I was listening to a brilliant interview with the theologian and scholar Walter Bruggeman this morning. He was talking about “the prophetic imagination” and using the poetry of the Old Testament prophets to make a point about a key capacity that is missing in the world right now: the ability to deal with disruption.
SImply, disruption is what happens when the plans we thought we had have suddenly changed. It could be a major economic collapse – a black swan event – or something so small as your bus left early. How we respond to disruption is a key capacity for individual resourcefulness, and how we collectively deal with disruption is a key capacity for resilience.
It is interesting, as Bruggeman notes, that our frame for understanding the future is basically consumerist. We purchase certainty. It’s as if we invest in the present because it guarantees a given performance of the future. When we buy something, we expect to receive quality and a guarantee that if it doesn’t work according to plan, we can hold someone else responsible.
That understanding about the way the future is supposed to roll out infects everything we do. When events overtake our assumptions about the future, we look for someone to blame, someone to be accountable, someone to make it right. I can find all kinds of ways in which I expect people to OWE me something. It’s as if our participation in the social contract guarantees that our expectations will be met.
But they never are. We cannot all live in our ideal worlds. Diversity and complexity means disruption.
The greatest challenge of our time I think, both individually and collectively, is how to equip ourselves for disruption. There are many patterns that scale across dimensions of practice, and a few key ones may be:
- Self-awareness. Knowing your own response to disruption is helpful. Do you get stressed by unexpected change? Do you take it in stride? Does your community shake and shudder with fits and paroxysms or do you just give up? All of these reactions are common and they are interesting. And they are not anyone’s fault or anyone else’s responsibility but your own. Learning to be resourceful with disruption begins by knowing how you deal with it.
- Stop. When events overtake you it is wise to stop. The worst thing to do is to continue to pursue the course of action you initiated before the disruption occurred. As an individual, stopping is easier than doing it as a collective. It often takes a loud voice to get a group intent on achievement to stop what it is doing, so being prepared to stop means paying attention to the small voices – the ones inside yourself and the ones inside your team.
- Look for surprise. One of the basic operating principles of Open Space Technology is “Be Prepared to Be Surprised.” My friend Brian Bainbridge lived this principle, even from within the relative security and certainty of his life as a Catholic priest. As a result he welcomed surprise with delight. Looking for and preparing for surprises isn’t just a good self-help trick though. It’s excellent planning. And because by definition, you can never know what will surprise you, the best way to prepare for surprise is to train your outlook to work with it rather than against it. Lots of energy is spent beating back the results of surprise. We would do better to be able to see it’s utility and work with it.
- Welcome and engage the stranger. There is a Rumi poem called “The Guest House” I love that has these lines in it: “This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival”Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows who sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honourably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight.” the stranger contains the answer. When disruption occurs, it is like a door opening through which floods unfamiliarity. That all comes with strangers and many of those strangers hold the answers to what to do next, but you have to take the time to engage with them. And never discount the stranger among you, the person you thought you knew that suddenly becomes a different in the midst of a crises.
- Choose wisely. Meeting the chaos of disruption with the order of stillness helps to create the space for wisdom. Not having stillness means one gets caught up in the rush and tumble of chaotic disruption and one reacts instead of acting wisely. Becoming still and then stopping has similar results. Balancing chaos and order gives us the time and space to make a wise decision. The opinions of others help here. If you are alone when your life is disrupted, you might not have the breadth of understanding to make a wise decision. You may end up travelling in a direction that takes you away from where you need to go. When you make a choice, choose wisely.
- Commit. Finally commit fully to your next move. This is principle that is alive in the field of improvisational theatre. The scene takes a surprising twist and as an actor you have two choices: hang on to the story you were previously developing or let the new story line change you. You can tell an improviser that only half commits to the new story. They become immediately stuck in a space that is too constrained to move. They are wanting to work with the new but unwilling to abandon the old. When disruption occurs it is already too late not to be changed by it. So commit fully to the new world so that you can be a full participant in it.
