Windows of Change

One of the issues which fascinates me is social change – how alliances can and do reach sufficient “critical mass” to force governments to change direction. My background is political science but, when in 1990 I moved into consultancy on “capacity development” I did my homework on the “change management” literature which was then so fashionable.

The pandemic has given us a “new kid on the block” to contend with – the social network theorists - whose father and inspiration has been Spanish sociology Professor Manuel Castells.

“TheRules of Contagion - why things spread and Why they Stop” by Adam Kucharski (2020) is a typical of this new genre. It’s actually been lying on my shelves for a few weeks and it is only a much-hyped book by Damon Centola “Change – how to make Big Things Happen” which has made me aware of the questions now being raised in this field.

I have to confess that I am reading it with a jaundiced eye. I am not impressed with the conceit of an author who tells me in the opening pages 

“I have a unique perspective on these ideas….in fact, over the past decades, my ideas have helped shape this new field” and that “I directly manipulated the behaviour of entire populations”

Hasn’t this guy heard of hubris? Or of Icarus who got burned when he flew too high?

Centola is a Professor (of Sociology in a school of Communications and Engineering) who has done a lot of work on both social movements and epidemiology – so clearly has something to say and I will read the book carefully. Indeed I can already spot where I need to amend my own theory of change which currently runs as follows - 

“I have a theory of change which emphasises the individual, moral responsibility as well as the dynamic of the crowd. Most of the time our systems seem impervious to change – but always (and suddenly) an opportunity arises. Those who care about the future of their society, prepare for these “windows of opportunity”. And the preparation is about analysis, mobilisation and integrity.

·              It is about us caring enough about our organisation and society to speak out about the need for change.

·              It is about taking the trouble to think and read about ways to improve things – and

·              To help create and run networks of such change

·              which mobilise social forces

·              And it is about establishing a personal reputation for probity and good judgement 

·              that people will follow your lead when that window of opportunity arises”. 

Centola’s presentation presents evidence which disputes that final point – showing that key actors in the Egyptian Spring with such reputations failed a week before the crucial catalyst. The key events were triggered by others…..

One of his central points is that social change 

“is not about information……it’s about norms……social networks are not merely the pipes…but the prisms that determine how we see those behaviours and interpret the ideas”

I’ll let you know more about the book once I get through it…..

afterthought;

The last book I read about networks was probably Niall Ferguson’s The Square and the Tower –networks, hierarchies and the struggle for global power (2017) which was actually a historian’s fascinating take on the issue. My comments on the book ranged pretty widely and had more to do with my own discovery of the importance of networks but a subsequent post referred to another article not referenced in Ferguson’s copious notes but which place the idea of networks in a far more insightful context than Ferguson – namely Tribes, institutions, markets, networks – a framework for societal evolution by David Ronfeldt (RAND Corporation 1996). It's an important article which argues that each form is necessary – one does not replace the other….With a great table of which I have selected some excerpts - 

Comparison of the 4 models

	Tribe/clan	Institution	market	Network
Key realm	Family/culture	State/government	economy	Civil society
Essential feature	Give sense of identity	Exercise authority	Allow free transactions	Share knowledge
Key Value	Belonging	Order	freedom	equality?
Key risk	Nepotism	Corruption	exploitation	Group think
Identity	Solidarity	Sovereignty	competition	Cooperation
Motivation	Survival	Rules	Self-interest	Group empowerment
structure	Acephalous	Hierarchical	atomised	Flat

Why Those seeking systemic change have had little traction….so far

I’ve been looking back at the posts which have this year discussed various efforts to improve “the human lot” and trying to draw the threads together……

One of the recurring themes of this blog is the “insularity” of those who theorise about social conditions ie their failure to realise that they are (generally) writing from one particular intellectual “silo” and aiming their missive at those within the same silo….

It’s taken me some time to realise that I’m guilty of the same sin….Let me explain…..

When I started this blog almost ten years ago, its initial focus was what we might call the “conditions of social injustice” in the West of Scotland in the 1970s which had persuaded some of us to elaborate a unique urban social strategy whose legacy is still evident today….

