Booz Allen defines its core mission as working with clients to deliver results that endure. Today, our clients face large-scale issues of unprecedented complexity: global climate change, rebuilding urban infrastructure, water scarcity, preparing for pandemics, dealing with aging populations, and maintaining quality of life in the face of globalization. These issues significantly affect national security, economic well-being, and the health and safety of citizens around the world. As we work toward developing solutions to these mounting, many-headed problems, more and more often we find ourselves repeating a four-word mantra: It takes a megacommunity™.
We have come to the conclusion that, in many cases, no one sector—government, business, or civil society—can solve these problems on its own. Each sector comes with its own discrete cast, skill set, and sphere of influence. Many of today’s complex problems require us to find ways to blend these sector-specific advantages and join together into what we call megacommunities (a term most simply defined as a tri-sector, action-oriented “organization of organizations” focused on a shared issue).
Forming a megacommunity presents a challenge for the government sector—as it does for all sectors. It will take hard work, bright thinking, and the best intentions to figure out how to reach across sectors and sector-specific interests to find the overlapping vital interest. But these overlapping interests must be defined and acted upon if we hope to tackle some of our most serious problems. Each new megacommunity increases our knowledge of how to shape a megacommunity effectively. And the government sector is a critical part of this new equation.
