(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Greenpeace, The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the Forest Stewardship
Council (FSC), and Unilever all tout their commitment to change
in support of the natural environment. But a look at their websites
reveals big differences in how they translate this into action.
In July 2016, Greenpeace’s homepage featured a huge “RESIST”
banner attached to a construction crane with activists rappelling
down, and the words “The Summer of Resistance starts with you—Bring resistance to your community!” The Nature Conservancy’s
showed serene fields and “Help us protect cherished landscapes that
unite us in all 50 states.” The FSC’s described its commitment to the “environmentally appropriate,”
“socially beneficial,” and “economically
viable” with pictures of forests,
Forest Champions, and businesses.
And Unilever’s showed a picture of
a farmer in a developing country
and the words “Sustainable Growth:
Value + Values. We are changing the
way business is done.”
Responding to a difficult challenge
such as environmental sustainability
can produce a wide range of actions. How can diverse change
efforts that aim for a similar outcome be thought of comprehensively?
What are their relationships? How do they interact most powerfully
to speed change? These questions led me to conceive of all the diverse
efforts to create change on a difficult issue such as climate change or
poverty, collectively as a “societal change system.” Such a system comprises
all those initiatives and programs that are working to change a
situation or issue. Seeing the whole of this system—through mapping,
data visualization, and other methods—yields unique insights about
how to create coherence; identify gaps in effort; exploit synergies; and
reduce duplication, conflict, and inefficiencies.
Four Change Strategies
Economist Joseph Schumpeter’s famous description of the “creative
destruction” of capitalism is instructive for change more broadly.
There is a natural tendency among those who work for societal change
to focus on the creative part of the task—developing the new. But
change also involves destroying the old, whether it be institutions,
relationships, or ways of doing things.
Schumpeter’s insight into the continuous churn of free markets
forms the basis for proposing one dimension for distinguishing change
strategies: destruction to creation. Extreme destruction might be
depicted as the collapse of civilization; less extreme forms might
include the rejection of a traditional social value or the breakup of a
company. The extreme of creation is captured by the birth of a whole
new societal order, while a less extreme form of creation might be
the formation of a company or the adoption of a new social practice.
A second dimension is confrontation to collaboration. The extreme
of confrontation is war, but there are many less confrontational actions,
such as those of Greenpeace activists. At the collaboration extreme, consider
the facilitation of deep mutual respect and common commitment
in a group to work together to realize a change goal through transcendence
of diverse perspectives, similar to the FSC’s work.
These two dimensions form the basis of a matrix that captures four
kinds of change strategy. (See “Change Strategies” below.) Each
quadrant is named for the archetype of change it reflects. I have
developed
this model over 20 years of work on large systems change
internationally—for example, on poverty in Guatemala, global corruption,
renewable energy, and the financial system.
How do we transform a group of well-intended but collectively
incoherent change initiatives into a powerful societal change system?
The matrix serves as a device to raise valuable questions and spark
insights for understanding change strategies or initiatives
holistically.
All change initiatives reflect some mix of the two dimensions. Although a
particular change initiative may shift position within a
quadrant as it evolves and its emphasis on particular dimensions
changes, moving to a different quadrant would transform its core
logic—its rationale, principles, and capacities.
To further explore this model, I also offer a table that describes
each quadrant generically and then addresses our two examples
of societal change. (See “Characteristics of Change Strategies” below.) Let us first examine each of the quadrants generically,
then turn to the two cases.
Doing Change: The Entrepreneurs | The upper-left quadrant is that of
entrepreneurs who are out to create a new approach that defies the
prevailing logic and ways of operating. This often takes the form of
a social or commercial enterprise. The entrepreneur can be an individual,
but for societal impact it is more often an organization or
movement. Social innovation labs, Ashoka Fellows, and Impact Hubs
all specialize in nurturing this type of activity. In business, this category
covers entrepreneurs who are causing radical change, such as
M-Kopa (providing solar energy in Kenya through innovative financing)
and Revolution Foods (bringing healthy food to K-12 schools).
Entrepreneurs are not fixated on destroying the old, although
that is typically the effect of their innovation. Their energy is devoted
toward creating the new. These change agents usually face substantial
skepticism and resistance by incumbents. This, problems with scaling,
or simply the inadequate power of the invention may make the entrepreneurs
unable on their own to bring about broad societal change.
