Leadership – Building State Capability

World Cup Lessons: Is it the team or is it the star?

Amy Bass in an article in today’s CNN opinion section entitled, four key takeaways from World Cup 2014, asks the question of all sports – Is it the team, or is it the star?

In development circles, many people believe the answer to this question is ‘the star.’ Leaders are seen as heroic figures that fostered miraculous changes in their countries, like Lee Kuan Yew for the Singapore miracle. In a recent blog/video Matt Andrews unpacks the hero orthodoxy in development and finds that, managing change is complex, and requires complex multi-agent leadership interventions.

As for the World Cup, Bass concludes, “The last game of this tournament pitted the best player in the world, Messi, against the best team in the world, Germany. And if nothing else, this match demonstrated definitively that while players like Messi might win games, teams like Germany win titles.”

If you are interested in learning more about multi-agent leadership read who really leads development? and going beyond heroic leaders in development.

BSC video 33: Multi-agent leadership in action

Who leads? How do they lead? When do they lead? Why do they lead? Answers to these questions are very important in understanding how change happens. Change is about people and people need to be led.

In this video, Matt Andrews, uses the story of Singapore to illustrate how true champions are the ones who convene, motivate, authorize and unleash multi-agent leadership. Leadership is about getting the right people to do the right things at the right time. You can watch this video below or on YouTube.

If you are interested in learning more about multi-agent leadership read going beyond heroic leaders in development, and watch who is the leader?

BSC video 32: Who is the leader?

In a study of successful change, we interviewed 150 people in 12 different places and asked them “who is the leader?” Instead of the listing the 12 champions, they responded with 107 names.

In this video, Matt Andrews, highlights that successful change requires someone to authorize the change, motivate, provide money, empower the people, define problems, suggest ideas for solutions, convene people, connect to others and to implement. All these things cannot be (and usually are not) done by one person. Change does not happen as implementation by edict it happens when groups of people take risks and make change happen. You can watch the video below or on YouTube.

If you are interested in learning more about multi-agent leadership read who really leads development? and going beyond heroic leaders in development.

The 5 M’s of Development: Multiple Men and Women matter (Part 4 of 5)

written by Matt Andrews

As I reflect on how change happens in development, 5 themes come to mind. I have written about the importance of moments, muddling and the mundane. Today I will discuss the fourth one: multiple men and women matter. In my experience, development and governance reform is about people, not as targets of change, but as agents of change.

This is not a surprising observation but is an important one nonetheless, especially when one considers how little attention development initiatives commonly give to the men and women who have to risk and adapt and work to make change happen and ensure change is sustained. Development initiatives tend to emphasize ideas and money much more than people, even though it is the latter that actually come up with ideas, shape ideas to contexts, and use resources to foster change.

When people are considered in development initiatives, it is often with a narrow lens on ‘champions’ or ‘heroes’. That’s not the picture I see as relevant in the research and applied work I have been engaged in. This work shows me that development and change require multiple functions or roles: we need someone to identify problems, someone to identify solutions, someone to provide money, someone to authorize change activities, someone to motivate and inspire, someone to connect distributed agents, someone to convene smaller groups, someone to provide key resources other than money, and someone who can give an implementation perspective (of the implications of proposed change).

For a variety of theoretical reasons I don’t think we will often find these functions played by one person, or organization. My empirical research suggests that this is true in practice. What I see in my studies is that successful reform requires multiple people providing leadership in a coordinated and synergistic way, such that all the different functional roles are played in an orchestra of change (people who are familiar with Lee Kuan Yew’s view of leadership will relate to the idea of the orchestra).:

I wrote a paper on leadership in twelve interesting reforms, where I tested whether one person stood out as the major leader. I found that this was not the case at all. Many people were identified as leaders in the cases, all playing different roles in the change process.
In a review of 30 cases of successful reform (from Princeton University’s Innovations for Successful Societies repository) I found that an average of 19 agents were mentioned as playing the roles noted. They all took risks and stood out for providing an important part of the change puzzle.

The research does find that ‘champions’ exist in many cases, however. But being a champion does not mean being multiple people (or wearing multiple hats, or playing multiple functional roles). Instead, my work showed that where a champion exists, he or she plays three specific functional roles: Authorizing, Convening, and Motivating. The champions do not typically play the other roles.

The 5 M’s of Development: Moments matter (Part 1 of 5)

written by Matt Andrews

As I reflect on how change happens in development, 5 themes come to mind. The first is simple, but is one of the most important observations I continually make when observing successful change that fosters better government and development results: Moments matter.

‘Change events’ happen when contexts become ready for change. That is, when:

there is disruption that forces people to accept change,
incumbent structures are being questioned,
there are viable alternatives that local people are willing to try, and
the weight of agency shifts from the old and discredited ways to a search for new ways (that may be untested but promise better solutions to pressing problems).

