The Development Entrepreneur

In every community there are individuals who stand out for their dedication to social or developmental goals. Known for walking their talk, many of them have to the extent of setting up organizations to pursue these goals.  Their track record might be mixed, and they might have changed their strategies over time, but they have kept on keeping on.  To name a few in Cebu, these's Jacob Koshy, who promotes self-motivated drug rehabilitation; Nestor Archival, whose house is a living laboratory of effective recycling practices; Nelia Sarcol, who built an international school and leads reforms in eduction; and Tessie Fernandez, who with Lihok Filipina works to empower women.

I used to call these people "Jedi" (I still do). Tads Bentulan calls people like these  "advanced beings". Jaime Faustino and Raul Fabella have coined a new term for them: "Development Entrepreneurs". 

Faustino and Fabella say Development Entrepreneurs (DEs, for short) are people who, on their own, are doing something to push improvements in a field that they are passionate about.  For some reasons they have taken it on themselves to achieve certain developmental outcomes.

What sets them people apart from everyone else who has ever wished the world was a better place is that they actually do something about it. And they do so in an entrepreneurial manner.

DEs know how to find and connect with their clients.  They leverage their resources by working with partners (organizations and individuals) who help them provide products and services with real value to their markets.  When they encounter resistance and challenges, they don't turn around and go home.  They look for a way around, under, through, above. They know when they are being intimidated and are able to recover.  They persist and persevere until they are able to achieve their goals. And because they have built their reputation and credibility, they are able to attract support from others to continue their work.

Like entrepreneurs running start-ups, DEs often have relatively small resources compared to what the other side has (the "other side" being people and groups who want to preserve the status quo). Which is not to say that DEs have to be poor; to be able to move at all, a DE needs to have some financial resources.  Successful DEs have built up considerable resources along the way - e.g., Nelia Sarcol's Center for International Education.   But compared to the challenge (in the context of this example, the Philippine educational system), the DE's resources are small.  Still, DEs are able to deal with this because they have something better than resources - they have resourcefulness. Faustino likes to say that a DE is like a monkey who needs to fight an elephant - so he recruits other elephants to his side.

If you want to be a DE, you can borrow a page from former US Air Force Colonel John Boyd's OODA concept, which has been proven to work as well in combat as in business.  Boyd says any encounter goes through four stages: Observation, Orientation, Decision, and Action. The side that can go through more OODA cycles faster increases the tempo of the engagement until the other side is overwhelmed.  In business the OOPA loop challenges entrepreneurs to be flexible in responding to their environment.  This is specially relevant when your concern is development in any aspect - you have to pay attention to how your actions impact on the people and the situation around you. 

So how to do OODA? Start with something that you are interested in (don't worry if you don't feel "passionate" about it now; that will come later, after you've invested some effort and time in your advocacy). Observe and learn from actual experience and from literature on the subject.  Orient yourself towards a course of action. (Here, you would do well to pay attention to Faustino's insight about effective reform - he says reform is possible when it is both technically correct and politically acceptable).  Decide resolutely to do something. Then Act on that decision.

After your first OODA cycle assess the effects of your action.  Assessment itself is part of the Observation phase of your next cycle, so in effect you're launching a second cycle. Go ahead, then do a third, and a fourth, and a fifth. Churn!

Just make sure you learn something new from each cycle.  Deliberately seek to improve on the next one.  This way, instead of simply going around  in circles, you'll be going up a spiral of developmental outcomes, and each cycle will become an evolution of rising expectations - and outcomes.