Even the most visionary, well-connected, and well-funded social enterprises fail to achieve their aims. A common reason for this failure—and a critical factor for success—is organizational strategy, the game plan developed by an organization and its leaders for achieving impact.
New Associate Professor of Public Policy and Management, Matthew Lee, brings to the Harvard Kennedy School his expert interest in strategic issues relevant to hybrid organizations that simultaneously pursue multiple objectives, including organization design, external evaluation, and innovation. Having studied social enterprises, impact investing, nonprofit organizations and corporate social responsibility, Lee’s teaching (and ongoing research) focuses on the social impact strategies of private, public sector, and hybrid organizations.
In his module, MLD-820M: Strategies for Social Impact, Lee and his students will investigate multiple organizations facing strategic challenges. In so doing, students will be introduced to the foundational perspectives in academic research on organizational strategy, as well as practice-oriented strategy tools and frameworks developed specifically for social impact-driven organizations.
A central theme of the course is that analysis must lead to action.
In each case and situation, there is no “right” answer, merely well-reasoned explanations for why these organizations are successful (or not), and what might work best for them going forward. The deeper goal of the course is to understand how each of these explanations work in general and to teach students how they can apply this understanding to build more competitive, more successful organizations, even in new and unfamiliar real-world situations. This ability to do so, repeatedly and with confidence, is the skill Lee says is colloquially referred to as “strategy.” Strategy has some formal foundations with recognizable links to academic fields such as microeconomics and sociology. But MLD-820M will not resemble a finance or accounting class where each new piece builds on the last in a tidy way. Instead, student learning will include both cognitive knowledge (the content in the readings and the slides) and procedural knowledge – the practical ability to take a real-world business situation and apply a variety of tools or “lenses” to make sense of it.
HKS Associate Professor of Public Policy and Management. Matthew Lee
This course is for those interested in leading or advising organizations focused on social and environmental impact. This course will be participation-based and will include case discussions, in-class exercises, and guest speakers. Cases considered focus on non-profit organizations, social enterprises, for-profit impact-first companies such as benefit corporations, and, also, public-sector organizations.
In this age of deep societal challenges and growing complexity, when government at all levels is tasked with implementing a wide and growing range of policies to ensure and improve the public good, public managers and those working with governments can find it very difficult to move the needle on important programs and policy initiatives.
With her course MLD-125 What Works in Public Sector Management, Professor Elizabeth Linosintroduces graduate students to the central elements of public management and policy implementation, with a focus on three core challenges that public managers face: managing programs; managing people; and managing change. A sampling of the questions explored in this course include:
How can governments use data and evidence to improve program performance and what do you do when the data is bad?
How do we reduce administrative burdens in government and why does it matter?
How can we recruit, retain, and support frontline workers?
What are the big dilemmas around algorithmic decision-making, nudging, participatory government, and other innovations that an effective public manager should consider?
Using academic theory from public management, real-world case studies, and a series of guest speakers who work in and with government, students will learn about the barriers and opportunities to make a difference through government. While most of the cases studied will focus on federal, state, and local government challenges in the U.S., Linos draws on best practices and studies from around the world.
Elizabeth Linos
Dr. Elizabeth Linos joined HKS in July 2022 as the Emma Bloomberg Professor for Public Policy and Management. Linos is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College with majors in Government and Economics. She earned her PhD in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School in 2016, and went on to spend 5 years as Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley
Between college and graduate school, Linos worked directly in government as a policy advisor to the Greek Prime Minister, George Papandreou, focusing on social innovation and public sector reform. While pursuing her doctorate, Linos spent two years as Vice President, Head of Research and Evaluation at the Behavioral Insights Team – North America, working with government agencies in the U.S. and the U.K. to improve programs using behavioral science and to build capacity around rigorous evaluation. In 2021 she was appointed, and now remains, a non-resident Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution.
Linos’ research focuses on how to improve government by focusing on its people and the services they deliver. Specifically, she uses insights from behavioral science and evidence from public management to consider how to recruit, retain, and support the government workforce, how to reduce administrative burdens that low-income households face when they interact with their government, and how to better integrate evidence-based policymaking into government. To those ends, Elizabeth founded and now directs The People Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government with a mission to empower the public sector by producing cutting-edge research on the people of government and the communities they are called to serve. For more information, follow the work of The People Lab on BlueSky.
MLD-125 will be offered in the fall semester. For questions about these courses, or any other in the MLD curriculum, email Greg Dorchak, MLD Area Administrator.
