Some multi-stakeholder processes lose energy when they over-emphasize the importance of agreement.  A lethargy takes over and participants drift away because they believe these processes to be unproductive.  Others fall apart because people hold tightly onto their own perspectives and goals, allowing no room for integrating and transcending—and so participants leave believing that they are right and others wrong.  For Adam Kahane of Reos Partners, the first exemplifies a degenerative form of love, the second one of power.

Adam Kahane is a globally pre-eminent large and complex systems change practitioner.  He’s worked on such multi-stakeholder issues as climate change in Canada, civil discord in Guatemala and Colombia, child nutrition in India, and sustainable food globally.  Knowing him for a decade, one of the qualities I’ve always appreciated is his reflectiveness about his own work.  In his new book, Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change, he speaks of stumbling and falling…as well as walking.  And thereby reveals valuable insight for change networks.

Why focus on power and love?  “I’m trying to reclaim them as useful words,” he explains. “In most real settings, both of these drives are present. They are present at all scales – individuals, teams, organizations, sectors, societies.  By naming them I’m trying to make them more visible and discussable so people can work with them…and move back and forth between them fluidly.”

Power is about distinctness, individuality and action from that perspective.  Love is about union and joining together.   Adam cites Martin Luther King Jr.’s insight that  “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.”  Power associated with an individual or stakeholder group often is power “over” as in controlling and limiting, but it can also be power “to” as with self-realization and action.  Love is associated with the greater good;   it is generative when it nurtures and supports us to grow, and degenerative when it suffocates power and action.

Leadership, power and love

“In working with diverse groups,” says Adam, “it’s helpful to think of leadership as holding activity moving back and forth between power and love.  In most settings the starting point is power dominating love…people are doing their own thing without a sense of connection of understanding wholeness.  So the first moves must be love moves: moves to overcome separation.  Most multi-stakeholder practitioners know about the love moves…sitting in a circle, having people engage personally with one another, having people put forward and find connections between their different perspectives…these are all love moves that reunite the separated…as are integrative activities such as systems mapping, learning journeys, team-building and other unity-revealing activities.

“Look at a typical repertoire of a facilitator, and it’s dominated by love moves.  The danger and common stumbling point, is that we move from power dominating love to the opposite extreme of love dominating power, which is harder to see as a problem.  It shows up as togetherness stifling action…sentimental and anemic.  Such as when people say ‘its lovely meeting you, but we’re not getting anywhere and we’re not able to deal with our differences.’  At that point the leader must be as comfortable with power moves as with love moves.

“I’m amazed at how many groups say they can’t deal with difference…it is seen as threatening.   One of the crucial neglected competencies is to make power moves.  Two of the most well-known group processes superficially look similar…but world café (a conversation process) is a love move to integrate and create common thinking; (whereas) open space (a process of a group dividing into particular interests) is a power move.  Whenever anyone says ‘Actually I don’t see it that way, I want to go in a different direction.’ – that’s a power move.  Power moves articulate difference, and have it discussable and permissible and actionable.

“Love dominating power shows up as rejecting and ignoring difference…saying ‘you have to leave your own agenda at the door’  This is a terrible and fatal misunderstanding.  In the climate change work in Canada…we were not talking about non-partisan, but multi-partisan activity…not asking people to put aside their interests, but to bring their interests and see how to move together,” he recalls.

This fluidity must be integrated into the core logic of change networks by creating rhythms and cycles moving between love and power.  Power actions of division are exemplified with stakeholder groups meeting on their own to identify their needs, and with individual local teams taking local action.  The love actions of union involve bringing the diverse groups together to transcend their individual needs (incorporating them into something bigger), and project teams sharing their experiences and making themselves accountable to the community-wide perspectives.

“The mental model,” says Adam, “is that we’re dealing with problems that can be solved by thinking through, finding the answer, and moving into mechanical implementation…(that approach) is widespread and appropriate in some situations, but not in most complex, problematic social situations.  We need to keep shifting between power and love.”

You can also see and hear Adam

Last week’s blog began answering the question that many in multi-stakeholder change networks hear :  “So what is it you actually do?”  I wrote about the first two activities of such Global Action Networks (GANs) listed in the Table, and now I’ll explain more about the other four activities.

Networks, Learning and Research

Learning is a core part of most GANs’ work, since how to realize their goals is not always obvious and participants’ capacity to contribute to reaching them must be developed. However, GANs often have a remarkably underdeveloped sense of this work. At a meeting of GAN staff who had roles in developing knowledge and learning, they all said that they had very few resources and learning outcomes and strategies were poorly defined. Nevertheless, GANs put an enormous part of their resources into learning, when all the meetings and time in conversation to develop knowledge and capacity are taken into account.

