THE TRANSLATIONAL LEADER
As we traveled the world researching this book, one of our most genuinely surprising—and surprisingly consistent—findings was the important role that certain kinds of leaders play in shaping community resilience. This was not our intention: We had not set out to write The Seven Habits of Highly Resilient People. And yet, when we discovered a community that was able to reorganize dynamically in the face of disruption, we frequently encountered the same character over and over again, in guises young and old, rich and poor, male and female. These leaders demonstrated an uncanny ability to knit together different constituencies and institutions—brokering relationships and transactions across different levels of political, economic, and social organization.
Such characters don’t conform to typical notions of what a leader looks like: They weren’t strong-jawed, visionary CEOs or coiffed elected officials, boldly directing from the top, nor were they bottom-up, street-level organizers. Instead, they represented a neglected third form of “middle-out” leadership, seamlessly working up and down and across various organizational hierarchies, connecting with groups who might otherwise be excluded, and translating between constituencies. The authority of these translational leaders was not rooted solely in their formal status but in their informal authority and cultural standing. (Think of Josh Nesbit and Patrick Meier in Mission 4636; Tio Hardiman with CeaseFire; or Willie Smits in Indonesia.) When disruption strikes, the presence—or absence—of such a leader can have a profound impact, as we’ll see in the island community of Palau, and the remarkable story of one of the translational leaders shaping its future.
To visit the island nation of Palau, we took a flight from New York City to Honolulu, traveling five hours back in time. From there, we hopped on a plane bound for Guam, an unincorporated territory of the United States situated far west of the Hawaiian Islands. On the way, we crossed over the International Date Line, going from five hours behind to twenty hours ahead in time. After that, we waited amidst Japanese backpackers and adventure divers to catch the once-daily flight leaving from Guam to the archipelago of Palau in Micronesia.
At the end of our travels, after landing in this exquisitely situated marine ecosystem, we had managed to visit today, yesterday, and tomorrow all in one fell swoop—a blurring of past, present, and future that, as we’ll see, could not be more appropriate.
Palau is an archipelago made up of 340 islands in the Pacific Ocean, approximately six hundred miles east of the Philippines. Clustered in the southern half of the islands are the renowned Rock Islands, a series of enchanting rock sprouts popping out of the ocean like lush, overgrown Chia Pets. A barrier reef surrounds the archipelago, the source of the islands’ famous lagoon, up to twelve miles wide, shallow in certain areas but reaching 130 feet deep in others. Three major ocean currents converge on the islands, and they bring in all variety of marine life from across the Indian and Pacific oceans. Palau Trench, about 25,000 feet deep, creates upwelling currents that deliver its nutrients to the shallower waters.
The result of all this movement is an astounding diversity of life: The archipelago supports seven hundred coral species—four times as many coral as in the Caribbean.
All of this makes Palau a biodiversity hot spot and earns it a place alongside the Great Barrier Reef as one of Seven Underwater Wonders of the World. It is little wonder that Palauan fishermen are considered some of the most knowledgeable in the world.
Before the twentieth century, these fishermen lived by an age-old conservation ethic that revolved around reef and lagoon tenure. The right to fish was limited by individual communities, and outsiders were forbidden to fish without permission. All of this was legislated through local village chiefs, a role passed down through family lineage. Through this traditional economy, Palauans existed in a state of subsistence affluence—island culture placed a great deal of value on social stability, community support, and family lineage, while the accumulation of physical goods conferred little, if any, status.
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Palau bounced between the British, Spanish, and German empires—tiny, overlooked, and largely unchanged. But when the islands were officially awarded to Japan following World War I, Palau’s traditional culture began to erode. The Japanese incorporated the islands and made them an integral part of their empire. Suddenly Palau’s capital city of Koror was transformed from a subsistence economy fishing village into a sophisticated outpost of Tokyo—modern built homes with glass windows and shingled roofs were erected alongside carefully manicured trees and plants, lending Koror’s main street an aura of tidy Japanese order. By the 1930s, so many Japanese had immigrated to the islands that native Palauans were the minority in their own country.
