Case-in-Point Method in Asia

by Elmer S. Soriano

It's not easy to teach leadership. The case-in-point method (CIP) developed at the Harvard Kennedy School to teach Adaptive Leadership. The methodology was developed it in the context of teaching 70 graduate students from over a dozen countries who are accomplished leaders in their own right. The types with the background and intelligence to get admitted into Harvard.

"The thesis underlying CIP is that one cannot simply learn how exercise leadership more effectively, particularly in today's increasingly complex and interdependent world, through traditional methods alone. Rather, the challenges of leadership must be experienced in real-time and reflected upon in a classroom laboratory conducive to taking risks and experimenting with new behaviors outside of an individual's current repertoire." (Green, 2011)

Can the CIP method be applied to less diverse, less educated cohorts?

At the Civika Leadership Institute we have tried the method in more practitioner-oriented cohorts in the Philippines including Coast Guard junior officers, commissioned and non-commissioned officers from the Marines, university faculty, and civil servants and here is the summary of our insights on the method.

1. Understand complexity through narratives rather than frameworks. The course at the Kennedy School provides over 1,000 pages of grad school readings in the course pack, drawing from references in sociology, psychology, management, the Bible, and many others. The course pack complements Heifetz' books. For our courses, we didn't have the luxury of abstractions with graduate students.

To make the abstract concepts more accessible, many of the key concepts had to be packaged in parables which were then unpacked narratively, rather through scientific paradigms. For example, double and triple-loop learning was explored through the parable of the Frog in the Well, where a frog who grew up in a well changed his worldview the first time he stepped out of the well.

2. Unity rather than dichotomy between content and method. Classroom sessions at the Kennedy School used the CIP method to induce learning of concepts as well as methodology. Some professional teachers we taught got disoriented when the CIP method was woven into discussing content. They were accustomed to learning content separately from methodology.  

Field practitioners, on the other hand, did not presume that there had to be a dichotomy between content and process, and they didn't see any inconsistency in melding content with method in the CIP sessions. This doesn't mean, though, that they didn't experience the distress and disequilibruim that comes hand-in-hand with the CIP method.

3. Shorter CIP conversation cycles. At the Kennedy School, CIP sessions lasted 75 minutes each, conforming to class session endings prompted by school-wide bells. In our sessions, we had 2-4 day one-time workshops and we would do big group CIP sessions with frequent "balcony" sessions at intervals as short as every 10 minutes.

4. Prepared frames based on dominant organizational, cultural, or sectoral narratives, as well as primary and secondary identities. Learners come in with narratives and identities. For relatively homogenous groups such as junior Commissioned Officers in the Marines, we took note of their age (late 20s), roles (leader of companies, usually composed of older non-commissioned officers), and life stage (newlyweds, young fathers, or just about to get married), and urgent adaptive challenges (peacemaking amidst potential electoral violence).

Leadership Capital

by Elmer S Soriano

Changemaking these days includes a category of interventions that yield disproportional gains and are worth studying.

Leaders should get a handle on these in order to increase the influence they have over outcomes. Here are some types:

1. Human knowledge capital or talent - smart, design-oriented individuals have the potential to contribute to system change if given the right platforms. The following
2. Learning capital - cash and brainpower connected to each other through a design platform
2. Network capital - friends, connections, and platforms that allow individuals to connect and co-create rapidly

Source:
JL Murray Julio Frenk. A WHO Framework for Health System Performance Assessment Christopher
http://www.who.int/healthinfo/paper06.pdf

Transboundary Leadership

by Elmer S Soriano

After running a number of leadership development workshops in different sectors and trying to help leaders grapple with their adaptive challenges, I see more and more how leadership development involves helping and individuals or groups cross boundaries. Below is a summary of types of boundaries I've seen:

Blind spots - spaces that are beyond the leaders sphere of awareness. If the leader isn't equipped with competencies to see the bigger picture, she remains trapped in her own worldview.

Identity divides - spaces that are perceived by the leader as beyond her own individual identities or worldviews. In these spaces, the leader feels that he is different and therefore has trouble empathizing with those beyond the fence. These can be race, class, school, or other forms of boundaries that divide one group from another.