The blog then fairly quickly moved to try to explore the sort of reform strategy which might be appropriate for government agencies “in transit” from a system of total state control (under communism) to one with a strange mixture of “Wild-West”/Mafia capitalism and of loose democratic contestability…

At the same time, I was following the “development literature” in which the historical context (or path dependency) had been - not communism but – imperialism…The past decade – as a recent post summarised – has seen multiple challenges to the development model which had held sway in the post-war period…..with a much more political model of change penetrating even to the World Bank citadels of power

And, in recent years, the blog’s focus has shifted yet again – this time scouring the critical literature (which has grown massively in the past decade) about the “global economic crisis” and trying to identify some common ground in the various explanations on offer for the meltdown and their implications for the future of the prevailing economic model. Critical voices have increasingly been heard of that model – although alternatives are still in short supply

In each case, theories of change were needed and were duly produced – with varying degrees of coherence. The best of this literature is probably the World Bank material on government reform; and that from the 3 bodies listed in the “global justice” section – particularly the material from Smart CSOs with its three levels of forces of power – “culture”, “regimes” and “niches”

As always, a table will make the point more graphically than text –

How different “theories of change” have dealt with some key issues

Focus	The issue?	Key analysts	Narrative
Urban Social injustice	How marginalised groups and areas could improve their political influence	Saul Alinsky Peter Marris	Urban ghettoes were rediscovered in the 1980s and various methods used by governments to empower their residents….no real answer has been found to the problem of labelling and stigma….
National governance (communist legacy)	How to make state bodies effective and accountable to  citizens	Nick Manning Tony Verheijen	Fast privatisation (not least of media empires) has created new patrimonial regimes impervious to citizen control. European Structural Funds have deepened the corruption.
National governance (imperialist legacy)	reducing patrimonial power	Robert Chambers Duncan Green Matt Andrews Tom Carrothers	Global aid and consultancy is a massive multi-billion industry which seems impossible to reform. Fashionable nostra come and go – with the local regimes firmly in control….
Managing the Capitalist Crisis	Ecological collapse, peak oil, low profitability, corporate theft, globalisation	The "usual suspects – Chomsky, Harvey, Klein, Monbiot, Varoufakis	The blog has noted several times the reluctance of writers to develop common ground in their various analyses – let alone develop a proper annotated bibliography about the crisis…..
“Global justice”	The search for a more sustainable and acceptable alternative economic model	Smart CSOs Great Transition Initiative CASSE	The ecological crisis has more resonance for change than talk about capitalism – so the most effective bodies which have captured global attention tend to focus initially on that – but increasingly broaden out to talk of alternative economic models

It’s interesting, of course, that newspaper headlines rarely refer to these fundamental issues – with the single exception of extreme weather conditions….

Perhaps this post is beginning to show the influence of the material I’ve been reading in the past week or so about thinking in terms of systems…..?? It’s suggesting that those of us angry with the way the world is being run need to –

-       Show more sensitivity to how issues are being defined in campaigns we’re not involved in

-       Spend more time making common cause with others

-       Clarifying our “theory of change”

-       Challenging the leaders of campaigns about such things…

Recommended Further Reading

Systemic activism in a polarised world (Smart CSOs 2018)

Theories of Change and the vision of the Great Transformation (Smart CSOs 2016)

How to break out of the system trap (Smart CSOs 2013)

Effective Change Strategies for the Great Transformation – 5 leverage points for civil society organs (Smart CSOs 2011)

Theories of Change - mine and other people's

For the past few years, people in the “development” field have been encouraged to have a “theory of change”. The global technocracy had at last been forced to recognise that its attempts to make political institutions in “developing” countries more open to economic development had not been working - and that a different more local, inclusive and incremental approach was needed if there were to be any prospects for improving the government systems under which so many citizens are yoked….. 

