Hey Milan, would you recommend any books on deinstitutionalisation, I was asked recently.
And sure enough, I shared some reading I find useful and interesting.
But I didn’t mention the two books that I consider the most important, and use almost daily in my work.
Neither of them is about deinstitutionalisation.
But both are.
Take the first one – Switch by Dan Heath and Chip Heath.
It’s topic: How to change things when change is hard.
See, it isn’t about deinstitutionalisation.
But it is about deinstitutionalisation because it’s about how people make important decisions and changes, about how to make a lasting change in organisations or policies.
The book offers so many informative and useful examples of how change works and how changes are implemented in different contexts.
It is very good for thinking about and designing any public policy, including deinstitutionalisation.
Which means there could be so many different quotes or angles I could use here, but I’ll settle for one:
“Clarity dissolves resistance.”
Working for deinstitutionalisation both in different countries and at European level, this perfectly matches my experience.
Clear picture of the end result, clear instructions for the process, and clear expectations of the different people involved lead to much faster understanding and much better implementation.
In other words, it helps when we can make it easy for people to understand what we want them to do.
And it helps, at least to me, informing our advocacy and policy work not only from sources that are directly about the topic, but also from other areas of research, other experiences and perspectives.
That’s why I’ll probably write about the second book some time soon too.