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1. NATIONAL FORUM OF EDUCATIONAL ADMINISTRATION AND SUPERVISION JOURNAL
VOLUME 28, NUMBER 2, 2010-2011
LEADERS WHO MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE:
ENVISIONING EDUCATIONAL INITIATIVES
FOR POSITIVE SOCIAL CHANGE
Joe Claudet
Texas Tech University
ABSTRACT
This article profiles and examines the innovative social change efforts of
one outstanding educational leader — José Antonio Abreu. Abreu’s
unique program of classical music education for underprivileged children
and youth in Venezuela has become recognized worldwide as a highly
creative program model that combines classical music training with
human and social development in a way that enables young people
growing up in poverty conditions to develop both an appreciation for
music and hope for a better life. The leadership profile provides a
qualitative basis for deriving some distinguishing characteristics of
innovative change agent leaders.
Introduction
H
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istory has underscored time and time again the immense difficulties
associated with enacting positive social change. Part of the
intractability of social problems themselves, such as poverty, gang
violence, drugs, lack of any new revitalizing economic opportunities,
etc., stems from the fact that these kinds of systemic social problems
over time become engrained in the very fabric of the society itself.
Their societal presence becomes even further entrenched — reinforced
and exacerbated — with each successive generation, making it an
almost insurmountable challenge to turn the tide on existing problems
and offer new opportunities to a society’s population. And, sadly, in
these kinds of social circumstances, it is always society’s young
people who are most directly and adversely impacted.
Providing effective leadership in these kinds of conditions is
especially difficult. Many social improvement programs and
initiatives may be attempted with the best of intentions, but ultimately
fail because they do not have the far-reaching change vision and
implementation traction necessary to lift the boats in a socially
systemic way for a whole new generation of youth to provide them
with new and better life skills and opportunities.
The kinds of social improvement programs having the greatest
potential for making a real difference may be those that can be
designed and championed by those rare individuals: change agent
leaders who possess the unique combination of far-reaching vision,
convergent insight, and real-world skill to fashion genuinely
innovative program initiatives that can offer compelling new kinds of
educational opportunities to young people — life-enhancing
opportunities that, simply, did not exist before.

3. Joe Claudet 81
This article profiles one such innovative change agent leader and the
educational initiative that is transforming the lives of tens of thousands
of underprivileged young people — through social immersion in
classical music. The profile then serves as a qualitative basis for
conceptualizing some plausible defining characteristics of innovative
change agent leaders.
José Antonio Abreu and El Sistema
Venezuela is a country with a history of entrenched poverty and
economic challenges that has all too often stymied the ability of its
population — and, in particular, its young people — to find meaningful
opportunities for individual and social development. Given such a setting,
perhaps there was no other individual better suited, because of his peculiar
mix of personal background, education, and leadership vision, to address
these complex social challenges than José Antonio Abreu. Born in Valera,
Venezuela in 1939, Abreu is a pianist, economist, educator, social activist,
and politician. Abreu’s leadership vision and passionate commitment to
social improvement have enabled him, beginning in the early 1970s, to
envision and make reality a remarkable national social activist program
initiative — an initiative that’s been growing and thriving now for 35 years
and is continuing to expand even today — that targets the provision of life-
enhancing opportunities to underprivileged youth.
Abreu’s program initiative began tentatively in a garage one evening
when only 11 youngsters showed up for a first rehearsal of his fledgling
national youth orchestra project. In interviews today, Abreu (now in his
early 70s) often recounts the initial dismay he felt during those first few
moments of that first rehearsal back in 1975: he had 25 music stands, music
sheets in place, and high hopes for his idea, but the turnout of children was
considerably less than he had expected. However, when that eleventh young
child with his violin case came walking resolutely into the garage and sat
down, taking out his violin like nothing new was happening, ready and eager
to learn, Abreu knew he “had to do it” — he had to go forward in building
and implementing his visionary idea.
The most distinctive feature of his visionary idea is that his social
change initiative specifically targets underprivileged children — children

