How Change Happens

Yesterday’s post was sparked off by a book and a paper with this title. Kzarnic’s paper was written in 2007 (although I came across only yesterday in the book) and is simply the best introduction to the topic I have come across – identifying what for him are the core approaches which the various intellectual disciplines offer to explain change – whether that change is described as “technical”, “economic”, “political” or “organizational”. And adding some multi-disciplinary approaches for good measure….

Green’s book focuses on one very small part of the picture - “people power” in poor “developing” countries, emphasizing right from the start that - 

Activists seeking social and political change usually focus their efforts on those who wield visible power, presidents, prime ministers and CEOs, since they hold apparent authority over the matter at hand. Yet the hierarchy of visible power is underpinned by subtle interactions among a more diverse set of players. Hidden power‘ describes what goes on behind the scenes: the lobbyists, the corporate chequebooks, the Old Boys Network.

Hidden power also comprises the shared view of what those in power consider sensible or reasonable in public debate. Any environmentalist who has sat across the table from government officials or mainstream economists and dared to question the advisability of unlimited economic growth in a resource-constrained world will have met the blank faces that confront anyone breaching those boundaries.

I’m long enough in the tooth to have seen many times the “conventional wisdom” of everyday conversation become a forgotten tale and am constantly amazed by how easily people move from one discredited world view to another without beginning to develop some scepticism about that conventional wisdom……    

Yesterday’s post tracked my own journey of discovery about “change” and power – first as a Scottish politician working with community groups, political colleagues, official advisers, academics and journalists; and, since 1990, as a consultant working to European bureaucracy and with Central European and Central Asian technocrats and politicians – local and national – all the time trying to keep up with the burgeoning relevant literature in fields such as “managing change”, “institutional reform” and “developing capacities”   

This experience suggests that there are actually four very different bodies of thinking and writing about “change – and how it happens” - each using different language and each with different audiences and loyalties…..

- Managing Change – the “management of change” literature was written by management consultants looking for markets and hit a peak about 15 years ago. The ultimate business guru book is an excellent introduction to the people and ideas on which that genre drew.  Critical management studies (CMS) was an interesting (if badly written) radical academic response to the overfocus of those writings on senior business executives with power and authority.  

- People Power – the literature of what we might call “Social change” is diverse and developing fast as the sense of crisis develops. It includes such fields as self-help, community enterprise and social movements and, for me, offers the best written and least self-serving material. Ronald Douthwaite’s Short Circuit – strengthening local economies for security in an unstable world (2003) is still one of the best arguments for social enterprise.  Tarrow’s Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics is a good summary of the last group. International Charities (such as Oxfam) also make an important contribution to thinking….  

- State Reform – it’s amazing to realise that Public Sector Reform (PSR) is only about 25 years old….the writings come almost exclusively from academics and consultants and either ape that of change management; or of the deconstructionists of CMS. Increasingly the literature on “change” has been coming from state bodies (national and international) such as The World Bank, OECD, Asian Development Bank, ODI etc and is addressed to senior officials, academics (and journalists?)…

- The White Heat of Technology – everyone’s great hope in the face of the environmental and financial disasters (which people have eventually understood) now face the world….We are overwhelmed by the books which all sorts of people have been pouring out in the past decade giving us the stories of the technological, economic and social forces which produced (and change) the world in which we now live.    

Coincidentally, the first thing I found in this morning’s surfing was a presentation by Chris Martenson’s about his Crash course – a full version of which can be accessed here. That single hour’s viewing told me more than I had learned in the several hours it took me last week to read Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything.

The presentation nicely complemented last week’s reading of Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organisations - a book which has apparently been making waves in Europe. His basic argument is that the wave of the future is joint-ownership and his book celebrates those companies (some quite large) which have adopted that principle and identifies some of the preconditions, systems and procedures which seem to account for its success.

When will they ever learn?

“Change” is one of these words that has had me salivating for half a century. According to poet Philip Larkin, “Sexual intercourse began in 1963…” – at roughly the same time my generation began to chafe under the restrictions of “tradition” - so well described in David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain and Modernity Britain 1957-1962. 

The notion of “modernization” (as embodied in a famous series of “What’s wrong with Britain” books published by the Penguin Press) became highly seductive for some of us - …. Coincidentally 1963 was the year Harold Wilson delivered his famous speech about the “white heat of technology” to an electrified Labour Party Conference, presaging one of the key themes of the 1964-70 Labour Government.

The need for reform of our institutions (and the power structures they sustained) became a dominant theme in my life when, in 1968, I found myself representing the east end of a shipbuilding town. I eagerly absorbed the writing which was coming from American progressive academics (such as Warren Bennis and Amitai Etzioni) about the new possibilities offered by the social sciences; and listened spellbound on the family radio to the 1970 Reith Lectures on “Change and Industrial Society” by Donald Schon – subsequently issued as the book “Beyond the Stable State” (1971). In it, he coined the phrase “Dynamic conservatism” and went on to talk about government as a learning system and to ask what can we know about social change.

From that moment I was hooked on the importance of organisations (particularly public) and of institutional reform……In those days there was little talk of management (!) and only a few Peter Drucker books…..    

Toffler’s Future Shock came the very next year (1971) by which time I had started to proselytize the “need for change” in papers which bore such titles as “Radical Reform of municipal management” and “From corporate planning to community action”…..

In 1975 I got the chance to shape the key strategy of Europe’s largest regional authority and to manage that change strategy for the next 15 years……  From 1990 I took my “mission” of institutional change to first central Europe and then (for 7 years) to Central Asia……

In 1999 I reflected on the lessons of my work (and reading) in a 200 page book In Transit – notes on good governance which contains from page 145 my (fairly rough) notes on the literature on “management of change” I had been reading in the 90s… Then followed a decade of intensive experience and critical reflection set out in the long 2011 paper The Long Game – not the log-frame – which reflects the stage I had reached in my thinking about how to achieve institutional change “against the odds”……

These were the memories stirred by a draft book entitled How Change Happens by Duncan Green – well known development adviser and blogger – which I downloaded yesterday and read, along with a shorter 2007 paper with the same title by R Kzarnic (which is actually a very concise and comprehensive review of the relevant literature)

It has raised yet again the question which has been nagging me recently – “when will we ever learn?” - or better perhaps “what” has been learned from all this exhortation to “change” or "develop capacities"?

For 50 years the rhetoric has been “improvement”, “reform”….“change for the better”…..we have ridiculed those who wanted to "maintain" or “conserve”……

But perhaps it's time to pause and ask some questions about the agenda of those who have preached change – at least in the public sector???

My own speciality has been the process of change – but it is the substance of most of the changes which is now being so seriously and widely questioned in Britain and Europe. Particularly the increased role of management and of private companies…..

We used to think it was advertising that made us such a dissatisfied people – constantly wanting “better” and “newer”….but it is also our political class which has helped create this dissatisfaction with public services and the demand for “better”….  

I've always believed in what I called the "pincer" movement of change - that improving people's lives required both "bottom-up" social movement and "top-down" support from "caring dissidents" within the system....Sadly the programmes which funded me after 1990 rarely gave me the opportunity to work this strategy........... 

The title of the post is a line from Pete Seeger's famous protest song - "Where Have all the Flowers Gone?" and the photo of that great folk-singer who died last year.....