Agile Institutions

Joel is a world leader in large-scale system change and institutional transformation.  He is a professor in the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University, where he teaches strategy and operations in the social impact MBA program.  He is co-founder of WayMark Analytics Inc., a double-bottom-line company enabling stakeholders in complex systems to accomplish together what they can't do separately.  Joel is an award-winning author of thirteen books and is past president of the Labor and Employment Relations Association.  He has served as a facilitator in transformational change initiatives including helping to develop and launch the Ford Production System, sustaining Unit-Based Teams and interest-based collective bargaining at Kaiser-Permanente, advancing cooperative and productive workplaces with Australia's Fair Work commission, chartering the US NSF EarthCube initiative, supporting MIT's Lean Aerospace Initiative, and advancing the future of self-sufficient production blending ancient traditions and new technologies. Joel's Ph.D. is from MIT.

We envision a world where progress on the 15 substantive UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is accelerated by delivering on the promise of SDGs number 16 (peace and justice; strong institutions) and number 17 (partnerships for the goals).  Agile institutions are possible and essential in an increasingly polarized world.  We have demonstrated how innovative stakeholder mapping methods and supporting facilitation can produce meaningful institutional change in 3-6 months.  Looking ahead, we propose a web-based platform that will be better, faster, and cheaper -- enabling time-pressured crisis responses and broadening access on a global scale.  At a time when many long-standing local, regional, national, and international institutional arrangements are falling short of the need, a combination of new, multi-stakeholder consortia and transformational methods in existing institutions is essential.  That is what we can do:  Increase partnership among stakeholders, supported by increasingly agile institutions, accelerating progress on the SDGs.

We help to forge institutional arrangements that that are agile and effective in the face of deep challenges.  Over the past five years, we have focused on a diverse array of large-scale institutional challenges -- where many stakeholders need to work together to accomplish what they can’t do separately.  This has served to prove out the methods.  We have conducted stakeholder maps advancing open data in science (impacting hundreds of thousands of scientists), community green energy (impacting tens of thousands in one community), biomedicine (impacting hundreds of millions of potential beneficiaries), high performance computing (impacting tens of thousands of scientists), restructuring in higher education (impacting tens of thousands in a state-wide system), unit-based teams in health care (impacting millions of patients), digital fabrication in communities (impacting hundreds of thousands with access to the technologies), high speed internet access (impacting tens of thousands on the wrong side of the digital divide in the target community), and other challenges.  This has led to the launch or sustainment of over two dozen multi-stakeholder consortia, accomplishing together what can’t be accomplished separately. 

This project will accelerate the public capacity for diverse stakeholders to coordinate efforts associated with any of the UN SDGs.  Already, our tools, methods and analytics are an advance over existing methods for stakeholder management (assessing potential opposition and development strategies to mitigate these risks), existing methods for stakeholder engagement (creating forums for user feedback or conducting satisfaction surveys), and existing models for collective impact (which depend on a “backbone organization” providing an organizing hierarchy).  We focus on ecosystems of stakeholders who are interdependent, yet unwilling to cede independence to a hierarchy (which is what most current global institutional arrangements require).  Building on a core insight from negotiations -- we lift up underlying interests and, with surveys and data visualizations, help stakeholders to see points of alignment and misalignment -- accelerating collaboration and constructively engaging differences.  The tools and methods must be better, faster, and cheaper.  At present, a stakeholder map takes 1-2 months.  The proposed project is to develop a web based platform-based version of our tools and methods that will be widely available and useful in facing time-pressured challenges.   This involves one year of intensive development and a second year of field testing. 

As a social impact entrepreneurial organization, we have demonstrated our commitment to the scientific community, where we have facilitated integration and collaboration to address global problems and opportunities through multi-stakeholder consortia.  We have an ongoing commitment to effective education systems; expanded behavioral mental health and community health care systems; access to technology into under-served communities; vibrant economic development institutions; and enabling corporations to interact as collaborative innovation engines.  Our geographical boundaries are completely flexible, from local to global.  We are interested in serving the most disadvantaged rural or inner city communities, though we also work with some of  the wealthiest, highly resourced and most powerful corporations and institutions that are also stakeholders in relevant ecosystems.  Our real ‘community’ is the community of complex challenges that, if addressed using the WayMark Analytics tools, would allow stakeholders to work together to create a more functional and productive future.

