Probably no skill is as central to multi-stakeholder networks as the ability to connect across differences.  For Global Action Networks (GANs), this means connecting between individuals and organizations with diverse cultures and ways of perceiving the world.  And it brings up difficult-to-talk-about topics like “love” and “the spiritual”.

Cobus de Swardt, Managing Director for Transparency International, describes this on a very personal level that he experienced when he was in prison in South Africa for his opposition to apartheid.  He was 18, and facing the prospect of being raped.

“I don’t think you can engage violence with someone you truly love…and so I ask ‘what does this mean?’  That if there’s a true bond with these people, I won’t get raped…so I’ll have to really work to act on this bond.

You can’t act out that you have a bond with somebody…if you think that they’re a total jerk, racist, then this will fail.  I had to overcome something within myself.  You have to seek out the common humanity with someone who you dislike, you might disrespect and have very negative feelings towards…you can’t “act out” that you have positive feelings.  You need to truly believe it.  For me that was my own biggest achievement because I had to overcome all my own prejudices.  The process to social justice is in many ways more challenging to overcoming your own prejudices than the big social justice issues you fight on a big stage.”

This might seem very distant from the tension that comes with connecting between organizational sectors (government-business-civil society).  However, many of the same leadership challenges arise.  There is strong tendency to exaggerate, create stereo-types, and even vilify others in contrast to one’s own position and organization.

A Human Dynamics and Multi-Sector Perspective

One powerful insight that has helped me overcome this tendency arises from my work on identifying distinct attributes of these organizational sectors. When I matched this to the Human Dynamics work of Sandra Seagal and David Horne on individual learning styles, I understood that the sectors tend to be aggregations of different learning styles – physically-centered for business, mentally-centered for government and emotionally-centered for civil society.  This insight provides an invaluable way for people to understand their differences so they can meaningfully work together.

From this perspective, people in business tend to simply “make sense of the world” (learn) in a very different way than people in the other sectors – no one sense-making approach is “right”;  rather, they are complementary and collectively represent a whole-world perspective.  However, these different sense-making approaches create enormous conflict, and GANs need to develop their competency to create collaboration across these learning styles to realize success.  Seagal’s work has actually been integrated into the Swedish education system, with children being taught how to communicate across these learning styles.

This connecting also has a spiritual component that is brought out by another GAN leader and good friend, Sam Daley-Harris.  Sam transformed himself from an orchestra musician into an organizer of what is one of the most important global networks addressing poverty:  the Microcredit Summit Campaign.  He and Muhammad (Grameen Bank) Yunus began working closely together 18 years before Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize.

I commend to you an inspirational 18-minute You-Tube video Poverty, Purpose, Pitfalls, and Redemption.  Sam speaks of bringing meaning and purpose to one’s life by connecting with others and “taking action when you see something needs to be done.”  He describes original micro-credit motivations involving “redemption”, as defined as “restoring (finding) one’s honor and worth, and setting one free.”

An on-going challenge for GANs is to maintain these love and spiritual components that are necessary for the critical work of GANs to create deep connections across difference.  How can they cultivate these qualities and bring together  bureaucratic, profit-maximizing and self-righteousness orientations…and realize effectiveness in their global change drives?  Some of the answers lie with Human Dynamics and leadership that reflects love and spirit.

“Ecologies of innovation” and “learning ecology” are two particularly important, fast-evolving concepts for successful multi-stakeholder change networks.   However, even the traditional role of “learning” is still poorly understood by most people in such networks.  When organizing a meeting in 2007 on the topic of “learning networks”, we had trouble identifying people responsible for learning.  And those who attended said their networks spend minimal resources on learning.  They typically spend enormous percentages of their staff time and money on face-to-face meetings, and knowledge-exchanges in many forms are daily practice…but these are not thought of as “learning events”.   Hence, a major activity of networks is still in rudimentary development.

The concept of “ecology” itself is important for networks.  It refers to the diversity of participants and their relationships.  Creating a healthy ecology in terms of generation of learning and innovation is critical for multi-stakeholder change networks like Global Action Networks (GANs).

Learning Ecologies

Colleague Bill Snyder, working with Etienne Wenger, developed a “learning ecology” model in the context of their work on communities of practice (published in Snyder & Briggs, 2003, see page 14 of Communities of Practice: A New Tool for Government Managers ).    Think of all the possible types of activities when learning happens.  These are not necessarily framed as “learning activities” – sometimes learning is not even the primary goal.  However, they can be structured to support learning as an explicitly valued activity. These are virtual and face-to-face interactions that can be one-on-one, sub-group, or community-wide.  The Figure describes this as an interacting set of activities that are framed as learning spaces.

These activities must develop both explicit and tacit knowledge.  Explicit knowledge can be written down and easily shared like facts and procedures. Formal education processes, databases and books are great for sharing explicit knowledge.  Tacit knowledge is knowledge that one has but cannot explain, and includes intuitions, values, artistry, and expertise.  It is best developed through such activities as dialogue, mentoring, joint problem-solving and informal exchanges.

