Partners who co-developed, tested or provided input to the Many-to-Many work.

This includes the Many-to-Many Learning Network James Lock - We are Opus, Kathleen Kelly - Local Motion, Leah Black - Regenerative Futures Fund, Lisa Clarke - Lankelly Chase, Matt Bell and Karen Pilkington - Plymouth Octopus Project, Zahra Davidson and Dan Ford - Huddlecraft, advisory from Angela Tang and our Lead Edge Testers of Andy Crosby - Collective Impact Agency, Guppi Bola - Decolonising Economics, Joey Harfouche - Open Society Foundation, Irene Lopez de Vallejo - DisCo, Lucas Counter - Space of Urgency.

Also a huge thank you to all the Partners who laid the foundations for this Many-to-Many work as part of the work on Beyond the Rules including Democratic Society, Lankelly Chase, York Multiple Complex Needs Network's (MCN) Enabling Team, Black Thrive and advisory from Angela Tang.

Finally, thank you to the generous resourcing support and deep collaboration from Lankelly Chase, Arising Quo and Laudes Foundation.