Institutions are the product of patterned behaviors, but changing institutionalized patterns is hard.  Improved tools, methods and analytics for stakeholder alignment will elevate all of the issues and projects associated with ELEVATE funding by building awareness of points of alignment and misalignment, accelerating action to solve the most difficult problems of our world.  Virtually all of the projects involve addressing issues for which the existing institutions are necessary and insufficient.  Existing and new institutional arrangements, at their core, need to do two things -- mitigate harm and create value.  Both are at risk when stakeholders are not well aligned.  

The concept of stakeholder alignment crystalized while facilitating a 2003 MIT initiative for the US Congress (led by former MIT Engineering Dean Ian Waitz) focused on aircraft noise and emissions.  I had decades of experience in facilitation of union-management collaboration and here were comparable dynamics with over two-dozen stakeholders.  That led to an NSF-funded project developing new ways to visualize points of alignment and misalignment among stakeholders in complex systems, with  initial applications in community green energy, digital fabrication, and biomedicine.  WayMark Analytics, Inc. (formerly WayMark Systems) was spun off from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with the benefit of the NSF I-Corps program in order to provide stakeholder mapping services.  WayMark has conducted over thirty stakeholder maps, which has advanced the launch and sustainment of multi-stakeholder initiatives spanning health care, higher education, economic development, green energy, decent work, climate action, immigrant and refugee rights, and effective institutions.  

When I co-founded MIT's doctoral seminar in engineering systems in 2002, students had to select a complex engineered system for analysis.  In every case, we found that the social systems (organizations and institutions) were not keeping pace with the accelerating rates of technological change.  Since then, I have been passionately committed to advancing agile social systems that can effectively co-evolve with accelerating technologies.  This is easier with teams and organizations, which I have helped to do; my focus and passion is for the much harder challenges associated with UN SDGs 16 (Peace and Justice; Strong Institutions) and 17 (Partnerships for the Goals).  My most recent book, co-authored with my two brothers, connects the social challenges with the third digital revolution (digital fabrication, following digital communication and digital computation).  My teaching in a social impact MBA program highlights social justice with respect to disparities around the world.  My partners in WayMark Analytics are similarly driven -- Barbara Mittleman as the founding director of public-private partnerships for the NIH; Pat Canavan as the former SVP of global governance for Motorola; and Mike Haberman who teaches data science and software development at the University of Illinois School of Information Sciences.

This question and others are focused on me, yet all that I do is in collaboration with others.  I am answering the questions, but am also signaling that the proposed project will be a collaborative undertaking.  Personally, I am an accomplished teacher, scholar, leader, and facilitator.  This includes facilitating the launch of dozens of labor-management partnerships, over a dozen multi-stakeholder collaboratives, and numerous high-performance work systems.  I have pioneered the concept of stakeholder alignment at the level of ecosystems.  As co-leader of the Stakeholder Alignment Collaborative, a consortium of two-dozen leading scholars and practitioners that has been meeting weekly for over five years, I can readily engage experts in information science, computer science, political science, management science, and other domains.  Concurrently, I have advanced relevant theory and policy as co-founder of MIT's engineering systems doctoral seminar, as co-author of books on strategic negotiations (Harvard Business School Press, 1994), cross-cultural diffusion (Oxford University Press, 1998), lean aerospace transformation (Palgrave, 2002), organizational learning (Oxford University Press, 2005), multinational human resource management (2013), auto industry transformation (MIT Press, 2015), and the third digital revolution (Basic Books, 2017).  As dean of the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I led the school through the great recession of 2008-09, leaving it stronger -- financially and programmatically -- than when I came in.  As editor of the Negotiation Journal, published by the Program on Negotiation at the Harvard Law School, I bring a negotiated approach to large-scale change.

When facilitating the launch of what would become the Council of Data Facilities (CDF) for the geosciences, we had approximately 40 facility representatives in the room for what had been planned as a three-day chartering workshop.  Following a day of presentations on the open sharing of data in science, on the morning of day two, I asked the group if they were ready to work on the charter.  The room erupted (not in a good way).  My co-facilitator asked for a vote by holding up five fingers if people were ready, four if they were ready with reservations, down to a fist if they were opposed.  Two-thirds of the room held up a fist. It turns out they were there to make sure nothing disrupted their funding, rather than to launch something new.  Only one-third really wanted a charter to launch something new.  I suggested that we hold the decision aside for 24 hours, allowing the group that wanted a charter to say what it might look like.  While the others worked on other matters the idea of a council bubbled up occasionally.  Many oppositional issues were addressed, a charter was adopted, and the Council continues to function today.   

