Some thoughts on how transformations happen

I have blogged here and here about pathways to system transformation in development to address what Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber described as wicked problems. 

In another post, I summarised some of the requirements for genuine system transformation

It involves some or all of these - cultivate champions at all levels; empower extensively, even at the risk of short-term failures; nurture positive deviances and encourage their diffusion; trigger conversations at all levels about the need for change; create the conditions for internal ruptures etc. This is very difficult to sustain. The toolkits are very different from what modern management teaches.

The most difficult (to comprehend) part of this approach is that it cannot be planned in any detail. You have to initiate the process with a few carefully thought out interventions or reforms which resonate with the felt-needs of all stakeholders, is important enough in the system's overall perspective, and which the system has the capacity to engage with meaningfully. Once initiated, the challenge is to watch and engage opportunistically based on emergent dynamics of the system and steer the course without letting things get off control. It is a long-drawn effort with uncertain pathway of change. This needs patience, tact, and an ability to continuously step back and in as required.

Tim Harford writes about how the German town of Freiburg underwent a long-drawn transformation and became a pleasant and walkable city,

In the 1960s, Freiburg’s beautiful Münsterplatz was a car park. When I visited this summer, the square was lined with pavement cafés and hosting a well-attended open-air concert. But this transformation did not happen overnight. It required the sustained accumulation, over decades, of one cycle lane or tramway at a time... Two academics, Rachel Aldred and Anna Goodman, recently examined the consequences of outer London’s low-traffic-neighbourhood investments. They found that car ownership took several years to fall steadily by 20 per cent. It takes time to change our habits and time to see the benefits...  

The Netherlands, meanwhile, was not always a utopia for cyclists: 50 years ago, pro- and anti-car factions literally fought in the streets... Its transformation began in the early 1970s, the seeds sown by a seemingly unrelated argument: when the federal government proposed a nearby nuclear power station, an unlikely coalition of church leaders, students and conservative farmers decided that they were all environmentalists.

Freiburg’s historic city centre, the Altstadt, was pedestrianised in 1973, a radical idea at the time. Local businesses were initially against the idea, but were appeased by the construction of car parks just outside the Altstadt. (They needn’t have worried; shops and cafés are buzzing.) The city expanded the tram lines, introduced an affordable season ticket branded “the environmental card” and arranged buses to feed the tram network rather than compete with it. An extensive network of cycle lanes and bridges were constructed. Freiburg’s traffic was also restrained: most streets have a speed limit of 30kph (18mph), and parking is controlled by residential permits and meters. The result of all this has been a walkable city centre that fizzes with commerce, surrounded by residential areas where children safely play in the streets. Both cycling and public transport increased by about 50 per cent between the early 1980s and the late 1990s, yet driving is perfectly possible and remains a popular way to get around.

This is a very good example of a system change driven transformation in the public realm. The same applies to several changes that we aspire for in our areas - cleaning up a river, making the city clean, integrating a mass transit system, lowering traffic congestion, making housing affordable, embracing energy or water conservation, transit-oriented-development, energy transition and so on. It applies just as much to the success of landmark regulations like the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC), Real Estate Regulation Authority (RERA), Tradeables and Receivables Exchange of India (TREDS) (all from the Indian context). 

Such transformation endeavours have the following features

1. Such systemic transformations generally take a long time, even a generation or more. So patience with such transformations is essential. Shortening the cycle is both nearly impossible and counter-productive in so far as forced and rapid changes create its set of distortions.

2. In general, such transformations involve a combination of physical investments (infrastructure, equipment etc), institutional changes (enabling urban planning and other policies), co-ordination (bringing together different stakeholders), market response (businesses adapting and new business models emerging), and citizen/customer behaviour changes. 

3. This diversity of requirements demands bringing together several stakeholders. This poses a significant co-ordination challenge, one which can generally be solved only through active government engagement. Market dynamics can rarely achieve such co-ordination, even in the long-run. But government engagement also brings with it the risks of top-down diktats, resource misallocation, skew in priorities, and other distortions. This is where such transformations generally struggle to succeed. 

4. Such transformations also require long-drawn painstaking accumulation. This requires a long term perspective. But politicians and bureaucrats, with their short time horizons, have limited incentive to stay the course for the long term. Therefore the critical need to have a broad-based consensus on the objectives and the final destination. This is essential to ensure that such projects do not get junked with changes in governments. 

Once a consensus is forged, a practical approach would be to make a perspective plan and have it formally and authoritatively adopted. But even such consensus and planning is no insurance for success. Once the plan is in place, its components can be implemented in a phased manner based on the priorities of governments and market dynamics. 

5. With all such projects, change (in terms of the destination sought) is diffuse and imperceptible in the short-run. However, some components of the plan may generate perceptible changes. Further, certain components meet the priorities of the government of the time. This means that the course of such changes is mostly dictated by opportunism.