Radically Inclusive Changemaking and Its Limits

Ashoka’s founder, Bill Drayton, memorably coined the term changemaker in 1981, spearheading the field of social entrepreneurship. The phrase galvanized a broader community of social change actors and then proliferated across the culture. Its verb form, changemaking—the practice of fixing broken systems to build a better world—has become a global preoccupation with a bipartisan appeal capable of uniting diverse actors. The usage of both forms has become so ubiquitous across sectors at this point that the concept is, arguably, becoming meaningless.

What, exactly, is a changemaker? What sort of leadership defines it? And is this work about leading change or enabling it?

In Becoming a Changemaker: An Actionable, Inclusive Guide to Leading Positive Change at Any Level, social entrepreneur Alex Budak offers a fresh, almost evangelical perspective on all three questions in an attempt to provide an all-encompassing guide on how, as the title states, to become a changemaker.

When compared with the avalanche of books already published on the subject, such as Henry De Sio’s Changemaker Playbook and Beverly Schwartz’s Rippling: How Social Entrepreneurs Spread Innovation, Budak’s most daring contribution to the field is to expand the definition of changemaker. For Budak, a changemaker is “someone who leads positive change from where they are” and does that work “far beyond the constraints of social challenges.” By widening the concept of changemaking beyond the social sector, Budak intends to offer a “radically inclusive” definition of an already very broad concept. In so doing, he contends not only that anyone—regardless of title, personality, race, gender, age, or class—can be a changemaker but also that changemaking can no longer remain the preserve of social entrepreneurs.

Indeed, the work of changemaking can be performed by and through any other profession—athlete, nurse, politician, artist, or nonprofit advocate—and in different forms, scales, and scopes of change. Even large organizations such as the Skoll Foundation, Echoing Green, and the Omidyar Network have claimed the mantle of “changemaker” for business and government intrapreneurs. But Budak wants to venture even further. For “inclusive changemaking,” a world without limits beckons.

This expansive perspective on both changemaking’s ends (beyond the social) and means (beyond entrepreneurship) emerges from the author’s experience as a changemaker who has supported hundreds of organizations and individuals operating across sectors over the last decade. The book builds on Budak’s practice in changemaking as well as his enormously popular undergraduate course at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, which features guest lecturers coming from the who’s who of global changemaking, from Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus to Change.org’s founder, Ben Rattray.

Becoming a Changemaker is organized into three parts, each focusing on one of the essential ingredients of the book’s recipe for changemaking: mindset, leadership, and action. Part 1, “Changemaker Mindset,” introduces the attitudes, traits, and behaviors that successful changemakers share, regardless of their sector. By drawing on current leadership and psychological research, Budak distills the essential building blocks of the changemaker mindset, from constantly questioning the status quo to learning to deal with setback through “learned optimism” and from “zigging when others zag” to using your imagination to “paint a picture of the future for others to follow.”

The second section presents the next step in the process of becoming a changemaker, moving from how to cultivate a changemaker mindset to examining how this facilitates the embrace of a new kind of leadership style. Budak calls this, simply, “changemaker leadership,” which he defines as “the ability to make meaningful things happen through and with other people.” This style is characterized by being collaborative, inclusive, action oriented, and experimental. It perceives relationships as networks of mutual partners that require trust and trust-building among all actors. Critically, the leadership style of a changemaker is one in which they are capable of influence without imposing hierarchical authority. In short, the changemaker is supposed to lead by channeling—as opposed to controlling or weaponizing—power.

Budak’s message is reminiscent of that of Purpose’s cofounder and CEO, Jeremy Heimans, and #GivingTuesday founder Henry Timms’ 2018 book New Power, whereby they differentiate “new power,” which operates “like a current” and is “peer-driven,” from “old power,” which is “jealousy-guarded … inaccessible, and leader-driven.” Yet, Budak overlooks their important caveat that “the battle and the balancing between old and new power will be a defining feature of society and business in the coming years”—that old power won’t, and can’t, simply disappear.

Following the logic of the book, from internal change and leadership philosophy to practice, Budak’s final section arrives at “changemaker action,” in which he reviews the panoply of distinct forms that changemaking can take, including nonprofit initiatives, intrapreneurship, artistic endeavors, and norm entrepreneurship. In offering the array of actions, he utilizes diverse methods—such as the for-profit sector’s lean start-up methodology, in which new ideas are swiftly tested for their feasibility, as well as those from the nonprofit sector, such as the theory of change model used to identify what a change effort seeks to do and why and how a change supposedly happens. Budak mixes and matches these methods to offer a one-page analytical framework he calls “Changemaker Canvas” that “takes the old-fashioned concept of a business plan and transforms it into a strategy,” thus helping “changemakers take change initiatives and break them down into smaller, manageable blocks.”