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Very interesting little article from David Wilcox about the differences between social entrepreneurs and social innovators. Here is how he describes those differences, from a tactical perspective:
4 Differences Between Social Entrepreneurs & Social Innovators
Here are four reasons why social entrepreneurs are significantly different than nonprofit social innovators:
1. Two Worlds
Most foundations and many nonprofits came into existence through a significant donor or donation. The people who shepherd the outcomes for those donors must be attentive and accommodating. Quite simply, donors drive much of the nonprofit world’s activities.
Most social entrepreneurs start with their very personal obsession to improve lives by solving a challenge or inequality, prefer to spend as little time as possible fund raising, and often bring innovations to the table that decades of nonprofit work have not uncovered.
Social enterprises typically begin with a small loan, such as the $46 that funded Professor Yunus and the invention of microfinance. As Yunus points out in every speech he gives, “When I saw a problem, I started a business to solve it.”
2. The Against Position
In branding, claiming the against position means using a competitor’s dominant spend and mindshare to carve out an anti-space–the Un-cola for example.
Social entrepreneurs are quintessential against positioners. At the New York Forum on Africa held in Gabon, Professor Yunus stated it clearly: “I looked at how traditional banks do business and we did the exact opposite.”
In very practical terms, these stubborn, opinionated entrepreneurs frequently show up after the aid and development models have failed or at least failed to become sustainable. Their arrival on the scene is less a Kumbaya moment and more a “disruptive innovation” one.
3. Core Competencies
Successful nonprofits are either great at fundraising or great at measuring impact. The superstars are good at both. These critical capabilities assemble billions of dollars to accomplish good works and they represent an important innovation source for the world.
Social entrepreneurs fundraise too, but they hate it. Seldom do they surface innovations in fundraising. A primary goal for most social entrepreneurs is to demonstrate that appropriate capacity building enables their innovation model to solve problems profitably and reduce dependence on fundraising altogether.
4. Buying Impact/Measuring Success
Jason Saul of Mission Measurement exhorts funders to stop thinking about giving to charities and to shift to buying impact. As valuable as this change to the donor frame would be, the repercussions would also result in significant reductions in the total charity population.
Funds should flow to the organizations making and reporting measurable progress actually solving key challenges. But impact buying reinforces the prevalent tendency in the nonprofit world to spend significant dollars on measurement. Funding those added “measurement investments” makes solutions more expensive and less sustainable.
Successful social entrepreneurs create business models where measurement is integral to the normal course of solving a challenge. This one innovation actually can make the difference between a profitable and a non-profitable model. Healthpoint Services in the Punjab is the first to couple the delivery of clean water and healthcare. This disruptive innovation touches villagers each day: when they pick up their water they are also exposed to an urban quality healthcare clinic offering services at a much lower cost.
So what does Healthpoint management measure?
Here’s one: At what monthly water subscription price do half the villagers become customers in 90 days? For Healthpoint, measurement is not a separate expense, it is a core business activity.
I do a lot of work in the non-profit, social benefit sector and find that there is a real stifling of innovation there, especially in the traditional services sector. It’s not that there isn’t an understood need for radical change in how services are delivered, but there are a number of factors weighing against these strategies being created. Riffing on David’s observations, here are four things that get in the way of social innovation…
1. Funding Ãœber alles
Funding and the attendant accountabilities that come with it determine much of the scope of what can be offered. Whether it is government funding or private funding, social innovators have to work within highly constrained fiscal environments. In many cases, they cannot even raise money outside of their operations for fear of losing charitable status. IN Canada recently, organizations that have been trying to create social innovation in the environmental sector have had their government funding revoked, their charitable status questioned and their operations audited. In times of scarce resources, leaders are unwilling to jeopardize what little they have to take a risk on new ways of doing things.
2. The For Position.
Most who are working in the traditional and mainstream social services sector are constrained by societal expectation of what services should be. Some exist in a regulatory environment that makes them little more than non-governmental delivery channels for government services. In the work I have done over the years in Aboriginal child and family services this has been a huge frustration. Agencies that want to transform the nature of these services are unable to do so because they get locked into having to deliver services the same way the Ministry for Children and Family development does it. This is frustrating for families and communities who accuse their own community-based agencies of being little more than Aboriginal faces on non-Aboriginal government services. Social innovation os hampered by an inability to take an Against position.
