CHANGING PLANNING BY CHANGING PRACTICE.

HOW WATER MANAGERS INNOVATE THROUGH ACTION

Margit van Wessel, Ronald van Buuren and Cees van Woerkum

Accepted for publication in Public Management Journal

Abstract:

In this study, we show how water managers who were not in strategic decision-making

positions strategized in order to innovate water management practice. They undertook

actions in order to infuse water management with a pragmatic logic that in their view

would be better able to handle complexity. They addressed the requirements of an

organizational context dominated by rational comprehensive planning as the model

for acceptable action and associated forms of organizing that honor formally

regulated responsibilities. Existing organizational practices and the logics grounding

these were the counterpoint of their strategy, as well as the source on which they drew.

Conventional forms of planning and organization were changed from within, through

insider action woven into the existing organizational process and form. And although

acting from a logic that competed with established practices, these managers avoided

confrontation and battle on the level of logic. They rather strategized by harnessing

existing practices to infuse water management with a new logic.

1

Leo, Edgar, and Will are water managers, working for a regional

water authority, an organization responsible for water

management in a region of the Netherlands.1 For some years now,

the three men have been dissatisfied with the results achieved

with their work. They see that many of the plans that they and

their colleagues develop and try to carry out take much longer

than planned, and are often only partly realized. Leo, Edgar,

and Will are not alone. Within water management in the

Netherlands, as elsewhere, there is much frustration and talk of

the need for changes in policymaking that will help achieve real

results more quickly. Water management has become more complex,

with multiple stakeholders becoming more and more involved in

policy processes, with more horizontal cooperation between them

and governmental organizations increasingly becoming the norm.

In addition, new challenges have arisen, most prominently that

of climate change. In the regional water authority in which

Edgar, Will, and Leo work, these shifts are also acknowledged

and acted on. The organization’s management encourages the

exploration and development of innovations. Working with their

project team, and in interaction with their leadership and other

stakeholders, Edgar, Will, and Leo initiated and led one such

2

process. Over the past few years, they have not only explored

and developed ideas, but also implemented a form of policymaking

that was novel for their organization. They organized an

innovative, participation-orientated policy process, and

simultaneously sought to create legitimacy for this within their

organization. In addition, following up on successes they see

being achieved, they have been developing their innovations

further, and have been working towards their application in

other projects as well.

However, these water managers are not the top leaders of

their organization and therefore do not have final

responsibility for strategic decision making. So how did they

manage to innovate? And what can we learn from them about

innovation in policymaking? In our view, there are important

lessons to learn here. We start this paper with an introduction

to the theoretical debate to which we seek to contribute, that

of strategy as practice. We then move to the subject upon which

the water managers sought to strategize (project planning and

allocation of responsibilities with regard to project planning)

and what they wanted to achieve. After an explanation of our

3

approach and methodology, we present our findings and clarify

their broader significance.

STRATEGY AS PRACTICE

In our view, the innovations devised by Edgar, Will, and Leo can

be understood and made useful for a wider context by an analysis

through the prism of ‘strategy as practice’, a currently up-and-

coming approach to the study of (organizational) strategy.

Scholars researching strategy from this perspective approach

strategy as something actors do rather than have. Rooted in the

premise that it is through the detailed study of micro-

activities that we come to understand the nature of

strategizing, research focuses on the everyday processes and

practices constituting the everyday activities of organizational

life and relating to strategic outcomes.2

Following strategy as practice scholar Jarzabkowski (2005),

we here define strategy as a situated, socially-accomplished

flow of activity that has consequential outcomes for the

direction and/or survival of an organization; and we define

strategizing as the construction of such flows of activity. We

primarily seek to clarify the nature of strategizing by

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organizational actors, without claiming their significance for

patterns enacted by people throughout the organization; however,

we do claim that this strategizing by organizational actors has

potentially broader organizational significance, in that

strategizing is here clearly directed towards organizational

practice beyond the actors involved.

In our view, the actions undertaken by Edgar, Will, and Leo

are interesting for students of strategy as practice because

they touch upon a set of interrelated questions that scholars

have been grappling with. Since we discuss innovation by

managers who are not the top leadership of the organization,

this paper connects with the debate about the strategic role of

middle-level managers (Balogun and Johnson 2004; Rouleau 2005;

Currie and Procter 2005; Mantere 2005). However, whereas the

literature primarily focuses on managers’ questions of

sensegiving and sensemaking connected to their position-specific

knowledge, this paper approaches the role of middle managers

from an alternative angle: that of the connections for competing

logics, actions, and institutional context.

Following Lounsbury (2007, 289), we see a logic as

referring to “cultural beliefs and rules that structure

5

cognition and guide decision making in a field. At the

organization level, logics can focus attention of decision

makers on a delimited set of issues and solutions, leading to

logic-consistent decisions that reinforce extant organizational

identities and strategies.” Lounsbury argues that efforts to

innovate practice must be conceptualized as fundamentally

constituted, but not determined, by institutional rules and

beliefs that are embedded in existing practices. He calls for

development of an institutionalist approach to practice that

focuses on attention to the broader cultural frameworks that

field-level actors often devise and alter, as well as the

activities and “work” of organizations and other actors that

interact with those frameworks.

While interested in agency and competition among logics,

Lounsbury and Crumley observe that, so far, the analysis of

actors and their role in catalyzing institutional change has

exaggerated the ability of actors to create, alter, and

transform institutions. They call for a more nuanced approach

that does justice to the power of broader institutional forces,

beliefs, and structural configurations to constitute and shape

individual activities (Lounsbury and Crumley 2007, 1008). In

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this paper, we seek to show how the project management team

engaged with such broader institutional forces, beliefs, and

structural configurations in their efforts to innovate in the

domain of water management. The key observation we present is

that, in their recognition of broader institutional forces,

beliefs, and structural configurations, water managers innovated

by harnessing these rather than confronting them. Although their

innovations were clearly rooted in a pragmatic logic that

competed with the logic of rational comprehensive planning that

dominated water management practice in their organization,

propagating this logic was a relatively marginal part of the

project management team’s strategy. Rather, preceding and during

their quest to innovate, the project management team sought to

avoid confrontation between logics by strategizing for

innovative activity to precede the sensegiving of the same (as a

competing logic) by other members of the organization.

