We Pursue Impact

We advise leaders doing the world’s most important work.

From our founding more than a decade ago, we have designed Incandescent to work with companies, venture teams, and social change actors pursuing system-level change.

In our view, systems change requires...

The moral imagination and unshakable commitment of mission-driven organizations
The boldness, innovation and speed of entrepreneurial ventures
The long horizons, breadth of vision and integrative thinking of the best philanthropies
The scale, operational rigor and organizational capability of the largest corporate enterprises

That’s why – even as a small firm – we’ve made the unusual choice to operate across sectors in order to draw on the tools and insights of each, solving problems too complex to fit neatly into any single lane.

We partner with philanthropies, non-profit organizations and mission-driven enterprises advancing ambitious goals – strengthening American democracy, turning the tide on climate change, advancing health equity, broadening economic opportunity and shaping the future of work and workers.

We shape strategy for systems change actors.

The field of strategy was built with a focus on how organizations “win” at the game of creating and capturing value. Systems change actors keep score at the higher level of the outcomes a whole society achieves – whether that’s educational attainment, the elimination of a disease or the experience of belonging. Therefore, they need to think about strategy in an entirely different way.

We work with social enterprises like Consumer Reports to sharpen strategy in a context of rapidly evolving market forces, including the rise of AI-enabled technologies.
We partner with foundations to develop programmatic strategy, such as Rockefeller Foundation’s pivotal work activating employers to move the needle on youth unemployment.

We develop strategies at a field level, working with multiple actors committed to shared goals, such as work on national service that led to the merger of multiple non-profits to form the Service Year Alliance.

We partner with for-profit and non-profit entrepreneurs as they create and scale new organizations.

Much of the consulting work done in the social sector takes the form of rigorous analysis about how to allocate resources to the proven solutions that can yield the highest social return per dollar spent. We applaud that analytical rigor – but the center of gravity of our own work is at the other end of the spectrum: in the entrepreneurial work to develop and demonstrate solutions reaching beyond the current frontier, where proven solutions are insufficient to tackle our most important problems.

We have been deeply involved with impact investing for much of the field’s history, including serving as advisors to Acumen since its earliest years.
We’ve been advisors, investors and board members in a range of impact-driven businesses, such as Catchafire, the leading platform for skills-based volunteering, and Open Capital, a consulting and financial advisory firm that enables investment and builds markets across the African continent.

We work with philanthropic and non-profit partners on the launch of commercial businesses, for instance advising Rockefeller on the development of Atlas AI, a platform for geospatial intelligence with many social impact applications, and spinning the financial health measurement company Attune out of the non-profit Financial Health Network.

We apply leading-edge practices in organization, culture and talent to social sector organizations.

We help impact leaders build the capabilities, practices, and teams inside their organization’s walls that can power their ambitious strategy out in the world. We have observed that where businesses can often be satisfied simply to implement best practices, in order to be efficient and effective working at scale, mission-driven organizations need to be built to deliver on needs that are right at the frontier of what’s possible: whether that’s responding to disasters, innovating to solve society’s hardest problems, driving change in intractable systems, or delivering empathetic care with limited resources to those in greatest need. Mission-driven organizations often need to evolve with extreme agility as their conditions shift or as success brings them new and greater resources. Many of our clients work with us as they reach these critical points of inflection.

We helped senior leaders at a major climate foundation identify how to better support a global team operating at meaningfully greater scope and scale
We partnered with the executive team at Rockefeller Brothers Fund as they set the top-team’s agenda for stewarding a new era of the Fund’s work
We collaborated with Omidyar Network’s leaders at a moment of strategic evolution, working alongside the team to translate the new strategy into priorities for execution

We build powerful partnerships among organizations that see the world differently – across sectors, disciplines, ideological lines and organizational stages.

Durable systems change often requires assembling actors – across lines of difference – to leverage combined expertise, perspectives and resources. Building partnerships capable of driving long term impact requires a powerful anchoring vision, relational trust, and a galvanizing shared “why”.

We helped conceptualize and stand up a funder collaborative focused on strengthening democracy, pluralism, and belonging in the United States that is today known as New Pluralists
We have played a catalytic role in the entrepreneurial development of new philanthropic initiatives, such as the Trust for Civic Life

We worked with the Gates Foundation, Hewlett Foundation and CIFF to bring together experts in both adolescent sexual reproductive health and human-centered design to explore how to make a decisive advance in reaching young women in sub-Saharan Africa. HCDExchange was built out of that early discovery work.