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.

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.

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[1] Patton, M. Q. (2010). Development Innovation:  Applying Complexity Concepts to Enhance Innovation and Use. New York, NY, USA, Guilford Press.

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/.