Webinar Follow-up Discussion
Responding to Questions from April 29

Jenny Strakovsky I want to ask: what does this mean now for how we design or change our institutions? How can hierarchical institutional structures be reconciled with the need for agility and rapid response to multidimensional policy challenges?

For example, one of our viewers said, “After nearly 10 years of experience in different government settings, it has often been my experience that change and new ways of working can get hampered by middle management who see this change as a threat. I've especially seen this with initiatives that break down silos like open door policies and promoting collaboration. How can we apply the leadership skills from your webinar to manage situations like this one on the ground?

Alnoor Ebrahim Well, thank you for that question. I think it's a really important one, because we see it constantly in organizations of all sizes, from small to very large, and I think that it's really a question about how does one lead change within an organization?

And there's a lot of good literature on this, a little bit of which I cited in the webinar, laying out a series of steps that run from actually, you know, creating a vision with a guiding coalition to rolling out some of that change, and ultimately institutionalizing new ways of doing things within our organizations.

The challenge, of course, is that organizations tend to be resistant, to change even when the outside context has modified greatly in the way that we've just been talking about. And middle managers to the question, turn out to be incredibly important to actually executing any kind of internal change in vision or direction and much of the leadership. Literature tells us that middle managers are likely to be resistors to change if they're not actually brought into the vision development as well as to actually designing how that change is going to be rolled out. And so it turns out to be wise, I think, in most instances, to bring them in as early as possible, both senior and middle management.

In addition, the challenges are often what in the literature are called “adaptive work,” which means that senior leaders may be able to frame the problem, but they don't actually know how to resolve it. They don't actually have the solutions. So, it requires a type of leader that's able to say, “Here's what I think the challenges are. Here's where I think we might end up going, but I don't actually know how to go about it, and I need your help to do this work.”

And there's plenty of examples where leaders have been able to do that, bringing middle management in. And as a result, being able to galvanize change within the organizations.

Ian, I don't know if you wanted to jump in on this, and then we might add a reflection based on another program that we're actually running.

JohnstoneYeah, I want to sort of seize on this idea of institutional structures. And here I'm going to be intruding in your space, your expertise, Alnoor, but I've been influenced by in some of the teaching I do on, on global governance, on international institutions, by an idea that was popularized by a scholar of organizational behavior who focused on corporations, Henry Mintzberg.

And he, if he didn't coin the term adhocracy, he certainly popularized the term adhocracy, which doesn't sound like a very good thing. But in fact, you know, he says it's important, and he says that for a lot of challenges that corporations face. And I'm going to argue, maybe international institutions face this kind of organizational form is actually quite useful.

It's compared to rigid bureaucracies. It tends to be decentralized, fluid in response to fast changing circumstances, in a fast-changing environment, not hierarchical, involves collaboration among networks, to deal with complex problems in an innovative way.

And when he first wrote about this, which I think was in the 1970’s, some of the examples he gave were space agencies. You know, NASA, avant-garde film companies, factories that manufacture prototypes and not mass produced goods, not the big industrialized form, but sort of small more specialized types of manufacturing. And I think today, you know, high tech startups might be a contemporary example of that.

And the idea is that they, these organizations, need to be able to innovate. They need to be able to move quickly and to do that they have to avoid the trappings of a rigid bureaucratic structure, with its sharp divisions of labor, its standardized operating procedures, its hierarchical chains of authority, and it seems to me that the international institutions that we see around us could benefit from a little bit of this adhocracy.

EbrahimYes, indeed, and I think you know, at some level, especially large institutions will never completely eliminate hierarchy, which, as Max Weber showed us, is actually part of designing efficient organizations. And so we need to find this balance between agility within the organizations. But within some sort of a larger structure and one of the ways in which we've been working on this in another program that we run at Fletcher is with the Asian Development Bank, which has undergone a major strategic shift to becoming not just a development bank, but a development plus climate bank focused on climate mitigation, climate adaptation, but thinking very broadly and creatively about how that gets balanced out in the benefit of development.

For countries in Asia as well as the pacific, part of the challenge here has been not simply a change in the bank strategy facing outwards with its member countries, but its internal change process. It means that no longer is it effective for the different units within the bank to work as silos, so transportation cannot work separately from energy or agriculture, for instance, or the private sector unit within the bank.

These silos have to be bridged. And teams have to be able to work together and across them. So we're seeing much more cross functional types of work on teams. And this plays well with the idea of "ad hoc" that Ian mentioned, where, you know, we've got some structure. But we're also seeing much more organic forms of engagement based on the problems that we're trying to solve.

The other thing that I want to say about this is, if you think about your own organization and ask yourself who actually has real influence in my organization? Who do I go to advice when there's a problem to be solved within my team or organization and in many instances I think you'll find that it's not necessarily people in formal positions of power or formal authority.

So it turns out that formal authority is not a good indicator of influence or agency within an organization, but rather people who have built trust and reputation within their organizations for being clear-eyed. Strategic will actually tell you what you think, what they think and will help you actually find solutions to those challenges. And so that, too, is a much more kind of collaborative engagement rather than through traditional formal structures. And this is true for very large organizations, as well as for small.

Johnstone I'm gonna jump back in, if you don't mind, Jenny, just because, one of the questions that we had in the webinar was about two of the biggest organizations of all, the World Bank and the UN. And the question was, are they adapting fast enough to this new, more pluralistic complex world order? And that's too big a question to answer in this context. But I should say that both organizations are currently undergoing significant reform exercises.

And you know, one of the themes that's animating the efforts in both is decentralization, getting people getting operations into the field closer to the people and to the problems that they're trying to address and the people that they're trying to help. So you know, that's happening. At the same time, there is continuing conversation about much bigger structural reforms reforming this UN Security Council, for example, or changing the voting weights in the World Bank.