Innovations were inserted into existing practice as if not in

competition with these. In addition, the project management team

banked on sensegiving by other members of the organization to be

informed by the positive results of the innovations rather than

the nature of the logic behind the innovations. Whereas

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Lounsbury’s research (2007, see also Lounsbury and Crumley 2007)

suggests that theorization of anomalous activity is an intrinsic

part of the process of legitimation of a new practice, we see

here rather that this theorization, in terms of competition

between logics, is avoided.

Central to our analysis of how this could be done is our

reconsideration of the relations between logic, actions, and

institutional context that this case offers. The case we present

here can help us to develop our understanding of the interaction

between logic and practice.

We connect here also with the place of discourse in the strategy

as practice debate. Much of the literature on strategy as

practice that studies dynamics around legitimation of activities

does so through the prism of discourse, seen as central to

strategies for legitimation. Quests for legitimation are then

primarily understood in terms of dialectics. Authors focus on

actors’ efforts to establish dominance of certain understandings

of what happens or should happen (e.g. Jarzabkowski 2005) or on

competition among groups embracing different discourses (e.g.

Lounsbury 2007; Laine and Vaara 2007). What we see in our case,

however, is rather how organizational members who know “the done

8

thing” – accepting the force of broader institutional forces,

beliefs, and structural configurations – employ their knowledge

to harness existing practices to insert a new logic into water

management, avoiding discursive battles. The insights we develop

here thus relate to research that explores interaction between

practices and (conflicting) meanings, such as Rerup and

Feldman’s recent analysis of the complex interplay between

interpretive schemata and routines in an organization they

studied (Rerup and Feldman 2011).

Our learning was facilitated by our access to activities of

Leo, Edgar, and Will and their discussions of them over an

extended period of time, as their project proceeded. What Leo,

Edgar, and Will did was, arguably, coherent and recognizable as

strategic. However, the strategies were not predetermined and

fully articulated, but took their shape in the context and

course of the water management project for which they were

responsible. While keeping a broad and future-oriented vision of

innovation in mind, the project management team’s strategic

reasoning was always closely tied to actions they developed in

response to concrete requirements that arose in the course of

the project. And it was through these actions that we as

9

researchers learned about the strategic nature of what they did.

Certainly, the patterns of consistency that we found were not

argued by the water managers in our terms. They rather spoke of

their actions as making self-evident sense, flowing from

awareness of the delicateness of the situation, and the need to

be “careful.” In the micro-context in which they worked, they

knew “the done thing,” and from that knowledge were able to

devise the strategy as they did – without necessarily

articulating it as we do here. However, because we learned how

the actions they undertook related to each other, we could

identify what tacit knowledge of what “could work” informed

action, and how that knowledge related to, and fed back into,

the organizational context of the regional water authority.

With our analysis of strategy as embodied in action, we

engage with a central question in the strategy as practice

field. As Johnson et al. (2007, 27) put it: “to what extent is

strategic activity driven by or a function of routine, as

distinct from being idiosyncratic? Or, to reconfigure the

question: what role does the individual actor play in relation

to institutionalized structures and routines?” While this

question is concerned with broad questions on the nature of

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sensemaking and its relation to action (Weick 1995), and the

situating of sensemaking in societal structures (Johnson et al.

2007, 41), we specifically address here Chia and McKay’s

theoretical argument on this matter. According to these authors,

much strategy as practice research maintains that we can

understand strategy by analyzing it as reasoned and articulated,

by individuals relating to the context in which they work and

acting consciously on that context. Building on practice theory,

Chia and McKay argue that we should not seek to explain strategy

through a methodological individualism that favors self-

contained individuals’ intentions and arguments explaining their

relations and actions with their external environment. Rather,

we should focus on actors’ internalized dispositions that

provide directionality to action – a modus operandi rather than

a matter of conscious intent – that present themselves through

the actions actors carry out. In their view, we need a truly

practice-oriented approach to strategy as practice that “1)

places ontological primacy on practices rather than actors; 2)

philosophically privileges practice-complexes rather than actors

and things as the locus of analysis; and 3) makes the locus of

1 In order to protect the identities of the water managers, we have changed names.2 See http://www.s-as-p.org/, the website of the Strategy as Practice network

11

explanation the field of practices rather than the intentions of

individuals and organizations” (Chia and McKay 2007, 232).

This closely connects with the question of how strategies

are structured. We engage here with key arguments on this that

have been made in recent years. A number of authors suggest that

we should understand internalized dispositions as historically

shaped – actors act on the basis of (largely tacit) knowledge

acquired in their context. Strategies should thus be understood

as embedded in the context in which they are carried out. If

actors draw on historically and culturally shaped practices, we

can understand strategy by understanding this interaction

between strategists and their context (Jarzabkowski and Spee

2009; Chia and Holt 2006; Chia and McKay 2007). In our case, the

context to which we are referring is the context of

institutionally embedded practices of water management rooted in

the logic of rational comprehensive planning at which the

project management team innovation efforts were targeted.

Arguments such as that of Chia and McKay have been made

before, with Whittington arguing as early as 1996 that

practitioners are able to “get things done because they know the

done thing” (Whittington 1996, quoted in Jarzabkowski 2005, 23).

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However, empirical research on this front has been minimal. “The

possibility that strategic change and the directions taken may

be brought about by culturally and historically shaped

tendencies and dispositions acquired through social practices

internalized by the actors remains relatively unexamined”, as

Chia and McKay put it (2007, 226; see also Jarzabkowski and Spee

2009).