Organizational or community boundaries - boundaries set by mandates, organizational budgets, program scopes. These also include turfs of others that are respected and not encroached upon. A leader usually operates within these boundaries unless she deliberately takes a risk and operates beyond these boundaries.

Agency scope and scale - leadership imagine their agency and influence within a certain scale (e.g. organization, federation, national, transnational) and operate within these psychological boundaries.  
Leadership development often involves creating a holding environment and inviting the leaders into this space which overlaps with their current space, but provides them a gateway to new spaces where they can do the adaptive work needed of them.

Image credit:
https://drexelnewsblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/frog-in-well.jpeg?w=283&h=290&crop=1

Social Franchise Lab (Part 1)

by Elmer S Soriano

Scaling up good practices or programs has been a challenge in the development sector. Here's a good article from the Harvard Business Review entitled How to Take a Social Venture to Scale. 

For a social entrepreneur with an innovative solution, the holy grail is scaling it—that is, taking it to a level where the new approach operates efficiently and effectively to achieve significant mitigation of a social problem. Indeed, many are under real pressure to scale as their supporters, not unlike investors in commercial ventures, clamor for higher social returns on their investments. But for every Habitat for Humanity, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and Teach for America that has managed to scale, there are thousands that have stagnated or failed. read more...

 Social Franchising provides an even more concrete approach to scaling up. 

Although social franchising is like commercial franchising, it is significantly different. The social franchise is normally set up not to maximise profits, but to enable people to work together and share ideas. The founder is driven by a social goal, such as the employment of disabled people, the democratisation of the economy or tackling climate change. As such the social franchise has a social purpose and is often owned by its social franchise members but it is also a business that makes profits. Without these profits, it could not survive and grow and meet its social aims. 

Sources:
https://hbr.org/2012/06/how-to-take-a-social-venture-t
http://www.socialfranchising.coop/what-is-social-franchising
http://www.sf4health.org/

Translational Leadership Applied to Health Insurance

by Elmer S. Soriano

Public policy is often difficult to translate into lay terms, resulting in translation failure which can result in governance failure.

Here's an example of how concepts of actuarial science were boiled down to customer-friendly tools so that rural women could pick which health micro-insurance package to subscribe to as a group.

Nodal Leadership and the Bishop's Gambit: Strategic Influence for Young Leaders

by Elmer S Soriano

How can a skilled but younger leader influence political outcomes in disproportionate ways, without threatening her superiors? 

Many young and intelligent leaders find themselves in this position. They are smart enough to diagnose the adaptive challenges facing their organization. They are connected well enough within social systems to shape outcomes, through betweeness centrality, able to shape the signals that are communicated through the network, and they have just enough informal authority to engage actors who matter through conversations. 

Nodal governance defined by Burris et al as "a variety of actors operating within social systems interact along networks to govern the systems they inhabit" shall be used as the conceptual peg for this article.

Imagine a mid-twenties technical staff with a masters degree working at UNICEF. She's assigned to various technical working groups across multiple projects, reports to and is trusted by top influentials in the country office, and is able to see and hear many signals that don't reach her bosses.

She wants to influence outcomes and sees some ripeness and resonance of some issues, but the different leaders in her network don't see her ideas as the priority. She's doesn't have enough formal authority to make things happen.

Questions this person may ask in order to define her strategy:
1. What is my preferred reality? How would I like this system to look like after six months, one year, or three years?

2. What networks of associated ideas will need to ripen and be considered valid in order for the scenario in no.1 to happen? Which decision-makers influence no.1, and who influence these decision-makers?

3. Map the social relations and ideas within the network. Click here for example.

4. Diagnose the disposition of 3-5 key influentials in the social network. 

5. Deploy Boundary Spanning Leadership in cycles of four weeks.

6. Close triangles to increase validity of ideas.

7. If there is emerging consensus behind a certain point or concept, point that out to your boss or another senior officer with convening powers, and allow that person convene a meeting or have a one-on-one conversation to swing a decision to advance no.1. 

If not, go back to no.2.