Interestingly, I find that these moments are not always a product of lucky timing. In fact, I commonly see years of activity and engagement in advance of any ‘moment’ that seems to spawn change. Understanding the moment requires going back in time five or ten years (or longer) and learning about how coalitions were emerging, drawing attention to problems, and experimenting with new ways of doing things. These activities are often at the margin of the story until ‘the moment’ arrives… But without them there would probably have not been a moment at all.

The bottom line is that we should spend more time preparing for moments than we currently do. Moments of readiness matter more than the development solutions we try to stuff into contexts that are not ready for change.

PMRDF: an Innovative State Capability Experiment in India

written by Salimah Samji.

Anyone who has ever worked in India knows how hard it is to implement programs. The sheer size of the country makes it impossible for anyone but the government, who is the only one with infrastructure and reach, to provide public services to its citizens. Currently, every district administers typically 100+ development schemes. Each scheme has its own rules, regulations, reporting, and funding. Districts are continuously burdened with new schemes and more work without the requisite resources. They are often understaffed and have few (if any) skilled functionaries to be able to do their job. The reality is that 90% of the time is spent on routine day-to-day management leaving no time for strategic planning or experimentation.

To address the capacity and implementation gaps in backward districts which are isolated and less developed, the Ministry of Rural Development launched the Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellowship (PMRDF) in 2012. The aim of the fellowship was to provide catalytic support to the district administration to help improve the delivery of programs and to develop a cadre of committed development professionals. The eligibility criteria was a minimum of a four-year degree from a recognized university. The fellows were to work for 2-3 years under the supervision of the District Collector, and paid INR 75,000 ($1,210) per month with a 10% increment each year subject to performance. That is a very generous amount. The rationale was to attract younger people who were passionate about development and willing to go to remote areas, but could not afford the low wages. In essence this was a way to bring in new blood into the system.

816 applicants were shortlisted from a total of 8,560 applicants for a group discussion and a personal interview. 156 fellows were selected to work across 82 districts in 9 states. Each state decided on the placement of fellows with 1-3 per district. Currently there are 137 fellows from the first batch and a second batch has just been selected. For more details see the TEDx talk.

Some of the challenges faced during the implementation of the 2012-13 PMRDFs include:

Building the trust of the States/District Collectors: When the program was initially announced, it was viewed suspiciously by some (i.e. was the center sending monitors to the states/districts?). Many meetings were held to explain and clarify the objectives of the program and to bring the states on board.
Ineffective use of the fellows: Depending on the District Collector, some fellows were welcomed and given a lot of responsibility and authority to experiment, while some others were used as glorified executive assistants – which is also understandable given the lack of human resources at the district level.
Lack of authority to issue instructions or to sanction funds: The fellows are not part of the government bureaucracy and therefore have no signing authority and cannot issue orders to lower level functionaries. As a result, they need to go to the District Collector with all those requests leading to time delays and inefficiencies. To address this, the state of Andhra Pradesh has delegated a budget head specifically for the fellows.
High monthly salary is attracting applicants who are not necessarily passionate about development: This has been an unintended consequence and they have tried to be more mindful in the interviews for the 2nd batch of fellows.
What happens after the fellows leave? One criticism is that they are building temporary capacity. To address this, the second batch will be offered one year of public service after their fellowship. However, this issue remains a challenge.

Here are some testimonies of the fellows, for more read their profile book or visit their blog.

“I still remember an incident from my initial days, when a village welcomed and garlanded me saying: We are receiving our first government official in our village after Independence.“
“… working with the field staff in implementation of these schemes was not always easy. My efforts at convincing them and the higher authorities did not yield fruit every time. The convergence of different schemes has also been a challenge as each scheme has different criteria for beneficiary selection and process of implementation. However, struggling with these issues every day helped me understand the minutest details of these schemes and the complexities involved in the development sector.”
“This last one year as a PMRDF has helped me develop both personally and professionally. It has given me a chance to work and interact with people at every level of the hierarchy, starting with the panchayat secretary and going up to state officials.”
“The last one year has been a period of immense pleasure, satisfaction, frustration, learning and un-learning … There were difficulties: sluggishness, winning the trust of various actors and bringing them onto common platform to get the ball rolling, getting bogged down with too many operational formalities needing to continuously establish yourself within the system. I learnt that things will happen if there is strong will. I learnt of a number of unsung heroes who keep things going—unappreciated and unrecognized—but making a difference each day with their integrity.” This comment is a great illustration of Matt Andrew’s multi-agent leadership paper, Who really Leads Development?

The PMRDF is a work in progress with a lot of learning, iterating and adaptation. There are no easy solutions when you are working on implementation intensive programs. It will be interesting to see what other lessons are learned from this dynamic experiment of trying to solve capacity issues at the last mile of service delivery.

BSC Video 12: Maintaining your Authorizing Environment

Maintaining your support through a change process is often a challenging task which requires time and effort. In this video, Matt Andrews, explains how one does not only have to maintain the initial authorization, but also expand the number of actors who provide authorization, thus increasing the legitimacy of the project or reform. You can watch the video below or on YouTube.

If you are interested in learning more, read Escaping Capability Traps through Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) and Limits of Institutional Reform.