INTERACTIVE IMPLEMENTATION

From 2006 to 2009, water managers of three regional water

authorities, researchers from three Dutch universities, and a

team of consultants from a civil engineering agency regularly

came together to explore and develop the practical possibilities

of an alternative approach to planning in water management

called Interactive Implementation. This approach (fathered by

Govert Geldof, see Geldof 2005) is grounded on the premise that,

in water management, conditions of complexity and concomitant

uncertainty make the rational comprehensive planning model

impossible to work with. Rational comprehensive planning assumes

that projects move in stages, from policy to design to

implementation and then maintenance, and is based on assumptions

13

of complete information and formal allocation of

responsibilities.

While bearing family resemblance with classic critical thought

on strategic planning (Mintzberg 1993), policy decision making

(Lindblom 1959) and policy implementation (Pressman and

Wildawsky 1973), Geldof’s Interactive Implementation focuses on

interactions between actors in water management projects. In

Geldof’s view, comprehensive plans for such projects are

unavoidably based on incomplete knowledge, which plans are,

again unavoidably, confronted with after “the baton” is passed

to the next stage. On the basis of this premise, Geldof’s

“Interactive Implementation” approach seeks to do water

management grounded in an alternative logic, integrating policy

development, implementation, and maintenance. Complexity is to

be handled by the creation of “hot welds” that connect actors

from different disciplines (policy development, implementation,

maintenance) as well as external stakeholders such as local

residents. By exploring opportunities together -- and by

handling or circumventing barriers to ideas as they arise by

acting on ideas -- plan development, and implementation go hand

in hand. The problem of plans falling apart because of, e.g.,

14

technical problems that arise during implementation, or

particular landowners refusing cooperation, can thus be avoided.

Opportunities that come up, such as landowners willing to

cooperate, or found chances of realizing policy goals in

alternative ways, can be taken advantage of. Water management

can then take shape in a process that allows for uncertainty and

gives actors room to learn about, as well as create, practical

possibilities. Policy is then realized through shared and

practical involvement in bringing together knowledge,

perspectives, and interests (Geldof 2005).

The role of the water managers in the Interactive

Implementation collaboration was to experiment with the

approach; the university researchers’ role was to analyze the

experiments on the basis of their knowledge in the fields of

public administration and communication science. One of the

regional water authorities, represented in the project by water

manager Edgar, experimented with the approach in a project that

we here call creek restoration project Westerheide. In the mid-

2000’s, his regional water authority had been handed the task of

restoring a number of creeks in this area that were noted for

having certain hydrological, ecological, and cultural values.

15

Based on these values, the province decided on a set of goals to

be achieved with regard to these values – goals the regional

water authority was to realize by 2013.

Edgar, project manager for the Westerheide Creek

Restoration, had experimented with innovations in an earlier

project, while working for another regional water authority.

When he became acquainted with the Interactive Implementation

idea, he felt that his own ideas, experiences, and plans matched

those of this approach. It was then that Edgar decided to join

the Interactive Implementation collaboration. As project manager

of the Westerheide project, Edgar was the most directly involved

in initiating and realizing the innovations within this project.

Leo was his Department Head, and although not directly involved

in the Interactive Implementation collaboration, he was

knowledgeable about this approach and supportive of Edgar. Will

was Leo’s superior, and an important link between Edgar and Leo

on the one hand, and the organization’s top leadership (the

Board) on the other.

Although the three did not agree fully on everything and

did not have similar involvement with the project, they

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strategized in alliance to such a degree that we refer to their

actions as those of the “project management team.” The project

management team sought to innovate in different ways, and

addressed collaboration with a range of stakeholders, external

as well as internal. In this paper, however, we focus on their

strategizing in relation to the top leadership of the

organization: the democratically elected body of the Board that

was in a position to agree or not to the innovations – and, with

that, grant or withhold legitimacy and financial support. In

other words, we focus on the project management team’s form of

engaging with a key part of their authorizing environment (Moore

1995).

The reason for this is that an important part of the

project management team’s efforts to innovate was strategizing

to achieve the Board’s agreement to the changes they sought to

bring to water management. This was for a good reason: their

innovations were grounded in a logic that competed with the

logic grounding the rational comprehensive planning process

dominant within the regional water authority. They sought to

move away from the premise that water management happens through

fully worked-out plans, evaluated and decided on by responsible

17

decision makers, which are then implemented. Important elements

of the logic behind rational comprehensive planning – that water

management is to take place on the basis of full information and

through formal allocation of responsibilities -- were

problematic for them. The project management team rather sought

to work with an incrementalist logic (cf. Lindblom 1959;

Mintzberg 1993) that tied together planning and execution.

They approached water management as a process that ideally

should involve learning by doing. They thus sought to bring into

water management a logic requiring plans to have room for

adaptation, and requiring sharing of responsibilities among

actors. (If plans cannot be decided fully beforehand, actors

involved in different stages of a project need to have room for

decision making.)

Starting out from the principle that one must work without

full information and control, or with a clear division of

responsibilities, clearly implies a challenge to existing

practices and frames of reference based on the logic behind

rational comprehensive planning. Within the regional water

authority, plans were supposed to be highly detailed and

finalized before presentation to the Board, which had the

18

responsibility of approving these before implementation could

start – and after acceptance of the plan, little was supposed to

be able to be changed. And yet the project management team

inserted their competing logic into the organization by

procedure changes and role changes among Board and project

management, and negotiated their implementation at the level of

a concrete project. They successfully strategized for

development and acceptance of a form of water management that

was informed by a new and alternative logic that moved away from

the premise that water management is to take place on the basis

of fully worked-out plans, and from formal allocation of

responsibilities.

So how did they do this? Our central argument, based on our

analysis of the data we gathered, runs as follows: the project

management team sought to innovate by transforming elements of

the existing policy process, while simultaneously seeking

legitimacy for the transformations they introduced. This they

did by relating their innovations to existing organizational

practices and frames of reference – and espoused ambitions,

structures, processes, and goals expressive of legitimate

meanings within the organization. They drew on these to confer

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legitimacy on their innovations rather than on the merits of the

innovative ideas themselves. They did so on the basis of a

shared knowledge and perspective as to what constituted prudent

operation.