8. If No.1 has been achieved, close this advocacy project and identify the next preferred reality.


Sources:
Information and Contact-Making in Policy Networks: A Model with Evidence from the U.S. Health Policy Domain http://www.hks.harvard.edu/davidlazer/files/papers/carpenter_esterling_lazer_information_contactmaking_us-health-policy.pdf

Nodal Governance SCOTT BURRIS, PETER DRAHOS AND CLIFFORD SHEARING
http://www.temple.edu/lawschool/phrhcs/salzburg/Nodal_Governance_Article.pdf

Boundary-spanning Leadership
http://www.ccl.org/Leadership/pdf/research/BoundarySpanningLeadership.pdf

School for Leadership Schools

How does one start a School of Leadership?

Major crossovers may be one trigger for starting a school of leadership.

Theoretical Crossovers

Theoretical crossovers happen when the dominant understanding of a large scale problem becomes inadequate and a new theory of change emerges, requiring a cohort of leaders equipped with new skill sets to replace the old leaders, who are now bottlenecks for inducing the change. There are two types of theoretical crossover, namely crossovers in leadership theory, and crossovers in solution concepts.

There would be crossovers in leadership theory, such as Theory U or Adaptive Leadership that propose a fundamental shift in the understanding of leadership itself. The New Organizing Institute and Center for Bridging Leadership at the Asian Institute of Management shows the way for organizers to organize through engagement based campaigns, and is a more empowering alternative to other forms of organizing.

Problem or Solution Crossovers

Crossovers in solutions concepts usually emanate from breakthroughs through transdisciplinary approaches, and teach students leadership skills to lead across two or more pre-existing domains. For example, the Climate Reality Leadership Corps and the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative provide a transdisciplinary approach to their respective problem spaces, and teach their students skills on how to lead in the translation of theories from different disciplines into action for a sector or community.

Narrative Crossovers

Narrative crossovers are usually constituency-based, and provide an alternative empowering narrative to replace the prevalent narrative of marginalization or oppression. The Indigenous Leadership Development Institute and Diaspora Leadership Fellows provide alternative narratives and spaces for pursuing empowerment.

Designing a National Leadership Development Architecture

by Elmer S. Soriano

“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.” 

― Roberston Davies

“Unfortunately, there seems to be far more opportunity out there than ability.... We should remember that good fortune often happens when opportunity meets with preparation.” 

― Thomas A. Edison

A friend of mine was sharing with me that the senior faculty at the school where she teaches at will all be retiring in a few years, leaving the challenge of leading her her school with her generation. The trouble is, she's only in her early 40's and she will have to take over the role of somebody who has some 20 years more preparation than her. This ontop of having to deal with the rapid changes in her domain. In that conversation with my friend, the challenge was described as Future Shock + Leadership Shock. 

How might a country prepare a pipeline of mature, global, public leaders to lead in the present and the future? Drawing from Warren (1995), we imagine a series of stepping-stone arrangements to cultivate a country's stock of leaders. We assume that each citizen is called to be good leaders, and that mature and capable leaders everywhere help advance the project of nation-building, from Parent-Teacher Associations, to churches, to government agencies, to elective positions in cities and national government.   

Level 100 - Commitment to Share/Volunteer

At this level, young adults are encouraged to participate in volunteer work so that they get a glimpse of the world of sharing and generosity. Volunteering opens up the eyes of an individual to his capacity to give up his time to benefit another. Sure, the intentions may not be as pure, but the experience opens up the psychological space beyond egocentric gain. Volunteer weekend activities such as Gawad Kalinga builds may be done out of curiosity, peer-pressure, boredom, or adventure, but they open up the mind to one's capacity to share.

Longer-term service programs such as the year-long Jesuit Volunteer Program or the two-year Teach for the Philippines program are more likely to have profound effects on a young adult's life, opening one up the the possibility of a career devoted to public service.

Level 200 - Commitment to Leadership Growth through Leading Project or Innovation Teams

A young adult may get stuck in casual volunteering.

Ideally, an elder, possibly parents, supervisors, or mentors, guide and challenge young adults to step up and start leading teams. Often done in parallel with sharpening selected technical skills, project and team leadership equips an individual with a growing sense of agency, where she begins to recognize her capacity to effect change in the world by mobilizing other people.

