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/.

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.

I was leading discussion by a half dozen executive directors of Global Action Networks on the topic of competencies critical to success when we turned to the question of resource mobilization.  I was surprised that none of the leaders thought of financing as a major issue for them, in comparison to the other competencies.

“But what if you think about barriers to your network really flourishing and realizing its goals?” I asked.  That moved the issue of financing to the top of the list of challenges.

The question of financing is wrapped up with stage of development discussed last week and featured in a webinar March 3.  At early stages, less money is required and the question is about finding a venture investor to explore possibilities.  Later stages require more funds and a sustainable business model.

Gathering finance information is very complicated for a network, since it requires defining what part of the network the data cover. As networks develop, most increasingly depend upon sub-parts (regional, particular program) raising their own funds.  In May last year I surveyed 11 networks[1] ranging from 8 to 15 years of age with the initial question:

What was the total income (revenue) that came to/through the Secretariat for the most recent fiscal year including funds that may have gone to other parts of the network?

The response ranged from $500,000 to $11.4 million, with the average of $3.6 million.

Sources of Income

But the finance question is also wrapped up in strategy.  Being multi-stakeholder, the networks could be expected to have tax-based contributions from government, civil society-based funding from foundations and revenue generation from services and fees.  Table 1 gives responses to the question:

Please indicate the approximate percent of funds that flow to/through the Secretariat that come from the following sources.

Most networks perceived potential conflicts of interest with business revenue generation.  One way the Global Compact addresses this is with a foundation to receive business donations;  the foundation does not fund core Secretariat costs, but only the broader network.

Reasons for Funding

Strategy also raises Secretariat-network relationship questions.  For example, Transparency International Secretariat’s role in putting together up to 30 National Chapters for joint funding proposals has recently increased dramatically from less than €1 million a year to more than €5 million.  Table 2 gives responses to the question:

Please indicate the approximate percent of the types of funding/reasons for funding.

These global networks are all really producing “global public goods”…something funded at the national level through taxes.  Substantial global network funding comes through taxes with funding from donor agencies like DFID and multilaterals like the World Bank.  However, as Ernest Ligteringen who heads up the Global Reporting Initiative commented to me, it is fitting a round peg in a square hole.  A much more robust solution must be found to do the important work of global public good financing with categorical national tax transfers or a global tax.

What are your experiences with financing?  What sort of more robust solutions should we strive for?

We depend on networks to voluntarily provide information like this, for on-going development.  If your network is not listed below as a participant in the survey, please have someone fill out the survey by clicking here.  Data is for the 2008 fiscal year, and individual responses remain confidential.  The survey takes only an hour.