With the introduction of the new Japanese culture came a new economic order: The Japanese introduced new nets, motorized boats, and other tools that greatly increased its fishermen’s catch. Gone were the days of giving fish away to other villages. Fish were now seen as vital assets to be bought and sold. A market economy was set in motion.
When the United States took over the islands as a trust territory following World War II, these trends accelerated. Research scientist Robert Johannes spent sixteen months with Palauan fishermen in the early 1970s, documenting the elders’ recollections of the shifting fishing culture in his pioneering ethnography Words of the Lagoon:
Increasingly he [the Palauan fisherman] found himself forced to compete with his fellow fishermen for money and thus for fish. He abandoned the leaf sweep, which employed a dozen or more men who worked cooperatively and shared their catch, and he adopted the imported “kesokes” net, which he could operate by himself.
In addition to encouraging competitive market-driven behavior and its attendant technologies, the U.S. trust government implemented a centralized democratic governance structure. In 1955, a legislature was chartered and the elected members from the various municipalities were given voting rights. In the transition, the hereditary role of the village chiefs, including their role in fisheries conservation, ebbed. In their place, American-trained civil servants encouraged principles of private ownership, competition, and self-interest. A narrative of national progress provided little incentive to enforce conservation laws: Modernization seemed well worth the cost of a few extra fish.
A tipping point arrived in 1959 when an export market for reef fish opened up in Guam and the U.S. government began to offer the Palauan fishermen loans in order to acquire bigger and more efficient boats. Under pressure to pay off the loans, the fishermen were now even more in need of a plentiful catch. Unsurprisingly, fishermen living in the heavily populated districts around the central islands of Koror and Ngeremlengui quickly started to see their stocks decline. In centuries past, this would have triggered ancient conservation methods to allow the stocks to replenish—setting aside the essential no-take areas that give the fish time to spawn—but in the 1960s and 1970s, the fishermen had no such cushion of time. Instead, representatives from the affected areas began to enact legislation invalidating traditional lagoon and reef laws. They wanted access to all of the fish all around the island.
At the same time, other forces were remaking Palau. Throughout the 1970s, young people started leaving their villages and moving to Koror seeking the lucrative jobs in the civil service, whose salaries were based on the comparatively inflated pay scales of civil servants on the U.S. mainland. This urbanization created its own gravitational force: By 1980, more than 60 percent of Palauans lived in the capital, many of them unemployed. Those with a job could hardly afford the expense of a fishing boat.
In a generation, in the islands making up one of the richest and most diverse systems of marine life on the planet, formerly village-dwelling Palauans found themselves urbanized, underemployed, in debt, and too poor to eat their own fish. The majority of the population subsisted on tinned mackerel salted and shipped in from Japan.
Like many such transitions, Palau’s transformation from a traditional, self-sufficient society to an interconnected participant on the global economic grid was a mixed bag. Market-oriented democratic governance brought freedoms and opportunities, to be sure, but it also brought a mix of new incentives and dependencies that eroded longstanding cultural institutions, norms, and taboos. This is not to suggest that precolonial Palau was an unremitting paradise, or that modernity is without abundant virtue. Like all such societies, Palau has permanently crossed a one-way threshold to modernity, for reasons voluntary, seductive, and forcible, and no one but the Palauans are entitled to weigh the costs and benefits. But one fact is inarguable: For all of the extraordinary benefits of global connectivity, the process of modernization also left cultural fissures that fractured traditional institutions, weakened shared values, and threatened the nation’s relationship with its extraordinary natural inheritance.