Edgar, Will, and Leo were constantly aware of the strategic

implications of their activities. As far as the content of the

changes was concerned: their activities were connected with the

project, but they consistently explained their own actions as

steps towards further change in a specific direction: more

flexibility in the planning and implementation process. And as

far as their communication with the context in which they

operated was concerned: they clearly articulated to us that they

communicated the way they did to seek legitimacy through

negotiation with the context in which they operated. Edgar,

Will, and Leo also clearly stated to us that they sensed that

their novel ideas were being interpreted by other members of the

organization from existing frames of reference that were

anchored in organizational practices that had strong legitimacy.

In the course of our analysis of the project management team’s

actions and their reflections on them, it became clear to us

that the three acted on the understanding that their chances of

20

success would be helped by minimizing the threat to these

established practices and frames of reference. They realized

that their chances of success would be helped by relating to

beliefs within the organization rather than by seeking

confrontation (cf. Kelman 1995 on frame resonance in a change

management context).

The discrete actions that the project management team

undertook were shaped by their addressing the requirements of an

organizational context dominated by rational comprehensive

planning as the model for acceptable action, and associated

forms of collaboration that honor formally allocated

responsibilities. The articulated reasoning involved in the

strategizing we found seems, at first sight, to be at odds with

Chia and McKay (2007). In their view, strategizing based on

knowing, is inarticulate. But the project management team’s

discussions consistently evolved around actions addressing a

concrete situation at hand in explicitly strategic terms:

certain actions needed to be undertaken at specific moments in

the policy process since the ideas at hand were “delicate”

within the organization; since solutions had to be devised “step

by step” or “carefully” in order to get innovative ideas

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“accepted” so that faster implementation could become a reality.

However (and here we see how the project management team’s

strategizing does agree with Chia and McKay’s view), in their

presentations and explanations of what they did the project

management team never explicitly defined the logic of their

actions. They never addressed how “being careful” should lead to

certain actions rather than others. Although actions were

clearly articulated as strategic, it was through the actions

that the strategy took shape, and it was through the actions

that the logic of linking innovations to organizational

artifacts surfaced. In other words, the logical consistency in

their strategizing – what “being careful” consisted of – could

only become known retrospectively.

APPROACH AND METHODOLOGY

How did we go about learning about the project management team’s

strategy? From 2007 to 2009, we, as researchers of Wageningen

University, had the opportunity to study the innovative efforts

of Edgar, Will, and Leo as they happened. We could follow the

actions they undertook in order to achieve the innovations they

thought would be beneficial (in terms of faster and more

22

complete implementation of policy), as well as the reasoning

they offered to us to explain their specific actions, over a

period of three years.

We regularly met and spoke with the project management

team. In addition, for an adequate grasp of the context in which

the project management team worked and the policy process we

were studying, we attended meetings, interviewed other members

of the organization, and studied organizational documents such

as memos, plans, reports, and minutes. We investigated the

nature of the innovations devised by the project management team

as well as the reasoning by which the project managers explained

their actions.

The key question with which we entered our research was:

how can project managers realize the ideas of Interactive

Implementation in organizations that tend to be attuned –

mentally and in their practices – to more conventional planning

forms? The collaboration between us as researchers on the one

hand, and the water managers of this regional water authority on

the other, primarily consisted of a series of interactions

oriented to helping us make sense of the experiments and

reasoning of the water managers. In our view, they were speaking

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from a unique position of knowledge of a micro-context that to

us was nonetheless of broader interest because it was imbued

with meanings and practices that had a much wider bearing than

that of this particular organization. To us, if there were

people who could figure out how to make the vision of

Interactive Implementation a reality, it was water managers such

as these who were keen to innovate while being insiders to

conventional water management practice and its orientation

towards rational comprehensive planning and formal allocation of

decision making and responsibilities. Charged as we were with

learning about the possibilities of Interactive Implementation

for water management in the Netherlands, we were interested in

how their actions made sense in their organizational context, as

well as how their actions could be of relevance for other water

management organizations, in the Netherlands as well as

internationally.

Our data analysis consisted of a largely inductive search

for patterns in the data. In the course of this process we

realized that the prism of strategy as practice was the one with

which we could best learn how to understand the actions

undertaken by Edgar, Will, and Leo in order to realize

24

Interactive Implementation. We began to focus on how the outcome

(a set of strategic practices) was structured, and it is this

structuring that we have learnt something about.

ADAPTING PLANNING AND REGULATION OF RESPONSIBILITIES

It has been widely acknowledged that agency in organizations is

distributed (e.g. Jarzabkowski 2005, 27; Regnér 2003; Rouleau

2005). Edgar, Will, and Leo were in a position to act

strategically even if they were not formally in a position to

decide on organizational strategy. Although not seeking to alter

organizational goals, Edgar, Will, and Leo sought to change the

way these goals could be legitimately achieved, and the actions

they took were meant to contribute to this change. The project

management team sought to move away from standard planning

procedures and regulation of responsibilities, and to structure

the policy process in a new way, in line with principles of

Interactive Implementation. The key challenge here for the

project management team was getting the Board to agree to the

changes they wished to realize. Normally, in this regional water

authority, the Board decides on plans after they have been

developed in detail. In the project management team’s view, this

25

left insufficient room for adaptation after the Board’s approval

had been granted. In their perspective, and in line with

Interactive Implementation, such an approach to policymaking

impedes the flexibility needed to handle complexity effectively.

A detailed and fixed plan can be confronted with problems during

the implementation stages, when it becomes clear that a

situation on the ground is different than expected, and not in

line with the requirements of the plan. As far as the project

management team was concerned, the project’s pace of

implementation would be helped by a more open process that left

room for the project team to develop the project in negotiation

with external stakeholders, and to make decisions about

implementation of project goals more independently. With this

type of flexibility, negotiations with external stakeholders

like landowners whose cooperation would be needed could be

started early on. Plan development and implementation could go

hand in hand, as they could engage with barriers and

opportunities as they arose. Developments such as encounters

with willingness or unwillingness of particular landowners, or

technical challenges or opportunities learned about during

26

discussions with maintenance staff or implementation of parts of

the project could be engaged with productively.

