written by Matt Andrews
As I reflect on how change happens in development, 5 themes come to mind. I have written about the importance of moments, muddling and the mundane. Today I will discuss the fourth one: multiple men and women matter. In my experience, development and governance reform is about people, not as targets of change, but as agents of change.
This is not a surprising observation but is an important one nonetheless, especially when one considers how little attention development initiatives commonly give to the men and women who have to risk and adapt and work to make change happen and ensure change is sustained. Development initiatives tend to emphasize ideas and money much more than people, even though it is the latter that actually come up with ideas, shape ideas to contexts, and use resources to foster change.
When people are considered in development initiatives, it is often with a narrow lens on ‘champions’ or ‘heroes’. That’s not the picture I see as relevant in the research and applied work I have been engaged in. This work shows me that development and change require multiple functions or roles: we need someone to identify problems, someone to identify solutions, someone to provide money, someone to authorize change activities, someone to motivate and inspire, someone to connect distributed agents, someone to convene smaller groups, someone to provide key resources other than money, and someone who can give an implementation perspective (of the implications of proposed change).
For a variety of theoretical reasons I don’t think we will often find these functions played by one person, or organization. My empirical research suggests that this is true in practice. What I see in my studies is that successful reform requires multiple people providing leadership in a coordinated and synergistic way, such that all the different functional roles are played in an orchestra of change (people who are familiar with Lee Kuan Yew’s view of leadership will relate to the idea of the orchestra).:
- I wrote a paper on leadership in twelve interesting reforms, where I tested whether one person stood out as the major leader. I found that this was not the case at all. Many people were identified as leaders in the cases, all playing different roles in the change process.
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In a review of 30 cases of successful reform (from Princeton University’s Innovations for Successful Societies repository) I found that an average of 19 agents were mentioned as playing the roles noted. They all took risks and stood out for providing an important part of the change puzzle.
The research does find that ‘champions’ exist in many cases, however. But being a champion does not mean being multiple people (or wearing multiple hats, or playing multiple functional roles). Instead, my work showed that where a champion exists, he or she plays three specific functional roles: Authorizing, Convening, and Motivating. The champions do not typically play the other roles.