Practitioners of this curious field often use the phrase “Doing Development Differently” – there is a nice short powerpoint presentation here of the main ideas to complement the OECD paper which is the first hyperlink

I.ve had my own theories of organisational change – whether in Scotland in the 1970s and 80s or in central Asia in the 2000s – always (I have just realised) with the assumption that "we" were facing the implacable force of what the great organisational analyst Donald Schoen in 1970 called “dynamic conservatism”

When I was lucky enough to find myself in a position of strategic leadership in a new and large organisation in the mid 1970s, we used what I called the “pincer approach” to set up reform structures at both a political and community level. The organisational culture was, of course, one of classic bureaucracy – but, from its very start, some of us made sure that it had to contend with the unruly forces of political idealism and community power. The regional body concerned was responsible for such local government functions as education, social work, transport, water and strategic planning for two and half million people; and employed 100,000 staff but not has been written about it.

You’ll find the full story of the strategy here – and a short version here. 

Thirty years later. I was doing a lot of training sessions in the Presidential Academies of Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan and developed there what I called the “opportunistic” or “windows of opportunity” theory of change against what I started to call “impervious regimes” ie so confident of the lack of challenge to their rule that they had become impervious to their citizens -

“Most of the time our systems seem impervious to change – but always (and suddenly) an opportunity arises. Those who care about the future of their society, prepare for these “windows of opportunity”. And the preparation is about analysis, mobilisation and trust.

·         It is about us caring enough about our organisation and society to speak out about the need for change.

·         It is about taking the trouble to think and read about ways to improve things – and helping create and run networks of such change.

·         And it is about establishing a personal reputation for probity and good judgement that people will follow your lead when that window of opportunity arises”.

I realised that it would be difficult to implement such an approach in Beijing when I arrived there in January 2010 to take up the role of Team Leader in a “Rule of Law” project and made a fast exit from a project that was supposed to last for 4 years – for reasons I tried to explain in a note called Lost in Beijing.

A year later, I tried to share some of my concerns about how the European Commission was dealing with capacity development in “transition countries” with participants at the annual NISPAcee Conference in Varna. But The Long Game – not the log-frame was met with indifference.

As it happens that was the year the World Bank published its quite excellent People, Politics and Change - building communications strategy for governance reform (World Bank 2011). And it was 2015 before this guide on “change management for rule of law practitioners” saw the light of day    

I said earlier that I had always assumed that reformers were facing “implacable force” in their intervention but need now to question this..…not just because 1989 showed how easily certitudes and legitimacy can crumble….. but also because management writing has in the past 2 decades paid a lot more attention to chaos and uncertainty – even before the 2006 global crisis (eg Meadows and Wheatley).

As someone who has always felt compelled to try to intervene in social processes (ie of an “activist” mode) I readily admit that my initial responses to those who argued that every force attracts a counterforce and, most memorably, that “the flap of a butterfly’s wings can ultimately contribute to tornados”…has been one of impatience. Quite a lot of the writing on “chaos theory” and even “systems theory” seemed to me to run the risk of encouraging fatalism.

One of my favourite writers - AO Hirschmann – actually devoted a book (”The Rhetoric of Reaction”; 1991) to examining three arguments conservative writers use for dismissing the hopes of social reformers:

- the perversity thesis holds that any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy.

- The futility thesis argues that attempts at social transformation will be unavailing, that they will simply fail to “make a dent.”

- the jeopardy thesis argues that the cost of the proposed change or reform is too high as it endangers some previous, precious accomplishment.

He was right to call out those writers; but we perhaps need a similar framework these days to help us make sense of the world of chaos in which we live. I had been aware of systems thinking in the 1970s (particularly in the writing of Geoffrey Vickers and Stafford Beer) and again in 2010 and, finally, in a 2011 post which focused on complexity theory. My brief foray into the subject didn’t greatly enlighten me but I have a feeling I should return to the challenge….

I have therefore a little pile of books on my desk – including The Web of Life (Fritjof Capra 1996); Leadership and the new Science – discovering order in a chaotic world (Margaret Wheatley 1999); Thinking in Systems (Donella Meadows 2009) – as well as a virtual book Systems thinking – creative holism for managers; Michael Jackson (2003). 

So let’s see if my older self is capable of new insights…….