During the summer and fall of 2019 I was asked to lead a team of five federal mediators and two lawyers, facilitating collective bargaining between Kaiser-Permanente and a Coalition of unions representing over 85,000 health care workers.  Prior to the negotiations, management had reached an agreement with a smaller Alliance of Health Care Unions representing approximately 50,000 health care workers, in the spirit of partnership.  By contrast, this negotiation was preceded by a corporate campaign by the unions against management and tensions were high.  In addition to approximately 100 union negotiators, there were over 300 union observers regularly broadcasting over social media.  As facilitators, we were successful in surfacing underlying interests on key issues, constructing shared visions of success, and setting the stage for joint implementation.  Still, the parties were dug in on a few pivotal issues, with union strike votes authorizing collective action and management about to hire tens of thousands of replacement workers.  It came down to a small number of lead negotiators and myself as facilitator, with an agreement at 4:00 am.  This prevented what would have been the nation’s largest strike and set the stage for collaboration during the current COVID-19 pandemic.

While WayMark is a for-profit corporation, the Stakeholder Alignment Collaborative, which is also relevant to this prize is an informal community of practice that has been meeting weekly on a virtual basis for over five years.  Brandeis University, which is also relevant, is a private higher education institution.

Most existing stakeholder approaches by institutional leaders center on engaging those whom they see as supportive (stakeholder engagement) or reducing risk from those whom they see as opposed (stakeholder management).  In contrast, our approach is innovative in assuming that any relevant institutional ecosystems include diverse arrays of stakeholders with both common and competing interests. Our approach focuses on the system as a system, rather than just from the point of view of one stakeholder with a particular agenda.  

Given the mix of common and competing interests, stakeholder alignment (a concept we first began advancing in 2006) must be a negotiated process.  We draw on negotiations principles by focusing on underlying interests (not positions), which are key to avoiding both entrenched conflict and superficial agreement. We innovate by helping all stakeholders to see the full landscape of interests, thereby accelerating the facilitated generation of unique value propositions for each stakeholder, shared visions, guiding charters, and agile consortia that can take into account dynamic and emergent developments.  

Institutions are a stabilizing force in society, but too often can be barriers to change.  We innovate by building "check and adjust" capability into institutional arrangements based on both quantitative and qualitative appreciation of stakeholders and interests.  Multi-stakeholder consortia are emergent institutional arrangements that enable diverse public and private organizations to accomplish together what they can't do separately.  Stakeholder alignment is not an event but an ongoing accomplishment.  Aligned stakeholders are foundational for agile institutions responding to complex challenges.

The pace of change for institutions accelerated in the transition from pre-industrial times (measured in centuries and millennia) to the industrial revolution (measured in decades and centuries) and is accelerating again in a post-industrial world (measured in years and decades).  Transformational change can now happen within a lifetime, but without alignment among stakeholders. accelerating institutional change will be more disorienting, disruptive, and destructive than it need be.

Every large-scale complex challenge, such as the UN SDGs, impacts a diverse mix of stakeholders, with an array of common and competing interests.  Our core theory of change centers on the power of making the landscape of stakeholders and interests visible to all -- enabling faster progress where interests are aligned and constructive dialogue on points of misalignment.  This is a negotiated theory of change in which qualitative and quantitative stakeholder data are joined with effective facilitation.

A key breakthrough in our work is to arrange stakeholders and interests as a matrix, with types of stakeholders on one side and the interests that are "at stake" on the other. Arranged this way, each stakeholder has a vector of interests and each interest has a vector of stakeholders. Alignment can be mathematically represented as the variance around the mean of each vector and we have pioneered new visualizations of these vectors.  

We do not see interests as fixed or immutable.  Parties regularly reassess  their interests as they see the broader landscape.  We have also seen interests shift as circumstances change, making stakeholder alignment an ongoing accomplishment.  The aim is not a merging of stakeholders, but  achieving sufficient alignment for action.  Where there are stakeholders with an interest in undercutting alignment, it is important to know where these misalignments lie. 

Note that this theory of change is relevant for all the vulnerable populations listed below since they (and others) are relevant stakeholders associated with the UN SDGs and stakeholder maps we have conducted.  As a result, all are checked.  We did not check all the SDGs, however, since we want to call attention to SDGs 16 and 17 as the primary focus for our work.