Learning is a key activity of the Global Compact, as it develops lessons to share amongst companies on how the UN principles it promotes can be implemented. It is also a key activity of the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC), which similarly organizes participants into regional learning groups and shares lessons across them.

For the GANs in health care, research is a particularly important activity. Often this is a traditional type of research:  half of the Stop TB’s 10-year work plan concerns R&D for new vaccines. The GANs support collaborative development of this research, bringing together government, civil society, and commercial organizations with their distinctive expertise and capabilities.

Networks, Measuring and Certifying

Certification is a popular organizing strategy to realize change. Production of goods and services is assessed in terms of social, environmental, and economic standards, and GANs certify whether those standards have been met. The International Social and Environmental Accreditation and Labelling Alliance (ISEAL) is an association of GANs, including the Marine Stewardship Council, Social Accountability International, and the fair trade groups associated with the Fair Labelling Organization.

Several GANs make development of impact measurement frameworks and infrastructure a core part of their work. Although the Global Reporting Initiative does not actually get involved in measurement or certification, it develops the frameworks for companies to assess their impact in terms of social, economic, and environmental outcomes. And in fact, most ISEAL members do not actually do the certification, although they certify the certifiers. Transparency International also has an important measurement program, with its Corruption Perceptions Index that rates countries. And The Access Initiative’s (TAI’s) core strategy has to do with the broader measurement concept of “assessing” countries’ fulfillment of their commitments in the Rio Declaration to access to information, participation, and justice in environmental decision-making.

Networks and Financing

The Global Water Partnership (GWP) exemplifies a GAN formed by donors who want to give scale to their efforts by pooling financial resources. The network has been supported financially by many developed countries. For these funders, the GWP is an economical way to achieve the overall goals of promoting social equity, economic efficiency, and environmental sustainability, by improving the way water is managed and developed.

This pooling of financial resources is at the heart of most of the health GANs, like the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. The latter is financially by far the largest of any GAN: in the 8 years following its 2002 founding it had approved funding of US$ 19.3 billion for more than 572 programs in 144 countries.

As well the GAN structure often facilitates approaching funders.  For example, GANs can put together proposals that cover a much larger geographic area and be of a much large scale than their individual participants or regional components.  This can make them more attractive to the funders.

Networks and Advocating

GANs’ advocating strategy usually resembles a co-learning approach across traditional divides, rather than a traditional lobbying and pressuring strategy. This is demonstrated by TAI. TAI takes a learning approach when conducting “assessments” of governments’ performance vis-à-vis their commitments to provide access to information, participation, and justice in environmental decision-making.

Although NGOs are in control of TAI, “TAI members recognize that governments are not monolithic; they are filled with allies and opponents,” comments Joe Foti, TAI Associate. This leads to a diversity of TAI advocacy strategies with the goal of governments co-participating in the actual process of assessing. TAI country coalitions find that it usually helps to conduct the assessments in close relationship with a supportive government agency, such as the national Ministry of Environment that is usually weak on finance, political power, and science. In Thailand the TAI coalition includes an institute sponsored by the King of Thailand, which gives it legitimacy in government eyes. And in Africa, the TAI-Cameroon representative was actually asked to advocate to other governments and speak on his government’s behalf at a UNEP Governing Council meeting on access to information, participation, and justice in environmental decision-making.

Of course GANs integrate these six strategies. For example, The Climate Group focuses in particular on bringing together local and state/provincial governments and business. One project demonstrates the effectiveness of outdoor LED lighting with city government. This requires bringing together LED experts, financial institutions to finance the city’s investments, and local government. Bjorn Roberts, Corporate Partnership Manager for The Climate Group comments: “We make (climate change) a compelling topic for all, and put it on their agenda. The conversations don’t happen unless people are put together.” Through The Climate Group, a local city project becomes a global pilot. It combines the strategies of shared visioning of green cities, system organizing by bringing together the diverse partners, learning with the pilot, financing through developing new financial instruments, and advocating with other cities to follow the pilot.

This table aims to provide an analytical tool for networks to ask questions about their own strategies.  What are they doing in each area?  Which ones are they strong in?  Which ones should they develop further.  I hope you find it helpful!

“So what is it you actually do?” is a common question of anyone who works in a multi-stakeholder change network like a Global Action Network (GAN).  Building on work done with others, I now answer that there are six particular functions for such networks that fall under their broad role as change agents.  A network usually does more than one, but focuses on only one or two.