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living in slum tenements in the most poverty-stricken areas of Caracas,
Venezuela’s capital, as well as in towns and villages all across Venezuela —
who, through accidents of their birth, are trapped in a vicious cycle of
poverty, gang violence, and drugs and who, as a result, have little hope of a
better life. His national youth orchestra project idea over time became
successful and quickly grew into the National System of Children and Youth
Orchestras of Venezuela — popularly known as El Sistema. This national
system today involves some 240,000 Venezuelans who begin musical
training in El Sistema at the age of two.
The children and youth are placed in 210 Youth and Children's
Orchestras and a national network of choirs located in cities, towns, and
villages throughout Venezuela. The orchestras are based on 96 "orchestral
cells" or nucleos distributed around the country, each nucleo having at least
one orchestra. The specific educational method utilized involves giving very
young underprivileged youngsters musical instruments (first cardboard
instrument “cut-outs”, then recorders, and then real orchestral instruments)
and teaching them to play music within the social environment of an
orchestral setting.
Although only a relatively small percentage of the children and
youth who go through El Sistema end up pursuing careers in classical music,
studies of the program’s impact have shown that youngsters who are
involved in El Sistema do develop increased self-discipline and a desire for
life-long learning and development and consistently demonstrate higher
success overall in their general academic and career pursuits. Many of
Abreu’s original national youth orchestra project students from the 1970s
serve as senior instructors and facilitators of the program, and the program
also utilizes a “peer mentoring” method whereby older, more experienced
orchestral players coach younger players. The Venezuelan El Sistema
program also includes workshops where children learn to build and repair
instruments, special programs for children with disabilities or learning
difficulties, and specialist centers or institutes for phonology, audiovisuals,
and higher musical education.
Abreu, a master politician, organizational strategist, and social
activist, has successfully shepherded the growth of his program through ten
different Venezuelan governments (both left and right leaning), all of which
have recognized the social value of his idea and its potential for positively

5. Joe Claudet 83
impacting the lives of Venezuelan citizens. Abreu has consistently been able
to obtain significant national funding support for his El Sistema program
from its inception through the present.
The El Sistema program, which has achieved worldwide acclaim as
an innovative educational and social development program, represents an
intriguing convergence of social work, classical music education, and state
funding. Over the course of its 35-year history to date, the program has been
and continues to be impressively effective in realizing broad-based societal
change that successfully lifts children out of a life cycle of hopeless poverty
and drugs. Moreover, it has been consistently apparent to observers (both
within and outside of Venezuela) of this remarkable social change initiative
that José Antonio Abreu’s unique combination of leadership characteristics
— his bull dog (never-give-up) persistence, coupled with a great deal of
motivational energy and an overriding belief in young people — has enabled
him to succeed as an innovative social change agent against huge odds.
Understanding Innovative Leadership and Social Change
The remarkable success of José Antonio Abreu’s national social
change initiative, El Sistema, provides us with an opportunity to contemplate
the makeup of innovative change agent leadership. What are defining
attributes of leaders who somehow are able to envision new, innovative
social change initiatives and who then proceed to forge their creative ideas
into reality? What are some of the characteristics that distinguish the
personalities, the thinking, and the interactive style of such leaders —
characteristics that, in combination, somehow enable these leaders to develop
and implement their social change vision?
Based on an examination of the cumulative leadership efforts of the
creative individual profiled in this article, leaders — like José Antonio Abreu
— who are social change agents and who are widely acknowledged to be
“innovators” seem to possess a number of distinctive characteristics. These
characteristics involve the leader’s ability to: (1) see the big picture and think
in new ways; (2) motivate others to develop their potential; and (3) inspire
those around her/him to believe in and follow a compelling new story.

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Innovative Social Change Agents are Naturally Adept at Leveraging
Convergent Thinking
Change agent leaders who are innovative seem to possess a natural
inclination toward convergent thinking. They can see both the trees and the
whole forest. They are natural bricoleurs — mental tinkerers who freely
play with ideas and idea combinations in outside-the-box ways to solve
challenging problems (Papert, 1980). Their leadership thinking is expansive
enough to be able to make connections across boundaries and ideas. Where
others see roadblocks and insurmountable obstacles, convergent thinkers see
opportunities. They freely use convergent thinking as a cognitive crowbar for
leveraged social change.
Change agent leaders who are convergent thinkers can marshal their
own knowledge and life experiences as stepping off points to imagine
programs and initiatives that can benefit others. In the case of Abreu, he
fused his own love of music and his personal experiences as a music
educator with his accumulated real-world insights as an economist,
politician, and social activist. He then instinctively leveraged these combined
creative ingredients to forge a new, powerful social change agenda: creating
a program for underprivileged children that could enable these young people
to experience the joys of music making while at the same time helping them
develop skills of self-discipline, social responsibility, and dedication to the
pursuit of ideals — life-enhancing skills that have the power to lift these
youngsters out of their social condition and into a better, more enriching life.
Through convergent thinking, Abreu was able to successfully transform his
own knowledge and life experiences into a broad-based social change
initiative to benefit others.
Innovative Social Change Agents Possess a Distinctive Talent for
Motivating Others
Change agent leaders exude a natural knack for motivating people to
set high ideals and to strive to achieve those ideals. These leaders themselves
possess a robust, personal drive for perfection and a passion for “over the
top” fulfilling experiences based on a learned respect for their profession or
area of activity. In setting and pursuing their own ideals these leaders, in
turn, also become natural models of excellence for others. In the words of the

