Our Point of Departure:

What if solutions to big problems require surrender? A humble acceptance of how little we actually know: about our own minds and other species; the crescent moon in the sky and the dark depths of the ocean; the behavior of subatomic particles and why it changes when watched; the soil underneath our feet and the canvas of constantly changing horizons suspended above our heads. What if the entanglement of ego with our pursuit of certitude is our greatest fallibility? What if we’re holding on too tightly to an approach to change-making that isn’t accepting of the fundamental randomness of causality? What if we are going about solving the social problem of animal exploitation all wrong? And what if we’re so confined in our thinking by current trajectories and paradigms telling us we’re right that we haven’t even considered that possibility?

Why, after billions of dollars invested and decades of trying, have we been unable to move the needle on the issue of ending the exploitation of other animals for human consumption?

Within every institution and every movement in history there can set in a kind of status quo, or an orthodoxy, that becomes so normalized and taken for granted that it’s difficult to notice, let alone question, without a practice of constant vigilance and rigour. At Impact Reimagined, it’s our contention that in the context of the animal protection movement, we need to safeguard against the temptation to sacrifice complexity, nuance, and honest inquiry for the sake of coming up with easy, siloed answers, to very difficult questions; answers that are often being proclaimed by those voices that are the most confident and certain. We need to be conscious of the ways in which false certitude and arrogance are rewarded, while doubt, uncertainty, and humility are perceived to make an individual or an organization less credible, or impactful. We need to think carefully about how ‘data’ and ‘evidence’, are tossed around as a currency of legitimacy, no matter how incomplete, narrow, and flawed the methodological approaches being applied to complex, interrelational phenomenon. And we need to be able to discern when ego and narcissism are masquerading as enlightened altruism and consequently promoting the wrong people into critical decision-making spaces that determine which ideas and approaches get a chance, and which are dismissed. In sum, we should all be skeptical of certainty when it’s abundantly clear that the closer you look, the more uncertain things become.

In order to avoid errors of judgment that, in the context of our movement, can lead to the significant waste of limited and vital resources, it’s critical to at least acknowledge the mists of uncertainty shrouding what we can and cannot know, and to incorporate an honest acceptance of these limitations into our decision making. However, unfortunately the opposite impulses dominates much of our society and our efforts to change it. Increasingly, everything is quantified, fed into reductionist regressions, ever smarter algorithms, and the black box of machine learning models. Science, statistics, empirical evidence, and sprawling datasets have created a kind of blind and unquestioned faith in our ability to become the master of uncertainty. But we pretend we can answer questions that we can’t to our own detriment. Writing out chance, randomness, and uncertainty because they don’t fit into the neater world we like to imagine exists and because it gives us a semblance of control isn’t serving us because it is dishonest. These misconceptions in the context of a movement seeking fundamental social change tempt us to trim the vast complexity of reality down, allowing us to cram its disconcerting and maddening messiness into small bites that feel more manageable to swallow; that replace uncertainty with certainty; chaos with order; disordered complexity into elegant simplicity, and an intertwined, accidental world into one governed by (mostly) rational individuals making independent choices. We gravitate towards straightforward stories of cause and effect, in which X causes Y, not in which a thousand disparate and random factors combine to cause Y. We focus on big, singular changes to explain big events, ignoring the small grains of sand that pile up and eventually create avalanches. And often, rather than rewarding and incentivizing intellectual humility in the face of this incredibly complex web of cause and effect, we often mistakenly conflate false certainty with confidence, power, and effectiveness -- as though pretending to have mastered uncertainty means you actually have. Too many people rise to the top of our organizations and our institutions following the strategy of being always certain, but who are often flat wrong. This has consequences for the overall effectiveness and collective impact of our movement.

So, with that backdrop and point of departure, the co-founders of Impact Reimagined - one a lawyer, one an academic; both working as CEOs in the animal protection movement - challenged themselves over dinner one lovely spring evening in Denver to think about how they could take this rather illusive concept of epistemic and dispositional humility and harness it in concrete ways to enhance philanthropy by reimagining how the animal movement approaches making an impact for animals. How could they transform what was perceived as a core challenge underpinning this collective effort into an opportunity for enhanced impact? How might this movement be able to lead the way in challenging assumptions limiting their ability to think creatively about how to effectuate significant change on this issue?

And so the Impact Reimagined Project came into being.