These are summarized in the Table, and the first two are discussed further. This Table can be used to assess a network’s activities.  Is it using all the activities?  If not, why not?  Does it need to do all of them? Which activities is it particularly good at?  Which should it strengthen?  How?

Shared Visioning

This is associated not just with a visionary statement, but also a statement of principles and ways to operationalize that vision.  However, this vision is never really “complete”.  The vision needs continual renewal with new participants as they join.  Also, the vision continues to develop as GANs operationalize it and give it greater precision and meaning.

The visioning is often associated with putting an issue on “the global agenda” – making it something people take up as an issue and challenge.  The Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict, for example, put “conflict prevention” with NGOs as well as governments having a key role, on the global agenda.

The visioning activity also engages people and organizations that are not participants in the GANs, typically through “campaigns”.  The Climate Group organizes big events with big names at strategic moments.  For example, it organized Climate Week in New York four months in advance of the Copenhagen Climate Summit, with the UN, the City, business leaders, the Carbon Disclosure Project and others.  Participants included the Secretary General of the UN with former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.

For the Principles in Responsible Investment (PRI), this is represented by the six principles themselves. The opening statement of the principles refers to “…act(ing) in the best long-term interests of our beneficiaries” as an over-all vision.  One of the PRI principles that follows is “We (signatories) will incorporate environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) issues into investment analysis and decision-making processes.”  What that means in actual action is a key part of PRI’s work.  PRI gives an illustration on its web-site of seven types of action this can involve.  The initial vision-setting can take considerable time and effort, as described in the next chapter on development stages.

System Organizing

System organizing is a key, on-going piece of almost all GANs’ work.  It involves creating links (bridging “structural holes” in the words of social network analyst Ron Burt) that facilitate gaining scale and exchanges of knowledge and resources.  Perhaps most importantly the links and GANs as a platform provide opportunities for coordination among sub-groups, and the critical overall development of “coherence” (improved alignment of network participants’ efforts for change as discussed in an earlier blog).

This can vary with the GAN’s particular development stage and shifting priorities.  For Ecoagriculture Partners, organizing was an initial driver, then people realized that their needed to be greater clarity about what it wanted participants to actually do, and increasing numbers of participants was put on the back burner for a while.  A GAN might stall in its push for system organizing, and essentially become a “club” for a small group of organizations in more of a partnership-like mode.

Ernst Ligteringen, Chief Executive of the Global Reporting Initiative points to the importance of system organizing, saying:  “It is really being multi-stakeholder, building bridges, helping different groups to understand each other.   There’s still a big gulf between civil society and business.   In the mainstream the views are still informed by prejudices and vie from one’s own constituencies rather than experience working with the other.”

System organizing is also associated with questions about governance renewal.  As a GAN grows, it must find new ways of engaging increasing numbers of participants in the decision-making processes.

The other four functions will be discussed next week.

If you are starting or working in a network, you should use new mapping technologies to “see the whole”.  Knowing who is working in your field and their relationships is key for good strategy.  In a previous blog, I briefly introduced several mapping technologies.  Now I’ll give more details about one of the easier and quicker ways to map:  using web crawls.   They give a view of the structure of the “virtual (digital) world”, that is becoming an increasingly good description of “real world” relationships as the internet develops.

“Hyper-links” embedded in organizations’ web-sites that link to another organization’s site can be gathered through web crawls of internet sites.  A map such as in the diagrams below can then be generated to describe organizations’ virtual relationships.

I did this with the Global Organizational Learning and Development Network (GOLDEN), using the Issue Crawler developed by Richard Rogers at the University of Amsterdam.  The mapping was driven by the GOLDEN goals in terms of key stakeholder groups.  It aims to bring together leading academic research centers and businesses to spur attainment of sustainability.  The issue arena can be labeled “academic-corporate interactions for corporate sustainable responsibility (CSuR)”. The founders speak in terms of engaging 50 research centers and 250 corporations within a short time.  “Community organizing” is not framed as a goal, but it is an implicit activity to realize the goal.

Network Development Rule 1

Rule number one in initiating a network is to understand that someone is always already working in the issue arena…and to identify them if possible.  As in most cases, some of the leaders in the issue arena are among the founders of the new network—although they’re all academic CSuR leaders.  And as is also true in most cases in global networks, they are mainly older white men (like me!).  To realize a global network with all the complexions that implies for the issue, mapping can help enormously.

Issue crawls begin by identifying key URLs – referred to as “seed URLs” – relevant to your issue arena. In this case, I identified networks of organizations of two major stakeholder groups that are working CSuR.  First to note is that the issue arena is already quite crowded:  I identified 9 existing academic-business CSuR networks including ABIS, GRLI and UNPRME.  Also I identified 14 business CSuR networks including Business for Social Responsibility, the International Business Leaders Forum and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.