Seven Features of Ecologies of Innovation

How to develop a robust learning ecology is furthered with the concept of “ecology of innovation” that is central to a new book, Complexity and the Nexus of Leadership, co-authored by colleague Benyamin Lichtenstein along with Jeffrey Goldstein and James Hazy.  They point to seven features of a healthy ecology of innovation that can be described in reference to GANs:

1. Ecologies are Systems of Difference: The multi-stakeholder and global qualities of GANs should be encouraged to produce innovation…although ensuring productive interactions requires skill.
2. Diversity is the Source of Adaptability: The differences allow for a wide range of combination of ideas and actions, in response to specific problems, needs and circumstances.
3. An Ecology is a Nexus of Interacting Ecosystems: This brings out the importance of the range of interactions in a learning system…thinking of networks as “nodes” of interaction in contrast the usual thinking of network “nodes” as physical places or organizational units.
4. Ecosystems Require Interaction Resonance: “Interaction resonance” is what makes exchanges robust…it “signifies a richness of information flow”.    “Continuous effort is required to strengthen, widen and deepen the capacity of the relationships, so as to transport resources and knowledge more quickly and effectively.”  (p. 31)
5. Ecosystems Coevolve by Cooperative Strategies: Rather than conflict and competition that are commonly seen as conditions to drive innovation, coevolution is dominant in networks.  It is a process of shared benefit in which all gain through interdependence and interaction.
6. Ecosystems thrive in a Disequilibrium World: Innovation is associated with changing conditions and capacities…technological, political, social, cultural and environmental.
7. Ecosystems Exist at Multiple Levels: GANs are local-to-global networks;  innovation can occur at any level and be carried throughout the network.

These ecology framings can guide network development, by answering questions such as:

• Are we appropriately making use of the possible range of learning interactions?
• Do we have sufficient difference?
• Are we good at creating productive interactions (interaction resonance)?
• What is the role of coevolution, as opposed to conflict and competition, in realizing our vision?

Answering these questions and developing “interaction resonance” should be a major goal of a network learning steward.  Networks really need to develop their learning and innovation competency, and that requires applying staff and resources to develop and implement a strategy to develop robust ecologies of learning and innovation.

The Complexity book deals with private enterprise;  it would find a much richer focus with GANs.  Its description of the “ecology of innovation” concept reinforces the reason that I find GANs potentially so powerful for addressing critical global challenges.  However, the concept raises in my mind the on-going question of whether we can innovate quickly enough to address the increasing scale and pace of disequilibrium (particularly environmentally)…or whether we’ll spin into disastrous chaos and global collapse.

^1. Adapted from:  Snyder, W. M. and X. de Souza Briggs (2003). Communities of Practice:  A New Tool for Government Managers. Arlington, VA, USA, IBM Center for the Business of Government. p. 14

My mind is full of thoughts about network start-up issues, since I’ve been asked to help develop a new global one that brings together academics and corporations for sustainability.  The experience illustrates four lessons about the exploration stage and initiation stage of the four network development stages.  Elements of those first two stages were combined into a “Step 1″ through the end of this year.

The lessons emerged last week at a first meeting in Milan with a luminary group of  about 20 academics.  It was organized by the indefatigable Maurizio Zollo who heads up the Center for Research in Organization and Management (CROMA) at Bocconi University, a leading European business school.

Lesson 1: Be passion-driven and work-focused

Happily both of the lead speakers who are known for their profound thinking spoke to these issues…the indomitable Simon Zadek and the quietly centered Ed Freeman.  Such people have lots of great choices about how to spend their time, and giving outlet for personal passion is required to engage the quality of leadership necessary to give life to an influential global network.

And you’ve got to know what you want to achieve.  The global academic-corporate sustainability field is extremely crowded:  the Global Compact (PRME), the Global Reporting Initiative, the Principles for Responsible Investment all have their own such networks;  as well, there are others such as the (formerly European) Academy of Business in Society and the Globally Responsible Leadership Initiative.

In this case, distinctive purpose was easily identified because of historic inter-personal ties for many present, participants’ own expertise in network development, and by the year of preparation led by Maurizio.  The group’s critique is that sustainability is being integrated into corporations much too slowly.  To change this, the group’s interest concerns (1) advancing knowledge about organizational learning and change towards sustainability, and (2)  actively supporting organizations’ transition towards their own model of sustainable enterprise.

The group coalesced around Step 1 of six months that will produce leading comprehensive case studies.  These will provide key insights as the basis for any future action.  (Click on photo of meeting participants and key to increase size).

Lesson 2:  Think “community-development”, not “governance structure”

I always get worried when people talk about “governance structure” in the abstract.  It should arise out of the need to support a community of people to do work and experience from doing the work.

Community development requires not just clear articulation of, and commitment to, the group goal, but also with respect to goals of distinctive stakeholder groups’ and individual participants’ goals.

In this case, community will be developed through interactions that produce the case studies, their analysis and definition of future action.  What’s needed structurally to do that work?  Nothing much.  There’ll be a call for proposals, networking to get the needed global complexion of research centers to respond, and organizing of an event to discuss the cases.

