You may not be interested in change, but change is interested in you

The people who stop you getting things done (part two)

(Second of a three parter: the people who stop you getting things done)

Last time, I discussed some of Mancur Olson’s ideas about distributional and blocking coalitions. In this piece, I want to focus more on why these coalitions arise - in particular, I’ll focus on the possible cognitive biases and structural strengths of these coalitions. Next time, I’ll focus on some novel ways of managing these coalitions, moving from zero sum to positive gain thinking.

How do distributional coalitions arise in the first place?

Olson’s analysis steps around some fundamental questions: how do people decide there is a problem in the first place? How do they define the problem? How do they decide they have a problem? How do they decide on a strategy to deal with the problem? How do they coalesce, bring resources to the fight, and get on with doing their blocking or grabbing? What motivates these coalitions?

The answer is obvious, and time-honoured: they talk; they get together in groups; they moan; they jostle for position within their groups; decide who will be the speaker on their behalf. They come together to prevent things happening: they want to stop certain things being done, or they come together to try and divide what might be a fixed pie up differently.

They get their start in the most elemental of ways: talking, deliberating, deciding what information needs to be admitted into their conversation, deciding what they are going to do. Then - maybe - doing it.

Acting collectively together for good or ill is something we humans are very good at, and the conversations we have together in groups are at the core of how we act together.

Photo by adrianna geo on Unsplash

Just thinking about these questions, we can distinguish between the structural factors and the psychological and cognitive factors underpinning distributional coalitions.

Structural factors

These arise from the rules of the game: they include things like who has access to resources; who are the key decision makers; what do the rules, laws, policies and procedures dictate or demand; who has money and is willing to spend it? We spend a lot of time worrying about structural factors: they’re obvious, in your face, and easy to see.

The concentration of power: If a small number of people or organisations control a disproportionate amount of power, they may be able to resist changes of benefit the majority. Distributional coalitions may wield significant political and economic power, allowing them to influence decision-making processes and maintain the status quo through lobbying, campaign contributions, and other means.

Power matters - a lot. Robert Caro, the famed biographer¹, said of Robert Moses, the architect of New York:

‘…Robert Moses…never elected to anything, and he came up to Albany for one day and changed the entire state government around, from the governor to the assembly. How did he have the power to do that? You have no idea and neither does anybody else. I said to myself, If you really want to explain political power, you’re going to have to understand that. So I decided to apply for a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard to study urban planning, and I got it. I was taking a course taught by two professors who had written a textbook on urban land-use planning, and they were explaining why highways get built, where they get built, and they were explaining it as if it were a mathematical equation, and with every class, they added a couple of factors—population density, grade elevations, things like that. Totally rational. I would sit there diligently taking notes, and then one day I suddenly said to myself, This is all wrong. They don’t know why highways get built where they’re built, and I do. They get built where they’re built because Robert Moses wants them built there.’

Those last lines are so important, and explain so much of what happens in our world: who has the power?² Moses had the power, through the numerous offices he held, often simultaneously, to do things as he saw fit, and no one had the power to stop him. He was a blocking coalition of one, and a distributional coalition of one. He decided where things were going, what was going to be demolished, what road and bridge and park was going to be place where: a kind of a one-man American Haussmann of the 20th C.

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Next time: overcoming distributional and blocking coalitions often requires creative and innovative policy approaches going beyond traditional methods; I discuss some possibilities.

And planned for Brain Pizza: another in my series on writing - this time on collaborative writing (something very common, but most treatments focus on solo writing); and a piece riffing on a quote from the late Amos Tversky I often think about: ‘The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.’ (source: ‘The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds’ by Michael Lewis)

Other structural issues