Leadership for Real Systems Change
The challenge
From donors, organizational leaders and institutions seeking to achieve lasting progress on the world’s most complex development challenges, we hear a few common refrains:
We are stuck in a cycle of deploying frameworks and roadmaps, but the underlying challenges persist: Balancing the pressure for quick wins vs. long-term investments. Prioritizing false harmony over productive conflict. Avoiding true commitment to shared frameworks that don’t directly align with our own organization’s goals.
Progress requires cross-boundary collaboration, which can be exhausting. Making even the smallest changes often requires consultation and consensus from across the development spectrum. Yet maintaining relationships across sectors and siloes takes up immense time.
We don’t know where to start to achieve the change we need. ‘Systems change’ has become a centerpiece of development agendas. Yet there remains a lack of shared understanding of what the work involves. Agencies and organizations are under pressure to produce major political change, but lack strategies they can use to mobilize actors towards shared objectives.
In order to navigate complex, multi-layered challenges, we need a shared toolkit to diagnose obstacles to progress and mobilize change within social systems.
OUR OFFER
KONU and Dalberg are hosting two open-enrollment workshops exploring the challenge of Systems Leadership. These workshops will invite change agents in international development to explore powerful concepts from the Adaptive Leadership framework, and make progress on the complex, systemic challenges they are tackling.
WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO CHANGE A SYSTEM? (AND WHY DO WE SO OFTEN FAIL?)
Virtual Session
August 29, 2023, 8:00-9:30am ET
The world of international development is fantastic at planning solutions to the challenges we face. Roadmaps, workplans, impact frameworks, and models exist in abundance. Development professionals spend many hours—and considerable money—building, announcing, promoting, and implementing these planning frameworks.
And yet, underlying challenges of unproductive behaviors, stakeholder resistance, or overmatched capacities persist year after year, program after program. What’s going on here?
This session will explore the difference between the execution work needed to solve technical problems and the learning work required to achieve deeper systems change.
Learn more and sign up here.
WHY IS IT SO HARD TO WORK TOGETHER? (AND HOW TO DO IT NEVERTHELESS!)
Virtual Session
September 26, 2023, 8:00-9:30am ET
Harmony, consensus, and collaboration are often the buzz words in international development. Everyone agrees we need all stakeholders to work together better. And yet, in private moments, you’ll hear a different story:
”Collaboration is like herding cats.”
“Everyone’s just paying lip service to the shared work!”
“People say one thing and do another! That’s a competition disguised as a partnership!”
“Please don’t make me participate in another coordination platform! I already have too many meetings...”
In this session, we’ll explore the ways people can resist efforts to change a system. Resistance comes in many forms: outright opposition, cynical denial (“been there, done that, it’ll never work”), avoidance, downplaying, stonewalling... How frustrating! To practice leadership, though, we need to look deeper to understand what’s beneath this resistance – and how to address it to keep making progress.
Learn more and sign up here.
WHO IS THIS FOR?
These offerings are best suited for:
Executives and managers who have been tasked with implementing programs that depend on political work to shift stakeholders’ perspectives or behaviors
Agency and organizational leaders who sense that pathways to greater scale or deeper impact require engaging complex stakeholder ecosystems
Donors who support organizations or initiatives working to achieve systemic change
WHAT’S OUR EXPERTISE?
The material for these workshops draws from the Systems Leadership Lab, a recently completed initiative between the UN, GELI, KONU and Dalberg. Learn more in the video below.
“It’s rare for us to have such deep, frank conversations that cut across government, UN, private sector, and civil society.””
“It is amazing - the fact that we’re creating a coalition with all these senior leaders in gov’t and local communities - this is a new way of working for us.”