However, to optimize the potential for a successful Step 2 does require some more work.  There must be some community development work done with the proposal submitters, and infrastructure must be in place to immediately follow-up and support the outcomes of the next meeting.  I have participated in far too many “event-focused” initiatives, that have poured attention into organizing a meeting only to be insufficiently prepared to support the passion and ideas that arise out of it.  The result?  Dissipation of energy and lost opportunity.

For Step 1 CROMA will lead administration, and the key investors – ABIS, Bocconi and INSEAD – will form the organizing committee.

Lesson 3:  Use leading tools

I arrived on the scene a bit late, and the initiative could not make use of some of the tools that would have helped a lot.  In particular, significant energy was spent to identify research centers and corporations to participate in the initiative.  The approach was the classic “who do we know”, and building out from there.

One problem with this approach is that it is very labor-intensive.  Another is that it is necessarily limited by current connections…and often to produce the needed innovation requires going beyond these.  But perhaps the biggest problem is that this comes from a “building” approach that can badly alienate people, rather than a community-weaving approach.

This is a crowded issue field.  The project’s success requires “weaving together” current activities in new ways…the “building something new” approach of asking others to “join us” will inevitably provoke hostility from people who have been working in the field for some time and will say “why don’t you join us!”

Mapping using web crawls and social network analysis supports a weaving strategy, by heightening understanding of who is already working in the issue arena, their current relationships, and how to complement their activity.  As well, it can be much more economical and comprehensive.

Lesson 4:  Integrate reflection, learning and flexibility

These terms might be summarized with one word:  emergence.  That’s a key quality of networks successfully dealing with complex challenges.   Networks are complicated – there are lots of players, relationships, goals and activities.  However, change networks are also complex:  they don’t really know the “answer” to the challenge they are addressing, and what they should do.  What does a truly sustainable corporation really look like?  The network must stimulate questions and processes that produce an ever-more effective set of actions.

At the Milan meeting I heard people describe this more explicitly and with greater comfort than I’ve ever heard before.  I guess academics deal better with uncertainty than most (although their weakness is that they more often have trouble with taking impactful action).  The result?  They were fine throwing out the original proposal for Step 1, and totally redefining it around the case development process.

So one of my own learnings in this case is the value of having academics involved in these early stages of development.  Originally corporate-types were invited to them meeting, but they didn’t show up and that is probably just as well.  They would have been frustrated with the conceptual development discussions.  However, their presence at the next meeting with the cases is critical, for Step 2 to be successful.  This emphasizes the importance of developing the cases collaboratively with the corporations, and the value of meetings designed around what I call Action Learning Development.

In his follow-up email to the Milan participants, Maurizio commented “As an Italian saying goes, ‘the good day can be told from the early morning’.  Well, there could not have been a better early morning for the long and exciting day ahead of us.”  I agree!

Some people think that our global future rests with reforming the UN.  That presents a depressing challenge.  But change often comes in the form of a skunk works[1], and that’s what UN Secretary General Kofi Annan created in 2000 with the Global Compact (GC).  The return on his $10,000 investment in the very competent Georg Kell and John Ruggie was on display last week at the GC’s 10^th anniversary.  And with it, was an embryonic display of our future global decision-making processes.

The Compact is a strategy to give life to the idealistic UN values about labor, human rights, the environment, transparency…the 10 Compact principles that are wonderful statements that the UN has produced, but has proven pretty ineffective at realizing.  The Compact is specifically focused upon corporations and engaging them to actively integrate the principles.  Although technically controlled by the UN, the GC’s success depends upon being responsive to a multi-stakeholder Board.

Over 1200 people participated in the New York Times Square hotel meetings that lasted 2-1/2 days.  It was labeled the “Leaders Summit”, an event occurring every three years.  The theme was “Building a new era of sustainability”.  Preparations totally pre-occupied the GC for many months.  The event itself was rather ho-hum, with some weaknesses:

• A vapid Accenture report that was widely criticized for its methodological weakness and self-promotion about enlightened corporate views of sustainability.
• Old white males dominating…but it was an accurate representation of the current corporate elite.   There was a sincere and modestly effective effort to bring in diversity:  geographically it was somewhat diverse (reflecting travel costs);  although technically there was diversity to include academics, NGOs and government types, they were not generally of a critical ilk.
• There was no meaningful “decision-making” role for participants that would build a true sense of ownership.
• Obliging people to stand with the arrival of the Secretary-General really inserted an anachronistic protocol into a forward-focused meeting.

Never to be discounted at these events is their occasion to build important inter-personal ties…the active community building.  The main activities consisted of panels highlighting Compact participants’ perspectives, punctuated with round table discussions for the greater 1200 with a variety of stakeholders.  These helped connect across different perspectives.  However, the range of participants and the rather superficial GC connections of many…I had new GC members who were a Namibian banker on one side and a Managing Partner of a small Danish law firm on the other…made discussion pretty superficial.

It led me to wonder if the GC’s national networks can be made the focal meeting participants, giving them a role in GC policy, planning and decision-making through the event.  This could ground the event in much more substantive issues with much better-informed and engaged people, as some other Global Action Networks do with global meetings.

