From Ideas to Impact: A Playbook for Influencing and Implementing Change in a Divided World by Michael Sheldrick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
With 15 years of work through Global Citizen, working on change campaigns related to global poverty, Michael Sheldrick in From Ideas to Impact attempts to distill what he’s seen work in the field. What he’s seen work best to tackle extreme poverty is systemic policy change. And systemic policy change demands tenacious and resourceful changemakers, folks willing to navigate the complex and barrier-rife mazes of power that separate a well-intended idea from the impact of securing meaningful commitments to money, better institutions, or innovative governance approaches. These folks are policy entrepreneurs.
Policy entrepreneurs can excel in three different leadership approaches needed to make change: Visionary, Diplomat, and Implementer. Sheldrick defines eight steps for successful policy entrepreneurship that fit within these approaches:
Visionaries set the foundation for change—
1) Know your policy goal
2) Know which stakeholders matter and how to influence them
3) Mastering the art of timing
4) Master the art of storytelling
Diplomats catalyzes impact through pragmatism—
5) Embrace pragmatic idealism
6) Leveraging your partners’ strengths
Implementers enforces accountability and follow-through—
7) Know your endgame
8) Communicate stories of success
These steps/capacities/principles and what they represent have been outlined in other academic and popular literature on policy entrepreneurship and changemaking. What makes the framework compelling in Sheldrick’s book is the way he connects them to cases of changemaking he has a personal connection to. In separate chapters, he describes efforts to achieve equal educational access in South Africa by tackling period poverty, effort to transition Western Australia and the industrial town of Collie away from coal mining and coal-based energy production, and efforts making the costs of climate change a little more just for countries like Barbados. The stories are impressive. There is also the impressive parade of celebrities Global Citizen ushers to literal stages to draw attention to each cause.
The star power is what loses me when it gets to the book’s conclusion. Sheldrick argues that anyone can be a policy entrepreneur. The Global Citizen app certainly invites everyone to contribute to the various campaigns through self-education and micro-actions (and rewards them with raffles for exclusive merch). But I think a bit of power is actually necessary to pursue the kinds of policy entrepreneurship the book describes. The steps for successful policy entrepreneurship may be the same at different levels of impact—your organization, local community, region, nation, the globe… However, it helps a lot if you are already in a position where you are driving toward some kind of goal—leading an organization, in elected office, etc. This is not a playbook for starting from scratch. It’s a playbook for those who want to refine their skills and increase the likelihood of success tackling complex, systemic challenges.
The book doesn’t replace the experience and mentorship budding policy entrepreneurs need in order to get started on their journeys of changemaking. But it may help them understand what is required if they want to make serious inroads on challenges like global poverty and climate change. The book’s subtitle and the background context for its contemporary discussion of policymaking are the stark divisions tearing apart our societies—the lack of openmindedness and compromise in current political discourse—and the ensuing disillusionment with policy and policymakers that nurtures populism and autocracy. I loved how the book celebrated diplomatic maneuvering that helped achieve progress. We need more of those stories and more celebration of them rather than the uncompromising activists who insist we must tear down all of our imperfect institutions. If we tear down them all down—institutions like the United Nations—we won’t have places to talk, venues to explore our disagreements or build new consensuses.
Beyonce probably won’t make a surprise appearance at your next rally. But if you build power through community organizing (read Hahrie Han’s How Organizations Develop Activists) and take some of the advice in From Ideas to Impact, you might be able to chip away at the many injustices in our world through better policies and moving money toward those that need it most.