“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

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 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.

When John Ruggie was describing his work with the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to reduce corporate-related human rights abuses, I couldn’t help thinking “do we really need another global network on this issue?  Would it be better to think about possibilities of them working together more closely?  Is this simply another case of ‘government’ wanting to “be in charge’, and resistant to joining others?  Or are the current networks too tied to their own identities to look at the bigger change opportunity?”

The UNHRC takes its definition of Human Rights from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948.  It presents a broad definition, including rights to education, to work, and to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being.

Competitors?

Is this definition sufficiently relevant to the numerous existing global, multi-stakeholder networks that are working on human rights issues with a particular focus upon corporations? Also in the broad arena are:

• The UN Global Compact, distinguished by its UN leadership, and its focus upon development of a “learning space” for corporations to integrate 10 principles into their operations including human rights and labor standards principles.
• The Global Reporting Initiative, distinguished by the formal absence of government and GRI’s work to create a framework integrating all others, for corporations to report their social, environmental and economic impacts.

In the labor rights arena, there are:

• The International Labour Organization, distinguished by its formal government participation in addition to NGOs, labour and business that make up others;
• Social Accountability International, distinguished by a workplace/plant-level certification strategy;
• The Fair Labor Association, distinguished by a buyer-driven strategy of American universities that want the goods they sell to meet certain standards;
• The Ethical Trading Initiative, distinguished by a strategy focusing upon supply chains of major corporations.

And then there’re other networks that could easily move into this arena, like Transparency International with its concerns about corporate corruption.

Time to Reassess Development Stage?

The question about current powerful options for reducing corporate-related human rights abuses is related to how the “issue domain” is analyzed in terms of its “development stage”.  In this case, its development stage of the “issue domain” (human rights and corporations) rather than the individual networks.  The networks began by focusing on distinct “pieces” of the emerging global puzzle…they’ve been experimenting with and developing particular strategies for over a decade (with the exception of the ILO, founded in 1919).

Maybe now is the moment for the networks to reassess their learnings and strategies, and to think how to really scale up for impact.  That doesn’t necessarily mean a merger which in many ways is contrary to “network thinking”…it might be best to have relatively distinct strategies and networks, but with a collective understanding of how they relate and their “piece” of the puzzle.  This is already happening to some extent with the GRI-Compact relationship.

In an organization world, the interests of organizations as institutions are dominant.  In a world of multi-stakeholder global networks, the vision for a field is dominant and the question of “role” is central.  What roles do we need played for the human rights-and-corporations domain to be healthy?  Undoubtedly the lessons from networks to date would reveal these, and provide the basis for developing a more effective collective strategy.  One way to get at this role question is through Value Network Analysis.

As the networks push for membership expansion, the NGOs and corporations in them are going to increasingly raise the questions about why there are so many and why they would want to participate in several networks.  That question was the original drive behind the founding of the GRI with respect to triple bottom line reporting.

This suggests that perhaps the key intervention of the UNHRC is to create greater “coherence” and “alignment” of these numerous initiatives.  It could convene them around the shared elements of their visions…and be a joiner and part of a greater movement, rather than the old-fashioned “lead and control” thinking that often makes government such a difficult partner.

Core Competencies for Networks: Webinar March 31 9am EST, 3pm CET

Global Networks in China: Webinar April 7

If you were given 10 million euros and three to five years, how would you go about “changing the role of the financial system to better serve economic, social and environmental objectives”?  The EU is asking that question.  And that’s something that I’ve been answering with a consortium of more that 20 European universities. Our proposal went in last week.

For me, all this builds on the work of the Global Finance Initiative that I led.  Scaling Impact’s Sanjeev Khagram and I were convinced of the need for a multi-stakeholder Global Action Network (GAN) in the global finance arena that would take on the very issue the EU is asking with an EU focus.  Starting in January 2008 – just before the financial crisis and with $185,000 from Ford Foundation – we analyzed the global financial arena by further developing mapping methodologies and putting together a stewardship team that came up with a clear action strategy.

But we couldn’t get money for the next phase…because the financial crisis shrank foundations’ budgets and visions!

One exciting aspect about the EU Call is that they clearly want what I’d call a societal learning and change strategy…where financial system stakeholders will work together to (1) gain important new knowledge and perspectives that will change the way they think about the financial system, and (2) develop new social ties that provide for on-going development of new ideas, strategies, structures, and processes with regards to the financial system.

In other words, the goal of the Call is not simply to produce new reports, books and ideas…it’s about making sure the new knowledge is “held” by stakeholders and that they have the vision and relationships to further it.

The Proposal

The proposal to the EU was put together with leadership of the European Academy for Business in Society and Maurizio Zollo, Director of the Center for Research on Organization and Management at Bocconi University in Milan.  It proposes conventional research by an inter-university faculty to investigate from a multi-disciplinary perspective the historic financial system dynamics with comprehensive analysis of the reasons for the financial crisis.

But the project also proposes an action research strategy that includes:

1. Mapping social structures and developing a holistic computer model that simulates cross-system (finance-environment-social-economic-political) and cross-level (local-to-global) interdependences. This contrasts with the narrow product- and firm-level simulations used by finance that contributed to the financial crisis.
2. Engaging stakeholders. A stakeholder council will include financiers, policy makers, regulators and social-, labor-, consumer-, and environmental-activists working on finance issues.  With the researchers, the councillors will co-lead the project and engage their respective constituencies. This will be supported by an innovative social media strategy.
3. Scenario-building. Through stakeholder engagement with small focus groups around the world and larger European ones, plausible alternative futures will be developed.
4. Experimenting. Working with financial firms and other stakeholders, new approaches to such things as decision-making and product development will be tested.

Each of these four actions will further develop methodologies that will be very helpful to other network change strategies.

This approach, like the strategy proposed by the GFI, builds on the experience of GANs and the World Commission on Dams in particular.  The WCD was a 1997-2000 multi-stakeholder process to create comprehensive guidelines for the building of large dams in response to environmental and social disasters associated with large dams funded by the World Bank.  Although the diverse Commissioners reached consensus in a final report, it did not translate into agreement among the broader stakeholders‘ community, and responsibility for next steps was delegated to the UNEP that proved incapable administratively or authoritatively to effect pursuit of the Commission‘s work.

The response to the EU Call aims to overcome the WCD short-coming with its more comprehensive activities and explicitly creating stakeholder connections that can carry on the work.

How would you address the financial crisis as a large-system change challenge?