We started our recent webinar with a simple invitation: come curious and open. Facilitators Monica Walker, Bay Love, Dwight Smith, and David Foster guided participants from outline to action, offering a disciplined way to see systemic problems clearly and to act with courage and precision.
If you lead teams, advise executives, or organize communities, you know the moment we’re in: progress feels fragile; debates turn inward; pressure mounts to “stay in your lane.” At the Groundwater Institute, our approach offers something steadier. It equips leaders to diagnose root causes and pursue informed treatment through measurable action that aligns your impact with your values.
This blog post offers a ready-to-use roadmap based on that webinar, including three steps any institution can take now, along with examples, quotes, and guiding prompts you can bring to your next strategy meeting.
Many readers know the fish-and-lake-groundwater story. If one fish goes belly-up, you ask what’s wrong with the fish. If half the fish in a lake are belly-up, ask what’s wrong with the lake. If you see half the fish belly-up across multiple lakes, it’s time to look deeper - to the groundwater.
Groundwater flows beneath lakes and streams, connecting them; most of the world’s fresh water lives there, unseen yet foundational. So do the systems and structures that quietly shape outcomes across health, education, housing, wealth, and safety. Or - within an organization - across the multiple systems, processes, and departments that comprise our work.
As Bay Love put it, the metaphor helps us stop “fixing fish” and start examining the deeper systems, cultures, and other difficult-to-see forces that create persistent dysfunction. When we look at society and analyze national outcome data, the pattern is unmistakable: some groups are 1.4–2.8 times more likely to face bad outcomes across domains—not because anything is “wrong” with those groups, but because of historical and structural factors permeating our groundwater.
The Takeaway: Patterns repeat across systems because the groundwater connects them. This also applies inside organizations. Chronic underperformance rarely lives in a single department; interlocking incentives, norms, and histories create familiar modes of failure.
Groundwater work is not an explanatory exercise. As Dwight Smith stressed, “Diagnosis is critical, but without treatment, it leads nowhere.” Our approach spans the full arc:
Even with a new context and lens, acting accordingly is easier said than done. The following are three practical steps any institution can apply now.
Leaders often get stuck in unproductive debates: purpose vs. profit; urgency vs. strategy; loud stance vs. quiet execution. Articulating a rightful role, David Foster explains, is how teams move forward without collapsing into those binaries. Think of your rightful role as a strategic identity at the intersection of:
Your rightful role isn’t just identifying what’s immediate control (and ignoring what feels ‘out of your control’). It’s an honest answer to the question: “Where am I positioned to play a part of changing the system?”
A nonprofit health system with staff and clinics in politically diverse areas decided to pursue system-level change to expand equitable access to care. They revised clinical treatment guidelines, delivered targeted clinician education, and adjusted internal reimbursement practices that were producing uneven patient outcomes.
Through organization-wide Groundwater Institute training, the team built a shared analysis of structural drivers, which reduced internal friction and created a common vocabulary for change. Coaching from the Institute helped leaders articulate a rightful role that linked their mission (healthy communities) with their business imperatives (such as cost, quality, access) and their unique assets. That clarity enabled them to prioritize high-leverage guideline and reimbursement shifts, sequence their work sensibly, and communicate the “why” to frontline staff and community partners.
"A rightful role that brings together purpose and business is both necessary for coalition—and necessary to defend your license to operate in this moment.”
-Bay Love
Try This Now: Draft a one-paragraph “Rightful Role Statement.” Link your purpose, your business imperatives, and your unique capabilities to a system-level aim. Share it with your leadership team and ask: Does it resolve our recurring tensions? Does it clarify where we’ll take risks—and where we won’t?
Coalitions win systemic change; email blasts do not. The most effective leaders in Fortune 500s, nonprofits, and civic networks “start with the who, then get to the what,” David noted. That means intentional relationship-building across functions, geographies, ideologies, and identities grounded in self-interest—properly understood.
What does that mean, you ask? In the community organizing tradition, self-interest isn’t narrow selfishness. It’s what truly motivates people: a safer school commute, a fairer promotion pathway, a meaningful legacy, healthcare for a loved one. You discover others’ self-interest through one-on-one, listening-first conversations, not by screening for ideological purity or role seniority.
“Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others—for their sakes, and for our own.”
— Cesar Chavez
What Building a Team Is (and Isn’t)
Try This Now:
Jim Collins’ warning applies as much to equity as to business strategy: When we confuse dramatic end outcomes with the organic, cumulative processes that produce them, we mistake progress for failure.
In other words, if your only metric for progress is “close the racial wealth gap,” every quarter will look like a loss. But if you also track process measures of power and capacity, you can steer, learn, sustain hope, and accelerate over time.
What to Measure: Beyond End Outcomes:
“If we only measure end outcomes, we’ll feel like we’re constantly failing. If we also measure the path, we can see and replicate what’s working.”
— Bay Love
Try This Now:
Many leaders today are managing hope as much as budgets. The Groundwater frame doesn’t ask you to be optimistic; it gives you a way to build hope on evidence. When you track the path—the team you’re assembling, the levers you’re moving, the coherence you’re creating—you can see progress, even while end outcomes take time.
Define your rightful role. Build a team that can win. Make it real by measuring both the goal and the path. Then keep going.
Want a sounding board? Connect with the Groundwater Institute for foundational training, immersive experiences, coaching, and community spaces designed to turn shared analysis into durable action.