Difficultly of fomenting institutional change not just a problem for minorities

I joke that half the entries I write are about best practice, the other half about worse practice and poor decision making.  Plus to be fair to elected officials even in the best circumstances change takes a long time.

I joke that I didn't start understanding patience within community organizing until my 40s, when I realized a "fast tracked" transportation project takes 10 years.

Lately too I've been thinking about how "ur academic literature" that is really important for interpretation is kind of lost to history and not referenced by current pundits.

The three big examples for me are Exit, Voice and Loyalty, about how people stay or leave organizations in the face of conflict, Diffusion of Innovations about exactly that (and the spinoff work by Geoffrey Moore, which Rogers disavowed), and Alexander Gerschenkron's papers on "The Economic Advantages of Backwardness in Historical Perspective."

The latter writings are particularly relevant to the take up of electric vehicles, and how China is overtaking the US in terms of having the preeminent position in electric car productions.  (This will be the subject of a later blog piece, along with some issues.)  In the case of China, they don't have the same investment in legacy technologies, so they can leapfrog the countries that do.

Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon has a piece, "We are facing limits from diversity," about the difficulties minorities face in trying to "change" organizations.  As someone who has worked on such issues for 30+ years, it's hardly an issue exclusive to minorities.  From the article:

... I once assumed that greater inclusion would inevitably lead to equitable policies, because people from groups that had been unfairly diminished would see injustice more clearly than others and be more motivated to address it. I don’t think that anymore. 

 ... It’s rarely directly stated that, “If we add more people of color or women to institution X, that will move it leftward.” But that assumption is embedded in a lot of discourse. Democratic politicians who are White women or people of color often emphasize their connections to those groups, hinting they will be particularly strong advocates for those who share their identities. For example, in his 2008 campaign, Barack Obama argued his candidacy was an extension of the 20th-century Black freedom movement. 

... Here’s the problem: Individuals, whatever their identity, usually don’t change powerful, established institutions, for several reasons. First of all, the minorities and women tapped to join such institutions are often chosen because they have signaled that they won’t disrupt the status quo too much. Many Black Democratic mayors and Black police chiefs have blocked efforts to increase scrutiny of officers or meaningfully reform police practices; they wouldn’t have gotten those jobs if they were going to push for major changes. 

... Second, even minorities and women who favor more progressive change are caught in a bind: Challenging the values of the institutions they are a part of would likely reduce their ability to advance, or even remain in their current roles. 

 ... The third and biggest problem is that minorities and women often simply don’t have enough internal power to change these institutions, even when they try. 

 ...Progressives should push institutions to fundamentally change, not just put more people of color in high-profile roles. The path to a consistently progressive Democratic Party is for the left to win primaries, particularly the presidential contest, and take over the party from within. A more diverse administration run by a centrist figure such as Biden isn’t enough. And when change is impossible, progressives should look to create or revitalize alternative institutions.

WRT institutional change, welcome to the club.

I did figure out some fundamentals when I did a bike and pedestrian plan for Baltimore County.  

(1) my job wasn't to be a bomb thrower but to figure out how to wend my way through the existing system and build support (at the first multi-agency meeting, a guy doing streetscape work did just that, criticizing all the other agencies--it was a good lesson) 

(2) build on existing best practice, reference it, building support across agencies.  

(3) work with advocates disappointed about not seeing progressive action from previous efforts, acknowledging that work, and how it led to the work that we're doing today.  Build on it.

(4) focus on preferred outcomes and look backwards at the system processes producing non-desirable outcomes as routine, and work on rebuilding the processes (process innovation) to generate preferred outcomes as a matter of course.

(5) make recommendations on elements like a Pedestrian and Bicycle Committee and sub-committees for political districts that were practical, and "opportunities for appointments" by elected officials.  

I was super proud of #5 and the sub-committees.  Because it would bring the executive and legislative branches together, with citizens, and a foundational agenda (from the plan).  The council districts did this have had way more progress on bike and pedestrian improvements than the council districts that haven't.

But one thing I didn't figure on... the County Executive gets to appoint the chair.  And he appointed a flunky, someone who worked for the Executive Branch, and therefore the Executive overly shaped the agenda and reduced the independence/objectivity/advocacy capacity of the group.

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That being said, systems aren't about improvement, but about maintenance of the system.  See Planning in the Public Domain and to some extent Social Psychology of Organizations.