At this stage, the individual should be guided toward understanding the larger structural adaptive challenges facing her generation and her sector. In preparation for Level 300, adaptive leadership, political analysis, and social network analysis are key competencies to acquire at this stage. Leading small transnational projects or enterprises is one approach top schools do and should be encouraged for high-potential individuals. 

Those in the private sector might not be able to find project like these assigned to them, so they should go out of their way to find or create projects for themselves. They may find a nearby orphanage and commit to co-create a project over an extended period of time, rather than sporadic piecemeal volunteer events of Level 100.

Level 300 - Cross-boundary Leadership and Governance

It is easier to lead office subordinates than stakeholders outside one's organization. At this level, a growing leader should be guided to take political risks, speak to power, and mobilize individuals and groups beyond her own boundaries formal authority. Through informal authority, a leader at this level builds alliances and transforms her organization and others through her efforts.

At this change, opposition and failures become a costly reality. Demands from family will also put a strain on a leader striving to grow in mid-career.

Level 400 - Societal Change Leadership

At this stage, the leader devotes his or her energies energies to consolidating the gains and paving the way for the successor generation. A number of them actually begin starting up leadership schools and injecting their life's work of insights into this school which serves as a repository and multiplier of the competencies that they have seen to work. The Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative focuses on this segment and reimagines what is meant by retirement. 

In order to adapt to Future Shock, leaders also have to start evolving in their awareness from 1.0 to 4.0 as described by Scharmer. Level 4.0 is often seen in senior leaders, but this has to be cultivated earlier in the leadership journey so that young leaders have a global and ecosystem-level consciousness.

  

Leadership and Network Weaving

by Elmer S. Soriano

It's not what you know, but who you know.

That's an old saying, but it takes on fresh validation from field of Social Network Analysis. The concept of betweeness centrality explains how a few nodes can be extremely influential when they are the gateway to other networks that would otherwise be poorly connected.

For example, the Wise City concept discusses how universities can exercise place-based leadership by deploying the massive intellectual resources to solve social problems of their host cities or countries.

The Bridging Leadership program in the Philippines creates links between devolved municipalities and the national Department of Health. The Communications for Communicators Schools forges multiple connections between the Johns Hopkins University, Asian Institute of Management, and various field-based practitioners to deploy health promotion campaigns.

Plastrick and Taylor (2006) offer these definitions to help network leaders navigate through  the various functions of network leadership.  

Organizer	Establishes purpose and value propositions of the network. Establishes first links to nodes for the network. Attracts initial resources for the network.
Funder	Provides initial resources for organizing the network, supporting development of connections, alignment, production, and coordination for the network. May play role of initial organizer of network.
Weaver	Works to increase connections among nodes, both the number of links and the bandwidth quality of links. Also may focus on growing the network by connecting to new nodes.
Facilitator	Helps network members to establish collective value proposition and negotiate collective actions plans for production.
Coordinator	Helps nodes to undertake collective action for production, by ensuring flow of necessary information and other resources, development and implementation of agreements among nodes.
Coach	Advises organizers, weavers, facilitators, and coordinators about how best to perform their roles in building networks.
Steward	Informally helps to build the network, but as a member of the network, not as a formal position-role within the network.

Holley developed a Network Weaver Checklist which gives one a quick overview of the function of a network weaver.


Sources:
Plastrick and Taylor (2006) NET GAINS: A Handbook for Network Builders Seeking Social Change http://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/plastrick.pdf

"GoldenGate01". Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GoldenGate01.JPG#mediaviewer/File:GoldenGate01.JPG

Governance Diagnostics: A Taxonomy

by Elmer S. Soriano

Kung gusto, may paraan. Kung ayaw, may dahilan.

This expression roughly means, "When there is a will, there is a way. When something is undesired, there is an excuse."

Policy in the context of devolved health services can be confusing because national agencies and local government units can blame each other for shortcomings. At the national level, the national agency may have a policy of health as a basic human right, and universal health care coverage. At the local level, mayors may claim autonomy over leading the municipal health system.

To help clarify the matter, Prichett and Sharma (2008) present a nomenclature that sharpens the discussion.

