Work together to build the case for systems-level change
Successful organizations are well versed in tackling what Harvard Kennedy School’s Ron Heifetz and his colleagues refer to as “technical challenges.” Unfortunately, many of today’s problems fall into what they call “adaptive challenges.” According to Heifetz and his coauthors:
While technical problems may be very complex and critically important (like replacing a faulty heart valve during cardiac surgery), they have known solutions that can be implemented by current know-how. They can be resolved through the application of authoritative expertise and through the organization’s current structures, procedures, and ways of doing things. Adaptive challenges can only be addressed through changes in people’s priorities, beliefs, habits, and loyalties. Making progress requires going beyond any authoritative expertise to mobilize discovery, shedding certain entrenched ways, tolerating losses, and generating the new capacity to thrive anew (“The Theory Behind the Practice: A Brief Introduction to the Adaptive Leadership Framework”).
Heifetz and his coauthors observe that one aspect of adaptive challenges that makes them so difficult to tackle is not that people resist change, but that they resist loss. For that reason, they state, “Adaptive leadership almost always puts you in the business of assessing, managing, distributing, and providing contexts for losses that move people through those losses to a new place.”
At the same time, part of adapting is not about change at all but about identifying what you want to conserve. In this way, according to Heifetz et al, “a successful adaptation enables an organization or community to take the best from its traditions, identity, and history into the future.”
The concepts of loss and conservation are key as you and your partners build a case for systems-level change. By taking into account how people will be affected by change, you can take steps to engage them throughout the process and prepare for the inevitable pushback.
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Collective Impact Framework
This is a comprehensive change methodology for tackling deeply entrenched and complex social problems. It seeks to enable collaboration across sectors in order to achieve significant and lasting social change. A distinctive element is that “Collective Impact initiatives have centralised infrastructure – known as a backbone organisation – with dedicated staff whose role is to help participating organisations shift from acting alone to acting in concert” (Collaboration for Impact website).
Collective Impact Framework
John Kania and Mark Kramer, “Collective Impact,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2011