However, such innovations imply the insertion of a new and

competing logic: the assumptions of complete information and

formal allocation of responsibilities would be inverted. Without

a detailed plan, the organization’s higher management (the Board

that was to make the final decision on the plan) would be left

with uncertainties about the project. What would be the outcome?

How would different elements hang together? How to keep track of

progress? In the project management team’s engagement with these

questions, existing organizational practices and norms were the

counterpoint of strategy, as well as the source on which they

drew. Seeking to move away from established practices and norms,

the project management team constantly sought to connect with

these practices rather than subvert them. The project management

team understood the Board’s concerns, and developed and

presented a set of ideas that offered flexibility but also a new

structure for their policy process. The strategically central

element was the Global Plan, which defined the project in

general terms rather than in detail. On the basis of this Global

Plan, smaller projects could be developed in detail and

27

implemented. A large project could thus be developed and

implemented step by step. A strategically important element

within the global plan was that of defined objectives rather

than detailed measure to be taken. As Leo stated:

The board should decide about the basic idea of the

project. They should not decide whether there should be a

barrage or that it should be a cascade or whatever. The

important thing is that the objectives are achieved.

Planning by objectives would provide the project team with

flexibility with regard to the means by which to attain goals.

The flexibility would help overcome barriers to implementation

that can arise while working with a detailed and fixed plan.

Will explained the benefits of the flexibility provided by

planning by objectives:

It makes the administrative apparatus more flexible. By

defining objectives we create more flexibility as to where

we get to work. Our Board always first wanted a list of

what activities, what creeks are you going to take on? What

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will your actions consist of? And now we say to our Board:

we’ll do 50 kilometers. We have a list of what we think

we’ll do. But of these, two parts can’t be done because

it’s too hard. We’ll take two other parts. Where it’s

easier. And the two other parts are kept for later. We’ll

take more time for it. But in case of a delay, we can still

achieve our goals.

The project management team envisaged smoother and faster

attainment of results: policy implementation would be sped up.

At the same time, Will clearly understood that this presented a

major change:

We used to have this starting point: if we take a creek,

this is what needs to be done. Some trees over here, a

nature-friendly bank over there. Fish ladder. Etcetera.

That would be the plan. Now we say, wait. If we could plan

it as we wanted, we would put it over here. And a pool over

there. But now we’ve got a farmer coming. And the farmer

says: I’d like a pool on my land. Well, then we put it

there instead of the other place. In the end, the picture

29

is different from what you have if you plan it all ahead.

But if you look at the goals, you will see that the goal is

one pool and two fish ladders. Then that is realized. Only

in a different place. It’s a totally different way of

thinking.

The project management team understood its innovations as

sensitive within the organizational context. To members of the

Board, the innovations could signify a loss of influence and

control. As Will explained:

For 20 to 30 years the Board has been used to talking about

creeks. And to know exactly which creek is going to be done

next year. And what will happen exactly. Etcetera. Now,

that’s pushed to the background more and more. The Board is

to focus on the outlines. And we get to figure out what can

be done quickest.

To engage with Board apprehensions about loss of influence and

control that they feared, the project management team defined in

the Global Plan not only the objectives of the project, but

30

supplemented these with more concrete insights into the

intentions of the project team: a set of drawings that conveyed

what results the project team had in mind; information about the

desired velocity of flow; degree of shading alongside the creek,

quantity and nature of vegetation, etc.; an overview of possible

measures to be undertaken; a cost estimate. Indeed, in Leo’s

view, the responsibilities of the Board would actually not be

diminished by their acceptance of the Global Plan. The

responsibilities would only be regulated differently, as Leo

argued:

The responsibility of the Board, that stays. In the end,

it’s the Board that decides whether money will be made

available. It’s the Board that decides whether these are

the objectives that must be attained. …But the Board must

focus on the outlines and on achievement of the goals. How

to go about it after the outlines and goals have been

decided on, that should be left to the organization.

As far as Leo was concerned, the setup of the Global Plan, with

its clarity in the outlines, would limit, for the Board, the

31

risks connected with agreeing to the flexibility it provided. An

important element of the dominant logic – that responsible

authorities are in control of processes, taking decisions on the

basis of information – was thus accommodated. As Leo explained:

This way the Board can get clear for itself what will and

will not be happening. I think this was their fear; that

they would have too little control of that, and that things

would happen that were really not acceptable to them.

As far as the project management team was concerned, the Global

Plan and its supplements could present to the Board a new form

of the design of the policy process and responsibilities. This

was intended to provide the Board with information and control,

and to build the Board’s confidence in the intentions and

capacities of the project team, so that it could more easily let

go of established forms of planning and regulation of

responsibilities. However, the project management team also

anticipated that obtaining agreement from the Board would demand

more than this. They sensed that, with their innovations, they

were “treading a fine line,” as they put it. In tandem with

32

development of the new form of the policy process, the project

management team therefore also worked on the legitimacy of their

innovations within the organization.

CREATING LEGITIMACY

The project management team employed a number of strategies in

order to create legitimacy for their innovations. They certainly

attempted to promote Interactive Implementation as a “good

idea.” Sharing and discussing their ideas within the

organization, informally and during meetings, the project

management team sought to propagate their ideas. As Edgar told

us, they did this “simply by mentioning it occasionally, or

passing a remark about it. And asking, “’Hey, how would you like

it if we did it like this?’ Without referring to a concrete

project.”

The project management team interacted with others in the

organization not just to enhance the viability of their ideas in

general, but also to estimate viability at particular points in

time. The information they acquired about the degree of

viability could then be taken into consideration when working

out what form of innovation to present within the organization,

33

and in which way. For example, they learned that there were

apprehensions within the Board about citizens being granted the

role of co-decisionmakers in policymaking. Proposals in that

direction had been suggested to the Board by others in a

meeting, but unsuccessfully. Leo told us:

What I got back from that meeting with the Board is that

they made clear that they were not ready for something like

that. They didn’t think it was a good idea, and rejected

it. That closed the door on innovations like that for

Westerheide. After that, it appeared no longer discussible.