A policy is a mapping between states of the world and actions by an agent of an organization. This is true of a government policy or the policy of a retail store (“refunds only with a receipt”) or a fire insurance policy (an agreement on payments conditional on realization of states of the world).

A de jure policy or notional policy is a statement of the desired mapping from the states of the world without a complete specification of the way in which the policy will be implemented.

A de facto or realized policy is either a description of what will happen across
states of the world. The notional policy is one element of realized policy but realized
policy can either be very close to notional policy or realized policy may in fact have very little to do with notional policy.

A policy action is just one outcome of the implementation of a realized policy. A complete policy specification includes not only a description of the notional policy (the mapping from states of the world to actions) but also a coherent behavioral model of the actions of the agents responsible for policy implementation and a specification of the mechanisms influencing the incentives facing the agents.

The mechanisms of policy implementation include a specification of the operation
of the direct organizations of implementation, in particular the actual processes whereby states of the world are determined organizationally (e.g. who has authority to determine the state of the world, the processes and procedures to be used, how state of the world declarations can be contested internally or externally) and the background institutions that constrain the organizations in mechanism design (and the specification of background institutions with respect to one policy may include direct organizations of implementation). For instance, an organization may desire to have a policy in which its agents caught stealing are fired, a relevant background institution might be organizations which provide worker protection from dismissal which make this difficult or impossible. 

Capability (of the state broadly or a specific organization) can be defined as the ability to consistently produce actions by the agents of the organization across a variety of situations (states of the world) that comply with organizational policies and procedures and further the goals of the organization. This is as true of private firms as not-for profit organizations (from religions to universities to hospitals) as for government agencies. This needn’t involve mimicking the organizational practices of private firms—it can be accomplished in a variety of ways from high powered incentives to fear and intimidation to rigorous selectivity to sustained inculcation of the organization’s values (and likely some combination of all of the above).

Source: Pritchett and Sharma (2008)

In the case of the Philippine health policies defining tuberculosis care, there are a number of de jure or notional policies, namely: Kalusugan Pangkalahatan (universal health care), National Tuberculosis Program, and the devolution of health services.

However, the de facto policy is that devolution is a dominant notional policy, such that mayors have been given, in effect, the power to veto the Universal Health Care policy and the National Tuberculosis Policy. The fact that multiple-drug resistant TB is rising due to gaps induced by mayors, and this is allowed by DOH Regional Directors illustrates this de facto policy.

Source: Pritchett and Sharma (2008) http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/lpritch/NEW%20docs,%20ppts,%20etc/Implementing%20Growth%20Analytics.pdf

Varieties of Leadership Training and Development

by Elmer S. Soriano

Civika Leadership Institute has the opportunity of working with leaders in various organizational settings and currently has a number of approaches to help leaders grow.

In partnership with the Asian Institute of Management, Johns Hopkins University (JHU), Campaigns and Grey, and USAID, the Communications for Communicators School (www.c4cschool.com) is an in-service communications fellowship that combines the JHU P Framework for health communications, with AIM's Bridging Leadership and development management courses. Some 80 mid-career practitioners in the health sector enroll in a 6-month course which includes three classroom workshops with practicum work and coaching in between. Each C4C Fellow works on a health communications campaign and completes the P Framework cycle. Started by Yoly Ong, the C4C aims to scale up world-class in-service leadership training within the bureaucracy.

Also in the health sector, Civika Institute works with the Zuellig Family Foundation in implementing the Health Leadership and Governance Program covering over 600 LGUs. Interventions include training, coaching, program data management and facilitating development of the local social networks that support maternal health. This program draws heavily from the work of MIT's Otto Scharmer, Amartya Sen, and Ernesto Garilao's Bridging Leadership. There must be around 100 mayors who have already finished the course and over 500 staff of the Department of Health of the Philippines. 

In the broader field of local governance, we had the wonderful opportunity to launch the Governance Innovation Lab with the Galing Pook Foundation. Galing Pook has been an award-giving body for the past 20 years, Galing Pook Foundation now aims to catalyze the replication of innovative practices. Dr.Eddie Dorotan, it's Executive Director, has wisely invested in developing a TV series on innovations on local governance which can now serve as the material for various courses in governance.