Using these 23 seeds to conduct crawls produces data about URL connections and maps that display connections visually.  Some notes on “reading” the maps:

• Always remember you are looking at the virtual (digital) world of relationships.  Although it increasingly aligns with the real world, particularly for global issues, idiosyncrasies remain.  For example, educational institutions are much more reticent to link to external URLs than, for example, NGOs.  And some simply have much less developed web-sites in this regard…EABIS, for example, does not have outlinks;  GRLI has outlinks, but not for its institutional partners (but note that importance of a URL is suggested by inlinks –  links directed at it from other URLs).
• Nodes are sized according to the number of inlinks .
• Nodes’ relative locations are the product of their links and those of others in the network (nodes they are “closest to”).
• The maps here are all co-link ones which means they show nodes with two or more links in the network.  As well, they display the top 200 nodes’ links for the seed URLs (there are actually only 112-118 nodes in these maps, since some nodes have multiple links).
• In these maps I’ve color-coded the seed URLs for each map:  red for the academic-business networks, green for the business CSuR networks, and purple for multi-stakeholder networks (explained below).

In Map 1 (click on the map to enlarge) only eight of the seed URLs are among the top 200 nodes.  The map suggests two centers (clustering of big nodes):  one around intergovernmental organizations like the UN and World Bank, and another around multi-stakeholder networks, in particular the Global Compact and the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI).  This leads me to do additional runs that:

1. Exclude the IGOs…I perceive them as “background noise” that is masking the relationships in the issue arena I want to describe;  and
2. Include as seeds the URLs of multi-stakeholder networks’ (Global Action Networks’…GANs’) that are clearly working in the issue arena:  the Global Compact, the Principles for Responsible Investment, the Global Reporting Initiative and Transparency International.

Map 2 is a run excluding the IGOs.  It shows the business CSuR (green) nodes as central, the academic-business CSUR (red) seeds as fewer and more peripheral (suggesting the importance for them of their linkage to IGOs rather than business CSuR networks), and reinforces the idea that the GANs should be included because of their centrality and size.

Map 3 also includes the GANs as seeds (purple). We can see that there are more academic-business (red) and business CSuR (green) network seeds (10), which also supports the decision to include GANs and exclude IGOs.  The seeds for the business CSuR networks and GANs group, which would be expected as they tend to link to each other and the same organizations.

The Map 3 academic-business CSuR networks (red) are comparatively small, non-central and dispersed; three are really part of an educational grouping that suggests their orientation towards educational institutions is significant stronger than towards businesses (if they were balanced, you’d expect to see them with the GANs);  the two Asian ones are quite different with Asian associations.

Each of these maps is accompanied by several types of data-base outputs summarized in this excel spreadsheet.  For example, Columns B-C list all the nodes in the network (I set the maximum at 600 nodes) by inlinks;  another data output even gives lists by web-page, to identify locations/people within large organizations that are relevant.

In a run using snowball analysis (rather than co-link) the crawl retains URLs with at least one link from seeds.  Run with the three stakeholder groups, this produced a list of 5317 URLs (Column D).  And other maps show these by geography which more helps identify, for example, research centers in China. GOLDEN is particularly interested in particular geographies, like China.  More runs can be done for China in particular, and using Chinese-language web-sites.

Web Issue Hyper-Link Crawls and Strategy

So here are some ways all this work helps strategically.  It gives:

1. A feel for the domain structure…the “ecology” of relationships.  Who is dominant?  What are the groupings that are important to understand for success?  The maps help create a network perspective, by giving a visual association with the abstract “space” in which an initiative is working.
2. Strategic options…who to partner with and “reweave” the nodes so they can realize a network’s goals.  Everyone has their own “network” of relationships, but how do we broaden this perspective and who should we prioritize to engage?  GOLDEN’s founding academics obviously want to partner with corporations.  But should they do this by weaving together existing networks?  By going directly to corporations?  Some combination…and if so what?  The data bases are particularly helpful in identifying potential partners.  They include many education institutions and corporations and their linkages, to help identify who would likely be most interested in becoming involved in GOLDEN, and who would come with the richest network.  The snowball crawl, for example, identifies 5317 potential partners…although only a small fraction of these will be of interest to GOLDEN, it is a universe of options that is much more comprehensive than traditional snowball methods.  Should the IGOs be actively considered as partners?
3. Strategic clarity…what would you like the issue arena/map to look like after your intervention?  What are the “holes” in the map where relationships should be forged?  Today the map does not have “GOLDEN”;  what would the map look like in three years time if GOLDEN is successful?  This has an “impact evaluation” suggestion, thinking that GOLDEN’s inlinkage placement on the map in a few years can be one way of assessing its success.  As well, this helps guide questions about partnering priorities and web-site development.
4. Communications…who are the gatekeepers? Who should GOLDEN “get on board” to facilitate communications?  Naturally enough, many nodes concern communications.  This includes social media web-sites, publishing ones and traditional media ones.  This is very useful for development of a communications strategy.
5. Other…there is much useful information.  For example, maps show foundations and resource-organizations working in the issue, to help define a funding strategy.

