The Three Types of Leaders Who Create Radical Change
Every successful social movement requires
three distinct leadership roles: the agitator, the innovator, and the
orchestrator, according to institutional change expert Julie Battilana.
What
determines whether a social movement will be a flash in the pan or a real
catalyst for longterm change? Why did Occupy Wall Street subside in a matter of
months, for instance, while the American Civil Rights Movement thrived,
resulting in the passage of multiple laws?
Julie
Battilana, a long-time scholar of institutional change, has identified common
themes among those social movements that don't merely broadcast the need for a
social change, but actually create long-term impact.
According
to Battilana, every successful social movement features three distinct
leadership roles: the agitator, the innovator, and the orchestrator.
Any
successful pathway to societal change requires all three, as Battilana explains
in the article Should You Agitate, Innovate, or Orchestrate? Understanding
the Roles You Can Play in a Movement Toward Societal Change, co-written with Marissa
Kimsey, a research associate at HBS. The article appears in the new issue
of Stanford Social Innovation Review.
“If you
look at the history of any successful social change movement, you’ll see there
were moments of really effective agitation, innovation, and orchestration that
led to the adoption of the change,” says Battilana, the Joseph C. Wilson
Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and Alan L.
Gleitsman Professor of Social Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School, who,
for more than a decade, has studied and researched the ways in which
organizations and individuals implement changes that diverge from
taken-for-granted norms. “Although history remembers some individual actors as
highly influential, single leaders rarely change the course of society on their
own.”
The
Agitator stirs the pot by articulating and publicizing societal grievances,
rallying an otherwise diverse group of people around a mutual desire for
change.
“Effective
agitators are able to draw attention to a problem and convince others that it
requires both some corrective action and collective work to bring it about,”
Battilana writes in the 2015 teaching note Power and
Influence in Society. “To
demonstrate that the status quo is not acceptable and to mobilize others,
agitators thus need to communicate in a manner that ensures grievances are
shared and collective and not seen as irrelevant.”
Take, for
example, marine biologist Rachel Carson, who alerted the public to the dangers
of pesticides in the 1950s; Donald Trump, who, throughout 2016, rallied
citizens around the slogan “Make America Great Again;” or Teresa Snook, who
launched the Women’s March on Washington after Trump’s presidential victory.
The
Innovator develops a solution to address the grievances. That means
anticipating roadblocks and coming up with alternative paths, as well as
justifying those alternatives in appealing ways to engage individuals, groups,
and organizations to support them.
“An
innovator is likely someone who has studied, lived, or experienced something
beyond the norms in a given environment and thus is able to create a vision of
a different future that nonetheless makes sense to, and captivates, those
living within the existing practices and conditions,” Battilana writes in
“Power and Influence in Society.”
Without
leaders who can lay out a persuasive path of innovation, a movement will never
make it past the agitation stage, Battilana argues.
Innovators sometimes draw on
existing, proven approaches to create long-lasting solutions. Battilana and
Kimsey cite the example of the French youth services organization Unis-Cité,
which was modeled after the American nonprofit City Year.Credit:
Unis-Cité
“If you
do not innovate and have a solution to the problem you’ve identified, the
movement will die,” she says. “I think that’s what happened with the Occupy
Wall Street movement. There was an effective agitation; the movement came at
the right time—a time when the world was screaming that we needed a different
financial system. But there was a lack of innovation. And we ended up coming
back to a system that is quite a bit like what we had before.”
The
Orchestrator spreads the solution created by the innovator, continually
strategizing how best to reach and work with people both within and outside the
movement, as the movement for change grows in size and complexity.
“Orchestrators
often need to tailor their message to the interests of the various
constituencies they are trying to persuade to embrace the change,” Battilana
writes in her teaching note. “However, in doing so, they need to strike a fine
balance, as they also need to ensure that the overall message around change
adoption remains coherent.”
“Agitation
without innovation means complaints without alternatives, and innovation
without orchestration means ideas without impact,” the authors write in “Should
You Agitate, Innovate, or Orchestrate? Understanding the Roles You Can Play in
a Movement Toward Societal Change.”
Traps and challenges
Battilana
and Kimsey explain that each role requires a combination of communicating,
organizing, and evaluating.
Agitators
need to communicate the necessity of the social change movement; innovators
need to communicate the validity of their proposed solution; and orchestrators
must be able to tailor information to different types of constituents—sometimes
different groups all over the world—while still maintaining a cohesive message.
Agitators
must also organize and launch a collective action against the status quo;
innovators must build a coalition of support behind their ideas; and
orchestrators must expand and sustain the collective action.
Each of
these three roles also comes with its own set of traps, a point Battilana
stresses when talking to action-driven students:
·
Among
agitators: fragmented agitation—triggering multiple areas of outrage that
can’t work together as a cohesive cause, and a stalled solution—raising a
valid complaint but lacking a remedy to offer.
·
Among
innovators: tunnel vision—failing to consider the negative implications of
a proposed solution, and impractical elegance—proposing a solution that
looks great on a computer screen but is virtually impossible to orchestrate.
·
Among
orchestrators: mission drift—losing sight of the envisioned social change,
and dilution—watering down the movement to the point that it no longer
addresses grievances.
Battilana
has advice for avoiding potential traps and how to determine when to play which
roles. Keys include continually assessing progress and changes in the environment,
as well as the understanding the individual’s sources of power and motivations.
Power may come from personal sources (e.g., charisma, expertise); positional
sources (e.g., holding official leadership roles, elected or appointed); and
relational sources (connections with family, friends, and colleagues). “Leaders
leverage these various sources of power as they push for change,” Battilana and
Kimsey write in their article.
"MOST MOVEMENTS ARE
FULL OF HIDDEN HEROES"
Battilana
also warns that effecting change does not guarantee glory. Behind any
successful movement lies a great deal of thankless determination and sweat.
“Societal
change takes time, it takes a lot of work, and most of the time you’re not
going to get a lot of recognition,” she says. “Most movements are full of
hidden heroes, if you will. No one may ever know about them. Some of them had
to work their whole lives and didn’t see the moment when finally things
changed. But they played key roles in agitation, orchestration, or innovation.”
by Carmen Nobel
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/the-three-types-of-leaders-who-create-radical-change?cid=spmailing-16870048-WK%20Newsletter%2009-20-2017%20(1)-September%2020,%202017
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