We also had the opportunity of co-convening the Digital Strategies for Development Summit in October of 2014. With five thematic streams and over 300 participants, it was a well-attended summit that served as an ASEAN platform for knowledge-sharing on technology-enabled development.

Our most recent offering now is the Resiliency Leadership Innovations Fellowship which combines Scharmer's U-Lab course on EdX with the knowledge on resiliency leadership. Starting with 10 Fellows, we aim to deepen our offerings in the resiliency leadership and governance space.

Nodal Governance: Unleashing the Potential of Global Citizenship

by Elmer S. Soriano

Is it possible to have governance without government? 

The idea of public leadership untethered from the bureaucracy has a lot of potential especially in contexts where government has been crippled by disaster, and where government is not trusted under normal circumstances.

Imagine a set of a few million professionals: doctors, nurses, engineers, managers, realtors, etc. collectively organizing themselves to get work done for a certain cause. That is exactly what happened when Supertyphoon Yolanda struck in 2013.

The thought of massive destruction and death aroused powerful feelings of kinship among Filipinos abroad. The Supertyphoon was a powerful frame that allowed individuals to recognize needs far bigger than any mayor could handle alone, and it was from within this mindset that old boundaries blurred and individuals acted beyond the confines of their job descriptions and stepped up to work collectively to rebuild devastated communities. 

The article #YolandaPH (Haiyan): Filipinos worldwide heed call to action by Rappler lists dozens of organizations mobilizing thousands of individuals just days after Haiyan struck.

The term "nodal governance" has been used by Burris et al as "a variety of actors operating within social systems interact along networks to govern the systems they inhabit."

"...that any collectivity can be understood to be an ‘outcome-generating system’ (‘OGS’) whose workings are generally too complex to be fully understood. Inhabitants develop forms of governance as a strategic adaptation to complexity. Our theory posits that governance in such systems is substantially constituted in nodes — institutions with a set of technologies, mentalities and resources — that mobilize the knowledge and capacity of members to manage the course of events. Nodes are normally but not essentially points on networks, but networks are a prime means through which nodes exert influence.

Source: http://www.temple.edu/lawschool/phrhcs/salzburg/Nodal_Governance_Article.pdf

The movie Fire in the Blood describes an OGS in the context of global HIV work. It shows how networks adapt and how complex dependencies emerge as nodal leaders and nodal governance is generated.

Translation Failure in Climate Change

"Storm surge" was a new term for most mayors who were warned about the impending supertyphooon Yolanda. For many mayors, strong typhoons were a common experience so they interpreted the warnings as just another typhoon.

This is one tragic case of translation failure. Meteorologists communicated technical warnings in earnest, but local leaders and policymakers decoded it wrongly. The correct technical term "storm surge" communicated by the meteorologists were not understood by those who needed to act on those signals. 

The Zuellig Family Foundation has developed an interesting tool for converging what Catacutan (2009) refers to as Political Knowledge, Scientific Knowledge, and Local Knowledge. 

The photo below is a mayor's health governance dashboard used by Philippine mayors in targetting their governance interventions in the area of maternal health.

It has six columns, corresponding to the Six Building Blocks of health systems by the World Health Organization. These columns are anchored in the evidence-based, scientific knowledge promoted by WHO. The cells within the columns are color-coded red, yellow, and green, corresponding to the signals in a traffic light. Each cell corresponds to national and local initiatives institutions that contribute to maternal health. It includes elements such as social mobilization called Barangay Health Summits.

A mayor merely has to look for the red and yellow cells in this dashboard in order to prioritize. He recieves leadership coaching so that he can act on the technical and adaptive challenges indicated by the yellow or red cells. A coach then walks the mayor through the technical and adaptive issues, decision criteria, dependencies, and procedures in order to convert a cell from red to green. 

Climate change induces such translation gaps because new technical signals have to be disseminated and communicated to leaders. Leaders have to learn these technical signals in order to respond accordingly.

Translational medicine or translational science focuses on delivering knowledge from the research lab "bench-to-bedside", in the case of health research. This is also applicable to the work of resiliency and disaster risk reduction.

Sources:
 Catacutan (2009)