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Addressing the World’s Critical Issues as Complex Change Challenges:
The state-‐of-‐the-‐field
By: Steve Waddell
NetworkingAction – Principal
Ecosystems Labs – Lead Steward
July 30, 2014
This paper’s development was initiated and financed by the World Bank. It was also supported by the GOLDEN Ecosystems Labs and benefited from a project supported through ENEL Foundation’s
project Towards A New Sustainable Business Model For Energy Companies.
July 30, 2014
The Report Authorship
This report is produced with the support of the World Bank and a team that includes the author who is with NetworkingAction and the Ecosystems Labs; Ceren Ozer with the World Bank and the Ecosystems Labs; and Joe Hsueh of SecondMuse, the Academy for Systemic Change and the Ecosystems Labs. A broader Advisory Team, not directly involved in this report but certainly influential in its development, included Peter Senge with MIT, the Academy for Systemic Change and the Society for Organizational Learning; Otto Scharmer with MIT, The Prescencing Institute and the Academy for Systemic Change and others from the Bank.
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Table of Contents Executive Summary ..................................................................................................................................................................... 1 Introduction .................................................................................................................................................................................... 3 What are “Complex Change Challenges”? .......................................................................................................................... 5
Complex challenges involve transformational change ..................................................................................... 5 Complex change involves radical innovation ....................................................................................................... 7 Issue boundaries are unclear and multi-‐stakeholder ....................................................................................... 8 Dynamics are non-‐linear ............................................................................................................................................... 8 The issue is not “controllable”; “solutions” are “emergent” .......................................................................... 8 Complex change involves contradiction, ambiguity, paradox, and transcendence ............................. 8 Action choices are opportunity, power-‐ and value-‐driven ............................................................................. 9
What is “the Field of Complex Change” ............................................................................................................................... 9 A field stakeholders ......................................................................................................................................................... 9 A multi-‐disciplinary and expanding tradition ...................................................................................................... 9 Emerging core terms ..................................................................................................................................................... 12
The Strategies and Methods ................................................................................................................................................... 14 Strategy development ................................................................................................................................................... 14 Learning infrastructure ................................................................................................................................................ 15 Frameworks of methods .............................................................................................................................................. 16
Challenges to field development .......................................................................................................................................... 19 Coherence, comprehensiveness and identity ..................................................................................................... 19 Profile with problem owners and funders ........................................................................................................... 20 Mindsets and institutions, from expert to co-‐creator ..................................................................................... 20 Knowledge and methods ............................................................................................................................................. 21 From change initiatives to change systems ......................................................................................................... 22
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 23
Attachment A: Individuals Consulted ............................................................................................................................... 24 Attachment B: Organizations Responding to the Survey ......................................................................................... 26 Attachment C: Expertise ......................................................................................................................................................... 27
Bibliography ................................................................................................................................................................................. 32
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Executive Summary At least billions of dollars are being spent annually to address challenges around the world that require complex change strategies. Ending poverty, addressing climate change, tackling civil and cross-‐border war, action on food security, meeting health challenges, and dealing with environmental degradation are all examples of complex change challenges. And yet, most action to address these complex challenges occurs without meaningful guidance from leading complex change knowledge and methods. Rather, it occurs by-‐and-‐large with streams of investment and action that is grounded in experience with what are called simple and complicated change approaches.
The clear benefit of using leading complex change knowledge is greater efficacy of effort and investment. There are good examples of this (see Box 3 and Appendix A). However, that knowledge and its associated tools and methods are being under-‐utilized because understanding about them is still low, they are highly fragmented between diverse knowledge traditions, and they require shifts in mindsets and approaches from expert-‐based to participant-‐based action that requires different skills.
This report creates frameworks to guide development of the field, but these frameworks require further development. They include frameworks for: • defining “complex change challenge” and its distinctive elements, • the knowledge traditions that have important knowledge, methods and tools; • describing the state-‐of-‐the-‐field in terms of structures; • a way to think about complex change strategies that includes not just the usual collaboration-‐
based ones but also the confrontation-‐oriented ones; and • creating typologies of the methods and tools, emphasizing the value of multiple typologies.
A surprising finding is the number of organizations, networks and platforms that this investigation identified that are actively working in the field of complex change. Notably, they do not act like traditional “consulting” organizations, but rather are dominantly mission-‐driven and networks. This undoubtedly reflects characteristics that are necessary to work successful on complex change issues. Distinctions between clients and providers, experts and practitioners become blurred.
The report identifies core impediments that must be addressed to advance the field of complex change. It shows considerable promise, but it needs to be developed as a field. There is no “there there” and the report project team struggled with a variety of terms before complex change challenges emerged as the key phrase. This was chosen because it describes the distinctive sub-‐set of challenges being addressed with what is believed to be a powerful framework presented in Table 1. Peter Senge commented in one meeting that developing common language is critical; this is necessary to develop a common identity and coherence across the rich traditions that have been emerging particularly actively in the last two decades. With common language and identity comes great possibility to marshal the scale, diversity and sophistication of effort that today is only a potential.
This lack of identity is the source of the impediment of a lack of profile with problem owners and funders: they simply do not “see” the complex change field and therefore do not recognize that they are often using inappropriate strategies and tools for addressing complex change challenges. Perhaps an equally big issue is the difficulty funders have in working with a complex challenge stance: there is a need for greater engagement as a peer, rather than as the final decision-‐maker. Part of funders’ difficulties arise from the need to develop assessment methodologies appropriate for complex challenges: traditional project-‐based planning methods undermine effort. Although there are some new assessment methods emerging, a significant effort is needed to further develop them.
One way of thinking of what is needed is to reflect on the history of addressing complex challenges: at one time, individual organizations were made responsible for them, then multi-‐stakeholder platforms. What is needed today is to move to developing “change systems”, comprising organizations and platforms.
This report is descriptive rather than prescriptive. Thoughts about how to address these field development challenges are the topic of a separate report.
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Addressing the World’s Critical Issues as Complex Change Challenges: The state-‐of-‐the-‐field
Introduction There is “an explosion of interest in complex systems science as a field,” reports Yaneer Bar-‐Yam, President of the New England Complex Systems Institute. His observation is echoed by others engaged in this report’s development, although they might name the field as transformation, transitions, resilience, radical innovation, whole systems change, paradigm shifts, or wicked/messy/intransigent problem-‐solving. This explosion of interest is linked to the growing urgency and scale of challenges such as poverty, climate change and environmental degradation that many see as threatening the very basis of our civilization, and the seeming inability of traditional approaches to address them. A promising option is to harness and advance emerging approaches that are referred to here as the field of “complex change”.
This is an initial investigation into the state-‐of-‐the-‐field. Given the early stage of the field’s development and the resources for this report, the aim is to provide draft frameworks to describe the field with an elementary identification of core concepts, knowledge, tools and structures, including identification of leading individuals and organizations in the field; and priorities to address to advance the field’s development.
This report is based on the lead author’s knowledge of the field, three dozen interviews with leading experts, practitioners and others working on complex changes as well as participants in an Advisory Group and two, two-‐day meetings (Attachment A), and a survey completed by 36 organizations working in the arena (Attachment B, Box 2). This was supplemented by more informal conversations and review of publications and web-‐sites. Sources were identified through the author’s extended network and referrals from it and those contacted. The aim was to be “illustrative” rather than claim to be “comprehensive”. The intention is to include diverse traditions, but the sources are almost entirely from Europe-‐North America. The survey methodology certainly does not provide for
Box 1: A View from an OECD Working Paper “…current configurations of large technology and innovation systems in areas like energy, food, transport, health may not deliver the change in growth models that are needed in time to avoid the bleak scenarios. This is why “system innovation” matters – to make the systems that underpin economic and human activity more resilient, equitable and sustainable for the future.” (Geels 2013) p.2
Box 2: The Organizations Surveyed The organizations surveyed are ones that are actively involved in knowledge, capacity development and action to address complex challenges. Of the 36 respondent organizations, 25 were ones with staff experts number in the median range of 11-‐20, but some were situated in large organizations such as the German aid agency GIZ; 11 considered themselves membership or participant based with 3 having 40-‐249 expert participants and 3 having up to 1000.
They identified with the following roles as “core to their identity”: • Complex issue owner – 37% • Consultancy – 53% • Training and education – 56% • Action researcher – 31% • Research – other 18% • Association of members – 27% • Funder – 11% • Community of practice – 38%
All but 5 were founded since 1980; 19 were founded since 2000.
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Box 3: Examples of Complex Change Illustrative examples of complex change approaches are presented below. All made extensive use of visioning methods associated with multi-‐stakeholder and systems development processes.
Health: The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria
Before the Fund was established, programs to address the diseases in Southern countries were wholly inadequate. They were organized with a classic hierarchical structure: national governments were responsible for their implementation and funding, which was received in significant part for many Southern countries from Northern donors who did little coordination. The Fund was established in 2002 with the transformational vision of “a world free of AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. It brings together stakeholders (donors, implementers including governments and NGOs, and other agencies) into a global structure of peer relationships. Rather than giving money to national governments, funds are disbursed with Country Coordinating Mechanisms: representatives of local groups who are stakeholder in the issue. This has transformed power relationships and efficiencies in 140 participating countries, with over $30 billion disbursed, 6.1 million people on AIDS antiretroviral therapy, 11.2 million people tested and treated for TB, and over 360 million anti-‐malaria nets distributed; the operating budget is $306 million (2012 figures). The Fund represents a new type of global organization that addresses complex challenges, called Global Action Networks (Waddell 2011).