Palau’s sudden connectivity with the global economic network illustrates, just like the current fate of the orangutans in Borneo, how frictions can emerge when forces with different time signatures start acting (and interacting) on a complex social and ecological system. Imagine the time it takes to conduct an individual transaction in a Palauan market—the sale of one fish, say, can take about five seconds. But now think about the social and political structure put in place to organize how that fish lands in a fisherman’s net. Such a cultural system is put in place over decades—generations, even. Let’s scale back even further to ecological and geological time. How many millennia does it take for an ecosystem to evolve enough diversity to sustain that species of fish? And how many more to replace the lost diversity once its population has tipped over into collapse?
Without compensatory mechanisms (such as those being designed by Willie Smits in Samboja Lestari), rapidly moving processes (like market transactions) layered on top of very slow ones (like ecosystem recovery) can erode the adaptive capacity of the system as a whole. Ultimately, the shearing effects can trigger collapse. Precolonial Palau was a place without significant economic dependencies outside of its own archipelago, certainly without a vast amount of material flows coming in and out of the islands. The time signature of society was slow and relatively stable, with a tight coupling between social systems and ecological systems, in a way that provided accurate feedback loops for making conservation choices. But when new extrinsic dependencies were introduced, a new time signature for Palau’s economy and value system followed. How does a tiny island nation like Palau navigate such dramatic shifts in priorities and values? When globalization creates more and more dependencies reaching farther and farther around the world—decoupling the time signature of ecological systems from the tempo and rhythm of human societies—how do we reconnect with feedback from the natural world?
What Palau needed was a way to navigate between the ancient and the contemporary, the fast and the slow, the local and the global—to reinforce deeply rooted traditions and build bridges between them and the newer strictures of globalization. Today, with the help of a translational leader, Palau is finding just such a balance.
NOAH AND THE BUL
When Palau gained its independence from the United States in 1978, a heady period of change for island government followed. During the transition toward independence, a young native-born Palauan took over as officer of Fisheries Management in the Palau Natural Resources Divisions. Noah Idechong, then in his twenties, exemplified the next generation of Palauan leaders: Although he graduated from Hawaii Pacific University with a degree in business administration, he was born and raised in a small fishing village on the eastern coast of one of the Palauan islands. His formal education in Hawaii allowed him to recognize the importance of administration while also respecting the quickly vanishing knowledge of traditional fishing and the ineffable value of the fisherman’s instinct.
Greater ties to the Japanese economy after independence brought the first trickles of tourism. Although the island was long known as a scuba diver’s paradise—the drop in depth and changing currents make Palau’s dives some of the best in the world—few people outside of the diving community had ever heard of the place. Then, in 1985, a five-star resort opened its doors on one of Palau’s private pristine beaches. Suddenly, word spread and, for the first time in its history, Palau needed to negotiate a substantial flow of tourists.
Almost immediately, visiting divers and fishermen found themselves embroiled in conflict. The best fishing spots were also some of the most popular dive spots, and fishermen were fighting for space with divers from around the world. The two groups brought dramatically different frames of reference to the encounter. The divers—often environmentally minded transplants only temporarily engaged in Palau’s community—wanted to protect the diversity of the reef; the fishermen were immediately suspicious of outsiders with an agenda for their islands and little apparent appreciation for their often severe financial imperatives.
The conflict between the two groups chilled into a cold war, then escalated when some of the fishermen began dynamiting parts of the reefs in an effort to increase the catch. Both groups brought their grievances to Idechong’s desk. What originally began as a position charged with managing fish stocks was now growing into something ever more complicated: a position charged with managing people.
“We only knew how to build a fishery,” Idechong said. “We never thought about things like stakeholder management and sustainability. The only framework we ever used was maximum sustainable yield. That was how fisheries of the past were run. I just assumed we were a part of that past.”
Desperate to quell the increasing conflicts, Idechong looked to his staff at Marine Resources for a solution. “We had nobody. We had no scientists, no officers, no one. All we had were people who knew how to catch fish and how to catch fishermen. That changed my attitude. We needed to figure out how to manage a fishery with a more diverse group of people.”