And too soon to tell whether these are likely to bear fruit in the near future, but you know certainly there is adaptation underway. Whether it's fast enough remains to be seen.

StrakovskyThanks for bringing that back from the webinar. So we have this theme of like the expansion of leadership beyond formal structures on the individual level in organizations. We also talk about the expansion of diplomacy beyond states. So I have two questions now about non-state actors that I want to bring in.

Alnoor, how do we work more effectively with civil society organizations and other non-state organizations to facilitate dialogue and create change? EbrahimSo the short answer to that question is, we need to ask them. And we need to ask civil society organizations what have been effective engagements with public sector actors with intergovernmental actors.

And I think we'll find that that there's not a one-size-fits-all solution. And, in fact, as part of the Fletcher Global Diplomacy Institute, we will be bringing together some leaders of civil society organizations to actually speak with diplomats about exactly this challenge.

A number of years ago I worked on a project writing a report on behalf of 16 of the world's largest international NGOs on their engagements with the World Bank. And where had they succeeded, and where had they not?

And it turned out that they had actually been quite influential in influencing the World Bank's policies on safeguards. So safeguards, environmental safeguards, indigenous people safeguards working on various kinds of challenging issues where they had been less effective, was on influencing the governance of that global institution, an issue that remains part of something that they're very interested in discussing and engaging on today.

The world has changed since I did that work over a decade ago. But some of the issues actually remain quite similar. And so I think it's important to actually engage civil society on these questions to find out where there is room for dialogue and collaboration. We're also finding that many of the global treaties and challenges related to climate or Ian's doing some work on plastics. A colleague of ours is doing work on biodiversity, and civil society actors are absolutely crucial to the good quality research that goes into informing, decision making, but ultimately also for building political buy-in for the kinds of agreements that might be reached.

Strakovsky: To address another specific question that came in about this very issue, we're seeing a reduction of development and humanitarian funding from Western nations, and, quoting one viewer, "NGOs have been fairly silent in response." What leadership style should NGOs and other development actors adopt if they are to demonstrate the importance of their work and influence for continued funding?

EbrahimSo I think whether NGOs have been silent kind of depends on which organizations you're looking at. I think we've seen quite a spectrum from the extremely vocal to those that are really trying to work behind the scenes. And we need that entire spectrum.

And so some organizations, including, for instance, some household names, like some of the Oxfams, do not take public funding, and that's part of the rationale. There is to be enable them to actually speak critically of public organizations, public actors on global press freedoms. We've seen many organizations remaining quite vocal in their advocacy including the committee to protect journalists, Amnesty International and others.

So there we're seeing actually quite a lot of vocality on the parts of NGOs. On the other side, we are seeing many working behind the scenes to try and influence governmental decision makers to hire away people that have left public agencies that are no longer funded. And so we're seeing some of that as well.

But I think the point raises an additional concern or issue is the fact that some organizations have become silent because of the threat of losing, funding for their critical work and part of the problem here, I think, as somebody that studies civil society organizations is that they inhabit a competitive funding environment.

So think about this, most of the problems that civil society organizations try to address are collective level collective action problems. Whether that has to do with democracy, human rights, poverty, healthcare education, and so on, that cannot be addressed by organizations acting alone.

But yet they compete for funding. And so the funding environment actually pits them against one another, which means that in moments like this some will be inclined to be quiet because of the risk of losing that funding.

What does this mean? This means that in order for civic groups to be more vocal, we need their funders to actually also be more vocal and to actually allocate funding for collective action rather than for individual organizations. So there's two types of structural challenges here, both in the funding environment as well as the implementing environment, and there the solutions will have to be collective ones that we can explore.

StrakovskyWe also have a question about diversity and inclusion. How can that be incorporated into diplomacy and leadership? And we're shifting towards from the institutional to the individual, so you can respond in either direction.

EbrahimSo first, a clarification. Much of the backlash, as I understand it, to diversity and inclusion. Efforts, especially in the United States, has been around the idea that there are quotas or special advantages to people from disadvantaged backgrounds. That by and large is not what most advocates of diversity and inclusion are actually talking about. And so we're seeing two very different ways of framing the challenge.

The more important challenge, I think is around, how do we get diversity of viewpoint of thought, including political thought, and experiences in order to inform much better quality, diplomacy, and decision making. That's the real issue.

So we want to have global perspectives, diverse perspectives on any sort of a diplomatic challenge. Otherwise, we have incomplete information. And we have diplomats trying to resolve a problem without actually understanding fully the context. And so in those instances, I think we can say that diverse perspectives, perspectives that include all relevant stakeholders and parties actually make for better decision making which is a very different perspective than what's being portrayed, I think, as a narrow view of diversity inclusion today.

JohnstoneI'm going to jump in on this as well again, sort of stepping back a little bit to the level of institutions. And in the webinar. We talked about multiple institutional forms. You've got the global institutions which are composed of up to 193 States.

But you know, you've also got regional organizations which are are smaller. And then you've got informal organizations which I described as being clubs of either like-minded States or not. So like-minded states and clubs of like-minded states by definition are less diverse and less inclusive. And that's part of the purpose of establishing these groups is in order to get countries that have similar values and similar interests to work together as a coalition clubs of unlike-minded States.

So take the G20, for example - serve the purpose of bridging the gaps. And you know, trying to make sure that there are this diverse range of perspectives represented in the club in the group. And so I'm not sure we're going to see one or the other institutional form favored in the future. We're probably going to see both. But I do think it's important to continue to preserve and work with and within the organizations that are fully inclusive, that do have not only every state in the world participating, but also are open to civil society and businesses and philanthropies and other actors who actually have an impact on meeting global public policy challenges.