Today’s array of societal challenges – from economic disparity, political injustice, rising dangers posed by climate change, and ongoing threats to basic human rights and democratic freedoms – demand, more urgently than ever, that citizens come together and act in collaboration to hold accountable, or change, the existing institutions and systems meant to ensure justice, health, safety, and dignity for people. The Harvard Kennedy School offers numerous important courses that explore the fundamental ways people organize and take collective action for social change. Further, the MLD Area course offerings provide students with the excellent opportunities to directly apply their learning in existing advocacy organizations and movements, and even to create campaigns of their own from the ground up.
HKS Assistant Professor of Public Policy Liz McKenna
In her new course MLD 370: Social Movements: The Art and Science of Social Change, Assistant Professor of Public Policy Liz McKenna applies a sociological lens to historical and contemporary cases of social, labor, and political movements from around the world to answer the questions: What’s the difference between a movement that wins victories for its constituents, and one that fails? And, what are the factors that make collective action powerful?
Drawing on her award-winning doctoral research on civil society in Brazil, and the studies detailed in her 2021 book, Prisms of the People: Power and Organizing in 21st Century America, McKenna’s work examines how organizational leaders build constituency bases that successfully exercise political power. Students in the course will also learn about the role of culture, media, and technology in collective action. With these frameworks in their toolkit, students then enter an experiential learning “lab,” where they investigate how the course concepts work in practice by selecting an existing social-movement organization and analyzing a challenge its leaders face. Projects can explore areas ranging from movement narratives; organizational structure and governance; leadership development; strategy and tactics; learning and adaptation; political contestation; power mapping; and effective use of data. Again, by understanding how to analyze, then potentially create and implement these aspects of a movement or campaign, students will benefit when working in future change-making roles.
For students interested in immediate, hands-on experience creating and working in campaigns and movements, the MLD Area offers three other powerful courses:
Marshall Ganz, the esteemed Rita E. Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing and Civil Society, has been teaching organizing at HKS for nearly 30 years. Having first come to Harvard (College) in the fall of 1960, he left a year before graduating to volunteer with the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project. There, he found a “calling” as an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and, in the fall of 1965 joined Cesar Chavez in his effort to unionize California farm workers. During 16 years with the United Farm Workers he gained experience in union, political, and community organizing; became Director of Organizing; and was elected to the national executive board on which he served for 8 years. During the 1980s he worked with grassroots groups to develop new organizing programs and designed innovative voter mobilization strategies for local, state, and national electoral campaigns. In 1991, in order to deepen his intellectual understanding of his work, he returned to Harvard College and after a 28-year “leave of absence” completed his undergraduate degree in history and government. He earned his MPA from HKS in 1993, then began teaching at HKS soon thereafter, while simultaneously completing a Harvard PhD in sociology (awarded in 2000). During his time as HKS faculty, Ganz has continued to work “in the field,” including with the Obama presidential campaign (2007-8), the Sierra Club, the Ahel Organizing Initiative (Jordan), Serbia on the Move (Belgrade), Avina (Bogata), Tatua (Kenya), and Community Organizing Japan (Tokyo), learning and perfecting his organizing frameworks.
The premise for MLD-377M and MLD-378M is that an “organized” citizenry is able to formulate, articulate, and assert its shared interests. Organizing, in turn, requires leadership: accepting responsibility for enabling others to achieve a shared purpose in the face of uncertainty. Organizers, then, ask three core questions:
Who are my people?
What is the change we need?
How can we turn our resources into the power we need to achieve that change?
That is to say, organizers must learn to identify, recruit and develop leadership; build community with that leadership; and create power from resources of that community. Students do this in MLD-377M, the “Design” module of the two-course sequence, by applying the five organizing practices: storytelling; relationship building; strategizing; structuring; and, lastly, taking action, as they actually organize their own leadership teams, decide upon a shared purpose, and design organizing campaigns to achieve their purpose. The pedagogy is structured in a purposeful sequence: “explanation,” “modeling,” “practice,” and “reflective debriefing,” which allow students to better learn from repeated practice.
During the second “Leadership” (in practice) module, MLD-378M, students learn to lead the campaign they designed: organizing a kick-off; developing leadership; innovating tactics; engaging with power; and winning, losing, and learning. Practice and critical reflection are again the keys to learning in this module. Students are supported in this process by a set of skilled course coaches who, themselves, have extensive experience actively engaging in these organizing practices and developing students into movement leaders.
