Network leadership for transformative capacity development: roles, practices and challenges

Abstract

Non-technical summary A wide variety of social innovations exist today that offer urgently needed pathways for transforming societal systems into more just, sustainable and regenerative ways of organising human existence on this planet. However, a more systematic and practically useful understanding is needed of how individuals and organisations can strengthen the transformative capacity of people working on connecting, spreading, maturing and structurally embedding these innovations. This study presents an updated conceptual framework of network leadership roles and practices, and describes how these can contribute to more widespread, systemic and lasting impact of social innovations. Technical summary This study tests and refines a conceptual framework, describing the roles and practices of network leadership that can support the development of transformative capacities, in the context of social innovation networks. Such capacities include spreading social innovations in wider society, embedding them in policy and public discourse, and generating continuity and further development of social innovation activities. We studied five cases of transnational social innovation networks involving community-led and student-led sustainability initiatives. Practitioners in these networks were asked to rate and comment on the perceived recognisability and importance of network leadership roles and practices, as well as challenges, which we articulated in a previous study and further developed in the current study through participant observation and document analyses. This resulted in a revision of the roles and practices, the identification of relations between roles and a better understanding of how they can contribute to transformative capacity development. The interviews also helped to clarify the practical usefulness of the framework, suggesting possible applications for evaluating, prioritising and aligning roles performed by various individuals and organisations. The findings are relevant for better understanding and guiding distributed agency in transformative social innovation networks. Social media summary Roles and practices for network leadership to enable more widespread, systemic and lasting impact of social innovation.

Applying SCALE 3D for evaluating transformative social innovation

“…This study describes how a recently developed conceptual model -the 3D framework -can be used for adaptive evaluation and strategy development, in a way that can support the efforts of transformative social innovation (TSI) networks. In recent studies, we developed the 3D framework (Strasser et al, 2019) and revised it through empirical testing (Strasser et al, 2020(Strasser et al, , 2022. It builds on transformative social innovation theory (Haxeltine et al, 2017;Pel et al, 2020), which articulates the relationship between social innovation (defined as 'new social relations and related ways of doing, organizing, knowing and framing') and transformative societal change (defined as 'challenging, altering or replacing dominant institutions').…”

“…So far, the empirical application and refinement of the 3D framework has involved collecting feedback from practitioners about the recognizability and perceived usefulness of the framework (Strasser et al, 2020(Strasser et al, , 2022. Overall, practitioners saw the 3D framework as a recognizable and practically useful lens for understanding transformative impacts and capacities, evaluating strengths and shortcomings and clarifying strategic plans and priorities.…”

“…All the chosen cases belong to the wider social innovation field (Pel et al, 2020) of community-led sustainability initiatives. Because we sought to experiment with the process of applying SCALE 3D, the testing process was conducted in slightly different ways, 5 over different timeframes (four one-off workshops and two project involvements of The selection of and involvement in all the test cases for this study builds on previous case work for refining the 3D framework (Strasser et al, 2020(Strasser et al, , 2022. Due to these pre-existing relationships, representatives of the test cases proactively invited the first author to test the application of SCALE 3D, as they saw this as an opportunity to support their practice and shape the further development of SCALE 3D.…”

Transformative Capacity for Building Community’s Social Resilience Post-C-19 Pandemic by Zakat

“…As defined in [13,10,14] transformational change involve a change of the stability. Transformability in resilience perspectives is the capacity to create, set up fundamentally new systems when ecological, economic or social structures make the existing system untenable.…”

Network Leadership is a Promising Direction in Management Science

“…Also, world scientists studying the nature of network leadership focused their attention on the consideration of network leadership as a dynamic process in the organization (Schreiber et al, 2008), research on the differences between hierarchical leadership and network leadership (Silvia, 2011), analysis of network approaches to leadership (Cullen-Lester et al, 2016), the need to use the principles of network leadership at the level of implementing strategic changes in organizations (Díaz-Gibson et al, 2016, Strasser et al, 2016, the network perspective of the development of leadership relationships in the organization (Sydow, 1998). Scientists considered the practice of network leadership from the perspective of the system of principles of distributed leadership (Harris et al, 2021), an overview of the various roles of participants in the organizational process in network leadership (Strasser et al, 2022), the use of network leadership in creative teams (van den Born et al, 2022).…”