Conflict Resolution: Northern Ireland
Strife in Northern Ireland made the country an economic basket case and severely threatened individuals’ security from the 1970s for over two decades. Today, although some conflict continues, the situation is transformed into one where economic and security issues are similar to most OECD countries. The change resulted from an array of initiatives involving mainly civil society and government: political options, righting injustice and inequity, conflict transformation, cross-‐community dialogue, and managing diversity. They led to structural and systemic change, as well as changes in attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors. These collectively have made an important contribution to the definition of processes to address pernicious conflict (Fitzduff and Williams 2007).
Climate Change and Energy: Re-‐Amp
Re-‐Amp comprises over 160 NGOs and foundations in eight American mid-‐west states that are halting new coal plants, heightening efficiency standards, increasing renewable energy sources, and realizing transportation policy changes. Since its founding in 2005, the participants have created system coherence: they have realized focus, alignment, synergies and efficiencies in efforts. They have created eight shared strategies in three focus areas: electricity, transportation and carbon policy. Some foundations fund one strategy, some multiple. One method instrumental with coherence development is strategic clarity mapping (Ritichie-‐Dunham and Rabbino 2001)The network has transformed funder-‐grantee relationships into a peer planning, action and learning group with a comprehensive view of the clean energy landscape (Energy 2011; Grant 2010).
Food and Agriculture: The Sustainable Food Lab
The Sustainable Food Lab (SFL) is a transformation platform exploring innovative ways to shift food sustainability from niche to the mainstream. It represents an example of social innovation labs (Hassan 2014) that integrate many methodologies. It began in 2002 with multi-‐stakeholder strategies applying the U-‐Process and Social Lab frameworks, as developed by the Presencing Institute and Reos respectively (Scharmer 2009). Over the next several years, the SFL evolved from an idea to an ongoing programme, involving a wide variety of influential international stakeholders and leaders from across the food system. It has resulted in a number of activities that are “tipping” the agriculture and food system to integrate sustainability in social terms (eg: integrating small farmers into supply chains) and environmental terms (mitigation of green house gases) within a sustainable economic framework (SFL 2014; Sweitzer 2006).
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scientifically rigorous conclusions about the state of the art; rather, it provides data and aims to propose frameworks for further development. The report audience is World Bank staff, those contacted in the research and others interested in advancing the field of complex change.
What are “Complex Change Challenges”? We can see attempts to grapple with complex challenges all around us: natural disasters such as in Haiti; the Kyoto process; war in the Middle East; food security; and degradation of oceans to name a few. Sometimes referred to academically and increasingly popularly as messy, intransigent, meta-‐ or wicked problems, complex change challenges have some common characteristics. David Snowden has a model that helps distinguish complex change challenges from simple, complicated and chaotic ones. This is adapted in Figure 1.
Simple challenges are ones that well-‐defined knowledge can address with engagement of relatively few players. They lend themselves highly routinized responses that can be managed with a hierarchical system, such as one for reporting potholes to an agency (eg: municipal government) that will send out someone to fill them. Planning usually consists of ensuring availability of skills and resources within relatively predictable, narrowly and precisely defined parameters.
Complicated challenges are ones where there is a desired outcome defined by physical, observable outcomes, but require the efforts by a large number of organizations, each of which has only a small piece of the “solution”. Putting a person on the moon required working through many definable engineering challenges and the development of a network of many organizations. Planning is much less precise than for simple challenges since the work involves development of new relationships (coordination) and new technologies (technological innovation) where there are significant unknowns to address.
Chaotic challenges are ones where no patterns can be discerned and therefore action is driven by instinct and planning is impossible. When a natural disaster strikes, the immediate impact is bedlam; the only systemic response to such situations is to build buffers, redundancy and capacity to deal with a broad range of contingencies.
Complex challenges are associated with a number of characteristics described below.
Complex challenges involve transformational change
The challenges distinctively involve transformational change, rather than ones that can be characterized as just reform or incremental (see Table 1) change challenges. The importance of the
Figure 1: Four Types of Change Challenges (Adapted from: (Snowden 2005))
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distinctions between the types of change is that they require distinct strategies, methods and actions. Incremental change basically requires a group of skills and methods that are appropriate for a mediation logic: there’s no question about what to do, only minor questions about how to do it. Reform action requires supporting a negotiations logic: defining roles and benefits to achieve an agreed-‐upon set of goals. Transformation skills like those necessary to address complex issues are based in a visioning logic that includes methodologies to change how and what people see and make sense of data and their world, identify previously unimagined goals and possibilities, and experiment with radically innovative ways of doing and organizing.
Table 1: Types of Change (Adapted from (Waddell 2011))
Type of Challenge
Simple Complicated Complex
Type of Change
Incremental Reform Transformation
Core Question
How can we do more of the same? Are we doing things right?
What rules shall we create? Who should do what? What are the rewards?
How do I make sense of this? What is the purpose? How do we know what is best?
Purpose To improve performance
To understand and change the system and its parts
To innovate and create previously unimagined possibilities
Power and relation-‐ships
Confirms existing rules. Preserves the established power structure and relationships among actors in the system
Opens rules to revision. Suspends established power relationships; promotes authentic interactions; creates a space for genuine reform of the system
Opens issue to creation of new ways of thinking and action. Promotes transformation of relationships with whole-‐system awareness and identity; promotes examining deep structures that sustain the system
Core Action Logic
Mediation Negotiations Visioning
How these change types inter-‐act is still a subject for investigation. Experience suggests that complex change strategies often arise only after incremental and reform strategies prove inadequate. However, experience also suggests that as complex change strategies with prototypes advance, the necessary reforms become more obvious and arise, giving the opportunity for widespread incremental change and “tipping points”. The major lesson is to ensure the right methodologies (mediation, negotiations, visioning) are being used for the appropriate change challenge.
Contrasting Leadership Styles Source: Fitzduff, M. 2014
Reform-‐Transactional: Offering gain to your particular ethnic, religious, cultural followers if they give you/keep you in power.
Transformational: Leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation, morality, and belonging; leadership which persuades people and communities to set aside their individual (and party) concerns and pursue a common goal that is important for the good of the whole of a society.
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Another way to look at the distinctions in logics is through leadership approaches. Transformational leadership requires reflexivity and the ability for profound self-‐questioning and handling of paradox and ambiguity with multiple actions; it requires much more conceptual thinking and interest in how things can be different. Simple and complicated change leaders are much more purely action-‐oriented, focused on the here-‐and-‐now and working with “with is”.
Complex change involves radical innovation
One popular framing about what changes when addressing complex challenges is levels: individuals, organizations, societies, and natural environments. Broadly speaking, Americans tend to focus on individual level change – change in the way a person experiences their world, which is accompanied by changed beliefs, behaviors and actions. Europeans tend to focus on the institutions and the rules we create for organizations.
Complex change is also associated with innovation, a term usually discussed in terms of technology and industry. However, just like change in general, complex change relates to a very specific kind of innovation. Reflecting Table 1 distinctions, Table 2 presents incremental innovation as something occurring more or less continually in industry and Total Quality Management; technology innovation is associated with complicated (although sometimes complex) challenges; radical innovation refers to discontinuities that spawn a new technology system and power relationships (eg: cell phones that have eliminated the role of intermediaries in many developing country agriculture markets). This involves changing the structure and the materials or core units that make the structure.
Table 2. A framework of innovations (Source: (Geels 2013) p.6)
Components reinforced Components overturned Architecture unchanged (linkages between components)
Incremental innovation Modular innovation (components are replaced without affecting other components or the system architecture)
Architecture changed Architectural innovation (components stay the same, but linkages between them change)
Radical innovation (changes in both components and architecture)
Complex change requires transformation in four ways
However, this is a relatively narrow object-‐based view of what changes. Ken Wilber, reviewing many different approaches to knowledge development, identified four broad categories of knowledge and action that comprehensively describe the change arenas. These are represented in Figure 2, and can be described as:
1) How “I” see myself and the world (my internal individual view);
2) How I see myself vis-‐à-‐vis others (my individual relationship with another person);
3) The values “we” have and provide our basis for action (the relationship between members of a group); and
4) The rules and decision-‐making processes we put in place to guide actions to reflect the values (the laws, contracts, agreements, and organizational structures that collectively are a basis of “society”) (Wilber 1996).
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This implies that transformational change strategies must address all these quadrants, and that the individuals and organizations sponsoring the change process must themselves, as issue stakeholders, change. This is particularly difficult for foundations and donors to accept. One popular controversy is whether these must be approached all at the same time, or can different categories be at least a focus of attention at different times in a transformational change process.
Issue boundaries are unclear and multi-‐stakeholder
Although the change focus is a particular challenge, that challenge is continually inter-‐acting and inter-‐dependent with other issues.
For example, poverty is closely connected to food security,
education and health. The issues affect diverse people and organizations, and cannot be addressed by one organization on its own. Indeed, the understanding of the issue and who it effects changes as actions unfold.