Nevertheless, the meeting was better than what the UN usually produces.  It demonstrated that the knitting together of Global Action Networks into a new web of multi-stakeholder change networks is advancing rapidly.  Transparency International, the Principles for Responsible Investment and the Global Reporting Initiative were active presences, and Social Accountability International’s Eileen Kaufman was a vocal participant.  These form a group of GANs reshaping corporations’ future, complementing a health care group of GANs operating out of Geneva.

But perhaps most importantly the meeting produced a sense of forward-momentum.  I heard criticism that the Compact was not offering anything to companies leading in sustainability action.  And then a segmentation strategy was presented to create a space specifically for leading companies.  The Global Reporting Initiative and the Global Compact announced an alliance that will respond to the criticism about emptiness of the current reports by companies on their performance in terms of the principles.  And John Ruggie, on behalf of the UN Human Rights Council, presented a very well-received new strategy framed by the concepts of “protect, respect and remedy” to replace the ridiculous era of corporate self-regulation on the issue.

I must admit that I continue to have great unease about inertia vis-à-vis sustainability, however. The Compact’s goal of increasing from 6,000 to 20,000 company signatories in 10 years seems rather uni-dimensional and lacking in aggressiveness. We still seem to be nibbling at the edges of the transformation challenge.

Reflecting this, a meeting theme was the need to take meaningful action on a bigger scale and in greater depth.  We’d better hold ourselves all accountable for achieving that when we reconvene in three years for the next Compact Leaders Summit.

Communities of Practice (CoPs) are particularly valuable for multi-stakeholder change networks because they present a very flexible model requiring modest financial support for the learning and its dissemination that are critical for the networks’ success.   They require very light infrastructure and enhance interpersonal ties that also are key to success.

Bill Snyder has worked closely to develop the concept with Etienne Wenger, who popularized it.  I have also worked with Bill Snyder to further apply the concept to global change networks.

In 2003 Bill and I worked with the Cooperative Programme on Water and Climate (CPWC).  At that time the network aimed to generate learning across 18 initiatives around the world that were working on implications of climate change related to water.  Our overall approach was to think of each initiative as an affiliated CoP and the CPWC as a whole as a CoP…so we wanted to explore the value and implications of thinking of the CPWC as a CoP of CoPs.

We organized a pilot initiative to explore application of the CoP model that included three initiatives: Central America (addressing flood impacts of increasing storms in small valleys), Bangladesh (addressing salination issues with rising sea levels), and West Africa (addressing increasing drought).  We aimed to create interactions within and between them that could be a microcosm for CPWC as a whole.

The Figure presents the major components in a CoP system, and this is how we experimented with its application to the CPWC.

• What: It might be an issue like “sustainable water use” or a sub-issue such as “communications strategies in water”).  For CPWC the over-arching questions concerned how climate change can be mitigated.
• How: The practice, or the activities to support development of capacity to address the “what”.  For the CPWC there was most obviously the practice of the 18 sites, but the CoP activity was personal interactions – via telephone, email and webinar – between (1) each of the three sites and Bill and me, and (2) between all of us and the CPWC Secretariat collectively, designed to develop learning.
• Who: The community – the people involved in the initiatives and the Secretariat.

The CoP infrastructure comprised two key components.  One was sponsors who included the CPWC secretariat itself and a funder, whose functions included:

• Developing strategic goals for the community;
• Providing funding for the support team and regional coordinators;  and
• Participating in ongoing reviews to assess progress and foster development.

Support for the daily activities came in the form of Bill and me in terms of CoP development.  Our activities included:

• Coaching regional coordinators;
• Guiding case development;
• Coordinating the global community;
• Liaising with sponsors;
• Developing the technology platform—including teleconference events and the website (for storing documents, posting messages, member directory, etc.);  and
• Documenting the methods, results, lessons learned, and proposals for next steps.

Support locally came in the form of the local coordinators – the lead contacts at each of the sites – who led activities at the regional level with the roles of:

• Identifying local players to participate in a regional learning system initiative;
• Developing regional case studies—as a baseline for identifying local improvement opportunities and for sharing insights and innovations across regions;
• Coordinating peer-to-peer and cross-level learning at the regional level; and
• Liaising with local institutions: government agencies, NGO’s, funders, and others.

While Bill and I considered the CPWC project a successful learning experience, we did not generate a robust or on-going CoP infrastructure.  There were several reasons for this. The major one was too much divergence in the site issues (the “what”) to inspire an on-going CoP – the local impact of the concept of  “water and climate”  was too diverse.  A second one was the  limited time of the local coordinator.  As well, we never did have face-to-face meetings that could have built a much stronger foundation.  Also, at the time (2003), the webinar/teleconference/internet connections we were using were not sufficiently advanced.,

Nevertheless, the learning within sites and across them generated deeper understanding by everyone of the system they were trying to organize, and there was value in sharing the lessons about how to connect the parts.  There were generic parts identified in the form of four general types of stakeholder communities:

• local communities;
• policy makers;
• socio-techno-science experts; and
• funders.

In a disciplined but light-structure manner, the CoP framing helps address core questions:  Who is in the communities?  What can they do to address the issue?  How can they improve the way they are addressing it?

