The “organizational catalyst” role, originally introduced by the Center’s founder in The Architecture of Inclusion, consists of individuals with knowledge, influence, and credibility in positions where they can mobilize change within complex structures such as modern research universities. Organizational catalysts occupy a position at the convergence of different domains and levels of activity. They have a mandate enabling them to connect information, ideas, and individuals and thereby solve problems and enable change. These are individuals in institutional roles, which enable them to enlist people with social capital and knowledge to act as change agents. They are situated at the nodal points of the institution, and they cut across silos that usually do not interact.
Organizational catalysts also have legitimacy and power within the various communities of practice that determine the background rules and make the cumulative decisions that define professional growth. They can speak the language in the currency of the community. Their multi-level interactions create a learning loop between individual and systemic negotiations by accumulating data from individuals, thus enabling identification of patterns, which then enables systemic intervention, which in turn feeds back to improve the capacity of individual negotiators.
Organizational catalysts occupy different formal roles within organizations: in the higher education arena they could be provosts, admissions directors, diversity officers, organizational ombudsman, directors of research initiatives, in-house counsel, or leaders of programmatic initiatives, curricular innovation or community based organizations. Indeed, formal responsibility for advancing diversity does not guarantee that the individual will operate as an effective organizational catalyst.
Rather, the capacity to link individual and systemic problem solving results from a combination of factors: (a) the legitimacy, skill, and systems orientation of individual change agents, (b) a strategic position providing those individuals with access to negotiations in many venues and with opportunities to mobilize change at multiple levels, and (c) a larger initiative that links bottom-up and top-down change.
