Battilana & Kimsey -Should You Agitate, Innovate, or Orchestrate?

When Should an Organisation Stop Delivering the Solution Itself?

Battilana and Kimsey distinguish three roles in social change: agitators make the case that the status quo must change, innovators develop alternatives, and orchestrators build the collective action required for those alternatives to spread. The distinction is useful because organisations often assume that doing more themselves is evidence of greater impact, even when the constraint has moved elsewhere in the system. A development organisation may begin by demonstrating a better heat intervention, for example, but eventually discover that scaling it depends less on operating more sites and more on budgets, standards, labour protocols, city ownership and financing. At that point the organisation’s most valuable role may change from delivering the intervention to changing the conditions under which other institutions can adopt it. This is harder than it sounds because delivery creates visible outputs, while orchestration creates outcomes that are distributed among other actors and are therefore harder to claim. It also raises an uncomfortable institutional question: can an organisation recognise when its successful programme has become less important than the system around it? Perhaps strategic maturity is partly the ability to change roles when the bottleneck changes.

Source: Julie Battilana & Marissa Kimsey, Should You Agitate, Innovate, or Orchestrate?, Stanford Social Innovation Review, September 2017. Read the source