This approach significantly shifts the focus of many people from solely engineering-type technical solutions, to understand that their work also involves creating new types of social inter-personal ties and a robust learning system.

For a paper by Bill about the project, click here.  Another paper, Communities of Practice:  A New Tool for Government Managers applies the CoP model in the U.S. government explains some key concepts in more detail.   Other resources are:

• Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice. New York, NY, Cambridge University Press.
• Wenger, E., R. McDermott, et al. (2002). Cultivating Communities of Practice. Boston, MA, USA, Harvard Business School Press.
• Wenger, E. C. and W. M. Snyder (2000). “Communities of Practice:  The Organizational Frontier.” Harvard Business Review(January – February): 139-145.

There are many different ways to approach impact measurement, but using the wrong methods can actually undermine a change network’s efforts. The value of appropriate impact measurement is that it not only helps explain to funders their return on investment, but it also is an important tool for priority-setting, decision-making and managing.

Traditional evaluation approaches come from an industrial “in-put/out-put” model.  This is fine for simple tasks, but it is inappropriate for complicated and complex tasks that are part and parcel of change networks.

Simple, Complicated and Complex Activities

Three key differences in these types of tasks in the Table reveal that a change network does all three activities.  However, these networks are distinguished by an over-arching mission that requires complex activities.  Therefore, although the networks need impact measurement methods that will address all three activities, their umbrella measurement method must accommodate complexity.

In change networks, the need for methods that can address complicated and complex activities is evidenced in a number of ways, such as:

• Methods for evaluating simple tasks can not address the complications of the interaction in network participants’ relationships.
• There is not one, but an emergent number of possible pathways that require exploration and development to address issues such as ending corruption, creating sustainable forestry and integrating triple bottom line imperatives into corporations.
• Change networks’ visions require a long time to realize.  With all the change in their operating environments over that time, adaptive strategies are required, although simple ones can be good for relatively short-term sub-initiatives.
• Change networks usually do not aim to “take credit” for the actual valued outcomes (such as healthy, happy people).  They aim for a back seat in favor of their participants’ being recognized for their work. This makes attribution, a cornerstone of traditional impact measurement, highly problematic.

The demands of complex systems are reflected in “developmental evaluation” (DE), both an approach and title of a book by Michael Quinn Patton about to be released.  Michael writes:

“Developmental evaluation supports innovation development to guide adaptation to emergent and dynamic realities in complex environments. …  Informed by systems thinking and sensitive to complex nonlinear dynamics, developmental evaluation supports social innovation and adaptive management.  Evaluation processes include asking evaluative questions, applying evaluation logic, and gathering real-time data to inform ongoing decision making and adaptations.”[1]

As in action research strategies, the evaluator is part of the development team from beginning to end, rather than someone who comes in at the end to simply do a post facto analysis.

Two Examples

Ricardo Wilson-Grau, a colleague who works with the DE approach, points out there is a number of methodologies that can be used under that heading.  He has, for example, practiced DE using Outcome Mapping with the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC) and the Global Water Partnership (GWP).

Ricardo explains that traditional evaluation poses questions such as:

• Were problems encountered in implementing the change strategy solved in a way that is faithful to the model?
• To what extent have the intervention model’s specified outcomes been achieved?
• What has been learned about how to fully and faithfully replicate the model?

DE, however, is more interested in answering other questions about the strategy as something in development. For example, the Global Platform for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC) introduced an Outcome Mapping in 2007 as a planning tool. In 2009, Ricardo advised on:

• How can the success of Outcome Mapping be judged so far?
• How can Outcome Mapping now be developed as an evaluation/monitoring system vis-à-vis results?

The first question was a reflection on the system itself;  the second was about further development of the system.  Based on those findings, GPPAC is now further developing Outcome Mapping.

Another example is with the GWP.  GWP operates in a highly complex, dynamic environment. It has thousands of members who are constantly changing, grouped into 60-70 country water partnerships, whose actual number at any given moment is unknown.  These country partnerships are grouped  into 13 regional water partnerships with a global secretariat in Stockholm.concerns the approach to measurement. Over ten years they had placed the issue of integrated water resource management on the environmental agenda.

In traditional evaluation performance and success are measured against predetermined goals and SMART outcomes: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. DE is quite different.  With Ricardo’s support GWP created a monitoring procedure to apply DE principles to  develop measures and tracking mechanisms as outcomes emerge. They introduced the procedure into one region and, according to what did and did not work, adjusted it for the next region. That is, the measures could change as the process unfolded. They tracked the forks in the road – specifically how different regions had to adjust the monitoring procedure – and used this information to point out the implications of key decisions as the innovative monitoring system evolved. Consequently, their donors are being informed of the governmental policy and practice changes that GWP – directly or indirectly, usually partially and often sometimes unintentionally – influences.  That’s simple, complicated and complex.

Ricardo is an independent evaluator and organizational consultant based in Brazil and the Netherlands. He can be reached at ricardo.wilson-grau@inter.nl.net.