Forcing Change: The Warriors | Activists as warriors are the archetype
of the lower-left quadrant. They are the energy pushing for
widespread change, trying to influence others through their pressure
and advocacy. They must be willing to risk harm—perhaps
only breaking windows, perhaps forcing a business to close and
lay off workers, perhaps breaking the law. They focus on gathering
strength through followers and supporters often associated with
social movements. However, in the same way that social activists
can attempt to force change through warrior-like tactics, capitalists
can withdraw investment in the name of change, and governments
can use the power of the state to incarcerate and fine resisters of
change. The danger for this quadrant is failure to gather sufficient
support and power to emerge from the margins—which leads some
to become more violent and can even result in civil war.
Directing Change: The Missionaries | Those who are in positions of
power and authority and are committed to change have a particularly
challenging position. They can use that power and authority to
secure change, but that often requires fundamental disruption in the
structures that give them power and authority in the first place. They
typically have a missionary’s zeal often associated with charisma for
pursuing transformation, since such work involves overcoming immense
inertia to break up and reinvent organizations and structures
to become something very different. Their energy can easily be suppressed
by status quo interests and skepticism that arise from trying
to create something that no one has yet seen or experienced fully.
Unilever CEO Paul Polman is an example of someone grappling with
this change strategy to create a new business model that does not
just do “less bad” but contributes positively to all aspects of society.
Cocreating Change: The Lovers | This is the popular
but complicated
strategy of “Let’s get all the stakeholders in the same room and
figure out how we’ll work together for change.” It can be described as
the “lover” strategy, because it is based on the proposition that
people want the same thing and are willing to work together to get
it. It depends on the willingness of everyone to change, since almost
always every participant is part of a transformational problem—it’s
not just others that have to change, but we all hold values, beliefs,
and
ways of understanding that have to change. Along the way, however,
a more powerful or well-resourced stakeholder may induce others
to settle for less change than is needed, resulting in co-optation.
The German Energy Transition
To illustrate these four archetypes of change at work, let us turn
to Energiewende in Germany, the first of two case studies of largescale
societal change that help to flesh out the model. The term
“Energiewende” was introduced in 1980 by Germany’s Institute for
Applied Ecology (Öko-Institut e.V.) as a call to abandon nuclear and
petroleum-based energy. Translated as “energy transition,” it describes
Germany’s commitment and ongoing transition to a sustainable energy
future. In 2016, about a third of energy consumed in Germany came
from renewables. (By contrast, about 15 percent of US energy consumption
came from renewables, with a large amount of that from
hydropower.) On one auspicious day in April 2017, Germany received
a whopping 85 percent of its electricity from renewables. As a change
challenge, the case is distinctive for the important role of technology.
In terms of change strategy, Energiewende illustrates the role of
cocreation. Such an approach is part of the core post-World War II
logic of Germany more broadly, as seen in joint labor-management
boards for companies and in coalition governments. In the energy
sphere, this approach was demonstrated in the 1980s with collaborative
experimental work on alternative energy by the science, engineering,
and industrial communities. Although there have been some shifts
in strength, there has been broad support publicly for the change.
The ongoing collaborative approach must be understood in contrast
to the United States: In Germany there is no oil and gas industry,
so the main question was how to achieve sustainable energy technologically,
financially, and pragmatically, by transitioning (destroying)
traditional forms of power generation. Along the way, more widespread
collaborative strategies for implementation have included broad public
consultation and engagement around specific aspects of Energiewende,
such as development of new transmission-line corridors.
This cocreation logic supported a directing-change approach
reflected in 1991 national legislation called the Feed-In Tariff Act
(FITS). It comprised two key elements: one requiring electric
utilities to purchase electricity from renewable energy sources at
minimum prices higher than the electricity’s real economic value,
and the second requiring consumers to carry the financial burden.
This approach also supported a doing-change movement for energy
transformation that pushed more decentralized energy generation.
Farmers became solar and wind farmers, as well as agricultural
producers;
subsidies for solar panels led to widespread generation by
homeowners. This doing-change activity became critical following the
legislation, as a myriad of small producers of solar and wind energy
arose. Individuals who earlier had thought of themselves simply as
farmers or homeowners became energy producers as they installed
wind turbines and solar panels. Individuals who were traditionally
consumers combined energy production for sale through solar
installations
on their properties to become “prosumers.”
