Written by Lant Pritchett
My main objective is to cross-post this Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) blog, Learning From What We Do and Doing What We Learn: What We Gain from a Solution-Search Approach to Building State Capacity by Susana Cordeiro Guerra, manager of Institutions for Development (IFD) at IDB.
But in doing so, would like to add a little of my own context. Two conversations, coming from very different angles, but with roughly the same message, stand out in deeply influencing how I think about change inside organizations.
One conversation came at the end of a week-long Executive Education course offered at Harvard Kennedy School that brought in mid-career professionals from the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank and other development organizations. This course was joint with Ricardo Hausmann and Matt Andrews and taught a combination of growth diagnostics, complexity and structural transformation and the pre-cursors to the Building State Capability book and the PDIA approach. We always set aside a session on the last day of the course for feedback from the participants.
In this particular feedback session one participant (and I won’t say that he was from the IDB or that he wasn’t) raised his hand and said, “This course has been terrific, but it has made me a much, more unhappy person.” We were naturally pleased by the first and more than a little shocked and worried by the latter. “How so?” we asked.
“Well, until I came to this course I knew my organization was far less than effective than it could be, but consoled myself believing that there was nothing that could be done about it. It was what it was and I therefore had to live with that. This course was terrific in that it convinced me that something could be done about it, and that my organization could be more effective. But I am the only one from my organization here and hearing about this new approach. I know I have no chance of going back and getting my organization to adopt anything like these promising approaches. Therefore, I am an unhappy person as I can no longer console myself that there is nothing than can be done, there is, but I cannot do it.”
These honest and poignant comments were a wake-up call.
A second conversation was with Clay Christensen, the HBS professor and author of the very famous 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma. We were friends from outside of professional channels and we were chatting at a social gathering at least 15 years after the publication of the 1997 book and the idea of “disruptive innovation” was everywhere. More or less out of the blue he said: “I have learned that you cannot change organizations with a book.”I was stunned as I regarded his book as one of the influential business books of all time (at least in the same league as the mother of all business books, In Search of Excellence). So, I said, “Geez, Clay, many people think your book has changed organizations far more than most.” He said:
“Maybe, a little, but I have had hundreds and hundreds of people tell me they read the book over the weekend, got excited about how it could help their organization, came in Monday morning fired up to bring these ideas into their organization and then quickly discovered that no one shared their newfound enthusiasm and there were lots of other things to be done and gradually they gave up. My conclusion is that the experience of reading a book is individual and asynchronous and changing organizations requires experiences that are communal and synchronous.”
These insights, and others from Matt Andrews and his work on leadership and Michael Woolcock on the sociology of organizations, and my own experience of an eight year research project on basic education in the developing world, have led me to understand that scaled change inside organizations (and, more broadly, systems) is not only changing the beliefs of individuals but also about communal and shared experiences that change the norms and practices of organizations, which requires a shift in shared beliefs, norms, and practices.
Which brings us back to the linked blog, about which I want to highlight three things.
- The title is not about “learning by doing” in the abstract, but about “learning from we do” which emphasizes that the learning is at the level of the IDB, as an organization, not just about the learning of individuals at the IDB.
- The second half of the title is about “doing what we learn” which again emphasizes that this isn’t about creating success for individuals but about feeding lessons from success back into the norms and practices of the organization. As the blog points out, it is possible to create success even in organizations with low capability and difficult overall circumstances, but the problem is that success is often effervescent and does not lead to a sustained dynamic of improvement.
- The blog emphasizes not precise procedures or algorithms top-down directives, but four broad principals to guide action in a “solution search” approach. This emphasizes that organizations can learn to do better by, and only by, doing, and doing differently. Doing to find and implement solutions to clear, pressing, locally nominated problems is the pathway to building capability. Embracing principles for action allows organizations to create (and for development organizations like the IDB, co-create with other organizations) the shared and synchronous experiences that lead to sustained improvements in practices and performance.
This circles back to the feeling of helpless many people feel in the face of the challenges of changing large organizations. The feeling that “what can I do? I am just a drop in the ocean” is common—and often justified—but, at the same time when drops in the ocean synchronize, they become waves. The power of waves, which are just drops of water, aligned, carry great power.