Dynamics are non-‐linear
The challenge cannot be characterized with an input-‐output model associated with production chains. There is no “root problem” or “beginning” or “ending”, but rather interacting nodes of activity that are producing the challenge. This emphasizes the value of system dynamics, social network, value network and other mapping of challenges, to develop a comprehensive understanding of dynamics, relationships and roles in a way that can sufficiently reduce the complexity while maintaining enough detail to produce action. Such mapping, repeated over time, also helps understand impact of actions.
The issue is not “controllable”; “solutions” are “emergent”
There is always insufficient knowledge about the complex interactions because of the large number of factors, diverse participants and arising novelty. The “butterfly” effect means a small change in one part of the challenge system can have a large impact, while enormous effort can be applied with little impact. Systems analysis is key in identifying probable “high leverage” actions, but rather than planning long-‐term, action should be thought of in terms of “nudges” in the desired direction. “Navigation” is a good metaphor, rather than “design and construction”.
This means that traditional outcome measures of success established in advance of action, must be subordinated to much more flexible assessment strategies. This in turn emphasizes the need for multiple strategies, and the importance of active learning processes to support the change.
Complex change involves contradiction, ambiguity, paradox, and transcendence
In his seminal book on paradigm shifts in scientific thinking, Kuhn (Kuhn 1962) noted that ways of thinking about how the world works persist until there is sufficient, disconfirming evidence that
Figure 2: Four Quadrants for Change
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contradicts the thinking. For example, moving from the world being flat to round included observations that a ship disappears over the horizon from the bottom up (rather than all at once), as well as Columbus’ voyage. Often new thinking involves integration of two contested ways of thinking to create transcendence. For example, in the 1980s Southern countries held that Northern countries pollution was the major threat to well-‐being, and Northern countries held that Southern countries’ population growth was the major threat. This produced the transcendent concept of “environmental footprint” that integrates both. Working with complex challenges means working with apparent paradox and ambiguities of many unknowns.
Action choices are opportunity, power-‐ and value-‐driven
Action to address the challenges is often opportunistic and requires recognizing the right conditions for an action. While people can promote big change in the financial system for example, little of significance is likely to be done without a sense of crisis that may be experienced as persistent or as a short-‐term event. Action will not be simple win-‐win or right-‐wrong; some stakeholders will be perceived as greater winners or even losers in terms of their historic relationships. This is particularly true as change moves from engaging “early adopters” to those who are the strongest resistors. Intervention and nudge choices are made based upon addressing issues such as fairness, achievability, ownership, human rights, and the importance of the natural environment.
What is “the Field of Complex Change”
A field consists of a definable set of methods and practices whose development is supported by a self-‐aware interacting set of people and activities to further its development and use. Some ways of describing the field of complex change are presented below.
A Field Stakeholders
Looking at the field of complex change in terms of roles, the following key ones are mentioned:
• Complex issue owners are those who are taking leadership to respond to complex change challenges. They are usually organizations, classically governments and inter-‐governmental organizations and their agencies and foundations; NGOs; occasionally businesses; and, in more mature issue fields, multi-‐stakeholder entities.
• Funders provide financial support to address complex challenges.
• Practitioners are those who are supporting action through organizing and application of methodologies to a particular complex challenge. Classically these are consultants or employees of a problem owner.
• Trainers and educators are those who are building capacity of practitioners, complex issue owners and issue stakeholders to address their challenge.
• Action and conventional researchers are those who engage in analysis of data of an issue to produce knowledge and methods to inform action. Action researchers with stakeholders in an issue support real time co-‐production of knowledge and action. Conventional social scientists work in a issue expert mode with particular emphasis on controlled, quantitative and historic experiences.
With complex challenges, stakeholders frequently play more than one role.
A multi-‐disciplinary and expanding tradition
One objective of this study was to create a map of traditions that have developed to address complex change, with the goal of defining a comprehensive framework for identifying people, knowledge and methods to advance complex change as an action (and) science field. Figure 3 emerged from discussions, including a crowd-‐sourcing public webinar. The rectangular boxes represent knowledge and action traditions; the ellipses identify some of the concerns in those traditions that have given
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rise to action and knowledge. The traditions are distinct in the way people talk about their change goals and reasons for taking action, often in terms of methods and knowledge, and also reflect to some extent in academic divisions.
The authors and this study’s sponsor, the World Bank, are most familiar with the Business in Society (BiS) and Socio-‐Economic Development (SED) traditions. These have developed a particularly rich set of methodologies to engage stakeholders: historically the BiS tradition is focused on questions about the well-‐being of the corporation as the core stakeholder and the SED tradition is focused on broader societal stakeholder concerns. In the last five to 10 years these stakeholder perspectives have increasingly interacted as the perspective of corporations has broadened and the SED traditions have recognized the importance of the contribution of corporations to addressing their concerns. However, both traditions have historically shared what might be described as an institutional-‐structural focus. Individuals’ roles have historically been framed particularly in the BiS tradition around the concept of “leadership”, traditionally in an hierarchical heroic model. Group processes, as “teams” in BiS and “communities” in SED, have spurred a rich tradition that has grown into the shared concept of “stakeholder convenings”.
These approaches historically contrast with the individual one that has developed with the spiritual-‐psychological one, where individuals’ awareness and insight (as opposed to heroic leadership) are emphasized. In many cases this has produced transformational intentional communities, such as with monastic traditions or Shaker communities. Both institutional and individual inter-‐actions are foci of the peace and conflict resolution ones which have received perhaps the most significant and concentrated attention as “complex change challenges” because of their obvious life-‐and-‐death issues. Conflicts such as those with the apartheid issue in South Africa, the persistent Israel – Arab
Figure 3: Complex Change Knowledge Traditions
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crisis, Northern Ireland troubles, internecine guerilla activity in Columbia, and violence in Central America have produced an impressive array of methods relevant to complex change from inter-‐personal strategies to post-‐conflict reconciliation commissions.
The need for effective government has produced in the political science field notable processes for national conversations around constitutional arrangements and strategies to advance agendas such as regional planning. Recently developing are the concepts of collaborative governance involving all organizational sectors and, in contrast to standard hierarchical government, and of “experimentalist governance” which integrates flexible, recursive processes. At an even broader cultural level, other methodologies have developed to support shifts in popular insights and values such as the wide range of media and specific methods such as Theatre of the Oppressed. Political, cultural, and socio-‐economic complex change strategies have produced a range of methods associated with community organizing, collaboration and purposeful conflict generation such as with strikes.
The most impressive growth in the traditions over the past decade is associated with environmental concerns with the concepts of “resilience” (there is a “Resilience Alliance”) and “transitions” (there is a “Sustainability Transitions Research Network”). Inspired by concerns about degradation of the natural environment originally brought biologists and natural scientists into the fray, with a gradual realization that addressing their concerns must categorically address socio-‐economic concerns. This has led to holistic stakeholder strategies around natural resource issues ranging from fisheries to, increasingly, climate change.
There is the tradition of complexity science itself that is of course highly relevant to complex change. This tradition is closely associated with system-‐related analysis (although other fields such as biology have developed their own systems approaches) and its tools such as system dynamics analysis and modeling. This tradition has a rich association with complicated/reform change efforts, and a more problematic one with complex/transformational ones. David Snowden emphasizes the danger with complex adaptive systems of confusing causality and dispositionality; similar is the danger of taking models as representations of reality rather than as one optional reality, and accepting their goal-‐oriented structure as the dynamic of complex adaptive systems.
As well as these traditions of several decades, others are gaining recognition with names such as “transitions science” and “sustainability studies”.
In terms of the survey group, on a scale of 1-‐5 with 5 being “core to our identity”, Table 3 gives the sum of ratings of 4 and 5 in terms of these traditions. The weakness of the psychological and/or spiritual development suggests a strong macro and institutional orientation amongst the survey group. The rating of “learning and assessment as change” as the most unifying tradition can be seen as surprising in the context of conversations that identify assessment/evaluation/impact measurement as a key under-‐developed component. The importance of “learning” reflects both the significant academic orientation of a significant portion of the respondents, and probably more importantly it reflects the common understanding that “learning” is a key competency to develop to address complex change challenges.
Table 3: Change Traditions of Survey Group 28% Psychological and/or spiritual development 44% Peace/conflict resolution 50% Cultural change 56% Business in society 56% Governance/constitutional change 67% The environment 72% Socio-‐economic development 75% Learning and assessment as change
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Striking in conversations is agreement that the traditions are highly siloed: there is little interaction amongst the traditions. For example, the environmental tradition could have drawn heavily from socio-‐economic methods already developed when it broadened its perspective a decade and more ago. However, it generally has developed its own set of methods and tools. There are attempts to address this fragmentation such as with the recent formation of the Sustainable Transitions Network of academics working in more applied settings where the “transitions” concept is shorthand with the shared perspective that we are undergoing fundamental transformation on a societal and environmental level. Indeed, the environmental concepts of “resilience” and “adaptation” are finding their way into the lexicon of the broader change traditions.
This situation produces the classic issues of fragmentation of a field: repeatedly inventing the wheel, parochialism that makes even talking across traditions problematic, missed synergies, and hobbling of ability to undertake the large-‐scale change efforts that local-‐to-‐global challenges demand.
