Social Impact Bonds: Changing the Rules of Health Financing

by Elmer S. Soriano MD

Grant funding for community development work has been significantly reduced in the Philippines, and the controversies around NGO scams have left both NGOs and government extremely paranoid about partnerships.

A forum on Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) was recently hosted by the Ateneo Economics Department to discuss SIBs as a potential mechanism for transferring funds to service providers including NGOs under a highly transparent and performance-based agreement. Funding would come initially from impact investors, rather than government.

 ASA Philippines Foundation, a micro-finance organization recently introduced a 2B Php Bond, pushing the frontiers of development financing in the Philippines. Though this is not strictly a SIB, the ASA bond already contains both the capital-raising and social development functions of SIBs.

A white paper entitled Scaling Tuberculosis Treatment thru a Social Impact Bond (Eddy, 2012) will be discussed in future  blog posts.

Sources: 

www.siblab.civika.com  

http://www.philstar.com/business/2017/02/05/1669077/micro-finance-ngo-issuing-p2-b-bonds 

http://www.instiglio.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Instiglio-White-Paper-Tuberculosis-Social-Impact-Bond.pdf

Teaching Leadership through Emotional Truths

by Elmer S. Soriano

We recently ran a workshop where we taught university faculty how to teach leadership to social workers. Coming from different disciplines (nursing, public administration, economics, etc) and different universities, we had to design a learning experience that tapped into the collective wisdom that was assembled in our classroom. This training was supposed to prepare them to teach 1,600 social workers across 1,000+ municipalities how to lead.

We started off the workshop asking them why they thought the Bridging Leadership framework was a better course than their current offerings of MBA, or MPA, or any of their regular graduate courses. They said their other courses weren't designed to "touch the heart", or awaken a "sense of purpose", or "transform lives" in ways that their other courses did not deliver.

We introduced the CYNEFIN Framework to help them wrap their heads around how Bridging Leadership addresses complex systems in ways that traditional MBA and MPA tools don't do as effectively.

Here are a few insights from that workshop:

1. Leadership training includes exposing the learners not just to leadership paradigms and frameworks, but also to "emotional truths".

Leadership is requires the practice of diagnosing problems, especially problems that are unnamed, taboo, or in a culture's blind spot. Students of leadership benefit from acquiring the ability to recognize and ripen emotional truths in their own lives, and use these emotional truths as lenses in diagnosing adaptive challenges. This video from Adichie describes emotional truths and other concepts on cultural blindspots.

2. Introduce the concept of VUCCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Chaotic, Complex, Ambiguous) Systems.

Leaders nowadays have to be highly functional in VUCCA systems, in this age where climate change and super-typhoons are the new normal. Traditional teachers are accustomed to have neat lesson plans, and quiet, orderly classrooms, which poor environments to teach leadership in the context of messy systems. This video describes how education is being disrupted by new ways of learning complex systems.

3. Use Case in Point to simulate the hot seat of leadership.

I think of the Case-in-Point (CIP) method as a rather abstract methodology, and I was surprised when one of the social workers told me that she observed that a number of faculty members resisted or did not understand the logic of CIP. She said that it was possibly because social workers often found themselves in the hot seat, being asked questions to which they did not have all the right answers. She said that faculty members, on the other hand, usually taught the "correct answers" and were less accustomed to being asked questions that reframed their mindsets.

In retrospect, the experiences at this workshop validate the role of the need for Leadership Teaching and Learning Lab. Adapting from MIT's Teaching and Learning Lab, the function could be:

The mission of the Leadership Teaching and Learning Lab is to jointly partner with leadership educators to create an educational environment where learners are academically challenged, actively engaged, and personally supported.

Our Lab Associates will do this by:

-sharing research-based strategies for lesson, subject, and program design and development.
-educating others about student-centered pedagogies.
-collaborating and consulting with other leadership educators to brainstorm opportunities and solutions for their teaching context.
-collecting data through the evaluation of educational innovations and assessment of student outcomes to provide constructive, practical, and informative feedback to educators.
-continually seeking additional areas where we may be of service to the Institute's continually evolving educational needs and interests.

Human-Centered Leadership Development

What if leadership development were human-centered rather than project output-centered? What if we trained individuals primarily to become mindful, mature, adaptive leaders first, and then measure program outcomes as a yardstick of their increasing depth in leadership judgment?