Of all the benefits, however, perhaps the greatest is simply helping people to think more in network terms.  Although not as helpful in this regard as something like value network analysis, web crawls are a great step forward.  And of course if you’re interested in me helping you apply these types of analyses to your situation, email me!

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.

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[1] A protected experimental space where the usual rules and procedures of the sponsoring organization do not apply.

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.

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?

Networks aiming for large systems change go through development stages as they grow and move from initiation to realizing their potential.  But throughout these stages, there are three particular dynamics important to nurture across these stages.

First Network Dynamic:  Community Development

These days the terms network weaving and boundary spanning are often presented as new concepts.  But for anyone like myself who has a pre-internet history in systems change, the term community development gets at the essence of what network development is about.  Some people might resist community development because they think of it as “geographic”, but this was never a necessary quality.  Global Action Networks are community organizers – it’s just that their community is global.

I like “community development” because it’s grounded in a very rich history of strategies and activities that are very adaptable to network development.  Moreover, framing a network as a “community” emphasizes its human rather than technical qualities that are the essence of healthy networks.

Community development starts with understanding who is in the community.  At the beginning, this is often more complicated that it might seem.  For the Global Finance Initiative we spent significant time analyzing this with mapping processes to identify key stakeholder groups and organizations/networks within each of those stakeholder groups.

As a network develops it brings out participants’ common interests and builds a common sense of purpose that are essential to successful networks.  One key outcome is enhanced understanding of inter-dependence. A second key outcome is enhanced coherence. This is a really important systems thinking concept that describes the process of creating alignment among the stakeholders towards a common vision.  By increasing stakeholders’ contact with one another, they understand and begin integrating diverse perspectives and developing shared activities.

Second Network Dynamic:  Deep Change

Colleague Otto Scharmer of Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed the Deep Change figure to describe transformational change processes.  This followed interviewing over 150 thought leaders on innovation and leadership. Social change networks are about realizing this type of profound change with their diverse participants.

The process is sometimes referred to as the “U process” because of the shape of the figure.  It begins with “co-sensing” to develop a collective understanding of “the current situation” with respect to an issue that appears “stuck”, complicated, and of high complexity.   Scenario development and other processes help people realize particular patterns that can make sense of diverse perspectives.  For large systems, this initially might take a year or two.

This moves people into co-inspiring, what Otto also refers to as “presencing”.  It is so central for him that he has established the Presencing Institute and some of the great open source online resources like the U toolbook. Presencing requires a process such as a retreat where people can get in touch with what might be and what is possible to “emerge” from “what is”.  This might take six months to a year.

The next stage is the “co-creating” which is my particular focus with networks as vehicles for this:  development of the strategies, relationships, resources, skills, structures, processes, and cultures to support responses to the network issue.  This involves fundamental realignment of power relationships that are deeply challenging to traditional organizations and individuals.  For global impact, this takes a couple of decades or more.

This approach guided the development of the change network called the Sustainable Food Lab.  This change process involves significant “shifts” in power and relationships amongst individuals, organizations and with society as a whole.  It is a process that I describe as “societal learning and change”.

Third Dynamic:  Experiential Learning

Experiential learning processes are the third dynamic present throughout change networks’ development.  Sometimes people refer to Scharmer’s dynamic as one of “learning from the future”, which means going through a process of deep reflection upon the current state, possibilities to address some issue and how to realize those possibilities.  Traditional learning is about learning from experience and the past.  This is often referred to as the “experiential” or “Kolb” learning cycle.  It draws from work of John Dewey, Kurt Lewin and others that David Kolb summarized.

This is the essence of creating a learning network as processes and a culture that encourage reflection upon what has been done, and integration into future actions.  This should not be thought of as a great chore or require some huge effort.  Rather, it is something that is integrated into the daily, weekly, monthly and annual rhythms of a network.  I like the term “action learning” to emphasize that there are not huge gaps between the steps in the cycle, but that they should happen as decisions are being made.

The health of these three dynamics is developed through a variety of activities.  Assessing their health should be part of assessing the health of a change network itself.