Emerging core terms
A challenge for any emerging field embracing diverse traditions is to develop common language and identity. The 37 survey responds were asked to rate a list of terms on the scale of 1-‐5 with 5 being high; Table 4 presents percentages that add ratings of 4 and 5. The highest ratings are for systems/whole systems, multi-‐stakeholder/collaborative/collective, transformational and complex. Although the survey was not balanced with respondents across change traditions, the response nevertheless suggests coalescing around common concepts.
Table 4: Frequently Used Terms to Describe Work 16% Third order 32% Evolutionary 35% Reform 35% Radical 54% Civic/public engagement 59% Scaling up 70% Transitions 73% Social change 73% Large 81% Complex 86% Transformational 89% Multi-‐stakeholder/ Collaborative/collective 89% Systems/whole systems
Other terms listed in open ended responses are: innovation, inclusive partnerships, communications of new insights, critical ecosystems, change leadership, collective impact, patterns, scaling change, multiscale, networks, emergent, high dimensional, big data analytics, high leverage interventions, bridging leadership, transpartisan, shifts, social change, civic infrastructure, civic capacity, asset-‐based, multi-‐sector, collaborative, collective, intergroup, policy change, community action, linking personal transformation with larger scale change, participatory, and awareness based systemic change.
Centers, consultancies, networks, platforms, labs
New fields develop around key individuals who are pushing their development. Usually, the individuals are advancing a particular approach or methodology through an organization, institute or center. Some examples are: • David Cooperrider at Case Western University is advancing the methodology of appreciative
inquiry with the Foster Center; • Rajesh Tandon at PRIA in India, is particularly associated with participatory action research;
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• Peter Senge is particularly well-‐known for advancing what can be broadly called systems thinking approaches at MIT and has founded the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) and is active with other organizations like the Academy for Systemic Change;
• Otto Scharmer founder of an approach summarized as the “U-‐Process”, is at MIT and has founded The Presencing Institute; and
• John Grin, Johan Schot and Jan Rotmans in the Netherlands founded the Dutch Knowledge network on System Innovations (KSI) with the objective to better understand, identify and influence the process of transitions. They defined a sustainability transition as a “radical transformation towards a sustainable society, as a response to a number of persistent problems confronting contemporary modern societies”. Since its launch transition studies have developed into an internationally recognised field of academic research and the KSI-‐network has been succeeded by the Sustainability Transitions Research Network (STRN).
Networks also have an important role in advancing broader thematic agendas, including the: • National Coalition on Dialogue and Deliberation in the US with a theme around “whole systems
change” and “civic engagement”; • Resilience Alliance focusing on resilience knowledge and development; • Sustainability Transitions Research Network is an international and multi-‐disciplinary research
community focusing on transitions research, covering a variety of domains including energy, mobility, housing, agriculture, water and the build environment;
• Beautiful Trouble is clearly in the “confrontational change” tradition, and represents a particularly interesting way of both sourcing and organizing knowledge in that tradition for wide and easy access; and
• University Network of Collaborative Governance with materials for people implementing the approach.
Consultancies that are leading the practice are not associated with the major management ones. In fact, the field is noted for entities that do not fit into the traditional consultancy mode, undoubtedly reflecting the need to work differently in the complex change arena. They tend to be public good mission-‐driven are operating more in a network way. For example, FSG focuses on development of “shared value” and devotes a significant amount of time to support of communities of practice globally. Ones with notable global reach are: • Consensus Building Network, growing out of the Consensus Building Institute with Larry
Susskind’s leadership associated with Harvard and MIT; • Forum for the Future, a non-‐profit based in London but with offices in New York, Singapore and
India; • Mobius Executive Leadership with an institute and a global practitioner network; • Presencing Institute with a network of around the world; and • Reos, a social enterprise that helps businesses, governments, and civil society organisations
address complex social challenges, with nine offices around the world.
In terms of platforms, one notable development is the creation of new national multi-‐stakeholder platforms in several Southern countries to engage business, facilitate dialogue and innovation and directly support public-‐private partnership action on key business and development challenges. These are developing with the support of the Dutch, Swedish and British development agencies and The Partnering Initiative based in the United Kingdom.
“Labs” around particular issues, called “social labs” by Hassan (Hassan 2014), are another type of platform that is exploding in number. These include the Ecosystems Labs that are still in early stage of development, and Social Innovation Generation (SiG) at the University of Waterloo. They vary in form and structure, but in general they are designed to integrate learning and practice by bringing together academic traditions with business, government and civil society ones with a prototyping/experimental focus. They are a clear response to move from the traditional focus of learning as looking at historic experience, to the type of learning necessary with complexity that must be experimental, embrace radical discontinuities and be future-‐oriented.
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The Strategies and Methods
Strategy development
A fundamental question is “what activities can give direction to complex change?” In looking at transition management in terms of principles, four are proposed as core: • Long-‐term thinking as a framework for short-‐term policy (at least 25 years). • Thinking in terms of more than one domain (eg: water, health, conflict) and different actors
(organizations) at different scale levels (local-‐to-‐global). • A focus on learning-‐by-‐doing and doing-‐by-‐learning. • Keeping open a large number of options (wide playing field) (Rotmans, Kemp and Asselt 2001).
Earlier “visioning” was referred to as the core logic in addressing complex change. The commonly referenced dynamic is one of interventions “nudging” an issue in the desired direction. David Snowden speaks of the need for multiple parallel safe-‐to-‐fail experiments with contradiction and dissent within them to obtain a diversity of interaction, and quickly amplify the things that go roughly in the direction you want. In The Social Labs Revolution, Zaid Hassan describes the difficulty of operationalizing the visioning logic beyond scenario development and similar visioning activities. He writes of the trap of falling back on traditional planning action and implementation strategies before developing within the vision direction what he calls (borrowed from the tech industry) a pattern of around “scrums” that might be week-‐long periods and “sprints” that are day-‐long periods.
One response at the strategic level to addressing change involves reference to “theories of change”: underlying assumptions about changes needed to address a challenge. These are often implicit, and action can be greatly enhanced by making them explicit. However, the complex, emergent nature of solutions and difficulty in predicting a traditional causal relationship with complex change challenges emphasizes the importance of acting with multiple strategies in mind: complex adaptive systems theory emphasizes the importance of experimenting and taking multiple strategies. This diversity is further supported by understanding that different people and organizations are sensitive to different pressures. A very simplistic framework is to develop strategies addressing rational, emotional and physical/material sensitivities at the individual level. Of course these are all highly influenced by underlying values.
Adam Kahane emphasizes that both “love” and “power” represent important strategic sources of action, each with a generative creative side and a degenerative side. Most people working on complex change issues focus on what he calls the positive side of “love” strategies: ones that bring together various parts and where people focus on collaboration as a change activity with collective well-‐being as the guiding outcome (Kahane 2010). However, the negative side of love is that it can smother and oppress individuals and groups. Power is the drive of everything living to realize itself. Its degenerative side can be expressed as individuals seeking to dominate and act with a focus on their individual well-‐being to the detriment of others.
Figure 4 aims to describe this perspective in support of a broad understanding of sources of change. One axis is insider-‐outsider in terms of the structure of power in the particular change issue arena – insiders holding traditional power. The other is the spectrum of strategies from realizing change by exerting raw power, to working together to realize a deeply held shared imperative. This suggests a distinction of strategies and methods that can be described as follows:
Forcing change archetypically would be a revolutionary movement by the dispossessed. This strategy is used by Via Campesina in Brazil, where landless peasants occupy land.
Driving change can be classically illustrated by such things as capital strikes; where labor unions are a powerful legitimate force it could also be a labor strike; legal sanctions can also be part of this field.
Allowing change actions can be exemplified by capital investment, agreement to voluntary codes and tax credit policies. This strategy is popularly represented with statements of principles and activities to implement them.
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Promoting change can be characterized by education and outreach programs as ways to raise consciousness to support action; much technological change activity such as cellphones which transform buyer-‐seller relationships in many developing markets also begin in this quadrant.
Of course with any complex change, there is considerable interaction between these strategies. These strategies must also integrate the observation made earlier that complex change involves transformation in four ways. The goal here is simply to support a comprehensive framework for understanding complex change strategies. Those engaged in development of this report are almost entirely focused on the collaboration end of the spectrum, and processes to support them. Ramirez at Said Business School, Oxford, urges studying the dark side of success and systems. One very interesting example in the confrontation tradition is with Beautiful Trouble: this is clearly in the “confrontational change” tradition, and represents a particularly interesting way of both sourcing and organizing knowledge in that tradition for wide and easy access. This analysis of strategies raises questions about engaging people working on the confrontational end; academically this would be notably social movement experts (largely in sociology) and policy and regulation people (largely in political science).
In general, the real power of the internet also seems underdeveloped. There is significant reference to the importance of it in the Arab Spring and several on-‐going conflicts in “getting the word out”; as well there are important sites such as Avaarz.org that mobilize opinion. However, these have not been well-‐integrated into more formal change strategies, such as the “town hall meetings” televised between Americans and Russians in the 1980s with great impact. One interesting attempt to integrate the power of the internet is with madmundo.tv, which provides everything from individuals interacting personally with power figures such as the head of the World Bank, to the development of people’s shared experiences shared on Arte, a major European television channel.