7. Joe Claudet 85
late Joseph Campbell, the 20th
century mythologist and educator, these
leaders “follow their bliss” and, through personal example, encourage others
to do likewise (Campbell, 2008).
The world of classical music and the ideals the art of music
embodies served as defining experiences in José Antonio Abreu’s own life
and career development. In addition, Abreu’s real-world education as an
economist and politician facilitated his own insightful understanding of
existing social conditions in his own country and the immensity of the social
challenges facing the Venezuelan people. Through his own belief in the
uplifting power of music coupled with his keen insights into the
developmental needs of those around him, Abreu was able to fashion a
unique social action program which, at its very core, is all about motivating
oneself and those around you to envision and pursue shared ideals. As a
motivational leader, Abreu exudes a natural “trust in people” — a natural
trusting in people’s inborn potential and in their ability to exceed themselves
and to get excited about pursuing worthy ideals.
Innovative Social Change Agents can Inspire People to Pursue / Follow a
“Compelling New Story”
Change agent leaders use the power of their own convergent
thinking to fashion compelling new life stories people want to pursue. These
leaders possess an uncanny ability to set and maintain a clear focus on
worthy ideals and a vision of excellence, and they convey and share that
focus with people they are working with and leading within their social
program initiatives — through the power of their storytelling.
Social change leaders, in essence, are conjurers of “compelling new
stories”: new ideas, new projects, new “ways of doing things” — and, in the
case of El Sistema, new programs that attract people’s attention and
involvement because of the learning and development opportunities they
provide. Moreover, innovative social activist leaders exude passionate
commitment and dogged persistence in believing in their own program
initiative ideas and in believing in the potential of the people they are
working with. In this important sense, social change leaders like Abreu
become beacons of inspiration for those around them, and the ideas and
ideals they embody within their social change projects serve as continuing

8. 86 NATIONAL FORUM OF EDUCATIONAL ADMINISTRATION AND SUPERVISION JOURNAL
inspirational guideposts that can create new paths and enrich the lives of
successive generations of young people now and into the future.
In summary: seeing the big picture and thinking in new ways,
motivating others to develop their potential and inspiring those around them
to believe in and follow a compelling new story appear to be distinctive
characteristics of innovative leaders who are successful at bringing about
social change. These characteristics derived from an examination of the
social change efforts of one such leader — José Antonio Abreu, can serve as
a practical means for elucidating the work of change agent leaders and for
informing our understanding of the relationship between innovative
leadership and social change.
Conclusion
This article set out to briefly explore the creative thinking and
leading efforts involved in envisioning, designing, and implementing
educational initiatives to bring about positive social change. This was done
through profiling the leadership efforts of one outstanding educator and
activist — José Antonio Abreu, and the remarkable social change initiative
he has successfully created and nurtured in Venezuela over the past 35 years.
Through examining Abreu’s leadership thinking and actions and the impact
of his program ideas, we then culled out three distinguishing characteristics
of innovative change agent leaders. Visionary social change leaders appear
to have the ability to: (1) see the big picture and think in new ways; (2)
motivate others to develop their potential; and (3) inspire those around them
to believe in and follow a compelling new story. With these characteristics
in hand, we can hopefully begin to arrive at a more insightful understanding
of the creative thinking and social change efforts of leaders who are both
innovative program designers and successful change agents — leaders, in
fact, who make a big difference.

9. Joe Claudet 87
REFERENCES
Campbell, J. (2008) The hero with a thousand faces (3rd
ed.). Novano,
CA: New World Library.
Papert, S. (1980) Mindstorms: Children, computers, and powerful ideas
New York, NY: Basic Books.
Smaczny, P., & Stodtmeier, M. (2009) El Sistema: Music to change life [A
documentary film]. EuroArts Music International GmbH.
AUTHOR
Joseph Claudet is the Associate Dean for Graduate Education, Research, and
Administration and Associate Professor of Educational Leadership at Texas
Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. Claudet earned his Ph.D., from Louisiana
State and his research interests include change agent leadership and
organizational learning.

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