Comparing Bridging Leadership with Traditional Masteral Curriculla

by Elmer S. Soriano

We asked some 25 university professors who taught Bridging Leadership (BL) to compare the BL framework and methodologies with their current graduate schools offerings. I asked them something like this: "Why we don't we teach leadership to young professionals by putting them through your your regular MBA, MPH, or MPA instead of through this Bridging Leadership course?"

A number of them were initially taken aback by the question. I think many of the professors thought of leadership training as Executive Education, that was somewhat academically more lightweight and less textbookish that their regular masteral course.

Here's a comparison of design elements that differentiate BL from the more traditional masteral classes. I threw in an additional column comparing the typical NGO training format.

Curriculum Design Element	Traditional Courses (MPA, MBA, MPH)	NGO Training	Bridging Leadership
Target Learners	Masteral students	Community members, development professionals	Current or aspiring leaders
Logic of Training	technical skills for employment after graduation	skills for livelihood and political "empowerment"	equipping individuals to induce institutional change during the course
Presumed Problem System	simple, complicated	complex	complex
Language Used	science, management	popular education	stories, systems thinking

Overall, the Some said BL unlocked passion and purpose among their learners in ways that their regular masteral classes did not.

  The Life Map Canvas is an alternative way of describing these elements, and we'll tackle that in a different blog. 

Image credits: http://theinspirationroom.com/daily/2013/nelson-mandela-on-education-as-a-weapon/

Teaching Leadership through Emotional Truths

by Elmer S. Soriano

We recently ran a workshop where we taught university faculty how to teach leadership to social workers. Coming from different disciplines (nursing, public administration, economics, etc) and different universities, we had to design a learning experience that tapped into the collective wisdom that was assembled in our classroom. This training was supposed to prepare them to teach 1,600 social workers across 1,000+ municipalities how to lead.

We started off the workshop asking them why they thought the Bridging Leadership framework was a better course than their current offerings of MBA, or MPA, or any of their regular graduate courses. They said their other courses weren't designed to "touch the heart", or awaken a "sense of purpose", or "transform lives" in ways that their other courses did not deliver.

We introduced the CYNEFIN Framework to help them wrap their heads around how Bridging Leadership addresses complex systems in ways that traditional MBA and MPA tools don't do as effectively.

Here are a few insights from that workshop:

1. Leadership training includes exposing the learners not just to leadership paradigms and frameworks, but also to "emotional truths".

Leadership is requires the practice of diagnosing problems, especially problems that are unnamed, taboo, or in a culture's blind spot. Students of leadership benefit from acquiring the ability to recognize and ripen emotional truths in their own lives, and use these emotional truths as lenses in diagnosing adaptive challenges. This video from Adichie describes emotional truths and other concepts on cultural blindspots.

2. Introduce the concept of VUCCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Chaotic, Complex, Ambiguous) Systems.

Leaders nowadays have to be highly functional in VUCCA systems, in this age where climate change and super-typhoons are the new normal. Traditional teachers are accustomed to have neat lesson plans, and quiet, orderly classrooms, which poor environments to teach leadership in the context of messy systems. This video describes how education is being disrupted by new ways of learning complex systems.

3. Use Case in Point to simulate the hot seat of leadership.

I think of the Case-in-Point (CIP) method as a rather abstract methodology, and I was surprised when one of the social workers told me that she observed that a number of faculty members resisted or did not understand the logic of CIP. She said that it was possibly because social workers often found themselves in the hot seat, being asked questions to which they did not have all the right answers. She said that faculty members, on the other hand, usually taught the "correct answers" and were less accustomed to being asked questions that reframed their mindsets.

In retrospect, the experiences at this workshop validate the role of the need for Leadership Teaching and Learning Lab. Adapting from MIT's Teaching and Learning Lab, the function could be:

The mission of the Leadership Teaching and Learning Lab is to jointly partner with leadership educators to create an educational environment where learners are academically challenged, actively engaged, and personally supported.

Our Lab Associates will do this by:

-sharing research-based strategies for lesson, subject, and program design and development.
-educating others about student-centered pedagogies.
-collaborating and consulting with other leadership educators to brainstorm opportunities and solutions for their teaching context.
-collecting data through the evaluation of educational innovations and assessment of student outcomes to provide constructive, practical, and informative feedback to educators.
-continually seeking additional areas where we may be of service to the Institute's continually evolving educational needs and interests.

Human-Centered Leadership Development

What if leadership development were human-centered rather than project output-centered? What if we trained individuals primarily to become mindful, mature, adaptive leaders first, and then measure program outcomes as a yardstick of their increasing depth in leadership judgment?

If we did that, we'd could take the following approaches:

1. Start with the life purpose of each learner. We would start by having a conversation on the learner's life journey and sense of purpose. Each individual is assumed to have a calling or vocation (or a series of vocations) in her lifetime and bringing out leadership means helping the learner connect to this deeper source of meanings in her life.

2. Understand life stage and life roles. Individuals are in a certain stage in family life, whether they are unattached, just married, caring for toddler, etc which shape their concerns as a person.  They also have additional roles and affiliations (ex.father, sister, church leader, civic leader)  and their leadership senses may be heightened when those aspects of their lives are woven into the leadership development conversations.

3. Identify adaptive challenges in their sectors that disturb them, and then help them deploy themselves as adaptive leaders. If they are engaged in working on social problems that disturb them, they will find themselves drawn to problem-solving in that space. 

Interiority, Faith, and Leadership

by Elmer S Soriano

Leadership in chaotic situations is not easy. In the midst of change or chaos, a leader has to be able to orient herself, connecting to a source of coherence and continuity from which to act from.

Different authors have referred to this as Source, True North, interiority, inner self, or spirituality. Regardless of what it is called, there is a recognition that leaders need to build up their capacity to understand themselves so that they too, can help others understand themselves and the complex work in the world that we all need to do.

On the other hand, there are hundreds of new leadership books published every year. How can one learn leadership without having to read up all the new concepts that describe this complexity. From Seven Habits of Highly Effective People to 21 Laws of Leadership to the Fifth Discipline, it is easy to gain textbook knowledge about leadership, but it requires deeper learning to prepare one for the emotional turmoil and ambiguity that accompanies the practice of leadership.

The Case in Point method pioneered by Heifetz allows learners to participate in a case group, which is a fractal that demonstrates the experience of leadership by creating such a leadership environment within the classroom. Scharmer in the video above, creates learning designs that allow learners to understand the psychology of leadership by first experiencing it.

The challenge is not just to help learners understand themselves. Leadership development has to take learners on a journey so that learners are able to: 1) diagnose themselves; 2) diagnose others, and; 3) guide others on a journey toward self understanding and understanding of the adaptive challenges that they face.

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

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