Learning infrastructure
There was considerable agreement amongst those surveyed on the need for development of capacity among many people to support the various complex change methodologies. However, the current capacity development infrastructure is extremely weak.
There is need for a review of formal degree programs related to complex change challenges, which is beyond the scope of this report. However, an example is the Masters of Science in Global Change
Figure 4: Change Strategies (Adapted from (Waddell 2001)
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Management at Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development outside Berlin. There are various programs in the different traditions with related programs. For example: • The Fielding Graduate University offers degrees through its School of Educational Leadership for
Change that is “dedicated to transformational change”. • There is a burgeoning number of programs around sustainability, that touch with various
degrees on complex challenges. • A recent paper review of mainly business in society and socio-‐economic development traditions
found few formal academic offerings on the core complex change topic of cross-‐sector (sic: multi-‐stakeholder) partnership for collaboration (Leigh 2014). It looked for the “…systematic study of teaching and learning and the public sharing and review of such work through live or virtual presentations, performances, or publications.” It only identified four certificate or degree programs of note (one masters program at Singapore Management University, two certificates at the University of Pennsylvania & University of Arkansas, and one year-‐long practitioner program at Presidio Graduate School. In terms of regular programs only six in North American institutions, one in Europe and one in Asia were identified. Even considering potential identification challenges, this emphasizes the paucity of the formal capacity development arena.
• In the peace tradition, a study revealed a brighter picture. In particular, there is the UN University for Peace in Costa Rica and numerous institutes and peace programs. It concluded:
• Over the last several decades, the field of peacebuilding has progressively formalized, leading to the development of academic programs, training, advocacy, and practice on peace and conflict issues.
• Several leading models have emerged, including peace education, which effectively incorporates other approaches that focus on the psycho-‐cultural, structural, and institutional dimensions of conflict (Fitzduff and Jean 2011) p. 3
On the non-‐degree front, those who completed the survey comprise both academic and non-‐profit organizations. Of them, 23/64% give regular open workshops and 29/80% give customized workshops.
To properly assess the learning infrastructure requires much more work. Logical next steps would be to gather more information about the programs of the respondents, and further information by the learning traditions referenced earlier.
Frameworks of methods
Addressing complex issues involves changes in individuals’ “mental models” and ways of thinking about what’s possible and what should be; in the structures, products and processes of organizations; and in markets, policies and values. This requires drawing on a wide range of methods and tools.
There is a common core of activities associated with the visioning processes referred to earlier as a distinctive imperative in approaching complex issues, that give rise to a range of common methods to support dialogue, complexity, innovation, problem-‐solving, and systems thinking. The Academy for Systemic Change summarizes them as activities to produce awareness-‐based systemic change. Georg Kell, Executive Head of the Global Compact comments in reference to the Compact’s work with corporations that “Core is vision that is shared… created vision of corporate sustainability and long-‐term success as over-‐lap with public interests.” And certainly there is broad agreement with Marv Weisbord’s emphasis of creating processes with “…the whole system in the room”1 – the diversity of perspectives – to move the issue in a way people will take responsibility for action to advance it.
In contrast to outside expert-‐planned approaches and applying solutions from others’ experiences, these change approaches are characterized by active engagement of stakeholders in the issue to identify and “emerge” (develop) innovative solutions in response to particular contexts. One 1 This should not be taken too dogmatically, however. The World Health Organization’s Tobacco Free Initiative was multi-‐stakeholder based, but there was an explicit decision NOT to include tobacco companies because their goals were so contradictory with that of the Initiative.
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distinctive feature of methodologies related to addressing complex change is what can be referred to as their over-‐arching “action research” framework. Given the emphasis on learning and radical innovation, the need to develop capacities to response to them, and the well-‐recognized need to engage those in the issue system to develop and be owners of response to complex challenge, action research contains the needed discipline and rigor matched with subjective real-‐time learning and change orientation. The term “action research” is used here to encompass a group of methods, including action science, action inquiry, action learning, and engaged scholarship. The clear emergent lesson is that conventional science, referring to analysis of data of an issue to understand action in the past, with particular emphasis on controlled, quantitative studies, is important but should be undertaken within an over-‐arching action research strategy.
This suggests a very challenging capacity and methodological dilemma. Conventional science is clearly the overwhelming presence in the academic community – indeed, action research is not well-‐regarded and there are many disincentives to the approach. Most of those identified as using it are either senior enough that they can disregard traditional career pressures, or they are simply acting without high concern for them. Nevertheless, there is a growing robust community of action researchers represented by individuals, publications such as Action Research, and some institutions such as Ashridge Business School and the Institute for Development Studies, both in England.
There are numerous ways to categorize skills and methods necessary to address complex challenges. One is by their purpose, which is the basis of the following categorization: • A range of mapping methods supports development of a common understanding of current
reality through diagrams with linkages between nodes (people, organizations, roles). • Scenario development and back-‐casting support discussion and clarification about possible
futures. Different approaches include trend projection, organizational futures and societal issue futures.
• Individual meeting between diverse stakeholders are best undertaken by calling on a range of dialogue tools such as world café, open space, charettes, and wisdom circles. These can be mixed together, or using some of the methodologies can provide the framework for an entire meeting.
• Whole Meeting methodologies have been developed for entire meetings, usually of two to three days with diverse stakeholders. These include future search, consensus conferences, sustained dialogues, appreciative inquiry, national issue forums and public conversations.
• Learning processes include (participatory) action research/inquiry/science, learning histories, learning journeys, and inter-‐organizational learning.
• Assessment processes include developmental evaluation, outcome mapping, and strategic clarity mapping.
Use of methods according to their purpose was the focus of a survey question, which produced the results of Table 5 (for a further detail of skills and methods, see Attachment C).
Table 5: Respondent Expert ise What are the types of tools/methods/approaches that you would consider your organization/members to be
particularly expert with, where 1 is "have no expertise" and 5 is "a core expertise"? The numbers combine ratings of four and five.
50% Conflict resolution approaches to address deep differences. 58% Scenario development to support understanding the future. 75% Mapping processes to see the whole system. 83% Whole-‐meeting processes to support collaborative direction-‐setting. 86% Facilitation tools to support robust meetings. 92% Learning and assessment to share knowledge and answer "how are we doing?"
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Another typology describes methods and tools that can be used integrates stages of development of responses to a complex challenge and development of system dynamics of a change system. Figure 5 presents this with key activities presented in boxes and methods to support them in red with arrows. In terms of the development process, there is movement from opportunity identification through the circle that begins with Self Convening; other activities are needed to support the change as a change system. This typological approach has the advantage of building expertise about the totality of the change activities and a sense of their sequencing and relationship as a change system.
A third way of categorizing arises from Wilber’s four core challenges described earlier. In Table 6 we can see how Fitzduff and Jean (2011) adapted this to describe methods in terms of the peace and conflict resolution traditions. They divide methods into those supporting changes in attitudes, knowledge and skills, values, and institutions. Their methods are still at a generic purpose level, and individual methodologies such as World Café and system dynamics mapping would be another layer of granularity.
All of these typologies are useful. Some individuals will find one more intuitive than others; some situations will lend themselves to one more than another. Creating a data-‐base that codes methods according to typology is certainly feasible and would be worthwhile. The most comprehensive data-‐base of methods found, comprising 184 methods, is that of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation in the US. It uses the concept of Engagement Stream to categorize dialogue and deliberation approaches into four streams based on one’s primary intention or purpose (Exploration, Conflict Transformation, Decision Making, and Collaborative Action), and shows which of the most well-‐known methods have proven themselves especially effective in each streams.
Figure 2: Systems Change: System Dynamics and Stage Development
Source: (Hsueh 2013)
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Challenges to field development
Coherence, comprehensiveness and identity
Some say that addressing complex change challenges is simply too difficult and too ambitious to take on development of the field. Commonly, people feel overwhelmed and daunted by the prospect. But as Marv Weisbord comments, at one time people had similar attitudes to people flying. Thinking of addressing complex change challenges as an emerging field of knowledge and action is important if the knowledge and action is ever to reach the scale and sophistication required by the increasingly pressing challenges globally.
Today the field is at a classic early development stage, where fragmented knowledge has emerged in response to specific challenges and questions coming from specific perspectives. Peter Taylor of the International Development Research Centre and the Think Tank network comments that “The big issue is willingness of people engaged in change to step outside of own confines of their own training…not just “silos” issues, but certain paradigms and world views.”
Those interviewed resonated strongly with the idea that there is an “emergent field” and the value in making it more explicit by connecting the fragmented parts and creating a more explicit strategy for applying and further developing both knowledge and capacity. Complex challenges, by their very nature, require broad capacity that goes beyond a single network or consulting organization’s ability: it involves creation of networks. In Indonesia, addressing fishery degradation issues required creation of 1,000 village-‐level community facilitator-‐organizers. There are many examples with Global Action Networks where hundreds and even thousands of organizations are engaged in addressing issues that could be further enhanced with greater access to leading complex system change knowledge.
Table 6: Four Change Challenges Source: Adapted (Fitzduff and Jean 2011)
Interior Exterior
I n d i v i d u a l
1. Psycho-‐cultural: Usually concerned with changing attitudes, increasing understanding between groups, and improving relationships between people and groups. Methods: Contact/Dialogue work to change attitudes/perceptions Mutual understanding work of a cultural/social nature Cooperative interventions on issues of common concern across groups
2. Education/Training: Usually concerned with developing and imparting knowledge and skills for change the particular issue field (water, peace, etc.) Methods: Training teachers and grassroots groups about the issue School and university programs Media programs Curricula development for schools, universities, community groups, etc.
