Navigating Challenges, Inspiring Collective Action

At Punjab Education Collective, we continuously make sense of the gaps, undertake capacity enhancement of the team, review our processes for effectiveness and efficiency, and have built reflection mechanisms across levels. But when it comes to involving different stakeholders to orchestrate collective action, the journey has not been bereft of its challenges.

Challenges Encountered

Speed of action : Sometimes shared meaning making in the team takes a lot of time because of diverse perspectives and the speed of action can get compromised. But the person solving in a silo will never have the full view of the problem and with that the ability to solve gets restricted to only a few individuals. Agency in the people in the system keeps getting lost. One has to become okay with slowing down which simply means investing time and effort to bring diverse voices, co-create with stakeholders, and enable collective action.

Building a new habit : Collective action is not a “natural reaction”. Organisation leadership may be very well-aligned to collective action, but when it comes to teams who are leading the work with departments/stakeholders, they are the ones who have to overcome the day to day challenges of collaboration and collective action. It becomes tempting to go back to habits that are familiar, and work in silos. The organisations have to recognise that this is an expected response, and leadership must regularly take time out to participate, inspire, and model behaviour.

Funding : The current funding ecosystem in India has primarily programmatic focus. The general inclination is neither towards supporting systemic approach, nor towards collective approach to problem solving. In a typical funding conversation, the conversation is bound to steer towards – ‘how do you attribute the outcome to your intervention?’ When it comes to collective and systemic change, we need to accept and find ways to contribute to improving outcomes, rather than only looking for attribution.

Role of Facilitative Leadership in Collective Action
In the effort to lead collective action, by guiding and empowering a group of people towards achieving the common vision, one of the key inputs is a facilitative leadership.

Facilitative leadership has to create an inclusive and supportive environment that fosters collaboration, participation, and shared decision-making. They have to create spaces for open dialogue, active listening, and mutual respect. By establishing trust and rapport, facilitative leaders can encourage diverse perspectives and foster a sense of belonging, which strengthens collaboration and collective commitment towards shared goals.

By letting go of control, facilitative leaders recognise and nurture the leadership potential of individuals, empowering them to take on roles and responsibilities that align with their skills and interests. Through distributed and shared leadership, collective action initiatives get strengthened along with cultivating a sense of agency and empowerment among everyone.

Celebrations to inspire and build ecosystem’s confidence in the approach
Any change Initiatives run on hopes and aspirations as much as on effort and planning. We have to engage in continuous dialogues with key actors and influencers around the importance, impact of collective approach, and how we can enable it – through societal thinking models, empowering stakeholders with data, and catalysing interactions using open source technology. And by creating opportunities for better visibility of the success stories at different platforms. A collective’s proof points are impactful only if we successfully manage to create more virtuous cycles of ideation to execution to inspiration.

The Way Ahead
The problems remain aplenty. To facilitate impact at scale, and address the integrated challenges created as a result of the pandemic, climate change, economic slowdown and ongoing wars, we need to come together urgently. The complexity of the challenge(s) warrants all hands on deck. Orchestrating collective action is no more a choice, but a need of the hour.
What will be next in the journey?

Intersection of cross domain missions
Missions ensuring water, healthcare, education, livelihoods, dignity and more have to coalesce to uplift the communities and accelerate their journey from poverty to prosperity. Imagine a girl child who does not have to travel hours for water because of ensured access to clean water. She is able to attend school and develop holistic skills, her family is able to save money for an enterprise instead of continuously fighting diseases. The increased income will enable better opportunities for the family and contribute to better mental health, with ripple effects across the community.

This impact can be amplified across different geographies only through collective action. I hope we are all able to join hands, and metamorphose our individual missions into a social movement, a call to action to enhance lives across the globe.

This is the third piece in the three-part series on Collective Action. Read the first one which illustrates what collective action is and how it is helpful. The previous piece lists the lessons from orchestrating collective action.

Meet the Author

Khushboo Awasthi

A management professional turned education enthusiast, Khushboo is the Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer of ShikshaLokam - an education leadership catalyst and Mantra4Change, a non-profit driving systemic public schools transformation in the Indian education system. With 13+ years of diverse experience in education and healthcare domain she is recipient of Women Transforming India Awards 2021 instituted by NITI Aayog, a Schwab Social Innovator of the Year 2023 and is part of BW Education 40 Under 40 Power List 2022. Khushboo is a travel enthusiast, a curious learner and an avid reader. Her interests lie in exploring concepts of agency, networks, large scale social movements and societal role of technology in encouraging co-creation and collaboration.