If we did that, we'd could take the following approaches:

1. Start with the life purpose of each learner. We would start by having a conversation on the learner's life journey and sense of purpose. Each individual is assumed to have a calling or vocation (or a series of vocations) in her lifetime and bringing out leadership means helping the learner connect to this deeper source of meanings in her life.

2. Understand life stage and life roles. Individuals are in a certain stage in family life, whether they are unattached, just married, caring for toddler, etc which shape their concerns as a person.  They also have additional roles and affiliations (ex.father, sister, church leader, civic leader)  and their leadership senses may be heightened when those aspects of their lives are woven into the leadership development conversations.

3. Identify adaptive challenges in their sectors that disturb them, and then help them deploy themselves as adaptive leaders. If they are engaged in working on social problems that disturb them, they will find themselves drawn to problem-solving in that space. 

Designing a National Leadership Development Architecture

by Elmer S. Soriano

“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.” 

― Roberston Davies

“Unfortunately, there seems to be far more opportunity out there than ability.... We should remember that good fortune often happens when opportunity meets with preparation.” 

― Thomas A. Edison

A friend of mine was sharing with me that the senior faculty at the school where she teaches at will all be retiring in a few years, leaving the challenge of leading her her school with her generation. The trouble is, she's only in her early 40's and she will have to take over the role of somebody who has some 20 years more preparation than her. This ontop of having to deal with the rapid changes in her domain. In that conversation with my friend, the challenge was described as Future Shock + Leadership Shock. 

How might a country prepare a pipeline of mature, global, public leaders to lead in the present and the future? Drawing from Warren (1995), we imagine a series of stepping-stone arrangements to cultivate a country's stock of leaders. We assume that each citizen is called to be good leaders, and that mature and capable leaders everywhere help advance the project of nation-building, from Parent-Teacher Associations, to churches, to government agencies, to elective positions in cities and national government.   

Level 100 - Commitment to Share/Volunteer

At this level, young adults are encouraged to participate in volunteer work so that they get a glimpse of the world of sharing and generosity. Volunteering opens up the eyes of an individual to his capacity to give up his time to benefit another. Sure, the intentions may not be as pure, but the experience opens up the psychological space beyond egocentric gain. Volunteer weekend activities such as Gawad Kalinga builds may be done out of curiosity, peer-pressure, boredom, or adventure, but they open up the mind to one's capacity to share.

Longer-term service programs such as the year-long Jesuit Volunteer Program or the two-year Teach for the Philippines program are more likely to have profound effects on a young adult's life, opening one up the the possibility of a career devoted to public service.

Level 200 - Commitment to Leadership Growth through Leading Project or Innovation Teams

A young adult may get stuck in casual volunteering.

Ideally, an elder, possibly parents, supervisors, or mentors, guide and challenge young adults to step up and start leading teams. Often done in parallel with sharpening selected technical skills, project and team leadership equips an individual with a growing sense of agency, where she begins to recognize her capacity to effect change in the world by mobilizing other people.

At this stage, the individual should be guided toward understanding the larger structural adaptive challenges facing her generation and her sector. In preparation for Level 300, adaptive leadership, political analysis, and social network analysis are key competencies to acquire at this stage. Leading small transnational projects or enterprises is one approach top schools do and should be encouraged for high-potential individuals. 

Those in the private sector might not be able to find project like these assigned to them, so they should go out of their way to find or create projects for themselves. They may find a nearby orphanage and commit to co-create a project over an extended period of time, rather than sporadic piecemeal volunteer events of Level 100.

Level 300 - Cross-boundary Leadership and Governance

It is easier to lead office subordinates than stakeholders outside one's organization. At this level, a growing leader should be guided to take political risks, speak to power, and mobilize individuals and groups beyond her own boundaries formal authority. Through informal authority, a leader at this level builds alliances and transforms her organization and others through her efforts.

At this change, opposition and failures become a costly reality. Demands from family will also put a strain on a leader striving to grow in mid-career.

Level 400 - Societal Change Leadership

At this stage, the leader devotes his or her energies energies to consolidating the gains and paving the way for the successor generation. A number of them actually begin starting up leadership schools and injecting their life's work of insights into this school which serves as a repository and multiplier of the competencies that they have seen to work. The Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative focuses on this segment and reimagines what is meant by retirement. 

In order to adapt to Future Shock, leaders also have to start evolving in their awareness from 1.0 to 4.0 as described by Scharmer. Level 4.0 is often seen in senior leaders, but this has to be cultivated earlier in the leadership journey so that young leaders have a global and ecosystem-level consciousness.