C o l l e c t i v e
3. Social and economic foundations: Mainly concerned with values of fairness, justice and security in a society. Methods: Equal/Shared access to employment, land, resources, healthcare, education Minority and gender equality Inclusive representation Reintegration of prisoners and former combatants after war Development/conflict work (All developed where possible on a shared/inclusive basis)
4. Building political, governance and other institutions to better manage conflict: Mainly concerned with developing institutions that safeguard all of the values listed in other three boxes Methods: Building inclusive political structures, agreements, frameworks, systems New accounting/reporting/ measurement systems Vigorous and free civil society institutions Pluralist cultural institutions
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Field development involves building an identity amongst stakeholders in the complex change challenges: problem owners, conventional researcher, funders, practitioners, trainers and educations, and action researchers. People interviewed were very responsive to the suggestion that they share a common interest, although there is no place to develop it. Connecting across knowledge traditions and in particular between knowledge and process experts and problems owners. However, the connections must be done thoughtfully. Kaustuv Bandyopadhyay of PRIA in India comments that there are lots of capacities available locally, but the question is how to take advantage of them. Larry Susskind at the Consensus Building Network points out that while some people might see connecting and collaborating as posing problems in terms of their competitive business models, another issue is that people are very busy and field building must take that into account. However, they and others expressed strong interest in the field’s development.
Its development must reflect the basic imperative of connecting stakeholders in the field with learning from action. Some such as Peter Senge and Otto Scharmer, expressed particular energy around addressing specific development challenges as exemplary projects to advance learning and knowledge about how to address complex systems change. However, to do this in an impactful and capacity development way also requires connecting such activity to a broader learning community. Others, such as the National Coalition on Dialogue and Deliberation, expressed particular energy for advancing access and knowledge to further develop its data base about methodologies and people who can apply them. A strategy for building on such energy is the subject of a separate report.
Profile with problem owners and funders
Given the fragmentation of “the field” of complex change, it is not surprising that the expertise that exists has little recognition. This has important ramifications for ability to address complex challenges with the sophistication possible and needed for effective action. As Ingrid Richter, of the Canadian Organization Development Institute comments, there is danger that “...all gets to be a method, rather than how it connects to the overall change strategy”. Very few people have an understanding of the array of methods necessary to address the change process, or an understanding of its entirety as a set of activities. Classically people know one or two methods, then apply them to every change challenge – the situation of people who always see a nail, if they have a hammer.
Helen Monteiro, Executive Director of WINGS, a global network of grantmakers, sees that there is particular interest in the complex change field amongst large foundations. But some small ones, such as the Garfield Foundation, have been particularly supportive of the approach. Complexity, systems thinking and collective impact are concepts that they increasingly embrace. Large donor agencies have certainly embraced the concept of multi-‐stakeholder strategies, and complex adaptive systems are increasingly part of their discourse. However, all this still has not come together as it could with the field of complex change.
Mindsets and institutions, from expert to co-‐creator
“Most people don’t think this way,” says Hal Saunders, founder of the International Institute for Sustained Dialogue. By “this way” he means “relational paradigm”: action grounded in supporting and developing people’s (stakeholders’) interactions so they can take leadership in addressing challenges. The emphasis is upon experts, usually from the outside, who come into an issue arena to advise (tell) people what to do. This undermines the needed work of people really “getting” and “owning” the issue, and understanding and committing to the needed action to effectively address a challenge. It is a “checkbox” approach, rather than a “guts” approach. Orland Bishop, well-‐known for his work with difficult inner-‐city conflicts, comments “…on the face of the problem, your expertise is very minor part of the solution.” He calls for an emphasis on dialogue and contact with explaining “why” for each other, and increasing collective consciousness and deeper agreement.
Jan Rotmans of the Dutch Research Institute for Transitions (DRIFT) points to the need for “emergent/co-‐evolution” approaches in contrast to management strategies. Perhaps a better way of framing the distinction is that management strategies need to be placed in the context of emergent/co-‐evolution ones rather than dominate them.
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Some of the mindset issue is simply a problem of inertia. Danny Sriskandarajah, Secretary-‐General of Civicus, includes his own sector as facing the challenge, saying: “in organized civil society, people are so busy doing what they’ve done, that they’re missing the opportunity for radical transformation.”
ICCO, a leading Dutch development cooperation agency, has been working for seven years to categorically deeply integrate systems sensitivity into its approaches. Hettie Walters, Co-‐ordinator for Capacity Development at ICCO, refers to the distinctions of David Snowden (see above), saying that she finds people are still “…in the complicated zone, not the complex zone…they don’t deeply recognize the difference. People still think in terms of step-‐by-‐step and nicely logical, working towards a pre-‐determined goal. They need to recognize that there’s lots that unpredictable…it doesn’t fit with the management view, uncertainty isn’t part of their mindset.” Complex challenge approaches requires that people leave traditional comfort zones where everything is plannable.
Knowledge and methods
Another early field development challenge is to demonstrate its value, and this requires creating a “tipping point” of knowledge and resources. A method or insight on its own does not create a field; a field consists of a definable set of methods and practices whose development is supported by a self-‐aware interacting set of activities to further its development and use. This includes most notably learning and assessments systems to share and develop methods and practices, and guide the field’s development.
Interviews included discussion about major challenges to the field’s development, and one of the most commonly mentioned is measuring impact. People want to know “what works” and to be able to more precisely align best methods with particular contexts and needs. A key related term of great currency today “collective impact”.
In fact, there was common reference, as undermining collective impact, to traditional measures using log frames depending on plans with pre-‐determined outcomes and strict adherence even in the face of evidence of better alternative, often previously unimagined options (as is core to “visioning”-‐ and learning-‐based strategies appropriate for complex challenges). The traditional approaches can be used for relatively short-‐termed and highly predictable activities that often occur within a strategy to address a complex challenge, but they cannot be the over-‐arching assessment framework.
Nevertheless, learning assessment activities are of course badly needed. This often seen as a challenge for funders, since they lead demand for traditional measures. For funders, the challenge is one of both methodology and their mental model: in complex challenges they cannot simply be funders allocating money to what they have identified as appropriate from a remote place; they must be fully engaged stakeholders as co-‐learners in how to address the complex challenge so they can adjust their funding streams appropriately. If fact, the accountability model for funders shifts to include complex change stakeholders as well as traditional ones. However, the learning and assessment activities are also badly needed by the field itself to significantly enhance the impact on the complex challenges. There is good reason to raise impact questions, for the field itself to advance.
There are some relatively new approaches that try to respond to the need. The basic direction is to shift from “evaluation” with pre-‐ post-‐ measures based on a traditionally planning model, to one of learning and assessment. This is very aligned with the general approach of action research. Action Research editor Hilary Bradbury comments “Action research is very empirical – we care about success as judged by the action and outcomes produced for the immediate issue stakeholders, as well as for wider networks, including but not limited to contributing to a larger body of social scientific knowledge.” Unlike conventional research that emphasizes objective analysis, the action research approach emphasizes experimentation and responsiveness to adjust interventions in response to arising learning.
Kettering Foundation has developed a learning methodology crafted around the concept of “learning agreements.” Kettering encourages and supports one of the least funded activities: explicit collaborative learning and reflection. An operating research foundation, Kettering studies “what it takes to make democracy work as it should.” It works primarily through learning exchanges with
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citizens’ organizations and institutions that are experimenting with innovations in the civic practices through which people recognize opportunities to shape the futures of their communities, untapped resources in communities, and ways to align the routines of professionals and the work of citizens. Those involved in the exchanges meet at the Foundation campus to trade their experiences for insights that Kettering has collected from past exchanges with groups from around the world.
Communities of practice, well-‐constructed (which is rare) can provide important learning system infrastructures for diverse participants. However, there is relatively little known about the type of inter-‐personal and inter-‐organizational learning systems for diverse participants that complex challenges require (Waddell et al. 2013). By and large, even with very large initiatives that spend considerable resources on what can be called “learning activities”, learning is treated as an ad hoc set of activities rather than an interdependent and inter-‐acting and reinforcing system.
Outcome mapping, developed by the International Development Research Centre in Canada, has grown into a robust community. It focuses on shifts in behavior and attitudes by constructing a learning system. Michael Quinn Patton has introduced the concept of “developmental innovation” to apply to complex change challenges. The Development Assistance Committee of the OECD has also tried to address the measurement issue.
However, a concerted effort must be mounted that integrates both the need to develop learning and assessment methodologies and their rapid adoption. Funders networks working in collaboration with other complex change challenge stakeholders would be an ideal combination to advance these tasks.
Power issues can be labeled both a methodological and knowledge challenge, and a mindset one. “Power” of the status quo is commonly mentioned as a key impediment to addressing complex challenges. As PRIA’s Bandyopadhyay comments: “People responsible for putting institutions in place, they don’t want to do it…it’s not in their interests.” This is another arena that needs to be addressed with much more energy that has been done to date by those working in the field of complex change methodologies. As Kahane notes, people focus on the “love” tradition, whereas there must be much more legitimate exploration of the “confrontation” ones to create the movement that critical global issues require.