To realize large-scale change requires really good large-scale conversations.  With tens and even hundreds of millions of people.  I remember the 1980s’ innovative format of satellite-fed televised town hall meetings with citizens of the US and the Soviet Union talking directly to one another for the first time.  They made a huge impression and broke down stereotypes.  Although social media and the internet allow much richer exchanges, by-and-large they have been pretty unimaginative.  But Patrice Barrat of Article Z and the Bridge Initiative in Paris, is pushing the boundaries with a new just-launched production!

Patrice integrates social media, mobile phones, video, television, email, web-conferencing, and other technologies to create conversations about critical issues.  He starts with a citizen with a compelling question and brings them to Presidents, Prime Ministers, CEOs, Executive Directors and other leaders to ask their question.

For example, he did a production with the Global Fund to Fight AIDS and a South African AIDS-infected child.  She asked the question “Why must I die?” Busi – a south African activist – carried her question to G8 participants Gordon Brown (UK Finance Minister), Paul Wolfowitz (World Bank President) and Kofi Annan (UN Secretary General).  The exchanges went on the web, which spurred others to add their own videos and written commentary;  after a conversation of several months, a film was produced integrating the contributions.

Patrice is a journalist animateur whose work reflects three principles:

1. Place film-makers/journalists at the service of citizens of the planet to help them ask questions that affect their lives…journalists bring the powers-that-be to the citizens to answer citizens’ questions.
2. Have the stories unfold publicly by placing video episodes on the web, before making the film for TV.
3. Remember that investigations don’t tell the ultimate truth about an issue…all issues are interactive amongst stakeholders.  It’s an evolving truth;  the story is always an evolving process.

After working for years as an award-winning journalist, Patrice began in 1999 to experiment with his approach, which is named MadMundo.tv.  He is maintaining the cutting edge with the second phase of a research project that brings together Article Z, telecom Sofrecom-Orange, business school HEC, and the Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation (IRI) of Beaubourg.

Just Launched

That second phase just launched last week.  With a team of a couple of dozen people he is piloting a monthly series of conversations for the French-German television network Arte.  The pilot is about the financial crisis in Greece.   He begins with a 28-year old Greek university graduate, Maria, who earns €700 a month, and her question. “Why should I suffer from the economic chaos?”  And for others:  “What if that happened to us?”  Maria will pose her question to such people as the Prime Minister of Greece, the President of the European Central Bank and the head of the International Labour Organization.  Every day there will be a new web-site video and commentary, to spur responses from others on-line.  And at the end of the month there will be a 52-minute TV production.

Patrice’s favorite MadMundo.tv production was a series with a Brazilian named Geraldo who was out of work and asked Lula before he was President “Who benefits from profits?”  Two years later when Lula was President a second series was done with Geraldo.  But this time there was difficulty in getting a meeting with Lula until Patrice met him at an airport and showed him Geraldo’s picture.  “He turned to the camera and said ‘Geraldo you want to know about globalization and profits?’  Lula started explaining how capital flows across borders and that people can’t cross borders…Geraldo was very proud that Lula still talked to him even indirectly.  They met directly later.”

A third series with Geraldo asking “Who can I trust” did not end so happily as Lula was embroiled in a corruption scandal.  But it took Geraldo’s question to the head of Transparency International, Romania, Burkina Faso and the UK.

Many leaders would dismiss Patrice’s request for an interview as a traditional journalist, but are much more interested in meeting with a citizen.  Sometimes it doesn’t turn out happily for the leader.  The citizen who met Kofi Annan commented that she was not impressed. Patrice explains that “Some people at the UN said (to Patrice) ‘We thought you were a friend.’  But that’s what the character had to say.”

What’s changed over the years?  One thing is that Patrice’s approach is recognized as legitimate and doable.  There’s a form of competition even, with YouTube and other on-line video exchanges. And Patrice has moved from a more journalistic style “to a style where you feel the character is really meeting someone.  It’s a series of discoveries and encounters.  It’s not made for an audience just to understand an issue, but to understand the questioning of the characters with their eyes and their evolution (in relation to the issue).”

Of course a big bi-product is strengthened community around the issue with greater participation and understanding about how to influence it.

Want to try creating your own MadMundo conversation with Patrice?  He estimates the cost between €120,000 – €160,000.

We are swimming in a world of “change”.  But not all change is the same, and very often the wrong strategies and tools are applied to a change challenge.  The result?  Lots of frustration, wasted energy and disillusion about our capacity to realize change.  To improve change strategies, you’ll find helpful distinguishing between three different types:  incremental, reform and transformation.

Understanding the differences helps set reasonable goals, identify appropriate actions and ensure the presence of skills that are necessary to support it.  I spent some time clarifying the differences with Philip Thomas, co-author of a UNDP book on change, and Jouwert van Geene of the Centre for Development Innovation.  The product is the Table below.  Click on the Table to enlarge it.

Transformation Change

When Thomas Kuhn wrote his seminal 1962 book on paradigm shifts, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he was writing about the physical sciences. He describes how changes occur in explanations (theories) about how the world works and what is possible.  For him a paradigm consists of definitions of what an analysis should observe, the kinds of questions that should be asked, how the questioning should be developed, and how the results should be interpreted.  These questions and paradigm shifts are associated with transformational change, by far the most difficult type of change.

