Motivation and mobilization

What is the most useful way in mobilising local stakeholders for a LED initiative? One way is to try to involve everybody from the start, which is unlikely to work. Another way is to rely on those people who gladly volunteer, but this again may be too small a group, or a group which does not bring in important resources (such as know-how on how to mobilize funds).

At the beginning, there will probably be a LED champion, that is one or a handful of persons from the public or the private sector. For the LED champion, it is crucial to identify possible project champions. A project champion is a person, preferably linked to an organization, who is strongly motivated to organize a given project - not just out of an economic rationality but also due to a deeper, more emotional motivation. The task of the project champion is then to try to identify other stakeholders who should be involved in this project, and to try to address and motivate them directly.

In running both the overall LED initiative and LED projects, it is useful to look out for the three types of people described by Malcolm Gladwell in his insightful book "The Tipping Point". It is such people who often make the difference:

• Connectors: They are people who have an extraordinarily large number they interact with directly. Due to charm, charisma or other personal characteristics, they manage to get people together easily. For an LED project, they are particularly helpful when it comes to identify who exactly ought to get involved.
  

• Mavens: They are people who are particularly knowledgeable about details such as where and how to make the best deal to buy a car. In the case of LED projects, they would know where to mobilize resources necessary, preferably without paying too much or at all.
  

• Sales people: They are people who are good at selling something - not because they know how to coerce but because they are persuasive and convincing, usually because they want to be helpful and because they are convinced of the product they want to sell. For an LED project, such people are extremely helpful, for instance when it comes to mobilizing sponsors.

Implementation

Key aspects of implementation are addressed under the first and second triangle. It is important to note that different instruments are hugely different in terms of necessary resources, know-how and time. At the early stages of LED initiatives, it is useful to stick to activities which fit with three criteria:

• they can be implemented with locally available resources,

• they can be implemented quickly, starting next week,

• they have a strong potential to show quick, visible results, i.e. with no more than three months.

Reflection and adjustment

Reflection and adjustment involves three elements: thinking about new instruments and activities, adjusting existing activities and discontinuing existing activities.

• Innovate
  When it comes to introduce innovation into a LED effort, an obvious option is to visit other places and to get involved in international networks (such as those organized by ILO and OECD) to know about experiences elsewhere and get new idea.
  
• Adjust
  In terms of adjusting running activities, there are two different issues. First, it is likely that there is incremental adjustment all the time. Second, in certain cases it may be important to formally adjust a given activity. An example would be a program which focuses at a specific sector or a specific type or size of firms, and where an interim appraisal shows the need to modify the focus. In such a case, it will often be useful to consider a formal re-launch of the activity to get the message of the new focus across to the potential customers.
  
• Discontinue
  This point is often the most difficult one, in particular if LED activities involve a certain degree of voluntary work. For this reason, it is useful to define any activity as a fixed-term activity, or at least to define at the outset one or several points in time when there will be a formal meeting among the stakeholders involved to define whether or not to continue a given activity. If you fail to do this, it will often be awkward to discontinue an activity which is taking a relevant amount of resources without rendering relevant results.

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