Idechong decided to intervene in the conflict in two stages: To begin with, he would create a dialogue with the fishermen. He hoped to convince them to work together with the divers, shifting more of the island’s economic focus from fishing toward an ecoconscious form of tourism. In the second phase, he would engage with divers and other members of the tourist communities and work with them to create a green fee, or tourist tax, that would benefit the Palauans, rewarding them for meeting their conservation goals.
To achieve this ambitious, two-phase strategy, Idechong needed to start by reinvigorating the ancient practices of conservation. He assumed that he could simply go to the chiefs and ask them to reassert their power over their individual reef systems. When he initiated a conversation with these village leaders, however, he consistently heard the same complaint: “The national government has taken away that power.”
Idechong was surprised by this response. While the power of the chiefs had demonstrably diminished, for sure, there had been no formal retraction of the traditional lagoon and reef tenure policies. The erosion of their power came not from any official legislation but, rather, from a kind of learned helplessness on the part of the traditional leaders. The proliferating market forces, which had gradually pulled resources and influence into the national government in Koror, had spread the perception that all power and resources lay in the capital. The traditional leaders, though nominally recognized, had become little more than figureheads. With no institutional muscle behind them, village chiefs were regarded as a quaint, if denuded, relic.
And yet, the new government had also failed in its attempts at governing land tenure and ecosystem management. Idechong recognized that if Palau had any hope of sustaining its vital resources, a combination of the two authorities—traditional and contemporary—would be needed.
“I went back to Parliament and said, ‘We have no plan, no money, no solutions, no scientists. Nothing,’” Idechong said. “If we are going to do this, we are going to have to invent local, Palauan solutions.”
One of the most extreme practices of conservation in Palau is traditionally referred to as the bul, a moratorium on fishing for an explicitly stated amount of time, protecting spawning channels for the fish, which allows them to replenish themselves. Idechong felt that only this drastic measure of conservation could begin to bring back the diminishing fish stocks: a win-win for both the fishermen and the divers. But he also knew that the chiefs, now rendered all but powerless, would be unlikely to risk further humiliation. So he came to them with an unusual idea. Idechong offered to serve as legal counsel for the local villages, helping them navigate the often-alien language of official government.
After they agreed, he spent the following months researching the Palau constitution side by side with the traditional laws. He discovered that though the central government had taken away the local right of the chiefs to fine, there were still many vagaries in Palauan law surrounding legislation of the bul.
“I saw some light there. I said, ‘You guys do the bul and, if something goes wrong, I’ll try to support you from the legal end.’ It wasn’t perfect, but we had no other choice.”
The first bul went into effect in the early 1990s at various locations throughout the islands. Almost immediately, village chiefs from the communities in northern Palau ran into difficulties asserting their enforcement authority. Idechong realized he needed to create legislation at all scales—from local to national—to mirror the traditional practices, offering them the scaffolding of legal language.
“Mirroring was a critical part of the puzzle,” Idechong said. “We asserted traditional practices and authority, and we asserted formal legal authority at the same time. When we employ a bul at the national level, we mirror that with a local initiative at the community level—enforcing the protection from all angles.”
It worked. Idechong’s first mirror legislation, enacted in northern Palau, was so successful that the local government and the village chiefs worked in concert to make the whole area a preserve for perpetuity, with limited fishing takes and an educational component.
From that moment forward, whenever a bul was imposed, Idechong set up a local government law instituting no-take areas for three years, mirroring the three-year bul moratorium on fishing in the area. After more than a decade of dialogue with local fishermen and village chiefs, in 1994, Idechong was able to mirror an entire network of traditionally deemed no-take areas all around the island with a national law titled the Marine Protection Act.
The next part of the solution involved getting the fishermen to work with the divers to create adaptive capacity for an economically viable tourist industry. Idechong used his credibility with the local people to articulate the benefits of bringing more outsiders to Palau.
“I said, ‘Here is a fish and his name is Herman. If you take him out and sell him at the market, you might get seventy dollars. But if the tourists come and look at him over and over again, you’re going to make much more money than that.’ I showed them how we calculate the amount using the number of dives that the tourists make in any particular site and then extrapolate the value of the fish for the given year. The value of the tourist fish is always much, much higher. When the fishermen understood that, they got on board. They wanted to become boat operators and tour guides because they could see the benefits of tourism in a tangible way.”
The final stage in Idechong’s strategy asked something of the divers and the other tourists starting to visit Palau. He convinced Parliament to institute a green tax on the tourists to help keep money coming in to protect the MPAs (Marine Protected Areas).
“In the old days, you would conserve and immediately bring the benefit into your village. These days, the local people ask, ‘Where are our benefits?’ The rewards go directly to the national government because they are able to reach their biodiversity and conservation goals while the villages do all the work. They complain that the water is serving the tourist industry, the police force is safeguarding the tourists, the infrastructure is put in place to make the tourists happy. I say, let’s move some of the tourist money directly to the community. There is no shame in that. Give them the tangible benefits for their efforts.”
Today, after considerable effort from Idechong, the tax is officially in place and positively received by both the locals and the divers. In 2012, the minister of finance expects to collect more than $1.5 million from the green fees—an enormous amount for a country the size of Palau—all of which will go directly to support community management efforts on the ground.
“Because the money is flowing, I don’t have to deal with grumblings anymore. People realize what it’s for and both the tourists and the local people are seeing the benefits. We created a transparent system where the benefits are clear to everyone.”
In 1994, Idechong moved away from his position with Fisheries Management to head up the not-for-profit conservation initiative called the Palau Conservation Society. He felt that working with an entity that existed outside the government structure would allow him to better reach the villagers and engage them in enlarging and connecting the areas in the Marine Protection Act to create a PAN, or Protected Areas Network.
It was during this period that Idechong developed one of his most strategic partnerships. He served as the bridge between the Western marine biology and ecology scientists flocking to Palau and the village chiefs and fishermen he was working with in the Palau Conservation Society.
“I knew I needed to have the right information, the right science,” Idechong told us. “But I also wanted to make sure I was working with scientists who knew how to stay out of the way.”
Bob Richmond, a researcher in marine conservation biology at the University of Hawaii, has been working with Idechong for almost thirty years. In one of their earliest meetings, Idechong told Richmond with full candor what he wanted from him.
“He said, ‘I don’t need you to come in and tell the people of Palau what to do,’” Richmond explained to us. “Noah thinks that a good partner is a scientist who comes in with the most reliable information. Then he feels it is his job to translate that information to the stakeholders.”
Implicit in this translation process is Idechong’s drive for outcomes as opposed to outputs. As Richmond put it, “Lots of scientists and researchers in my field and in the government are counting the number of workshops, the number of people attending, the number of posters created. Idechong, by contrast, is looking at what is happening at the reef level: Are the fisheries improving? Are the corals coming back? Is the ecosystem resilient to both human and natural stressors?”
In 2005, Richmond approached Idechong and the Palau Conservation Society with funding from a research grant. He wanted to study the relationship between people and nature in a Palauan watershed with results that could be of use to the communities served by Idechong’s organization.
Richmond and his team of scientists were moving forward on potential sites for the study when Idechong interceded.
“He told us that he wanted a place that would bring about better outcomes for conservation efforts,” Richmond explained. “Instead of letting pure science dictate our choice, he chose the watershed that served as the main drinking water source for Koror. It was in an area of mangroves that was rapidly being cleared for housing lots, causing devastation to the reefs. Idechong felt that data from that specific watershed would have the greatest impact on people’s behavior, galvanizing them to protect the area.”
Richmond and his team went door to door in the watershed area and, with Idechong’s guidance, they got complete buy-in for the study from every member of the community.
Next Idechong insisted on hiring local fishermen to check on the gear and equipment that were a part of the study. Initially Richmond assumed this was out of fear that the equipment would be stolen, but Idechong quickly corrected him.
“He wanted eyes and ears in the water all the time. He wanted his guys to go and have a beer with the fishermen and get a day-to-day perspective on details: ‘Oh, it rained today’ or ‘I was out in such and such an area and I didn’t see any fish either.’”
His plan worked. By the time Richmond and his researchers were ready to present their collected data to the villagers, the fishermen were already engaged in the project and eager to hear the latest news.
“They knew everything! They were up on every bit of data that we had collected and we never said a word to them about it. There was no learning curve at the presentation because they were completely primed with all the data and on board with the work we were doing. That was just a part of Noah’s brilliance: He kept the information open and transparent.”
After Richmond and his fellow scientists finished presenting their data to the villagers, Idechong made it clear that they would now sit in the back of the room and effectively become invisible. As Richmond put it, “We were there in a supportive role.”
Two young Palauans, Yimnang Golbuu and Steven Victor, both mentored by Idechong and sent on for doctoral training at Richmond’s lab in Hawaii, presented their findings on the watershed to the village chiefs.
“We’re sitting in this traditional village house and they set up a PowerPoint. All the foreigners stayed in the back, quiet and respectful. Noah made a point of sitting with the fishermen, his people, while the chiefs sat in the front. And then we all listened while two Palauan PhDs presented to fellow Palauans with a Palauan language PowerPoint.”
What happened next still astounds Richmond, and he references it as a moment of profound revelation for his work as a scientist and researcher.
“After the presentation, the chiefs were very deferential to Yim and Steven. You could see it in their body language and in their tone: ‘Could you explain this’ and ‘I didn’t quite get that . . . ’ But then something changed. The mood became more confrontational. The village chiefs began using a harsher tone, almost as if they were reprimanding the young Palauan scientists.”
Richmond looked to Idechong for reassurance. Is everything all right? he telegraphed with his face and eyes.
Idechong returned the look with a signature twinkle in his eye. He nodded his head and just sat back and watched.
“When we came out later, I said to Noah, ‘What the heck happened at the end there? That was not a peer-to-peer conversation. It sounded like they were being lectured.’”
Idechong explained that in the hierarchical culture of Palau, transfers of information must be exchanged between the elders and the younger scientists. What the chiefs were basically saying, Idechong told Richmond, was, “You guys came to us and really impressed us as Western scientists. You brought in good information and we are proud and impressed by your work. But any good Palauan would know that the term for sediment on land is different than the term for sediment on the water.”
The message, Idechong noted, was, “You guys have come in and taught us some really interesting things from your scientific education and now it is our duty to teach you to be better Palauans.”
The dynamic Richmond and his research team observed typifies the traditional social reciprocity that characterizes Pacific island cultures. Getting information without returning some in exchange is considered rude. To Richmond, the village chiefs sounded like they were chiding the young scientists, but they were actually expressing gratitude by giving something back. These are the kinds of subtleties of culture that are often lost without the presence of a translational leader.
“It was actually that information exchange that sealed the conservation deal,” Idechong told Richmond.
“What’s funny,” Richmond mused, “is my colleague at the meeting, a brilliant modeler, was giving us flack about even attending. He kept saying, ‘Why are we going to this meeting? Is there going to be a publication coming out of this? Why bother?’ And we just kept saying, ‘Shut up and watch.’ After the meeting, he came out raving. He said, ‘I’ve never seen that kind of dynamic at a scientific presentation to stakeholders before.”