At this point, the project management team realized that the

Board would not permit a form of policymaking that appeared to

hand over power to citizens. In fact, they consciously decided

subsequently to avoid altogether the term “interactive” in

communications about their innovations, so the Board would not

associate the project management team’s innovations with

interactive policymaking (as participatory policy development is

often called in the Netherlands), which had negative

connotations for the Board. As Leo told us:

34

So it was discussed, how that project ran, and then a

certain point it’s: yes, well, the Board isn’t really ready

for Interactive Implementation, or leaving it to the

region… so you get: “be careful, don’t call it Interactive

Implementation.” But you can do it in this way, we say. To

get the Board used to it. Also to make clear what you think

are the solutions. Indicate the breadth of measures, in the

plan you propose. This way they can imagine a lot about

what will and will not happen. We give a good indication of

costs. So the risks of saying yes to a Global Plan get

smaller. And all that turned out to be true.

In short, while seeking to establish connections between their

innovations and existing practices and frames of reference,

confrontation between logics was avoided. Moreover, the seeking

of legitimacy for their ideas on Interactive Implementation as a

logic as such played a remarkably small role in the project

management team’s efforts at creating space for Interactive

Implementation. Their adaptation of the form of the innovations

and the communication about these innovations within the

35

organizational context was much more prominent. In different

ways, the project management team sought to insert new logic

while keeping a low profile – not emphasizing the alternative

nature of the logic behind what they were doing, but rather de-

emphasizing this. Part of this particular strategizing for

legitimacy was discursive (cf. Jarzabkowski 2005; Rouleau 2005),

in the sense that the project management team strategically

employed language to construct and communicate the meaning of

their innovations within the organization. Another part involved

strategies for legitimacy that invoked espoused ambitions,

structures, processes and goals that were expressive of

legitimate meaning within the organization. In other words, they

strategized by drawing on a range of sources of legitimacy

provided by the organizational context itself.

This creation of legitimacy was contingent on situations

and interactions during the policy process. Construction and

communication of meaning took place around situations:

combinations of circumstances at a given time. To further their

cause, the project management team interpreted within situations

and communicated these interpretations to others in the

organization. Creation of legitimacy was also relational. It was

36

in interaction with others in their organizational context,

around situations that arose, that the project management team

provided interpretations that were, in their estimation,

appropriate, considering the audience that they were addressing.

Discursive work was thus linked to situations and interactions,

and meaning enacted (Hajer 2009).

We identified three main strategies. First, the project

management team sought to give meaning to their innovations by

drawing on the legitimacy of other ambitions that they knew had

currency within the organization; claiming that their ideas were

in line with these. Second, they constructed their innovations

as inconsequential, so that their dependence on formal support

would decrease. Third, they sought to connect successful

achievement of existing organizational goals to their approach

in order to make clear to other organizational members what

Interactive Implementation could signify for the organization:

something that works.

“We’re in Line with the Organization’s Ambitions”

Within the regional water authority, a range of discourses

around proper or desirable organizational functioning circulate,

37

and the project management team invoked such discourses in the

presentation of their ideas and activities. Knowing of the

legitimacy of experimentation for the purpose of organizational

learning, the project management team presented their

innovations as a pilot that could contribute to this goal. In

Edgar’s view, a pilot status gives to a project the status of

research; an experiment that can be allowed to go wrong.

References to the project as a pilot were strategically made:

I’ve referred to the project as a pilot all the time. Not

to people in the area, but internally. In communication

with the Board. It’s been in the proposals. During

meetings. The higher up in the line, the more this was

stressed.

In Edgar’s view, the pilot status of the project was accepted,

and this resulted in room for action being much enhanced.

The project management team also sought to promote their

ideas by translation (Rouleau 2005), selecting elements of the

innovation and connecting them with other ideas that they knew

had currency among organizational members. While sensitive and

38

not taken on head-on, citizen inclusion in policymaking has high

importance as a principle, at least in the sense that that

realization of public support through citizen involvement is

acknowledged as an important source of policy legitimacy. The

project management team discursively linked their innovations to

inclusive policymaking; Edgar told us, “I presented the ideas to

this person. And I tried to connect it with what I thought this

person wanted. Contact with citizens. Citizen influence.”

Relatedly, the project management team also sought to

justify their innovations by connecting them to another activity

undertaken in the organization that they knew had legitimacy. At

the time the Global Plan was being developed, the organization’s

upper management was developing a new organizational vision,

geared towards more inclusion of citizens and private parties in

the policy process. The project management team emphasized, in

its communication with the Board and the organization’s upper

management more generally, the agreement between the project’s

innovations and the organization’s new vision. While avoiding

the dangerous impression that they wanted to hand over

responsibility to citizens, the project team, so to speak,

“borrowed” the new vision’s legitimacy.

39

Innovations as Inconsequential

There were three ways in which the project management team

constructed their innovations as inconsequential in terms of

their effect on the organization and thus, the competitive

nature of the logic behind their innovations. Firstly, the

project management team addressed the issue of formal allocation

of responsibility by constructing their activities as falling

within their job descriptions. Having been made aware that their

ideas had limited legitimacy, the project management team

estimated that the Board might reject their innovations early

on, preempting the possibility of benefits becoming clear.

Development of a new form of plan design could be taken as

a challenge to the division of responsibilities between Board

and project management. The project management team therefore

decided to classify their developing a Global Plan as within the

bounds of their mandate, framing this activity as legitimate

because it was rooted in their taking responsibility for an

efficient and effective project setup. Furthermore, they

reasoned that developing a new design would in itself not have

major consequences for the organization, and would therefore not

40

necessitate a formal request for support. Articulation of the

innovative nature of their activity was thus avoided, and

thereby also the issue of the acceptability of the same. Taking

this route was attractive for the project management team since,

in their estimation, the desirability of Interactive

Implementation innovations would become clear during

experimentation. As Will told us:

Our Board wants to see what Interactive Implementation

means. Well, with this way of working we can show what it

means. The moment we choose to work with this new approach,

this is what it means and these are the consequences.