This has had wide-ranging implications for other directing-change
actions, such as the decision in 2014 by Germany’s top utility, E.ON,
to sell off (a form of “destruction”) its traditional coal and nuclear
power businesses entirely, in order to focus on clean energy, power
grids, and energy-efficiency services.
The distinctions among the four strategies can be blurred. For
example, the city of Munich is working with the utility it owns to
become, by 2025, the first city of more than a million residents to use
100 percent renewable energy. Given the city’s ownership of the utility,
this can be seen as a directing-change strategy. But it also can be seen
as a collaborative strategy, considering that it is a product of multiple
stakeholder groups working with the producer and owner. And it is
a doing-change strategy, considering that a geographic location has
decided to simply go ahead and create the new system.
The energy transition is not occurring without resistance. But the
main questions concern how to transition—with traditional energy
generators and energy-intensive industries being the primary losers,
who were largely bought off by the structure of FITS. As the new energy
producers grew in number, they became key advocates for pushing ahead
with the transition when it looked as if it might falter. Political mobilization
was critical as a forcing-change strategy, leading to the Green
Party joining a coalition government (1998-2005) that reinforced the
original path with strengthened legislation in 2000. With local public
utilities providing an important portion of the country’s energy, local
elections also became periods of (re-en)forcing change with demonstrations
and other actions to press forward with the energy transition.
Marriage Equality in the United States
In 2015, in an ultimate directing-change move, the US Supreme
Court ruled that marriage between
same-sex couples was a constitutionally
protected right. Today 62 percent
of Americans support it, according to
the Pew Research Center. But only a
half century earlier, every American
state had laws that criminalized some
form of same-sex sexual intimacy; until
1973 homosexuality was described as
a “mental disorder” by the American
Psychiatric Association; and in 1996
President Bill Clinton signed the
Defense of Marriage Act, prohibiting
same-sex marriage. The victory of marriage
equality in the United States is
arguably one of the most rapid changes
ever for a core social institution and for
fundamental values.
Perhaps predictably, given the
very personal yet cultural quality of
the issue and its US setting, the first challenges were by doing-change entrepreneurs. Individuals did not
have to have someone “approve” their marriage to consider themselves
married, and the United States has an individualistic tradition.
Gays and lesbians simply lived as married couples, minus the legal
recognition. In the 1980s, this increasingly became associated with
commitment ceremonies of various forms, with those supportive of
them present. Gay couples often brought children into their family
from traditional marriages, through adoption, through surrogates, or
simply through extended family. They became defiant role models.
On the streets, warriors took action by the public assertion of
gay identity. In 1969, when policed applied routine harassment practices
on homosexuals at the Stonewall Inn bar in New York City’s
Greenwich Village, a riot ensued, and from this tiny, isolated protest
a powerful gay rights movement grew. In 1979, between 75,000 and
125,000 individuals participated in the first national LGBT march on
Washington, D.C. Gay parades became annual events in major cities,
promoting gay pride and civil rights. In the 1980s, protests and aggressive
actions were organized around the AIDS crisis. This experience
provided a firm base for similar organizing tactics when the issue of
marriage equality came to the fore in the 1990s. It became a dominant
theme in the annual parades and fueled protests for legislative action.
Attempts to secure a directing-change strategy through legal rules
started early. In 1970, the first legal challenge by a same-sex couple
against the restriction of marriage rights to heterosexual couples was
filed. The US Supreme Court dismissed it without a hearing. Gay activists
took up the issue in the 1990s as the AIDS crisis forced more people
out of the closet and more gays and lesbians decided they wanted
the legal benefits associated with marriage. Eventually, legal victories
piled up, beginning with arguments under state constitutions. In 1999,
the Supreme Court of Vermont held that excluding same-sex couples
from marriage was unconstitutional, prompting the legislature to create
“civil unions” as marriages in all but name. The Massachusetts Supreme
Judicial Court in 2003 issued the watershed ruling that made marriage
between same-sex couples legal for the first time in an American
jurisdiction. In 2012, voters in four states supported marriage equality
through referenda—after 32 referenda
had been lost around the country.
These victories built on cocreating
change strategies of coalition
building. Religious coalitions were
especially important, given that
opposition to same-sex marriage was
often claimed on religious grounds as
being against the will of God. At the
turn of the millennium, the Religious
Coalition for the Freedom to Marry in
Massachusetts included more than
1,000 clergy, congregations, and organizations
from 23 faith traditions. Lobbying
in a warrior tradition grew into
new coalitions cocreating change as
Democratic Party leaders and legislators came on board.
In the background, a huge shift took
place in business: By 2013, 67 percent of
Fortune 500 companies offered health benefits for same-sex couples. The earliest significant examples were
more experimental in a doing-it tradition, in industries that had a
disproportionate number of gay employees and a more liberal workforce
where employees could come out. There was a mix of concerns
about fairness and ability to attract and retain employees. The early
adopters gave way to a more directing-change strategy as businesses
became convinced through lobbying and example setting that they
should support their gay and lesbian employees.
The environment that led to this monumental shift was supported
by a similar move by media companies. They started with a doing-change
strategy of very occasionally bringing gay lives into popular
entertainment. But this grew into a directing-change strategy, whereby
the regularity of gays and gay marriage in popular entertainment
became a message about what should be accepted as the new “normal.”
One of the first media breakthroughs on gay issues in general
came in 1971 with an episode of the leading television sitcom All in the
Family, which featured sympathetically two gay men. More direct issues
of partnership, love, and commitment between two men were featured
in the highly acclaimed 2005 hit movie Brokeback Mountain; the top-rated
sitcom Modern Family, which premiered in 2009, included a gay
couple with a child; and in 2012 Marvel Comics gave one of its superheroes
a homosexual wedding, ensconcing it as a new norm to support.
Six Lessons of Societal Change
Applying the framework to the two cases not only helps to clarify
the strategies and logic at work, but also offers more general insights
about the process of societal transformation and the workings of
societal change systems. Six lessons, in particular, stand out.
Each of the four strategies can contribute critically to one transformation.
All four strategies play an essential role in both cases. The
energy case provided individuals with a way to realize their ideals
as prosumers, to advocate in various forums their beliefs and values,
to develop collaborations with the existing system to create change, and
to access power in institutions to support and direct the
change. In the same-sex marriage case, doing change was reflected
in individuals living as though they were married; forcing change
provided a chance for supporters to demonstrate their position
publicly; cocreating with early adopters such as supportive clergy
provided important ways to pressure the establishment; and as
supporters grew in legislative and judicial forums, they created a
directing-change legal environment.
This suggests that the strategies are collectively important for
providing a range of ways of supporting transformation, since different
people and organizations have different roles in the change
process. Property owners in Germany became doing-change leaders
when they became prosumers; others supported the effort by being
warrior activists. In the fight for marriage equality, only gay couples
were capable of doing change, whereas non-couples and the broader
community could participate in forcing change through demonstrations,
parades, and referenda; cocreating-change efforts were
particularly important for developing more sustained interactions
among institutions that were early marriage-equality supporters;
and the directing-change activity gave supporters a way to create
change within their own institutions and in society more broadly.
Particular transformations emphasize a particular strategy. The
four strategies were not of equal importance in the cases. For Energiewende,
the directing-change legislative strategy was particularly
important. Its salience arose in the context of broad agreement about
the end, the value of the change, and the need to focus on the means
to realize carbon-free energy. Under such circumstances, the ease of
doing change through modest solar and wind energy commitments by
individuals was also important; this group grew in power to become
particularly strong advocates to offset the influence of resisters such
as major industrial electricity users and private power companies.
The marriage-equality example makes more balanced use of all
the strategies, although the directing-change action was the result. The
doing-change strategy was critical for bringing gay relationships
into the open and creating discussions among friends and family
to challenge the traditional definition of family; forcing-change
activities created space for a broadening number to express their
support; building coalitions across traditional religious perspectives
was critical to challenging religion’s role in the debate; but it
was state legislation and finally the US Supreme Court rulings that
were critical to ending the debate in the face of a still-divided
public.
As a transformation progresses, the comparative importance of each
strategy changes. Energiewende really took off with a cocreating-change
strategy generated by broad support, which opened space for a shift to
the directing-change legislative action. Legislation, in turn, enabled
the doing-change strategy of individuals pursuing their own renewable
energy production; forcing change provided secondary support
for the overall transformation. In this case, all the strategies continue
to interact as the transition continues.
Doing change was the original strategy for gay couples. But this
was highly marginal, until the forcing-change activities associated
with the assertion of lesbian and gay equality and demands for AIDS
services created space for similar marriage-equality forcing-change
activities. This produced directing-change actions first by some
municipalities, states, and corporations, and eventually through
the final resolution by the US Supreme Court.
The particular circumstances and environment that a transformation
confronts determine the order of the strategies and their interaction. In
our two cases, there is a notable diversity in stage order, and there
is no obvious pattern. This suggests that characteristics of the cases
themselves determine interactions between the strategies.
The most obvious question is why people do not simply start in
an organic fashion, with the doing-change strategy growing into
widespread adoption and a new dominant way of organizing and
acting. This seems to have been the case for marriage equality. However,
that case demonstrates that realizing an enabling environment
for doing change usually first requires some forcing-change work.
An important precursor to doing-change commitment ceremonies
was elimination (or at least lack of enforcement) of laws against sex
acts between members of the same sex. This required substantial
forcing-change action by gay activists, although their efforts started
with a desire to be left alone rather than to be married.
Qualities of the change issue itself can make a doing-change strategy
on its own highly problematic. There were certainly early solar and
wind energy entrepreneurs, but a doing-change Energiewende strategy
was destined for irrelevance in the traditional operating environment,
since developing technologies at scale requires substantial investment
and change in rules governing energy transmission. However, in this
case a cocreating strategy of collective education was the predominant
predecessor of the creation of an enabling legal environment.
Therefore, there seems to be a dual lesson on strategy interaction:
In permissive enabling environments, there can indeed be an
organic change process that emphasizes doing change. These are
environments where legal structures and norms provide the basis
for, rather than impede, experimenting and innovating culturally,
technologically, and philosophically. But in the absence of such
an environment, forcing change is not the only strategy possible:
Cocreating change can provide an important avenue if there is broad
agreement that change is needed.
Enabling environments support experimentation and the creation
of networks. The fourth lesson suggests important qualities of an
enabling environment to ease transformation. There is particular
value in structures and traditions that support exploration: the ability
to try out new lifestyles, technologies, and values associated with
transformations. Institutional rigidity, narrow definitions of what is
acceptable, large interdependent structures where change requires
complicated coordination, and weak processes for developing broad
consensus about change directions all contribute to a brittleness
that is associated with more problematic transformations, such as
the United States’ transition to sustainable energy. Part of this is a
question of political systems and the beliefs associated with them.
Both cases involve political democracies. However, the multi-party
German parliamentary system is more change friendly, as demonstrated
by the important role of the Green Party. The range of options
in the one-party Chinese system, for example, would be very different.
However, an enabling environment is not simply one of passive
acceptance of diversity. The marriage-equality case demonstrates
the importance of creating networks and adopting forcing-change
strategies as well. The German case represents the importance of
creating large-scale conversations and experimenting with transformational
challenges to promote a cocreating-change strategy.
Each strategy requires distinct competencies. This article began by
observing that different change organizations tend to be associated
with different strategies. The cases illuminate the distinct tactics associated
with each strategy, which in turn implies that they require different
competencies. Experimenting with doing change is associated
with entrepreneurial startup talent; forcing change emphasizes abilities
to attract and organize mass numbers of people to take demonstrative
action; cocreation focuses on facilitation and group-process
skills; and directing change requires management, policy making, and
enforcement capacity. This point about competencies further suggests
that an organization is unlikely to be good at more than one strategy.
Yet, the two strategies build off each other. Sustainable energy, for
example, can be seen not just as a technological question within the
current power structures, but also as an opportunity to create more just
and resilient societies. But within the latter, broader vision, negotiations
are needed for how to get there. This also suggests the importance of
one change initiative being able to hand off the change work to another.
Beyond Classification
This typology of change strategies promises far more than simply
a system of classification. More important, it can inform an overall
strategy of change for any particular issue in a societal change system.
It can also guide the development of resilient societies, by illustrating
the qualities that help address and resolve large change challenges.
This strategy analysis leads to important questions about processes
for supporting productive interactions between strategies. For those
working on change initiatives, the focus shifts from questions about
how your initiative can be successful to how you can best serve the
needs of the societal change system as a whole. Are there synergies,
gaps, redundancies, or conflicts between your change initiative and
others’ that should be addressed? The very concept of a societal
change system suggests that whatever particular strategy your initiative
adopts, there will be a need eventually to adapt to a cocreative
strategy for the change system as a whole.
