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, the mundane and multiple men and women. In keeping with the ‘m’s’, today I will emphasize the importance of mobilizers.
These are the people who bring multiple men and women together, encourage them to work beyond the mundane, muddle purposively, and take advantage of or create moments for change. They are people who convene small groups of key agents needed to play specific roles (often in teams or in small authorizing groups), or who connect distributed agents to each other (so the agents don’t even need to interact directly), or who motivate people across networks. These mobilizers are the key to effective leadership, if you ask me, because they bring all the different fucntional roles together. Here is an example of conveners and connectors in action, in a simplified version of a recent reform story I was engaged in. It was work in the judicial sector of a country. A donor had been supporting initiatives to introduce a statistical management system to the sector, so that resource allocation decisions could be more evidence based (everyone would know where case loads were high, where judges and prosecutors were present, where buildings were in place, etc.). After five years and millions of dollars no system existed. This was partly because different groups across the sector did not engage in the reform together. The donor had connections to the ministry of justice and although there were overlaps with the Supreme Court and prosecution, there were no direct connections. Thus the reform was not supported by the other agencies. See my diagram … Sorry it is a mess.
I started working on the issue, and had a local person work with some of the folks in the ministry of justice and the courts and the prosecution, as a convener (see M1 in the figure below). This person worked with me to hold meetings of people from these different agencies, and in this way created first degree relationships across the agencies that helped foster a common understanding of the problems warranting change and of the potential ways the agencies could work together to foster change. The role of one mobilizer created direct links between key agents and indirect links between all agents in the system. This opened up access to new ideas, functions, contributions, etc.
A second type of mobilization was also important, however, and involved another person working as a connector between distributed agents in the ministry of justice, courts and prosecution office (because it is not only important to convene the heads). This person (M2 in the figure below) created relationships between multiple people in the system and allowed them to connect with each other THROUGH him. This connector role ensured that all people in the system had a first or second degree link to other people, which made the network tighter than it was before, opening a path to agreement on reform and enhancing access to talents and ideas needed for reform to work.
The reform is still going step by step, but the connections are better than they have ever been. These connections are proving vital to reform and development and are only possible because of the role of mobilizers in the change process.