Note: *Enrollment into MLD-377M is limited and by permission of the instructor. The course is taught in a two-week intensive format during the Spring 1 Module, with in-person instruction limited to two intensive workshops on the weekends (February 23-25 and March 1-3, 2024). Also, MLD-377M is a firm prerequisite for enrollment in MLD-378M.
Brooks’s course seeks to understand longstanding inequities and injustices and recognizes the importance of principled advocacy in an age of unprecedented activism.
Like Ganz, Professor Brooks, brings a wealth of experience into the classroom, having served four years (2014 – 2017) as president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); worked as civil rights attorney; and practiced as an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Cornell William Brooks in 2015 leading America’s Journey for Justice march from its starting point at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, AL.
At the NAACP Brooks reinvigorated the activist social justice heritage of the NAACP, dramatically increased its youth membership, and conceived and led the 2015 march known as “America’s Journey for Justice” from Selma, Alabama to Washington, D.C., over 40 days and 1000 miles. During his tenure, Brooks and the NCAAP aided in organizing to address policing injustice in Ferguson, MO to failure of government to protect water quality in the majority-black, low-income community of Flint, MI. Prior to leading the NAACP, Brooks was president and CEO of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, where he led the passage of pioneering criminal justice reform and housing legislation. He also served as senior counsel and acting director of the Office of Communications Business Opportunities at the Federal Communications Commission; executive director of the Fair Housing Council of Greater Washington, and a trial attorney at both the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the U.S. Department of Justice. As a DOJ trial attorney, he secured a record-setting settlement for housing discrimination victims and filed the first government case alleging housing discrimination against a nursing home.
Brooks’s course MLD-375 seeks to understand longstanding inequities and injustices and recognizes the importance of principled advocacy in an age of unprecedented activism. Issues of highest concern in the course are environmental injustice, biased policing and public safety, criminal justice and prison reform, the fragility and erosion of the right to vote, the need for equitable economic development, and the long call for reparations for racial injustice in the United States. Brooks teaches students tested advocacy principles – e.g., moral ambition, perfect/imperfect victims, concentric/consecutive coalitions, and scholarship — to address these issues, including the particular strategies of the arc of advocacy.
To provide an experiential element, students in MLD-375 work with the William Monroe Trotter Collaborative for Social Justice, U.S. municipal governments, as well as national- & state-level advocacy organizations, on real time campaigns with a focus on what is demonstrably effective. Students will develop visions, strategies and campaigns as well as designing legislative, policy, organizing, communication, and moral framing strategies to address injustices. As an example, one recent student project sought a posthumous presidential pardon for pioneering civil rights leader, Callie House, who at the turn of the 20th century was wrongfully imprisoned. House founded the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association, a movement of over 300,000 members, but her efforts were squashed and her legacy was tarnished and minimized by a gross corruption of justice. (Read more here.) Projects like this are part of a portfolio of reparations efforts featured in the course that aim to face up to the deep harm caused by slavery, racist Jim-Crow era laws and policies, and ongoing structural inequities.
Note: Students must competitively apply for enrollment in MLD-375, with the key criteria being a demonstrated passion for social justice. Students admitted to the course should expect extensive work outside of class and must remain patient, flexible, and persistent in the face of the real-time challenges posed in the course.
A range of other HKS courses complement the four MLD Area offerings above, with each one listed below providing a different framework, addressing different issues and contexts, and providing informed and valuable approaches.
For the past ten years, Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Social Policy Jeffrey Liebmanhas led the HKS Government Performance Lab which provides technical assistance to state and local governments interested in improving the results they achieve for their citizens. During that time Liebman and his team of experts, many HKS students and alumni fellows, have become experts at using analytics, outcomes-focused contracts, and cross-sector collaborations to help improve social service programs at the city and state levels. The GPL helps governments address thorny questions, like how to use data to find individuals who had fallen through the cracks, or how to restructure contracts to incentivize providers to serve the most difficult clients. Originally founded as a platform to explore the efficacy of Pay for Success (PFS) projects like Social Impact Bonds, where the governments agrees to pay for services only if they are shown to be successful, and allowing them to test promising new interventions and collaborative stakeholder models, the GPL evolved in response to a need Liebman and his team discovered across the agencies in which they worked. “Our government partners began to ask whether the same models we developed in PFS could be applied to help government social service agencies run their core operations better,” says Liebman.
