Guest blog written by Matt Andrews
As I reflect on how change happens in development, 5 themes come to mind.
Moments matter
The first is simple, but is one of the most important observations I continually make when observing successful change that fosters better government and development results: Moments matter.
‘Change events’ happen when contexts become ready for change. That is, when:
- there is disruption that forces people to accept change,
- incumbent structures are being questioned,
- there are viable alternatives that local people are willing to try, and
- the weight of agency shifts from the old and discredited ways to a search for new ways (that may be untested but promise better solutions to pressing problems).
Interestingly, I find that these moments are not always a product of lucky timing. In fact, I commonly see years of activity and engagement in advance of any ‘moment’ that seems to spawn change.
We should spend more time preparing for moments than we currently do. Moments of readiness matter more than the development solutions we try to stuff into contexts that are not ready for change.
Muddling matters
Developing countries need to muddle through if they want to improve governance. There are no quick answers to the complex challenge of governance reform.
Many people in the development community tell me that they agree with the idea of muddling (conceptually), but don’t see how it can be done in developing countries or in governments where politicians are looking for solutions and want the solutions ‘yesterday.’
I keep telling these people, that purposive muddling is common, and necessary, and instead of saying ‘it isn’t possible’ we should be exploring the strategies others have adopted to make it possible (and to make it part of the DNA of some organizations).
The mundane matters in development.
What I mean is simply that everyday, boring, taken for granted events, pressures, relationships, activities and such have a huge influence on prospects for change and development. We think these things are ordinary, banal, and don’t matter. But actually, they dominate time and activity, and are the key to ‘getting things done’ and to prospects for change and development.
If mundane processes and pressures do not foster efficient activity, organizations are likely to be inefficient–there will be loads of meetings and people answering emails and writing papers and filling in time sheets and doing due diligence activities but these mundane activities will not foster effective results. Similarly, if the mundane does not support change then change and development will not happen: people will attend meetings but won’t follow-up with new activities because their time is already spoken for by the mundane.
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).
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 functional roles together.
This blog is a summary of an original series of five blogs, one for each M, published by the Building State Capability Blog. I’ve linked each section to the original blog and you can also access them here.
Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash
