Crosby B.C., Bryson J.M. - Leadership for the Common Good (2005)(en)

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Leadership Guidelines

Policy entrepreneurs in this phase orchestrate a variety of forums that identify and evaluate potential solutions and create a public issue. They take a systems view and focus on institutional design. They make sure to bring the appropriate expertise to bear on the search for solutions. They help constituents assess solution components and continue paying attention to stakeholder interests and power bases. Finally, they help constituents construct and communicate a compelling vision of how solutions can be enacted to achieve widespread benefits.

This phase can be underdone or overdone. On the one hand, the entrepreneurial team may fail to search broadly enough for solution components, or fail to research and assess those components adequately. On the other hand, the team may keep searching too long for a perfect solution as problems worsen, casualties mount, and the advocacy unravels. The team may have to settle for a goodenough solution. It should focus energy on areas of uncertainty, such as stakeholder views or the consequences of adopting solution components. Search guidelines should be tailored to the specific situation and available resources. No matter what, the team should undertake a search strategy that pushes outside normal search channels, makes efficient use of people’s time and existing knowledge sources, and increases the perceived legitimacy of the effort. In a complex situation, the search may be carried out by multiple work groups overseen by the entrepreneurial team and the coordinating committee. In a simple situation, the entrepreneurial team and coordinating committee can do their own research.

Orchestrating Forums and Managing Conflict

Policy entrepreneurs think carefully about which stakeholders to involve in particular forums. They should prevent experts from dominating the forums and be ready for increased conflict as more stakeholder groups are involved.

Create Forums to Consider Solutions

Update and use the participation planning matrix (Exercise 6.3) along with the problem statement from the previous phase to organize forums for considering solutions to the overall problem, as

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well as specific subproblems. As in previous phases, wise design and use of forums requires leadership by indirection—that is, managing the ideas, rules, modes, media, or methods governing the search process and those used to publicize its results. Forums are often a mix of participants in the advocacy coalition, potential members of the coalition, and stakeholders with specialized expertise about potential solutions.

Use Experts Sparingly

Be careful about relying too heavily on specialized experts, especially at the outset of this phase, since their involvement may cause premature closure around their preferred set of solutions.

Anticipate and Optimize Conflict

In the process of considering a range of solutions, the participants are likely to take up at least some that certain stakeholders view as radical and highly threatening. Controversy, of course, is not necessarily bad, since it can be used to focus attention on the problem, educate key actors and decision makers about the nature of the problem and its potential solutions, and place an issue on the public agenda. At the same time, the entrepreneurial team should avoid unnecessary controversy that may all too easily escalate to the point that compromise and mutual gain become impossible.

Remember that as more groups get involved in a forum, conflict over potential solutions is sure to increase. Take for example the efforts of public health officials in the mid-1980s to put together a blood-testing program to detect the presence of an AIDS antibody in blood donors. The blood bank industry welcomed such a program because it would enable them to allay growing fears that the nation’s blood supply was spreading the virus. Some scientists, however, argued that the proposed test could still miss a significant number of carriers of the virus. Gay rights advocates, meanwhile, worried that the test results could be used by employers, insurers, and government agencies to discriminate against gay men. Even after Mervyn Silverman (as head of the U.S. Conference of Local Health Officers) put together a proposal that guaranteed confidentiality of test results, officials at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration still resisted creation of the testing program, mainly on budgetary grounds (Shilts, 1988).

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Taking a Systems View and Focusing on Institutional Design

To help constituents craft the most promising solutions, policy entrepreneurs insist on thinking about systems and institutions. They seek to tap stakeholders’ self-interest to ease the institutionalization of change.

Use Feedback Loops

First, to increase the chances that the solution search will get at interrelated problems, seek what Allen and Cherrey (2000) call families of solutions with abundant feedback loops. The loops should reinforce positive change, balance tendencies to reinstitute the previous status quo or produce new problems, and keep the system flexible. Such systems should make changes self-sustaining, not easily dislodged, diverted, or diminished. Peter Senge (1994) recommends identifying points of high leverage. Use oval mapping (Resource B) and future search (Resource E) to help encourage a systems view. These methods get the main participants in a system together so they can take each other’s views into account and discover how elements of problem and solutions are linked.

The organizers of the Vital Aging Network have taken a systems approach by pursuing solutions, such as the Advocacy Leadership Certificate Program and the VAN Website, that are linked by their promise for empowering older adults (and their supporters) to make changes in employment, education, and health care systems.

Pay Attention to Institutional Design

In other words, consider how institutions such as schools, churches, markets, government agencies, and nonprofit service organizations should be designed in order to achieve the outcomes you desire. A starting place might be consideration of government, market, nonprofit, and community successes and failures in relation to the problem. For example, the African American Men Project final report highlighted failures in public education, the criminal justice system, public assistance programs, and the labor market in assisting African American men to be productive citizens. It also mentioned several nonprofit, government, educational, and philanthropic programs that offer significant opportunities for these men.

Recognize that any comprehensive solution set undoubtedly involves government, business, and nonprofit organizations, as well

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as communities. Additionally, be aware that ideologies, or at least deep preferences, revolve around the proper role of government, business, nonprofits, and communities. For example, a group like the WBCSD, not surprisingly, prefers market-oriented solutions even though it supports government regulation when necessary.

Build on Self-Interest

Try to create a solution that taps into individuals’ and organizations’ self-interest so that the solution can be stabilized and institutionalized. An example is the U.S. constitutional system, which gains stability through separate institutions sharing power and responsibility, thus checking each other’s untoward ambitions.

Bringing Expertise to Bear on the Solution Search

Policy entrepreneurs can reap the benefits of both broad and indepth solution-search strategies by beginning with a broad scan and proceeding to intense exploration of the most promising solutions. The process outlined here does this in a way that enables an entrepreneurial team to identify and use the expertise of stakeholders with relevant ideas and experience.

Develop Solutions Methodically

Use a three-step process to ensure that the solutions identified in the oval-mapping and future-search exercises are developed further. The process allows your team to unearth a range of solution components and then narrow them down to feasible alternatives. The process is based principally on the work of Amitai Etzioni, Andrew Delbecq, Andrew Van de Ven, David Gustafson, and John Bryson (Etzioni, 1967, 1968; Delbecq, Van de Ven, and Gustafson, 1975; Bryson and Delbecq, 1981).

The process consists of three steps:

1.A broad scan within and outside normal search channels, to gain an understanding of the possible territory within which solutions might be found

2.A narrow-gauge search within the most promising territories, to find specific solution components likely to be effective, ethical, and acceptable to key stakeholders

3.Detailed exploration of identified solution components

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In step one, participants identify potential sources of broad conceptualizers and then select the conceptualizers themselves—the cosmopolitans who have an extensive grasp of the knowledge sources likely to yield solutions to the problem at hand. The most effective way to begin is to solicit nominations of information categories through structured or unstructured individual or group processes. For example, to get category suggestions, participants may hold extensive conversation with several people who seem to be plugged in to relevant networks. At a follow-up working session, participants can use their notes from these conversations to generate candidate categories that can be recorded on snowcards and grouped into columns by subject. (You can use a modification of the snowcard exercise in Exercise 3.1.) The column subject labels can then be the main search categories. They may include specific disciplines or skills, relevant professional organizations, other advocacy groups, appropriate technical assistance services, research services, and potential funding sources.

Once the categories have been identified, structured interview procedures or focus groups can be used to search within categories for further information. Interviews might be conducted over the telephone, in person, or via e-mail. A standard set of questions and standard method of recording answers should be used. Interviewees and focus group participants should be asked to identify names of knowledgeable people; books, reports, articles, and other documentation; relevant models or frameworks; and relevant projects or ongoing research.

The second step is to bring together information from the interviews or focus groups to determine the most promising areas for the narrow-gauge search. Go through the raw material, summarize key points, and engage in thorough (perhaps facilitated) discussion. Once these search areas are selected, familiarize yourselves with them; learn about the territory and the tribes, factions, unifiers and dividers, customs, practices, knowledge bases, worldviews, and stories to be encountered in the territory. This orientation may be gained through interviewing ten to twelve knowledgeable people identified in the broad-gauge search. After orienting yourself, organize a forum in which key stakeholders use a structured group process—such as brainstorming, the snowcard technique, or the delphi technique (sequential surveys designed to elicit areas of consensus, typically among experts)—to accomplish several objectives:

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•Identify possible solution components

•Furnish resources to make the components workable (for example, technical assistance, a grant program, an industry association, or training program)

•Offer potential resources (via new legislation, new foundation funding, new for-profit endeavors, and so on)

See Exercise 8.1.

Be sure that the voices of all knowledgeable people are heard, not just those of respected professional experts or political figures. You can convene a separate forum or use a method of balancing power, such as holding a caucus in which a less-powerful group prepares a presentation for a plenary session, or ensuring visible experts and politicians are a minority in a particular forum.

If you convene a forum of experts, be sure to go over the purpose of the forum and where it fits in the change process. Make it clear that many other knowledgeable people are involved in finding and analyzing solutions. Offer the experts time for networking among themselves, since this may be a prime reason they agree to attend the forum. Be prepared to keep the experts on track through strong process facilitation. They are likely at the outset of a working session

Exercise 8.1. Undertaking a Solution

Search Within Specified Areas.

Once your entrepreneurial team has selected an area (for example, “community building”) in which to search for solutions to a problem, you can use this exercise to identify solution components.

1.Brainstorm possible solution components, beginning each with a verb (in the case of community building, examples might be “start a neighborhood association,” or “organize block clubs,” or “involve churches”).

2.For each solution component, prepare a flipchart sheet with the solution component at the top. Divide the remainder of the sheet into two columns; label one “Resources Available to Make This Workable” and the other “Potential Resources.”

3.Fill out the sheets and discuss the results. Decide which solutions to explore further.

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to expose their biases through short (or not-so-short) normative assertions as they announce and stake out their positions. Once they are allowed to do so, they can be expected to move fairly expeditiously to furnish information about solution components and resources.

The third step is to decide which of the solution components identified in step two merit in-depth exploration. Try to obtain firsthand knowledge of how the component might work. For example, if the solution is an existing program (or an adaptation), observe it in action. Use a structured group process to explore the strengths of each component, weaknesses, and modifications that would improve applicability or performance in the situation at hand. Useful structured processes are brainstorming, the snowcard technique, delphi technique, or force field analysis (which is based on a map of forces promoting change and forces resisting change; see Johnson and Johnson, 2003).

Paying Attention to Stakeholders

Remember that the solutions developed in this phase need to garner the support of an adequate number of key stakeholders. A prime method, of course, is involving them in any forum convened to consider solutions. Use two additional methods to better understand how solutions might tap into stakeholder interests and relationships: (1) diagrams linking individual stakeholder interests to the common good, and (2) stakeholder-issue relationship diagrams.

The first of the two, diagramming individual links to the common good, begins with the diagrams of bases of power and directions of interest along with the supra-interests diagram (Exercises 7.2 and 7.3) developed in the previous phase. Develop a new diagram for each stakeholder showing how the stakeholder’s diagram of bases of power and directions of interest links to the suprainterests. Developing these diagrams is a kind of marketing research into how policies need to be found, tailored, and sold (Andreasen, 1995; Kotler, Roberto, and Lee, 2002). The research is designed to understand the audiences well enough both to satisfy their interests and to advance the common good. Effective one-way and twoway communication strategies may be created through developing and testing out these diagrams with key informants in the target audience.

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evaluation criteria for each of these considerations. The second is assessing each solution component against the criteria. A thorough assessment of each component—using sound evidence—helps you decide which components should be built into a formal proposal in the next phase of the policy change cycle.

Select Evaluation Criteria

Your team can use Exercise 8.3 to choose the criteria for assessing solution components.

Criteria related to technical and administrative feasibility may include:

•High likelihood that the solution attacks the causes of the problem concerning us.

•Resources are available for implementing this solution.

•The technology (computer software, group process skills, transportation systems, administrative structures and processes, and so forth) for implementing the solution is available or easily constructed.

•High likelihood that the solution will produce desired results.

•Low likelihood that the solution will cause worse problems than the one it is designed to solve.

•High likelihood that the solution is sustainable over the long haul.

Here are possible criteria related to legality:

•Good fit with existing laws, from local to national

•Unlikely to violate human rights

•Accordance with provisions of a constitution or international treaty

These criteria are related to political acceptability:

•Good fit with the supra-interests identified in stakeholder analysis.

•Emotional or symbolic response to the solution likely to be neutral or positive among the majority of key stakeholders.

•Policy arguments and strategies can be constructed to develop support for the solution among key stakeholders and diminish the power of antagonistic stakeholders.