Fitzduff calls for more basic understanding about how to create contexts that are able to handle diversity that complex challenges involve – diversity in terms of formal power, race, ethnicity and other factors. She notes that in the peace making field she works in, there is lots of work with politicians, such as with learning journeys. But when people are asked about changes they make, people just say “oh I changed my mine”, with attribution to why very tricky.
From change initiatives to change systems
Organizationally, the twentieth century was dominated by innovation with hierarchical organizations: development of matrix and other forms of global business to produce previously unimagined wealth; massive government bureaucracies that could deliver the welfare state; and an impressive array of NGOs to effectively promote community concerns about values with expanding local-‐to-‐global networks. Naturally, the core focus of change was through organizations both as objects of change and as change agents.
Towards the end of the twentieth century the change focus shifted increasingly to networks, driven by globalization, enabling communications technologies that also provided a mental model, and an array of issues and opportunities that were recognized as beyond the capabilities to address by any one organization. This has produced innumerable multi-‐organizational and multi-‐stakeholder change platforms and initiatives in all major issue arenas.
The challenge now – v3.0 in popular parlance – is to create change systems that support coherence and alignment amongst change initiatives in particular issue arenas and across them. This is not a world of coordination, but one of generating coherence through targeted interventions and stewarding development of particularly critical ingredients of a complex change system that do not fall into the responsibility of anyone – such is the case with learning systems and the development of
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the field of complex change challenges itself. One example of such an emerging change system is Sustainability for All (SE4All). It does not aim to take operational-‐level activity around a particular renewable energy technology; rather, it aims to ensure that the relationships and resources are connected to priority issues to realize its sustainable energy, energy efficiency and energy access goals. How to organize such systems effectively and apply leading methods, is a leading and pressing issue that deserves significant attention.
Conclusion Complex change is an emerging field that holds enormous potential to address the pressing, pernicious challenges of our age such as environmental degradation, provision of quality health care for all, and physical and economic security. It will not “solve” them – by the very definition of “complex challenge”, that is not possible. However, there are very important steps to vastly improve the issues.
The emerging field presents a rich array of insights, tools and methods. However, they are being under-‐utilized for a number of reasons, including:
1) People simply are not aware of the field of complex change knowledge and methods and what it offers – it is still very young and emerging;
2) The field itself is highly fragmented amongst knowledge traditions and has weak identity;
3) Inertia and comfort with traditional approaches;
4) The methods tend to focus on collaborative group methods and ignore other powerful ways complex change is realized;
5) Discomfort and lack of skills to deal with the qualities of complexity, ambiguity, paradox, and emergence that are central to complex change strategies;
6) There is significant division between those who are developing formal knowledge and methods, and practitioners who are informally developing them;
7) The methods involve activities such as multi-‐stakeholder meetings, network creation and personal development that commonly are given very low priority; and
8) Application of inappropriate evaluation measures – and the need to develop more appropriate ones – leads to undermining and disincentivizing complex change approaches.
The steps to address these involve various activities that advance the field and application of its insights, tools and methods. The core one is to create coherence of the field by weaving together the current fragmentation of knowledge traditions and stakeholders. How to do that is the subject of a separate report.
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Attachment A: Individuals Consulted
People Formally Interviewed Last First Organization 1. Bar-‐Yam Yaneer New England Complex Systems Institute 2. Birney Anna Forum for the Future 3. Bishop Orland Consultant 4. Bradbury Hilary Oregon Health & Science University 5. Brouwer Herman Centre for Development Innovation, UofWageningen 6. Coleman Gill Ashridge Business School 7. Cruz Anabel CIVICUS & Instituto de Comunicación y Desarrollo (ICD) 8. Elahi Shirin NormannPartners 9. Fitzduff Mari Brandeis 10. Garrison John World Bank 11. Geels Frank UofManchester 12. Grin John UofAmsterdam 13. Hanig Robert Consultant 14. Hassan Zaid Reos 15. Heierbacher Sandy National Center for Dialogue and Deliberation 16. Jorgensen Steeen World Bank 17. Kahane Adam Reos 18. Kell Georg UN Global Compact 19. Lewis Penelope World Bank 20. Monteiro Helena Worldwide Initiatives for Grantmaker Support 21. Nielsen Randy Kettering Foundation 22. Rameria Rafael Oxford-‐Said Business School 23. Richter Ingrid Threshold 24. Rotmans Jan Dutch Research Institute for Transitions 25. Sarah Cornell Stockholm Resilience Ctr/Ecosystems Labs 26. Saunders Hal Institute for Sustained Dialogue 27. Sriskandarajah Danny Civicus 28. Susskind Larry MIT/Harvard/Consensus Building Institute & Network 29. Taylor Peter International Development Research Centre 30. Waddock Sandra Boston College 31. Wales Jane Global Philanthropic Forum 32. Walters Hettie ICCO 33. Weisbord Marv Future Search Network 34. Westley Frances UofWaterloo 35. Woodhill Jim AusAid 36. Zondervan Ruben Earth Systems Governance Also providing input is the Project Team associated with this report • Joe Hsueh: SecondMuse, the Academy for Systemic Change and the Ecosystems Labs • Ceren Ozer: World Bank, Ecosystems Labs
A core Advisory Team, not directly involved in this report but certainly influential in its development, comprised: • Adam Yukelson – Presencing Institute • Otto Scharmer – MIT, Academy for Systemic Change and Presencing Institute • Peter Senge – MIT, SoL, Academy for Systemic Change • Robert Hanig – Academy for Systemic Change; Global Partnership for Oceans
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A broader group participating with the Project and Advisory Teams in at least one of the two, two-‐day Advisory Group meetings, included: • Barbara Stocking – President, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, UK • Brigitta Villaronga – GIZ and Universal Health Coverage Program • Dorothy Berry – (frmr) Vice President, IFC • Ed Campos – World Bank Change, Knowledge and Learning Group • Gloria Grandolini – Country Director (Mexico, Columbia), World Bank • Joe McCarron – Reos Partners and Open Contracting • Klaus Althoff – Programme Director, Climate Leadership Plus – Leadership for Global
Responsibility, GIZ • Marc Sadler – World Bank Practice Leader of the Risk and Markets Practice of the Agriculture
and Environmental Services Department and Climate Smart Agriculture Director • Marsha Marsh – COO, WWF-‐USA • Michael Jarvis – World Bank Open Contracting Program Manager • Milla McLachlan – Southern African Food Labs and Ecosystems Labs • Nazir Ahmed – President, Giving Works • Pawan Patil – World Bank, Global Partnership for Oceans • Peter Kristensen, Global Partnership for Oceans Peter Program Manager; World Bank • Stuart Gill (via skype) – Secondmuse and Disaster Resilience System • Wiebke Koenig – Head of Global Leadership Academy, GIZ
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Attachment B: Organizations Responding to the Survey
Organization Name 1. Academy for Systemic Change 2. Canadian Organization Development Institute 3. Collective Leadership Institute 4. Consensus Building Institute 5. Corporate Partnerships of Deutsche
Gesellschaft für Internatinale Zusammenarbeit 6. Dialogos 7. Dutch Research Institute For Transitions 8. Forum for the Future 9. FSG 10. Future Search Network 11. GIZ 12. Global Leadership Academy of Deutsche
Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit
13. GOLDEN Ecosystems Lab 14. Grantmakers for Effective Organizations 15. Institute of Development Studies 16. Interaction Institute for Social Change 17. Mobius Executive Leadership 18. Monitor Institute, a part of Monitor Deloitte 19. National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation 20. Nesta 21. New England Complex Systems Institute 22. Open-‐Ended Response 23. Presencing Institute 24. Reos 25. Resilience Alliance 26. SecondMuse 27. Society for International Development 28. Society for Organizational Learning 29. Stichting Urgenda 30. Stockholm Resilience Centre 31. Strategic Action Forums 32. Synergos 33. Systems Thinking World 34. Tamarack -‐ An Institute for Community
Engagement 35. The Partnering Initiative 36. The Partnership Resource Centre, Erasmus
University 37. Think Tank Initiative 38. University of oxford 39. Wageningen University & Research, Centre for
Development Innovation
Most of the organizations listed have websites with useful practitioner resources. Of particular note: the National Coalition on Dialogue and Deliberation has a well-‐organized data-‐base of methodologies for “civic engagement” in the US and connections to other resource websites. Other sites include:
• Resilience Alliance includes workbooks on assessment and other aspects of applied resilience development
• Sustainability Transitions Research Network has academic research articles.
• Beautiful Trouble is clearly in the “confrontational change” tradition, and represents a particularly interesting way of both sourcing and organizing knowledge in that tradition for wide and easy access.
• University Network of Collaborative Governance with materials for people implementing the approach.
• Transitions Academy
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Attachment C: Expertise
Itemized skills respondents listed on the survey
1) Action oriented research, as a way to prototype new ways of working/innovating with stakeholders
2) Personal reflection and personal change for social change; a range of other methodologies like U-‐process, appreciative inquiry and learning journeys
3) Joint fact finding and analysis, integrating local and global knowledge, to help stakeholders develop a shared view of issues and options
4) Large system change design; catalyzing "viral" change in organizations; transformational design 5) New conceptual and analytic methods in patterns, networks, multiscale and evolution, among
others; Organizational transformation. 6) Design and strategy skills for system change 7) Thinking and Acting Systemically, Multi-‐Stakeholder Engagement, Personal Mastery / Aspiration,
Learning Journeys. Creative Orientation, World Cafe, and various other tools and methods of thinking and acting collaboratively, reflectively, systemically.