A sample of stakeholder maps signaling populations served:

• Biomarkers Consortium (2012-2015) stakeholder map contributing to strategic planning for leading public-private partnership connecting the NIH, FDA, PhARMA, BIO, university researchers, and patient advocacy organizations employing tens of thousands scientists. 
• Jamaica Public Sector Labour Relations (2012) stakeholder map for national summit impacting tens of thousands of public sector workers.
• Digital Fabrication and Self-Sufficient Production (2012-present) two stakeholder maps combined with engagement through MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms lifting up the work of over 2,000 fab labs around the world.
• EarthCube, Council of Data Facilities (CDF), Coalition for Publishing Data in Earth & Space Sciences (COPDESS), iSamples, NDS, XSEDE, AGU/FAIR Data, West Big Data Hub, CaRCC (2012-present) ten stakeholder maps leading to new institutional arrangements (EarthCube, CDF, iSamples, CaRCC), expanded campus research computing capabilities, and transformation of geoscience publication policies requiring reusable data, impacting thousands of geoscientists. 
• Libraries and Autism Spectrum Disorder (2015) Stakeholder survey and summit dialogue impacting over 800 public libraries in Illinois.
• Kaiser-Permaente and Coalition of Health Care Unions (2018-present) stakeholder map of Unit-Based Teams relevant for over 100,000 employees.
• Minority Serving Cyberinfrastructure Consortium (MS-CC) (2018-present) stakeholder map leading to vision, charter, and alignment among HBCUs advancing data capabilities for thousands of students and faculty.
• National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) (2018-present) two stakeholder maps enabling internal/external alignment relevant for the thousands of researchers utilizing continent-scale ecological data. 
• Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy (MIRA) Coalition (2020) stakeholder map informing strategic planning impacting tens of thousands of refugees and immigrants.

For next year (2021) our impact goals include continued stakeholder alignment work in the following domains:

• COVID-19 collaboration and sharing of data, models, and resources.
• Unit-Based Teams (UBTs) and labor-management partnerships in health care.
• Multi-stakeholder collaboration and cyberinfrastructure in science, including support for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) as minority-serving institutions.
• Self-sufficient production serving first nations in Alaska and disadvantaged communities in Massachusetts.
• Immigrant and refugee advocacy and services.
• Cooperative and productive employment relations. 

Organizationally, we anticipate adding a small number of affiliates in 2021 and others in the following years.

Our five-year plan is to transition beyond boutique consulting and to establish a web-based platform that can provide stakeholder alignment support on a large scale relevant to work associated with a broad range of UN SDGs.

Our current tools and methods are effective, but need to be better, faster, and cheaper.  At present, a stakeholder map involves working with a team of subject-matter experts to identify the relevant stakeholder categories and the key interests that are at stake (1-2 weeks), development and approval of a survey instrument (1 week), data collection from diverse stakeholders (2-3 weeks), data analysis and report generation (1 week), and facilitated data-driven dialogue (1-3 weeks).  Accelerating from the stakeholder map is the generation of a shared vision, a governing charter, and initial collaborative operations for new initiatives and accelerated progress for existing ones.  More than half of the stakeholder maps we have conducted have been in support of U.S. National Science Foundation projects, funded at a cost of $15,000 each.  A major barrier to progress is the ability to conduct maps in less time and at a lower cost.

On one occasion (out of over two dozen) we have conducted stakeholder maps and had parties seek to undermine the entire stakeholder alignment process.  In this case, seeing the depth of opposition was instructive for the parties seeking to work together.  We have had a number of other cases where the stakeholder map did include issues on which there were deep divides.  These examples do point to a boundary condition for stakeholder alignment tools and methods that is a barrier to be addressed.

With a year's intensive development, we anticipate launching a web-based tool that can reduce the time to under a week for an initial landscape map, followed by 2-3 weeks of iteration with stakeholders.  The cost could be an order of magnitude less than the current $15,000 with sufficient automation.  A key part of the time and cost involves the analysis and sorting of qualitative data and we anticipate building on some early experiments we have done with AI technologies for classifying open-field qualitative data.

Overcoming the barrier of stakeholders who see it in their interest to undermine open dialogue and constructive problem-solving is not easily overcome.  As these methods are applied to some of the SDGs, such as Gender Equality, Affordable Clean Energy, Decent Work, Reduced Inequalities, and Climate Action there will be entrenched opposition along various dimensions.  We are committed to providing consortia addressing aspects of these and other SDGs with tools and methods to at least mitigate the risks of unconstructive opposition (even as we lift up the value of different perspectives). 