Jeffrey Liebman
Government leaders were seeking data-driven, boots-on-the-ground technical assistance, so Liebman rapidly expanded the GPL, placing students and HKS alumni with backgrounds in data analysis, public policy, and implementation in the field with a variety governments and agencies selected through national competitions. Projects began with programs aimed at reducing prison recidivism and reintegration for young people exiting the juvenile justice system, then expanded to include initiatives in maternal and infant health, high-quality pre-K, and addressing homelessness. Working across jurisdictions allowed Liebman and his team to discover and refine a set of approaches that responds to the recurring, problematic issues governments face. For example, one of the key insights Liebman’s team uncovered during its PFS work was that procurement and contracting were too often seen as back-office compliance functions instead of used as powerful levers for systems change. GPL developed a signature framework for Results-Driven Contracting to help governments achieve high-priority strategic goals and drive improvements in service delivery.
This and other lessons are now taught at HKS each Fall in MLD-630: Government Turnarounds. The course delivers proven strategies that government leaders have used to turn around troubled agencies and improve government performance. In teaching, Liebman draws on a mixture of lectures, case studies (often with guest visits by the case protagonists and other experts), and student presentations. Topics covered include:
1. Setting strategic goals and getting your organization to follow through on them.
2. Data-driven leadership strategies for improving agency performance, such as performance stat and delivery units.
3. Using results-driven contracting strategies to improve procurement.
4. Techniques for recruiting, training, re-energizing, and retaining talent.
5. Strategies for overcoming inertia.
6. Strategies for sustaining reforms.
In Power, for All, Battilana and her co-author Tiziana Casciaro offer a new vision of power – what they define as the ability to influence someone else’s behavior – as deriving from having access to valued resources. Understanding what those resources are, people can take action to plan for, create, and sustain organizational and systems change. Drawing upon lessons derived from their rich research, and conveying lessons through wide-ranging case narratives, Battilana and Casciaro reveal the insights into power and influence that come from understanding (1) the two basic needs all human beings share—safety and self-esteem—and (2) the resources people seek to satisfy those needs: obvious ones, like money and status, but also less obvious and less tangible resources, like autonomy, achievement, affiliation, and morality. In sumPower, for All demystifies the essential mechanisms for acquiring and using power, showing that it is available to ALL people, not just those with personality, money, or, indeed, those willing to use intimidation, threats, or worse.
Tiziana Casciaro and Julie Battilana with their award-winning book, Power, for All.
Building on these empowering ideas…,
…and designed for individuals at any stage of their career, Battilana’s course MLD-340 Power and Influence for Positive Impactwill debunk the fallacies that many have about power and explore the fundamentals of power in interpersonal relationships, in organizations, and in society. In doing so, it will lift the veil on power, revealing to students what it really is, and how it works, ultimately unleashing their potential to build and use power to effect change at home, at work, and in society.
MLD-340 is ideal for students who want to make things happen, despite the obstacles that might stand in the way. Students will walk away prepared to exercise power positively to challenge the status quo in order to address the pressing social and environmental problems of our time. Students will learn conceptual models, tactical approaches, and assessment tools to develop their personal influence style and understand the political dynamics surrounding them. The subject matter in the course also specifically encourages students to use power responsibly, resist its corruptive perils, and challenges students to develop their own sense of what constitutes the ethical exercise of power and influence in their lives. In the past a stellar array of in-class guests have been invited into the course, each an eminent and effective changemaker in their field:
*The Academy of Management’s George R. Terry Book Award is granted annually to the book judged to have made the most outstanding contribution to the global advancement of management knowledge during the last two years. Books that contribute to the advancement of management theory, conceptualization, research, or practice are eligible for this prestigious award. Battilana and Casciaro were presented the award at the 82nd Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management on August 7, 2022.
Many development experts use plan and control methods to introduce new policy solutions into complex settings. Too often these results end up in in failure. Effective leaders in the challenging development context should be using more flexible facilitated emergence methods instead, but often they do not know what these methods involve. MLD-103M: PDIA in Action: Development Through Facilitated Emergencetaught by Matthew Andrews, Edward S. Mason Senior Lecturer in International Development, is a Spring module course that introduces students to a new approach to doing facilitated emergence, Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) in the development context. Students will learn how to facilitate discussions about problems and potential solutions, to engage with teams, and to facilitate an iterative learning process. MLD-103M is a complementary course to MLD-102: Getting Things Done: Management in a Development Context also taught by Matthew Andrews, although MLD-102 is not a pre-requisite.
MLD-103M will be offered at Harvard Kennedy School in the Spring semester. If you have questions about this course, or any other in the MLD curriculum, email Greg Dorchak, MLD Area Administrator.
