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

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

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

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

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

A Human Dynamics and Multi-Sector Perspective

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

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

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

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

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

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/.

“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?