By constructing innovating as not really changing the division

of responsibilities in the organization, the project management

team created room to develop their ideas.

A second strategy that constructed innovations as

inconsequential was that of de-emphasizing the adaptability in

their project plan in its communications with the Board. The

reasoning we saw appearing here runs as follows: if the project

management team did not stress the innovative character of the

41

changes in procedure (adaptability), then the Board would not

see these changes as highly significant and therefore

potentially objectionable. Agreement would be achieved more

easily. The plan that the project management team presented to

the Board focused on content, with little attention to

procedural changes, as Leo told us:

The accent was on the content of the plan, not so much the

procedure. Procedure, that’s somewhere in the proposal, in

two or three sentences, briefly. Possibly they missed it.

In addition, the appearance of the plan was highly similar to

that of a conventional plan, even though its content was

actually different. As Edgar told us:

The Board was used to getting the fat, fully detailed

plans, with everything described down to the minutest bit.

Now it appeared as if everything was described down to the

minutest bit. But that wasn’t really the case.

42

A third strategy that constructed their innovations as

inconsequential was that of building into the project the

possibility of reverting to the established way of working.

During the development of the Global Plan, stakeholders in the

area were already being consulted by the project team, as part

of the plan development process. However, the exact and more

expansive nature of local stakeholder involvement in later

stages of the policy process envisioned by the project

management team was not divulged to them at this early stage. In

the interaction with local stakeholders, Edgar maintained the

possibility of dropping the new way of working in the course of

the process, if he had to.

In the interaction with residents I have to be very

careful. I want to convey that we do it together with them.

But at the same time, I can’t commit. Because the Board

could still decide that I have to revert to the

conventional way. So I constantly have to maintain two

scenarios. To be able to shift smoothly.

43

This way, the project management team would not have to go back

on promises if the Global Plan was not approved by the Board. As

Will stated “Suppose the Board blew the whistle on me. Then we

could simply go back to the old way. That’s also why the fat

plan was fat. Then I could still go the other way.”

In other words, the project management team in some

situations sought not to promote the innovation, but rather

chose to introduce it without always searching for dialectic

with established practices; in fact rather avoiding these. As

Edgar told us, “What we want to do all the time is introduce the

new way of working in the background. And that’s going quite

well. …The ultimate would be if we could work like this, and

that our Board or Director would say: ‘Actually, isn’t this how

we always did it?’”

The project management team was aware, though, that this

strategy had risks: problems could arise later on in the

project, when the consequences of working with a Global Plan in

terms of changes in planning and the allocation of

responsibilities would become clearer.

Something that Works

44

However, all this was not so much a matter of choosing to

innovate on the periphery (cf. Regnér, 2003) as one of buying

time and moving step by step – in order to achieve wider

legitimacy as time passed and the project moved on. The project

management team sought to obtain this wider legitimacy by

creating as well as presenting positive results, thereby to

overcome apprehensions. As Edgar put it, “taking away fears by

having an example.” The project management team invested more

time than usual in the project, and expected project team

members to do the same. Tighter deadlines than normal were

maintained. According to Edgar, after implementation had

started, the time would come to really show the benefits of the

approach:

First this has to be in the implementation stage. Then I

can really say: this is what we’re going to do and these

are the goals we will realize. And then we can present the

interactive element to the Board, because then we have an

example by which we can say “This is what it can mean.”

Then they’ll get the picture. …Then it will be easier to

silence people who say that this is nonsense. I don’t

45

really expect people to be saying, “You’re out of line.” I

think the organization will say, “Great that it got

implemented so quickly.”

Aware of the limited legitimacy of their ideas, and believing

that the legitimacy of their innovations depended on an image of

success, the project management team was highly motivated to

make sure this success was attained, and visibly so. As Edgar

put it:

In this project, I’ve experienced that it must not go

wrong. It simply will have to be successful. No matter

what. Because if not, the moment we come up with

Interactive Implementation again, we don’t stand a chance.

After part of the project had been completed, they declared the

approach a success: implementation had started much sooner than

normal, and there had been hardly any opposition from local

stakeholders. The project management team admitted that the

project had been relatively “easy,” with residents not having

interests strongly opposed to those the project served (such as

46

farmers on whose land the regional water authority might want to

operate). Still, they thought that the positive results were

important for the legitimacy of their innovations. As Will told

us:

The success of this approach has proven itself. We started

implementing more than a year sooner. Okay, this was the

easiest part of the project. And there are parts of the

area

that are more agricultural, and there it will be harder.3

But it was the idea, you start with the easy parts, start

implementing quickly, create an example. We’ve seen with

other projects that that helps. So nevertheless, the first

project is running great. And that’s good. It’s what you

need.

The project management team also wanted to make sure that

positive project results that became evident after some time

3 In the project management team’s view, projects involving negotiations withfarmers with regard to the usage or selling of their land can be expected to be tough. Farmers may also refuse to cooperate. This makes (timely) completion of projects problematic.

47

would be communicated and would also reach the Board. As Edgar

told us:

All we need to do now, with our communications people, is

make sure that the pieces that get into the media reach our

Board members. That they say, “Gee, nice article last

week.” And, “Gee, nice that you guys go about it that way.”

Through such project-related communication actions, legitimacy

would be built up, the project management team hoped. This

legitimacy might then provide them with license to innovate

further in the same direction. To assist in the development of

this process, the project management team devised a mid-term

evaluation through which they were able to communicate the

positive results mentioned above. As Edgar told us:

And now I’m at a stage at which to show that we implement

more and faster. So that we can really show the Board: this

has been effective. So let’s do this in other areas too.

And add a little extra; even more participatory. Because

48

we’re preparing another pilot. To implement Interactive

Implementation.

DISCUSSION

The project management team inserted an incrementalist logic

into their organization that tied together planning and

execution. This logic can be seen as in competition with the

logic behind rational comprehensive planning that was dominant

in their organization: that water management is to take place on

the basis of plans based on full information and through formal

allocation of responsibilities. Insertion of the incrementalist

logic, however, was not through confrontation. Through insider

action, this new logic could be inserted into existing practices

as if not in competition with these. The Global Plan and its

supplements created flexibility for the project management team

while accommodating the Board’s requirement of information and

control. Knowing, however, that their innovations lacked

legitimacy, the project management team attempted to create this

legitimacy through a range of activities, mostly not in terms of

a competing logic.