8) Analysis 9) Dialogic Change, Process Monitoring, Collective Leadership 10) Structuring and Integrating Strategic Choices, Rapid prototyping of solutions, coaching for
network leadership, convening, social network analysis, developing a narrative for change 11) Team coaching and off site intervention for addressing key issues combined with surfacing stuck
mindsets and assumptions. 12) Leadership development -‐ systems thinking 13) Dialogue 14) Theory-‐development tools, system modeling, network analysis 15) issues management; wicked problems identification; monitoring and evaluation 16) Personal cultivation practices (self); sustainability frameworks 17) Mix of methods, tools and approaches (e.g. leadership for global responsibility and step model of
cultural diversity) 18) Multi-‐stakeholder Dialogues 19) Story-‐telling, Indaba
In addition, comments noted the growing importance of information technologies, media and software in analyzing and responding to complex change challenges.
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Cases
Case Issue: Regional Energy Development
Tools/methods provider: Dialogos
Short Description: Senior advisors to Prime Ministers, sitting Ministers and a former Primer Minister from the South Asia region have been brought together in a development process to seek to bring about new thinking and new action for South Asian Integration. Focus areas have included the creation of cross border energy trade and transmission and the increase of trade flows. Distinctive here is the establishment of a sustained "Champions Process" with senior leaders from the region committed to design and facilitate transformational results. Initial results include the creation of a first ever India-‐Pakistan 500kv transmission line, the initiation of India-‐Bangladesh waterways trade facilitation, and the creation of a South Asia Visioning Process.
The change intervention is distinguished by use of a dialogic design that focused on innovation at the level of deep purpose and implementation that integrates high level dialogue with a scalable delivery platform and delivery system.
Case Issue: Children’s Well-‐Being
Tools/methods provider: Future Search network
Short Description: A UNICEF-‐sponsored effort called Operation Lifeline Sudan invited children and adults in November, 1999, to take part in a future search to address the crisis of losing a generation of children to the turmoil of a brutal civil war. To allow the children's voices to be heard, the main future search was preceded by a future search for children only. About 40 children, ages 13 -‐ 17, (accompanied by their teachers) participated. Most of these children had suffered displacement and separation from their families as a result of the war, and some even fought in the war. This was followed by a second future search with a diverse group of adults. Participants recounted shared history, reviewed relevant world trends, visualized a desired future, planned to improve children’s lives. This supported acting from a shared framework of a shared understanding.
Sudanese living outside Sudan (expatriates from the UK, and South and West Africa) joined in the plan to develop curriculum material and deliver textbooks to villages over the next two years. Another task force formed to identify community members inside Sudan with existing teaching skills. A third group talked organized around training courses for agriculturists and farmers, while the health care professionals collaborated to work with local citizens to erect buildings to be used as centers.
Case Issue: Sustainable Shipping
Tools/methods provider: Forum for the Future
Short Description: The Sustainable Shipping Initiative (SSI) brings together some of the biggest names in the maritime sector to plan how it can contribute to -‐ and thrive in -‐ a sustainable future. Its ultimate aim is to drive leadership in shipping and make sustainability mainstream within the industry in line with delivering the SSI 2040 Vision. Forum for the Future catalyzed and facilitated a system innovation process to create the SSI, which aims to be an organization for the whole shipping industry run by the leaders and with a high level of ambition. The SSI helps to protect the future of the industry by working individually and together on progressive approaches that accelerate sustainability.
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In order to achieve this a coalition and strong network of 21 significant and respected global organizations spanning the whole shipping supply chain was built over 3 years. A Case for Action was developed which identified the key trends impacting the industry and the three key challenges. Building upon Forum’s collaboration expertise and support for individual organization leadership development, the coalition developed into a commitment and action to the SSI 2040 Vision for a sustainable industry. The SSI platform supports the collaborative actions in order to accelerate change across the shipping system. It also opened up opportunities for SSI members to learn from best practice and find new commercial opportunities, communicate their achievements to industry and global media and now provides a model for other industries to follow.
Case Issue: Fisheries
Tools/methods provider: Academy for Systemic Change
Short Description: Noroeste Sustentable in LaPaz, Mexico brings together stakeholders in the interests of sustainable fisheries and community health. This three plus year initiative involves systems mapping, organizational learning, multi-‐stakeholder facilitation, Nature Quests (Way of Nature) for personal cultivation, and Theory U. Through these tools, stakeholders deepen their understanding of the system affecting the Bahia de la Paz, develop their leadership, undertake multi-‐stakeholder dialogues to develop innovative vision and shared action.
Case Issue: Internal Conflict
Tools/methods provider: Various
Short Description: Strife in Northern Ireland made the country an economic basket case and severely threatened individuals’ security from the 1970s for over two decades. Today, although some conflict continues, the situation is transformed into one where economic and security issues are similar to most OECD countries. The change resulted from an array of initiatives involving mainly civil society and government: political options, righting injustice and inequity, conflict transformation, cross-‐community dialogue, and managing diversity. They led to structural and systemic change, as well as changes in attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors. These collectively have made an important contribution to the definition of processes to address pernicious conflict.
Case Issue: Fisheries
Tools/methods provider: Stockholm Resilience Centre
Short Description: The Western Indian Ocean Marine Science Association funded a project led by SRC scientist Tim Daw titled: "How do protected areas affect fishers? An assessment of fishers' spatial behaviour around protected areas". This has involved participatory research to better understand how environmental protection affects fisheries and local livelihoods. SRC researchers used frugal technologies for data gathering, partnered with the Fisheries Department of governments, involved the local community in multi-‐stakeholder engagement activities, and demonstrated mutuality (technical methods training was a long-‐term benefit to the African participants who enabled data gathering.)
Case Issue: Health and Nutrition
Tools/methods provider: Synergos and Reos
Short Description: The Bhavishya Alliance in India was founded by Synergos, UNICEF and Hindustan Lever to reduce child under-‐nutrition in the state of Maharashtra. The Alliance comprised of thirty government, corporate, nongovernmental and international institutions, including the state government, the Department of Tribal Welfare, Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), ICICI
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Bank, Tata Group, Nike Foundation, GAIN and local NGOs. Bhavishya created new relationships among stakeholders and leveraged their expertise to design and test innovative initiatives that reduce under-‐nutrition. Successful pilot projects are being scaled up, and a project to impact child nutrition by empowering girls is being integrated into national government programs.
Case Issue: Business Development
Tools/methods provider: The Partnering Initiative
Short Description: The Business in Development Facility (BIDF) draws on leading multi-‐stakeholder change strategies to countries drive the engagement of business in development by systematically promoting and supporting the development of ‘win-‐win’ partnerships between companies, international agencies, government and NGOs. It is an open platform supported by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, DFID and implemented with TPI.
The BIDF is supporting national stakeholders in creating a locally-‐owned and run ‘Business and Development Partnerships Hubs’, platforms to engage business and to systematically promote, support and build capacity to help drive more widespread, effective PPP action. Currently, TPI is working with local partners to develop Hubs in Colombia and Zambia and is currently scoping Mozambique.
Case Issue: Food
Tools/methods provider: The Sustainable Food Lab
Short Description: The Sustainable Food Lab (SFL) is a transformation platform exploring innovative ways to shift food sustainability from niche to the mainstream. It represents an example of social innovation labs that integrate many methodologies. It began in 2002 with multi-‐stakeholder strategies applying the U-‐Process framework and action learning. Over the next several years, the SFL evolved from an idea to an ongoing programme, involving a wide variety of influential international stakeholders and leaders from across the food system. It has resulted in a number of activities that are “tipping” the agriculture and food system to integrate sustainability in social terms (eg: integrating small farmers into supply chains) and environmental terms (mitigation of green house gases) within a sustainable economic framework. Case Issue: Coffee Value Chain
Tools/methods provider: The Collective Leadership Institute (CLI)
Short Description: CLI supported the process of developing a far-‐reaching agreement on the mainstream coffee value chain with coffee producers, the European coffee roasting industry, development cooperation organizations and major international NGOs. While this effort culminated successfully with a multi-‐stakeholder meeting in Salvador da Bahia, the path to Brazil was not assured from the outset. An important part of the approach involved applying the six dimensions of the Collective Leadership Compass early on in the process when there was a lack of trust between stakeholders and the prospects for a positive outcome looked grim. Beginning with a high level of mistrust and a severe reservation to engage in fruitful conversations, 1 ½ days of structured dialogue led to a promising outcome: almost all stakeholders explicitly committed to participating in the initiative, a commitment for collective action.
The Compass emphasizes co-‐creation, and the conversation focused on future possibilities, humanity and wholeness as starting points to draw out collective intelligence and innovation with respect to sustainability standards. The group became actively engaged, with people volunteering to connect
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the project team to their networks of influential actors. The Compass helped the group take an essential step towards collective leadership – they were committed to traveling together.
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