This book defies simple classification. Is it a collection of entertaining anecdotes for wannabe changemakers? A how-to manual? A leadership-motivational-self-help book? An autobiography? Becoming a Changemaker is all of the above. But, to be clear, it is not an introduction to social innovation. The book effectively popularizes major research findings from a variety of disciplines—from psychology to behavioral sciences to decision theory—by connecting the dots among fields that too often remain inaccessible beyond academia. It is essentially an attempt at glamorizing changemaking for a new generation of doers through a combination of personal stories and DIY tips backed up by the latest social science theories.

Against this backdrop, Budak offers readers the Changemaker Index, a self-assessment instrument composed of 25 questions that “measure an individual’s development as a changemaker” throughout their learning and life journey. Data from the first iterations of the index suggest that “not only is it possible to become a changemaker in a little as a few weeks,” Budak contends, “but, controlling for variables like age, gender, and race … anyone can, to a statistically significant extent, successfully become a changemaker.” Yet, given that the data Budak makes his assessment from are limited to the university students enrolled in his course, this conclusion might appear slightly overblown. At the same time, the tool promises to inform the work of dozens of philanthropies and other social change organizations that strive to evaluate their changemaking capacity.

So, is Budak’s claim that “everyone can become a changemaker” credible? Put differently, in a world characterized by endemic global inequalities and other structural injustices, is the argument that “everyone can be a changemaker” persuasive?

Rather than focusing on changemaking as a collective process that entails the restructuring of societal power relations, Budak focuses on changemaking as a fundamentally individualistic attempt at making marginal improvements to quality or quantity of life. Due to this individualistic and utilitarian approach, Becoming a Changemaker deliberately disregards—and therefore bypasses—complicated and systemic issues relating to democratic change, justice, and equity, which all affect the ability of someone, and especially someone systemically disadvantaged, to become a changemaker.

Is true changemaking leadership about being able to influence others or rather about giving others the space to express their potential?

Contrary to the prevailing contemporary social innovation research, the book ignores the processes and institutions that lead to—and too often make impossible—such change. When Budak nods to the existence of “structural barriers beyond us,” he immediately assigns the responsibility to overcome such obstacles to the very same individual changemaker, who “can, and must, create a world that works for each of us.”

Despite emphasizing an egalitarian and radically inclusive concept of changemaking, and despite a leadership style that emphasizes mutual collaboration, Budak’s changemaker emerges as a Hercules. This conclusion, which appears hard to reconcile with the author’s call for a diffused and collaborative changemaking leadership, raises a deeper question: Even accepting Budak’s premise that changemaking can be learned and is universally accessible, can this single method—can a single person—address the scale of today’s challenges?

A tension persists in the book between the celebration of the uniqueness of the changemaker as singular agent of change and the book’s parallel effort at demystifying and democratizing who a changemaker is. This strain is rendered even more acute by the vague and unclear nature of what the much-sought “positive change” should look like. While the book is not prescriptive about the scale or scope of the required change (provided that it is “positive”), it refrains from offering moral principles—be they sustainability, justice, or equality—or an associated sociopolitical vision upon which to build a better world.

Instead of imposing his own ideology, Budak presents a politically neutral tool kit to enable anyone to realize their own changemaker aspirations. Yet the vagueness surrounding the use of the term “positive change” not only risks emptying such a critical concept but also carries unintended consequences. By refusing to provide a basis for critiquing systems and institutions, Becoming a Changemaker risks recapitulating the world we live in today, populated by lionized individuals cultivating change in a societal vacuum. Wouldn’t such an outcome defy the very essence of changemaking, defined as challenging the status quo?

I contend that inclusive changemaking—by going beyond its traditional end (social) and conventional means (entrepreneurship)—inherently calls for more normative and contextual guidance. And that should focus not only on the “how” but also on the “why” each of us should become an agent of change. Ultimately, is true changemaking leadership about being able to influence others or rather about giving others space to express their potential? The book remains ambivalent on this fundamental question. 

Despite these limitations, Becoming a Changemaker is an important contribution to the broader changemakers’ community, especially at the time when changemaking ventures beyond the boundaries of social entrepreneurship.