A wonderful example is with Sam Daley-Harris’ frustration over the way traditional organizations ignore and marginalize data that does not conform to what they believe is possible. “There’re these figures,” says Sam, Director of the Microcredit Campaign Summit, “,…Yunus Mohammed (Grameen Bank, Nobel Prize Winner), Ingrid Munro (Kenyan microcredit innovator)…and they (people in power) write off these people who break rules as ‘special cases’…they dismiss it or marginalize it.  If I walk into a USAID or World Bank office and said ‘Ingrid in Kenya is making microloans successfully to former thieves, prostitutes, gang members’…what would they do with that information?  Why didn’t they look at Grameen Bank 25, 15 years ago?  Why isn’t that happening in Kenya?  Because it breaks their pre-conceived conventional wisdoms of what is possible…it can’t be replicated, it’s a special case.”  Sam and the USAID/World Bank are looking with different paradigms.

Transformational change involves significant change in relationships and power structures.  Global Action Networks (GANs) typically arise out of questions requiring this type of change.  The Sustainable Food Lab (SFL), for example, began with questions about how to transform the agriculture and food system into a sustainable one.  This requires visioning strategies, and the SFL developed one of the most disciplined ones I’m aware of, by applying insights and approaches associated with Peter Senge who founded the Society for Organizational Learning, Otto Scharmer at the Presencing Institute, and Adam Kahane with Reos Partners.

Reform Change

This type of change is much more familiar. For example, often people refer to “reform of the finance industry”.  They mean that the formal rules that guide its operations should change. In fact, it is one reason many social change activists identify a successful change campaign with “advocacy” as a tool to change laws and policies.  Other tools associated with reform change strategies include negotiations and mediation.

Reform also follows successful transformation activities.  To move into this stage the SFL began prototyping with action experiments and pilots that reflected their vision for sustainable agriculture.  This experience aims to develop new procedures, formal relationships, and ways of behaving to reflect the values and beliefs of the vision.

For example, one SFL project is developing new business models to connect small-scale farmers and food companies “…that distribute risks and rewards more evenly across the supply chain, improve the flow of market information, and increase access to credit and technical assistance.”¹ These qualities of the business model arise from the vision and new insights about interdependence.  They challenge assumptions of the traditional business model of company plantations by identifying new relationships, rules and processes.

Incremental Change

The change challenge then passes into the domain of increasing application more broadly.  Incremental change is so common people often don’t think of it as “change”. This is change with widespread replication and adaptation of the models, and adoption of the reformed rules, processes, beliefs and values.  This might seem like the easy part, but history is littered with proven pilots that have never become influential.  On the global scale that GANs are working, scaling up change is an enormous and important challenge.

SFL’s strategy at this stage is product- and organization-focused, through the product-line.  For example, SFL participants Rainforest Alliance and Unilever are joining together to produce a Lipton tea bearing the Rainforest logo. Lipton markets about 12 percent of all tea sold worldwide.   Separately, Unilever committed to use exclusively palm oil certified by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil for its beauty products by 2015.

Join us for a discussion on this blogpost at the Change Alliance community.

Join us for a webinar on these change strategies, June 16 at 10:00 EDT, 14:00 UK, 15:00 CET. This is a joint NetworkingAction – Centre for Development Innovation – D3 Associates – Change Alliance webinar. Click here for more information.

1. SFL. (2010). “Projects.”   Retrieved March 22, 2010, from http://www.sustainablefoodlab.org/initiatives/.

Networks are more productively approached as living systems, rather than as engineered and built structures.  But what does this really mean, and what are the implications?  Some of this is described in a wonderful report I read last week titled Capacity, Change and Performance.  This report came to my attention through The Change Alliance and Jan Ubels at SNV.

The report nicely summarizes four key points about a complex adaptive system (CAS) perspective.  CAS begins with individuals or organizations guided by some higher inner principles.  CAS:

1. Focuses on processes more than structures or outcomes as a way of managing;
2. Defines systems on the basis of interrelationships between people, groups, structures and ideas and the behavior, events and outcomes they produce;
3. Emphasizes emergence as the way human systems change on the basis of countless interactions amongst a huge number of elements;
4. Brings out in-built tendencies towards self-organization that drive the emergence of order, direction and capacity from within the system itself.

The importance of the CAS perspective came up in a conversation last week with Jim Woodhill, Director of the Centre for Development Innovation and Marianne Hughes, Executive Director of the Interaction Institute for Social Change. We were discussing the barriers to realizing the potential for multi-stakeholder change strategies, and Marianne commented:

A great obstacle is our capacity to see system relationships, capacities to see and move through processes of real innovation with multi-stakeholders coming together, transcending differences.

Jim added:

How to understand systemic interactions…having that capacity to see this.  And how that connects to a spiritual dimension…about people’s emotions, cognition, how people see the world, the wider institutional environment…science has cut 3/4 of that out of the picture in the way it tries to tackle problems.

Systems Thinking and Networks

“Systems thinking” and system dynamics are similar to CAS, but start with the collective whole rather than the individual/organization.  They were popularized by Peter Senge with his 1990 classic The Fifth Discipline. Other key concepts are:

• “feedback loops”:  the processes that an action (input) sets in motion that re-enforce and/or undermine the action; and
• “unintended consequences”: a feedback loop to undermines the original intention.