Idechong’s delicate social maneuvering paid off in the policy implementation of the study. Within six weeks of the presentation, the traditional leaders approached the elected leaders and demanded a moratorium against development in the watershed. It went into effect within six months of the presentation and remained valid for several years. That bought Idechong enough time to legislate through the state and federal level to insure protection of the coastal mangrove in perpetuity. When the moratorium ended, the mangroves were officially protected under national law as a marine protected area, conserved in the language of tradition as well as the language of law.
Today Noah Idechong is an elder statesman of Palau. We met him for breakfast at one of his many haunts in Koror, the Penthouse Hotel. Although he has the same mane of dark hair and curious sparkle in his eyes, the Idechong of today is too busy to hold court for long. In the early 2000s, he returned to government, winning election as a speaker of the Palau National Congress (constituting both the House of Delegates and the Senate). While serving in the legislative branch, Idechong has been a tireless advocate for his conservation agenda at both the national and international scale. He convinced then-president Tommy Remengesau to try scuba diving for the first time. The experience converted Remengesau, and he made conservation a keystone issue for his term, signing into law a total ban on shark finning, deep-sea bottom trawling, and the live reef fish trade in Palau as well as approving Idechong’s Protected Area Network Act, legislation that ensures long-term financial sustainability of the marine network.
These days, Idechong divides his time between Palau and the other island nations in Micronesia, working to replicate and scale his original success in new contexts. He is talking up his Micronesia Challenge initiative (a commitment by all Micronesian nations to effectively conserve at least 30 percent of the near-shore marine resources and 20 percent of the terrestrial resources across Micronesia by 2020), brokering funding for it with local and international conservation agencies like the Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, and Global Environment Facility. He is also bringing the message of the bul and integrative leadership to the United Nations.
“Other people offer solutions,” Idechong told us, “while I offer dialogues. When I work with people, we discuss and we discuss and I let them think and then we discuss some more. I provide assistance to guide them in their thinking, but there is no end to the process. There is no set goal.”
Idechong has honed this process after years and years of seeing outside organizations come into Palau and promise quick fixes through attempts at infrastructure improvements and community building projects.
“The project gets money and then, when the project completes, the entire effort dies and everyone disappears. This is the kind of thing I have steered away from. I adopt my partnerships for a lifetime.”
Conservation scientist Michael Guilbeaux has worked with Idechong for many years and he considers him both a colleague and a mentor: in his words, “a Palauan father.”
“Noah is extremely open about incorporating the ideas from science but he wants to do it in an appropriate way for Palau. There is a healthy circumspection about the science. In the face of climate change and some of these other global issues, what can we do? Noah’s feeling is that science can only take us so far when we’re dealing with social systems. Scientists can study this thing to death but Palauans need to get down to business and do their work.”
And what is that work? we asked him.
“The work is building capacity. All people can do is build adaptive capacity.”
Creating that capacity required Noah Idechong to seek out the correspondences between the ancient and contemporary; between the scientific and the social; between the ecological and the economic; between formal government and informal governance. He achieved this by using the central tool of all translational leaders: brokering relationships between organizations, constituencies, and forces operating different levels of scale, organization, and time within a system.
Translational leaders do not dispense with hierarchies; they recognize and respect their power. Instead, standing at the intersection of many constituencies, translational leaders knit together social networks that complement hierarchical power structures. Rooted in a spirit of respect and inclusion, these complementary connections ensure that when disruption strikes, all parts of the social system are invested, linked, and can talk to one another.
The activity at which Idechong so naturally excels is also referred to as “network weaving,” a term coined by social network analysts Valdis Krebs and June Holley, based on their extensive work exploring how to build resilience in rural communities in Appalachian Ohio. And although he might not have done so explicitly, Idechong was demonstrating several of network weaving’s core principals.
Krebs and Holley describe how a resilient community network emerges through four stages: First, small, autonomous clusters emerge, often without any guidance, among individuals and organizations with shared interests, values, and goals. In the Palauan example, this might be represented by the close connections between the commercial fishermen or the reef divers. These clusters serve to reinforce interest politics, and if their interconnectivity ends there, these groups can remain oppositional and the larger social structure weak and brittle to disruption.
