PURPOSE-DRIVEN INNOVATION

In this management treatise, economist Flanding and attorney Grabman argue that digital technology and shifting social norms are imposing changes that organizations must accommodate with clear goals.

The authors, both United Nations employees, offer that organization as a model of change oriented toward 17 guiding Sustainable Development Goals—from ending poverty and hunger to fostering clean energy. They recommend the seven steps of a change management framework developed by UN Lab for Organizational Change and Knowledge, which include crafting a change strategy, building capacity, and achieving quick wins; all of this is illustrated with case studies drawn from UN agencies. These include the UN Department of Safety and Security’s drive to achieve gender parity in its ranks, UN Cares’ initiative to foster LGBTQ+ inclusion using surveys that led to employee learning modules, efforts by several agencies to make administrative services more cost-effective by consolidating them in lower-cost cities, and a UN-wide move to recruit lower-level employees as change agents who advocate for climate measures or Covid-19 adaptations. From these examples, Flanding and Grabman distill principles for designing initiatives, highlighting the importance of sponsorship by powerful leaders, adapting past breakthroughs to new contexts, and communicating persuasively (noting, for instance, the value of videos that celebrate early successes). Overall, this is a book of granular management theory, steeped in academic prose and often focused on administrative minutiae: “[UNDSS] established an intra-departmental gender coordination team, a senior management gender steering group, and the inclusion of gender-related objectives in manager performance and development goals.” At their best, however, the authors write vividly of the human side of vast collective changes: “UN Cares’ reliance on [LGBTQ+] experts who had been discriminated against…gave voice to the previously voiceless and allowed them to tell their own stories….People and their stories are memorable, much more so than dry hypotheticals unmoored from real experience.” Managers in the midst of organizational upheavals will find plenty of intriguing food for thought here.

A dense but informative primer on navigating large-scale organizational transformations.