Related Expertise: パブリックセクター, コーポレートファイナンス&ストラテジー
By Martin Reeves and Roselinde Torres
Civil rights leader Ella Baker was famous for eschewing monolithic top-down approaches, preferring to work behind the scenes to effect change, building on or combining existing efforts and engaging with the broadest set of stakeholders. To mobilize the vote, for example, she prodded civil rights activists to go beyond inspirational speeches and assemble all the “pieces” required, such as voter identification, education, and transportation.
Organizations (civil and commercial alike) frequently struggle against internal and external inertia, complexity, distraction, and fractiousness to get things done. Civil society often sees business as a paragon of discipline, with its emphasis on goals, measurement, efficiency, and accountability, and looks to it for lessons in how to effect action. But for today’s complex, dynamic, multiple-stakeholder problems, business also has much to learn from social activism.
Multidimensional matrix structures, excessive layers, complex procedures, competing agendas, and internal politics can all scupper the execution of apparently robust plans. Indeed, an explicit objective of many organizational transformation programs is to remove such barriers to execution. But merely removing barriers is not enough to bring about change—as anyone who has witnessed the failure of a high-profile initiative can attest. In large organizations and societies, enacting change requires many people to synchronize new beliefs and behaviors. Because it is difficult to know what will motivate diverse individuals to act differently, and to predict the collective result when they do so, traditional linear approaches to change often fail.
In theory, digital technology should make things easier by increasing the reach, speed, and ease of communication. In practice, however, we see the same failures of collective action in digital contexts. With business and societal challenges increasing the need for synchronized change, it is important for leaders to understand how to make collective action work in an increasingly connected world.
Traditional project management applies a classical approach to problem-solving. Large problems are divided into smaller ones, on the assumption that the sum of the solutions to the parts will constitute an overall fix. These smaller problems are solved by collecting pertinent facts, analyzing root causes, identifying logical solutions, and encapsulating them in durable plans. The main challenges then become removing obstacles to change (such as complex processes or structures) and managing implementation in a disciplined fashion. This is done by setting clear, quantifiable goals; creating plans that cascade down to specific actions; assigning organizational accountability for each part of the plan; and tracking implementation and impact using key performance metrics.
This familiar approach is well suited to challenges that can be decomposed, solved analytically, and executed within a single organization, such as streamlining a production process, reducing costs, or reorganizing. However, many problems are more complex, such as those involving changing contexts, interdependencies between various elements, diverse agents, or a scope that reaches beyond the boundaries of an organization.
Problems are often not decomposable: if we break them down and solve for each part, the result many not constitute an overall solution. And they are often not analytically tractable, because in a complex system, any one action potentially changes other agents’ perceptions and actions. As a result, interventions cannot be boiled down to an unchanging set of simple instructions. Furthermore, even if we could identify the ideal solution, merely broadcasting it to participants might not motivate them to act, or to do so in a coordinated and effective manner. This problem is exacerbated when coordination must extend beyond a single organization and influence and control are diluted. For example, we know that reducing carbon emissions is required to slow or reverse global warming, and we know with some precision what each country, industry, and individual would need to do to achieve this, yet we are still seemingly unable to mobilize collective action. (Paradoxically, our biggest success in reducing emissions to date has been as an unintended side effect of dealing with COVID-19.)
Therefore, we must broaden our approach beyond traditional project management. And to do that we need to look to other domains where collective action is required, such as social activism.
Sociologist Charles Tilly proposed that to be effective, a social movement must exhibit four key characteristics: its proponents must see the cause as worthy, they must be united in their stance, they must be sufficiently numerous to make a difference, and they must be committed to making change
The framework immediately helps us understand some ways in which collective change initiatives often fail:
Failures of Worthiness. A cause must be seen as worthwhile by those who would join it, but perceived worthiness can be undermined in several ways.
Failures of Unity. If proponents do not speak and act in unity, they may send mixed messages and undermine the ability to gain support from a wider constituency.
Failures of Number. If a cause does not reach sufficient scale—or, in the early stages, if participants do not believe that it can—it will not succeed.
Failures of Commitment. Change inevitably faces many obstacles, and without sustained commitment and the appearance of commitment, an initiative is unlikely to endure and succeed.
Failures of Diversity. To be successful, a cause needs to demonstrate that it can eventually appeal to a broad audience, and that this ability can be inferred from the diversity of current adherents. Lack of diversity early on can undermine a movement.
Digital technology can transform many physical challenges into information problems, and in so doing greatly reduce the cost and effort necessary to create change. By leveraging technology, the following basic elements of collective change can all be executed more rapidly, at lower cost, with less delay, and to broader audiences:
However, digital technology does not in itself solve the fundamental challenges of worthiness, unity, number, commitment, and diversity—in fact, it also creates several new challenges.
Lower transaction costs facilitate the proliferation of initiatives and communications, which dilutes the average worth of each and makes the challenge of breaking through the information clutter harder. For instance, online petitions have dramatically reduced the friction involved in collecting signatures, which in turn has lowered the perceived impact of individual petitions.
In a world focused more on screens than on interpersonal interactions, acts of digital speech can be easily mistaken for effective action and commitment. As journalist and author Tom Friedman has remarked, today’s digital activism may amount in many cases to little more than “firing digital muskets into the Milky Way.”
It’s certainly easy to reach a large number of followers on digital platforms. But this is counterbalanced by a lower likelihood of deep engagement. We should not mistake likes or clicks for self-initiated action or lasting commitment.