In the second and more intentional stage of network weaving, translational leaders like Idechong create a hub and spoke model, with themselves as the initial hub, connecting many different kinds of constituencies. Doing so often requires a mixture of charisma and grace, and the knack for navigating the politics of difference. During this second phase, translational leaders spend much of their time learning about the network they’re building, discovering what each of its nodes knows and what each needs. Authenticity and an ethic of generosity are critical at this stage, as the network has a single point of failure—the leaders themselves. But if done in the proper spirit, the emerging network—and the leader at its hub—will grow a reputation as a connector and begin to develop its own gravitational force. Idechong’s early work bringing together divers and fishermen correlates broadly with this second phase.
In the third phase, translational leaders begin to close the triangles in their network—building direct bridges between different constituencies for whom they are the sole bridge. This starts to create a multihub, or “small world,” social network.
Due to the number of relationships involved at this point, the best network weavers don’t just connect—they teach those they connect how to become connectors themselves. “This transition from connector to facilitator is critical,” Krebs told us. “If the change is not made, the network weaver at the center can quickly become overwhelmed with connections, and the growth and efficiency of the network slows dramatically—or can even reverse course.” At this point the translational leader must quickly change from being a direct to an indirect leader, guiding the emergence of new network weavers throughout the community.
If successful, a multihub network forms and a new dynamic also emerges—the power of weak or indirect ties, particularly between hubs in a social network. These provide vital bridges between groups with different perspectives or expertise, or they may evolve into strong ties themselves, bringing hubs closer together. Idechong’s effort to build direct, unmediated bridges between, for example, Bob Richmond’s scientific research team and Palauan fishermen is an example of this stage of network weaving.
The final stage of Krebs and Holley’s model, and its ultimate aim, is called a core/periphery social network. In this highly stable yet highly resilient social arrangement, which usually emerges after years of effort, a core of strongly affiliated hubs at the center of the social system is connected to a constellation of people and resources on the periphery, through weak ties. This allows for an efficient and natural division of labor: The periphery monitors the environment, while the core implements what is discovered and deemed useful. “The periphery allows us to access new ideas and new information from outside—the core allows us to act on them, inside,” says Krebs. This kind of core/periphery model is exactly what Idechong is building today, as he connects strongly functioning cores across Micronesia to learn from one another.
This is not to say network weaving is a magic bullet. The capacity that translational leaders create does not belong to them—it belongs to the community itself, and there’s never a guarantee of its sufficiency in the wake of disruption. Nor does network weaving eliminate competitive forces at work in a community. There will always be oppositional people and organizations at work, and translational leaders cannot pretend such oppositions don’t exist. Instead, they can look for points of collaboration within the larger competitive reality.
“In a healthy network, you have to connect on your similarities and compete on your differences,” says Krebs. To illustrate, he tells the parable of the jars: “Imagine a community in which two women make and sell jam—one sells organic jam, the other sells exotic flavors. Both are competitors, and neoclassical economic theory suggests they should compete ruthlessly. But they are also community members and neighbors, and they need to have a relationship for the social network to remain healthy. Perhaps there are ways for them to cooperate in a limited way: for example, to aggregate their purchase of jars so that they each lower their costs. This won’t eliminate their competition, but it will create the opportunity for a relationship with a broader definition and a hint of mutualism. Often, before you weave the network, you have to find the jars.”
As you can see, at various times, translational leaders must be connectors, mediators, teachers, behavioral economists, and social engineers. They must carry out these duties with candor, transparency, generosity, and commitment. They must also embrace key principals of social network creation: Build your network before you need it. Build direct relationships so that, in a pinch, reconfiguration and collaboration can emerge quickly, but not so many relationships that things become densely overconnected. And most important, create the context, trust in the participants, and know when to let go.