We have conducted 18 stakeholder maps through sub-contracts on National Science Foundation grants, including EarthCube, Council for Data Facilities, iSamples, XCEDE, NEON, National Data Service, Campus Research Cyberinfrastructure Consortium, Minority Serving Cyberinfrastructure Consortium, West Big Data Hub, and others.  As well we ourselves were formed as the spin-off from an NSF grant (and being a graduate of the NSF I-Corps program).  

Other organizations with whom we have partnered include:

Association of Research Libraries

Australia's Fair Work Commission

Brandeis University, Heller School for Social Policy and Management and Relational Coordination Analytics 

Champaign/Urbana Green Energy Initiative

Curtin University/National Data Service, Australia

Dodge City, Kansas, Digital Access Initiative

Illinois State Library

Kaiser-Permanente Labor-Management Partnership Office

Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy (MIRA) Coalition

MIT, Institute for Work and Employment Research (IWER, Sloan School) and Center for Bits and Atoms

UMass Memorial Health Care and the SHARE union

University of Alaska

University of Sydney, Australia, Grill Centre for Project Leadership

University of the West Indies, Jamaica

In each case we have conducted stakeholder maps and provided various levels of facilitation support.  As well, a research group of approximately two dozen individuals, the Stakeholder Alignment Collaborative, has been meeting virtually on a weekly basis for over five years and is closely connected to WayMark.

As a double-bottom line organization, we track impact and revenue.  Revenue is generated through stakeholder mapping and facilitation engagements.  Impact is measured with new initiatives launched, policy changes achieved, and populations served.

At present we operate as a boutique consulting service, but can envision a software-as-a-service offering on a web-based platform that would reach a broad audience and operate at a scale commensurate with UN SDG initiatives.

We also envision a growing cadre of empowered professionals who can offer add-on services and who can contribute to the web-based platform.

We are already financially sustainable, but operating at a modest level of 5-7 stakeholder mapping engagements a year.  All costs are covered, but it is not a scalable model.

We seek an impact investment or prize award to fund the 1-2 years of intensive development needed to have our tools and methods adapted to be widely available through a web-based platform.  At that point, we will shift from boutique consulting to software as a service.  A freemium model is likely, with key automated services openly available and additional custom support available through a growing cadre of certified professionals.  

We began with an NSF I-Corps grant through the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and after that all funding has been through fees for services.  For the first three years of operations, the revenue has been under $25,000 per year.  For the past two years, we have operated with just over $90,000 in 2018 and just over $200,000 in 2019.

We estimate that the development costs to adapt our approach to a web-based platform is approximately $300,000 to $500,000.  Many of the planned  features, such as automated survey development and generation in established domains, survey administration, and report generation, would cost under $150,000 to program and test.  The areas that account for the wide range in estimated development costs are modules for stakeholder testing on stakeholder categories and interest specification, combined with AI methods for classifying open-text qualitative responses when the training data set is small in size.  Our preliminary experiments with rudimentary AI tools (such as one, two, and thee word matching) have been promising, but much more work is needed. 

At continued steady-state operations, we anticipate approximately $150,000 to $200,000 in revenue for 2020, which will cover all expenses and carry over some funds for the future.  This will not, however, fund needed development, which is what motivates this application.   

We already see our work as helping to accelerate progress against the UN SDGs and welcome the orientation of the Elevate Prize with these broad societal challenges in mind.  While the prize funds would be beneficial for needed development and scaling of our methods, the access and visibility associated with the prize are more important.  We look forward to sharing our knowledge and expertise, while also forming a set of shared-learning partnerships with others who share our commitment to aligning diverse stakeholders in agile ways to accelerate progress on the challenges we all face.

Funding will be important to shift from a consulting model that is limited in scope to a web-based platform that can support large-scale impact.  Our first five-years of part-time consulting engagements has been an essential discovery process and we are now ready to develop tools and methods that are better, faster, and cheaper -- which will take additional funding.

We all serve as mentors and coaches for the initiatives we help to launch and, as such, we appreciate the value of mentoring and coaching.  We already benefit from the guidance of world-class thought leaders, but we know much more input is needed if we are to achieve the desired large-scale impacts.

Our board is small and we don't have a formal advisory body.  We see the Elevate Prize as accelerating the establishment of an advisory board of experts and substantially increasing our visibility and impact.

We have already had preliminary discussions with Shift7, which looks to be a highly complementary organization.  We have had some collaboration with the Relational Coordination Research Collaborative and the Fab Foundation, both of which are illustrative of the type of organization with which we would welcome collaboration.  Field Ready is another organization with which we have had preliminary discussions and which holds promise for stakeholder challenges in refugee camps and disaster zones.