And the network effects associated with technology are making the world a more polarized place, where affiliation is more tribal and mutual mistrust higher. This increases the risk of preaching only to the converted. While this may give the appearance of unity, it can easily mask a lack of diversity. Most social media platforms prioritize content that is in line with preexisting interests, so many users are exposed only to content they agree with. As a result, they can believe that there is a high level of agreement with their opinions, even if they are marginal when viewed from a broader perspective.
As corporations grow larger, as our digital reach expands, and as business activity encroaches upon social and planetary limits, our challenges are increasingly collective in nature. We cannot apply the convenient, mechanical recipe of “problem-analysis-plan-action” to such challenges. Effective collective action is not simply project management writ large or project management by digital means.
We don’t yet have a definitive playbook for effective collective action in an interconnected world, but we can derive some useful principles from social activism and systems science, as well as from observing the failure and success of complex change initiatives (See “Putting It All Together: 96 Elephants”):
1. Make it easy for someone to act. Instead of focusing mainly on decoding what actions logically need to take place, focus on motivating voluntary action taking. Understand what people must believe, and how they can be inspired, influenced, or incented to change their behaviors. Provide educational platforms, role models, mobile apps, and other support tools to enable people to easily take action toward the desired outcome. For example, the NationSwell Council, a community of service-minded leaders, engages members with “The One Thing” they can do to further a social initiative.
2. Convey the worth of your initiative by focusing on the purpose underpinning plans and goals. A strongly supported purpose can function as an intrinsic motivator that drives self-initiated behaviors in a much more powerful way than extrinsic motivators.
3. To create unity, don’t just transmit information but tell stories. Stories can be powerful tools that go beyond facts by creating holistic meaning, assimilability, familiarity, vividness, and emotional appeal. The most emotionally compelling stories include characters, memorable images, lessons, and a call to action.
4. Broaden the number of people who support you by building on preexistent initiatives. This not only ensures that your initiative starts with a significant support base but also allows you to leverage existing processes, communities, and resources where appropriate to accelerate impact.
5. Communicate commitment by highlighting and celebrating examples of costly signals and pivotal actions. Committing to goals publicly, putting skin in the game, and taking on the toughest challenges are costly but effective signals of commitment. In nonprofit organizations, the increasing levels of commitment can be made explicit, from being a member, to donating money/time, to advocating for policy change.
6. Realize diversity in your support base early on. Communicate with and enlist dissimilar people and skeptics. Create spaces in the agenda for people to add their adaptations consistent with the mission. This increases the chance that your initiative will reach critical mass without later running into resistance from groups with conflicting interests. It might also expand the initiative in creative ways you had not considered.
7. Leverage the unique strengths of technology to sustain new forms of collective action. Use technology to facilitate collective action, but regard it as a “force multiplier” rather than something that in itself guarantees success. There is no number of clicks or likes that will guarantee people act. And often the mechanisms of power—such as the legislative process—are decidedly nondigital.
For instance, technology drastically lowers friction for large-scale asynchronous collaboration, which has made initiatives like Wikipedia possible. The Wikimedia Foundation catalyzed collective action by developing a clear vision (creating a freely accessible, massively comprehensive encyclopedia) and making crowdsourcing collaboration tools widely available. Volunteers have leveraged these tools to create the largest and most accurate repository of freely available knowledge, through bottom-up action.
To help sustain movements over time, the knowledge of an organization’s history and outcomes can be archived, so present change agents build on their predecessors’ success instead of repeating the failures. Similarly, archiving can synchronize subcommunities of action.
8. Lead for collective action. There’s no collective action without the right leadership. Effective collective action is not brought about by charisma alone, nor by compulsion, fear, or excellence in project management. The jobs to be done in orchestrating collective action include understanding and articulating a common purpose, understanding the mechanisms of power and the bottlenecks in a system, communicating in a persuasive manner to a diverse audience, persisting in the face of obstacles, and evolving approaches as circumstances change. These jobs are likely to demand different traits than those of the traditional top-down leader, such as humility, being comfortable in one’s own skin, the ability to establish trust with a wide range of personalities, adaptability, integrity, and emotional intelligence. Effective leadership of collective action may also need different types of leadership profiles in the different stages of a movement or initiative.
Change is becoming more incessant and complex, requiring new approaches that transcend traditional project management. By learning from social activism, especially its focus on creating and propagating the will to act, leaders can more effectively bring about change across a diverse set of stakeholders. In the words of Ella Baker, “The major job was getting people to understand that they had something within their power they could use.”
The authors are very grateful to the executive staff and board of The Wildlife Conservation Society for the access and time they gave us to discuss and shape this article. Thanks go to Cristián Samper, John Calvelli, Susan Chin, Alejandro Santo Domingo, Rosina Bierbaum, Rudolph Crew, Katie Dolan, Julia Marton-Lefèvre, and Juan Manuel Santos.
BCGの戦略シンクタンクとして、アイデア創出に有効なテクノロジーを活用し、ビジネス、テクノロジー、科学分野からの新しい価値あるインサイトを探求・開発しています。ビジネスリーダーを巻き込んで、ビジネスの理論と実践の境界線を広げ、ビジネス内外から革新的アイデアを取り入れるための刺激的なディスカッションや実験を行っています。2022年7月に日本における拠点であるBHI Japanを設立しました。
Managing Director & Senior Partner, Director of the BCG Henderson Institute
San Francisco - Bay Area