| Development reshapes institutions, redistributes authority, and changes relationships that may have existed for generations. For public leaders, the challenge of implementation is not only delivering results. It is about managing the consequences of change itself. In this article: . Why successful reforms create unexpected losses. . Why many implementation failures occur during the transition between systems. . One question to ask your team before you start. |
Last week, I listened to Michael Woolcock’s last lecture at the World Bank. I have followed Michael’s work on policy implementation, state capability, and institutional change for more than a decade. It influenced how I understand development—not simply as a matter of economics, but as a process shaped by institutions, relationships, authority, and the way people make sense of the world around them.
Creative Destruction: Beyond economics
The lecture’s title—Development as Creative Destruction Revisited—sounded like a discussion about economics. But it was really about something much broader.
Economists tend to focus on what development creates: innovation, growth, productivity, and new opportunities. Woolcock focused on what it destroys. Development does not merely change economic outcomes. It changes communities, authority structures, identities, and relationships that hold them together.
To add nuance, he distinguished between four forms of creative destruction:
- Destructive Creation – intentionally dismantling existing systems to impose a new order.
- Creative Destruction – innovation replacing older technologies, industries, or practices.
- Deconstructive Creation – deliberately dismantling existing arrangements in the hope of creating something better.
- Paradigm-Level Creative Destruction – situations where people disagree not just on solutions, but on what counts as a problem in the first place.
What struck me most was not the typology itself, but Michael’s repeated reminder that our understanding of development is often incomplete. We are good at seeing what reforms create. We are worse at seeing what they disrupt.
For public leaders, this raises an important problem: We are quick to count what a reform delivers, and slow to count what it costs.
Why policy implementation is the management of trade-offs
One story from the lecture illustrates this perfectly.
Michael described a conversation with a village chief in Vanuatu. The chief proudly explained that his daughter would become the first person in their family to finish high school. He was grateful for what education would give her.
He was also worried.
His daughter increasingly viewed the village elders as uneducated. She talked about careers and opportunities that would likely take her away from the community. If she left, she might never return. Her children might not learn the local language. A different future was becoming possible for her, but that future also carried losses for the community she came from.
The chief thanked the program for supporting education, while he also felt it was destroying his community.
What I find powerful about this story is that both realities can be true at the same time. The daughter’s opportunities represented genuine progress. The chief’s concerns represented a genuine loss. Development created possibilities while simultaneously changing the relationships, traditions, and institutions that had previously organized community life.
Read quickly, this can sound like nostalgia. It is not. The daughter should get her education. The point is narrower and harder: even a reform that is clearly good still imposes a loss — and a leader who refuses to see it will be caught off guard by the resistance it creates.
This is where implementation gets messier than design.
Implementation is the management of trade-offs
Public leaders often search for the perfect solution. But implementation rarely works that way.
Michael Woolcock, Norman Loayza
Every meaningful change creates tensions. Between speed and participation. Efficiency and inclusion. National priorities and local realities. Innovation and stability. These tensions are not signs that something went wrong. They are often the consequence of meaningful change.
The job is not to remove them. It is to manage them well enough that the change survives.
I once heard that public policy is the art of the second best. And experience has shown me that is often the case.
Throughout the lecture, Michael returned to this idea from different angles. Whether discussing migration, urbanization, education, property rights, or state building, the underlying question remained remarkably consistent:
What happens when one way of organizing life is replaced by another?
Development changes what people do, but it also changes how people relate to one another. It changes the relationship between citizens and the state, between generations, between communities and markets, between formal and informal institutions. In many cases, these relational changes are harder to manage than the technical aspects of reform itself.
Policy failure lives in the transition
Many reforms fail on the way to their destination. The policy objective may be clear. The hard part is moving people from one system to another while preserving enough legitimacy, trust, and authority for the change to endure.
Changes create resistance. Authority is questioned. Existing arrangements become unsettled. It is during this transition that implementation succeeds or fails.
None of this means that development itself is misguided. Trade-offs are not an argument against change. It means leaders must understand the full consequences of change, not just the intended benefits.
One question before you start
There is one practical thing you can take from the lecture.
Before launching a reform, most teams are clear about what they want to create: the target, the metric, the result. Few map what the reform will displace.
Add one step to your design to get the full picture. Ask your team: if this succeeds, which relationships, roles, or sources of authority change — and who absorbs that loss? List them. Name who loses standing, income, status, or certainty, even when the reform is good. Then decide how you will carry those people through the transition.
You will not eliminate the losses. But a reform that anticipates them — that brings the people who lose into the design and the transition — is far more likely to last than one that discovers them later as resistance.
Successful reforms do more than solve problems. They reshape institutions, relationships, and the sources of legitimacy that hold them up.
So, before you start, ask yourself:
What else changes if we succeed?
The answer often decides whether the success lasts.