System dynamics guru Jay Forrester pointed out in a classic 1971 paper Counterintuitive Behavior Of Social Systems that “The human mind is not adapted to interpreting how social systems behave.  We think simplistically and linearly.”

These comments followed analysis of four programs to address inner city problems. “All of these were shown to lie between neutral and highly detrimental regardless of the criteria used for judgment,” he found.  “The investigation showed how depressed areas in cities arise from excess low-income housing rather than from a commonly presumed housing shortage.”

Jay points to “Three counterintuitive behaviors of social systems (that) are especially dangerous”:

• Social systems are inherently insensitive to most policy changes that people choose in an effort to alter the behavior of systems.  Policy support results from human intuition that develops from exposure to simple systems.
• Social systems seem to have a few sensitive influence points through which behavior can be changed. These high-influence points are not where most people expect.
• Social systems exhibit a conflict between short-term and long-term consequences of a policy change. A policy that produces improvement in the short run is usually one that degrades a system in the long run.

Networks, particularly global, multi-stakeholder change ones, are CAS beasts. Their core strategy is one that assumes a CAS approach is required.  If these networks are to integrate this systems wisdom, they must be expert at such things as identifying and working with “high-influence points”.   The Capacity, Change and Performance report summarizes some of the CAS implications in a marvelous Table shown below. (click on Table to enlarge.)

“Participants” are a basic component of any network, whether they be organizations or individuals.  But that is a pretty broad term, and most networks really require a much more elaborate definition of roles.  For example, is a “participant” the same thing as a “member”?

A couple of years ago I had conversations with several global, multi-stakeholder networks to better understand these issues.  The same word is used in very different ways, and confusion between distinct concepts was creating confusion among network participants.  The Table below is a product of the conversations, and suggests that networks should distinguish between four roles.   For both the network and its stakeholders, decisions to fit into one category versus the other is wrapped up with important strategic decisions.

The networks generally have a broad approach to who can become a participant:  anyone who is a stakeholder in their issue or wants to become one.  This is equivalent to the concept of “citizen” as someone who has rights, but does not necessarily exercise them.

Co-owners have some specified decision-making rights, typically around voting in Board or other elections, standing for election, or voting on policy issues.  Being a co-owner is usually associated with signing on to a set of principles at a minimum.

Occasionally certain categories of organizations are not citizens, although they are stakeholders.  For the Tobacco Free Initiative, a decision was made to prohibit tobacco companies from participating since the Initiative’s goals and those of the companies were perceived as antithetical.

Some stakeholders are happy to simply be a citizen, take advantage of the work of the networks, but not become active – referred to economically as a “free-rider”.  This is particularly true for networks that produce new learning or policy change, such as The Climate Group when it brings together cities and other stakeholders to develop innovations around LED lighting…of course the networks are usually pleased to have their learning adopted, but free-riders make networks’ business model problematic.

A stakeholder might be a “citizen”, but make a strategic decision to actively oppose a network.  One example is with forest companies that have formed the Sustainable Forestry Initiative in opposition to the Forest Stewardship Council’s multi-stakeholder certification.

Other stakeholders might strategically chose to be participants, but not be a co-owner.  Greenpeace is a strong campaigner on fishery issues and participates in the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) assessments to determine whether a fishery is sustainable.  However, it does does not sit on MSC’s Stakeholder Council, because it prefers the added independence of action that can come with the role of “participant” versus “co-owner”.

For many networks, certain categories are allowed to participate, but not be co-owners.  IUCN allows some businesses as participants, but they are pointedly not allowed to be co-owners.  Governments cannot become members of the Global Reporting Initiative (although it has developed a Governmental Advisory Group), out of fear that its voluntary nature would be seen as an avenue to mandatory rules that would diminish GRI’s ability to attract corporate members.

In contrast, in terms of the Table, governments are co-owners in the Kimberley Process that stems the flow of conflict diamonds.  However, the Process refers to them as “Participants”;  active business and NGO stakeholders are referred to as “observers” but are participants in terms of the Table. Participants and Observers meet in Plenary annually.

Not uncommonly, organizations are referred to as “members” officially, but have no formal decision-making power.  In fact, they are simply participants.  The Microcredit Summit Campaign refers to “members” as those who have done a variety of things, the most notable reporting for three years on their activity to support the Campaign’s goals.   However, the Campaign is legally a program of an NGO called Results Education Fund whose Board has legal authority (is the owner).  The Campaign Executive Committee consists of people who have agreed to be such at the request of staff, but its meetings are sporadic and advisory.

The fourth concept that often gets mixed with “membership” is really a financing strategy.  Some networks require that members pay dues.  However, often this obligation is restricted to, or  higher for, for-profit companies.  The Fair Labor Association, for example, has a sliding scale based upon the size of the company and with a minimum payment of $5,000.  The rationale for selecting only companies to pay is that they actually derive financial benefit for participation whereas for the NGOs participation is a net cost.

How does your network think of “partnership” and”membership”, and does it create any confusion?