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/.