GML HBS Abigail Rivera López

 20 SEP 2017

 RESEARCH & IDEAS

The Three Types of Leaders

Who Create Radical Change
Every successful social movement requires three distinct leadership roles:
the agitator, the innovator, and the orchestrator, according to institutional
change expert Julie Battilana.

by Carmen Nobel
What determines whether a social movement will be a flash in the pan or a
real catalyst for longterm change? Why did Occupy Wall Street subside in a
matter of months, for instance, while the American Civil Rights Movement
thrived, resulting in the passage of multiple laws?

Julie Battilana, a long-time scholar of institutional change, has identified

common themes among those social movements that don't merely
broadcast the need for a social change, but actually create long-term impact.

According to Battilana, every successful social movement features three

distinct leadership roles: the agitator, the innovator, and the orchestrator.

Any successful pathway to societal change requires all three, as Battilana

explains in the article Should You Agitate, Innovate, or Orchestrate?
Understanding the Roles You Can Play in a Movement Toward Societal
Change, co-written with Marissa Kimsey, a research associate at HBS. The
article appears in the new issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review.

“If you look at the history of any successful social change movement, you’ll
see there were moments of really effective agitation, innovation, and
orchestration that led to the adoption of the change,” says Battilana, the
Joseph C. Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business
School and Alan L. Gleitsman Professor of Social Innovation at the Harvard
Kennedy School, who, for more than a decade, has studied and researched
the ways in which organizations and individuals implement changes that
GML HBS Abigail Rivera López

diverge from taken-for-granted norms. “Although history remembers some

individual actors as highly influential, single leaders rarely change the course
of society on their own.”

The Agitator stirs the pot by articulating and publicizing societal grievances,
rallying an otherwise diverse group of people around a mutual desire for
change.

“Effective agitators are able to draw attention to a problem and convince

others that it requires both some corrective action and collective work to
bring it about,” Battilana writes in the 2015 teaching note Power and
Influence in Society. “To demonstrate that the status quo is not acceptable
and to mobilize others, agitators thus need to communicate in a manner that
ensures grievances are shared and collective and not seen as irrelevant.”

"IF YOU DO NOT INNOVATE AND HAVE A SOLUTION

TO THE PROBLEM YOU’VE IDENTIFIED, THE
MOVEMENT WILL DIE "
Take, for example, marine biologist Rachel Carson, who alerted the public to
the dangers of pesticides in the 1950s; Donald Trump, who, throughout
2016, rallied citizens around the slogan “Make America Great Again;” or
Teresa Shook, who launched the Women’s March on Washington after
Trump’s presidential victory.

The Innovator develops a solution to address the grievances. That means

anticipating roadblocks and coming up with alternative paths, as well as
justifying those alternatives in appealing ways to engage individuals, groups,
and organizations to support them.

“An innovator is likely someone who has studied, lived, or experienced

something beyond the norms in a given environment and thus is able to
create a vision of a different future that nonetheless makes sense to, and
captivates, those living within the existing practices and conditions,”
Battilana writes in “Power and Influence in Society.”

Without leaders who can lay out a persuasive path of innovation, a

movement will never make it past the agitation stage, Battilana argues.
GML HBS Abigail Rivera López

Innovators sometimes draw on existing, proven approaches to create long-lasting solutions.

Battilana and Kimsey cite the example of the French youth services organization Unis-Cité, which
was modeled after the American nonprofit City Year.Credit: Unis-Cité
“If you do not innovate and have a solution to the problem you’ve identified,
the movement will die,” she says. “I think that’s what happened with the
Occupy Wall Street movement. There was an effective agitation; the
movement came at the right time—a time when the world was screaming
that we needed a different financial system. But there was a lack of
innovation. And we ended up coming back to a system that is quite a bit like
what we had before.”

The Orchestrator spreads the solution created by the innovator, continually

strategizing how best to reach and work with people both within and outside
the movement, as the movement for change grows in size and complexity.

“Orchestrators often need to tailor their message to the interests of the

various constituencies they are trying to persuade to embrace the change,”
Battilana writes in her teaching note. “However, in doing so, they need to
strike a fine balance, as they also need to ensure that the overall message
around change adoption remains coherent.”

“Agitation without innovation means complaints without alternatives, and

innovation without orchestration means ideas without impact,” the authors
GML HBS Abigail Rivera López

write in “Should You Agitate, Innovate, or Orchestrate? Understanding the

Roles You Can Play in a Movement Toward Societal Change.”

Traps and challenges

Battilana and Kimsey explain that each role requires a combination of
communicating, organizing, and evaluating.

Agitators need to communicate the necessity of the social change

movement; innovators need to communicate the validity of their proposed
solution; and orchestrators must be able to tailor information to different
types of constituents—sometimes different groups all over the world—while
still maintaining a cohesive message.

Agitators must also organize and launch a collective action against the
status quo; innovators must build a coalition of support behind their ideas;
and orchestrators must expand and sustain the collective action.

Each of these three roles also comes with its own set of traps, a point
Battilana stresses when talking to action-driven students:

 Among agitators: fragmented agitation—triggering multiple areas of

outrage that can’t work together as a cohesive cause, and a stalled
solution—raising a valid complaint but lacking a remedy to offer.
 Among innovators: tunnel vision—failing to consider the negative
implications of a proposed solution, and impractical elegance—proposing
a solution that looks great on a computer screen but is virtually impossible
to orchestrate.
 Among orchestrators: mission drift—losing sight of the envisioned social
change, and dilution—watering down the movement to the point that it no
longer addresses grievances.
Battilana has advice for avoiding potential traps and how to determine when
to play which roles. Keys include continually assessing progress and
changes in the environment, as well as the understanding the individual’s
sources of power and motivations. Power may come from personal sources
(e.g., charisma, expertise); positional sources (e.g., holding official
leadership roles, elected or appointed); and relational sources (connections
with family, friends, and colleagues). “Leaders leverage these various
sources of power as they push for change,” Battilana and Kimsey write in
their article.
GML HBS Abigail Rivera López

"MOST MOVEMENTS ARE FULL OF HIDDEN HEROES"

Battilana also warns that effecting change does not guarantee glory. Behind
any successful movement lies a great deal of thankless determination and
sweat.

“Societal change takes time, it takes a lot of work, and most of the time
you’re not going to get a lot of recognition,” she says. “Most movements are
full of hidden heroes, if you will. No one may ever know about them. Some of
them had to work their whole lives and didn’t see the moment when finally
things changed. But they played key roles in agitation, orchestration, or
innovation.”