49

In their strategizing within the project, the project

management team sought to promote their ideas, but more

prominently sought to create legitimacy for their innovations by

drawing on organizational practices and frames of reference. So

rather than celebrating and propagating the innovative character

of their ideas, they often toned down this innovativeness and

rather sought to create legitimacy by relating their innovations

to what they knew to be legitimate already. First, they sought

to give meaning to their innovations by drawing on the

legitimacy of ambitions they knew had currency within the

organization: development towards inclusive policymaking and

organizational learning. Second, they constructed their

innovations as inconsequential, so that their dependence on

formal support would decrease. They (1) constructed their

managerial roles so as to accommodate their ambitions, (2)

presented their innovations as minor elements in a conventional

project setup, and (3) maintained the conventional project setup

to fall back on. Third, they counted on successful achievement

of existing organizational goals finally to make clear to other

organizational members (by “an example”) what Interactive

Implementation could mean for the organization: an innovation

50

that leads to faster and smoother implementation, with this

meaning (something contributing to organizational success)

granting them the legitimacy they needed to carry their ideas

further.

The case material presented here shows how managers who

were not in strategic decision-making positions innovated while

accepting the power of broader institutional forces, beliefs and

structural configurations to constitute and shape their

individual activities.

This strategizing by Edgar, Leo, and Will provides a new

angle on the connections between logic, actions, and

institutional context, particularly with regard to relations

between actions and strategizing for the legitimacy of these

actions. Much of the literature on strategy as practice that

studies strategizing for legitimacy focuses on discourse, giving

meaning to practices, in competitive terms (see e.g. Mantere and

Vaara, 2008; Jarzabkowski, 2005). Lounsbury and Crumley (2007)

even see confrontation between logics as essential to innovation

involving competing logics. On the basis of their research on

the competing (trustee and performance) logics in the money

management industry, they state that “the case of active money

51

management suggests that a key condition for new practice

creation is whether innovations generated by practice

performativity become socially recognized as anomalies by field-

level actors such as professions, industry, trade associations,

media, etcetera. If the irregularities are not problematized,

then extant theory will not be challenged, and rogue activities

will wane or persist in a marginalized fashion.” (Lounsbury and

Crumley 2007, 1005)

Although it is too early to tell how successful Edgar,

Leo, and Will have really been, it is clear that their strategy

involved a competing logic but avoided battle on the level of

logic in the sense of competition between discourses, but rather

involved a delicate harnessing of existing practices in order to

infuse water management with a new logic that did not even have

to be recognized as such, as far as they were concerned.

The diverse actions that shaped strategy in the course of

the policy process in our case had in common that they were

rooted in an acceptance of the force of practices and meanings

that stood in the way of the innovations: ways of working rooted

in rational comprehensive planning as practiced within their

organization, and concomitant formally regulated

52

responsibilities. Although the promotion of Interactive

Implementation as a desirable novel idea did take place, much of

the strategy rather sought to insert a new logic by connecting

innovations to espoused ambitions, structures, processes, and

goals that already had legitimacy within the organization. The

project management team strategized by incremental application

of their ideas within projects, accompanied by strategies to

neutralize the threat to existing ways of working that the

innovations might pose to other members of the organization.

Indeed, as Jarzabkowski (2004, 536) has put it: the micro-

context provided an opportunity for adaptive practice. Although

the innovations were largely inspired by external sources, it

was through the water managers’ participation in the social

process of problem-solving within the organization that external

meanings were made part of the organizational reality – through

practice. And it was through relating to these existing

organizational practices and frames of reference that strategic

thinking and acting of the project management team took shape.

So, although they strategized from a will to realize the

(competing) logic of Interactive Implementation within their

organization, they did so through the practices of their daily

53

work and the logics that informed these. We might even suggest

that a reason for their success was that what they promoted was

consistent with the logic of practice. The logic of practice is

not in contrast to practice, but embedded in practice – and the

water managers’ strategic activities were very consistent with

that logic.4

Practice was thus generative (Jarzabkowski 2004; Rerup and

Feldman 2011). Rather than seeking a confrontation of competing

logics, the project management team negotiated their logic

through their project design, and harnessed dominant logic to

create room and time for their innovations so that in the end,

results could become the source of its meaning rather than the

merits of their innovative logic in competition with the

dominant logic.

This does not mean that the new logic has “won.” In fact,

we might suggest that the dominant logic behind rational

comprehensive planning remains unchallenged at the level of logic; that

the new logic remains marginal, needing, as it does, existing

practices, frames of reference and success in terms of results

to stand a chance at survival. So, what is then, in fact, the

agency of the project management team with respect to 4 We thank an anonymous reviewer for this point.

54

institutional forces, beliefs, and structural configurations?

Our data suggest that project management agency lay in the

knowledgeable and skillful manipulation of these forces,

beliefs, and configurations in order to work according to a

competing logic and create practices of water management

informed by them that might become generative, on the basis of

their being there, as a reality, and being successful. Practices

that could, in Edgar’s view, thus even become “the done thing” –

through being done.

With these conclusions we engage with appeals made by

Johnson, Melin and Whittington (2003), Whittington (2006), and

others to connect micro-level analyses with macro phenomena. The

micro-level actions undertaken by Edgar, Will, and Leo related

to an organizational context that was itself shaped by macro

phenomena: rational comprehensive planning is still, in spite of

widespread critique and frustrations, the conventional model for

water management in many water management organizations as also

many other public organizations. The actions undertaken by the

water managers addressed the logic behind this model rather than

anything idiosyncratic. And while actions were shaped by micro-

context, the question they addressed was: how to deal with

55

complexity in public management? This is surely not a matter

only for Dutch water managers like Edgar, Will, and Leo.

56

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