3. The wrong Core Competencies
Many mainstream social service agencies have gone to a management model of leadership that values the MBA as the primary qualification. Increasingly, CEOs of charities are being hired from traditional business schools and they don’t even have the range of experience or innovative approach that social enterprise CEOs have. This is the result of risk aversion…if we can hire a good manager to be careful with our money, we will survive the funding crises in the sector. the problem of course is that the work becomes narrowly defined on operational efficiencies and strategies that are about problem solving and fixing rather than taking the long view about the complexity and disruption facing the sector. Relying too much on risk aversion constrains the ability to innovate other than incrementally. It won’t surprise you that I believe leadership that hosts the margins of the social field for co-creation and emergence is critical to finding and precipitating real social innovation.
4. Becoming a slave to measurements
Alongside the management approach to services and the constraints on funding comes a slavish amount of accountability to targets. These targets are often chosen because they are easy to measure but they sometimes have little or no relevance to the context. I like Healthpoint’s metric of asking “At what price do half the villagers become customers in 90 days?” I also like what is happening in the field of developmental evaluation, which provides a set of tools and resources for working in complexity with safe fail prototyping of new actions. But in the current climate, with managers and funders demanding easy to see outcomes, their is a hard sell. A group I have been working with that is trying the impact the social determinants of health finds itself often wanting to know what changes have been happening in quarterly periods. That is simply not the right way to look at things, but without numbers, funding is held up. The flip side is that the wrong numbers get the wrong stuff funded, and rarely are the numbers representative of innovation.
Perhaps the biggest reason why social innovation and social entrepreneurship are different is the location of power. In social innovation power is often vested in the funder and the extend to which the funder is wedded to status quo or simply risk averse is the extend to which social innovation is constrained. In social entrepreneurship, power rests largely with the entrepreneur and there are many more degrees of freedom to pursue radical innovation. And it’s your money to lose!.
I think an application of more strategies from David’s list to the shadow list of problems that I’ve seen would accelerate social innovation. Probably the best way to innovate in the social sector is to steal from social enterprise. One leader I know makes strong recommendations for her network to watch TED talks as a daily practice, and that simple form of cross pollinating opens minds for sure.
What strategies have you experienced that have acce;erased real, deep and lasting social innovation?
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Here is a case of getting seduced by the numbers and sucked into the wrong thinking. This article is looking for interesting ways to measure the growth of the global middle class. It does a generally poor job of it. The whole article is a bit of a dodge. Using made up numbers to render a quantifiable mark for an abstract concept, concluding in a blithe statement about a billion car pile up.
But the money quote I think is in the conclusion, about what this materialist and upwardly mobile trend in the world says:
The people of this burgeoning middle class also expect their governments to be representative and accountable, and they are sure to put increased pressure on the nondemocratic systems in many developing countries. Seen in this light, the rising incidence of protests and dissent in China, Russia, Thailand, and the Arab world is not surprising.
Which is actually interesting. And a little understated. Because I think one of the implications of the growing “middle class” is the fact that the world can become much more connected through alternatively mediated means. You have power and water, a mobile phone and an internet connection and you join a very interesting club, globally speaking. Furthermore, people can not only demand accountability from their own governments but from governments whose foreign policies affect them. I mean, look at the famous photo of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, the Vietnamese girl running scared and naked from her village, which had just been napalmed. 40 years ago no one could do anything about this situation. These days, photos like that could provoke a massive decentralized response of outraged middle class people. Such people might learn how to fly planes, for example. Or leak documents. Or go all Anonymous.
On a smaller scale, the growing middle class can use its material wealth to do things other than buy cars. For example, a newly middle class Egyptian could buy food to support an occupation of a park in New York. The new models of philanthropy can be many to many, inverting the idea of “giving to the poor.”
The article has a pretty narrow and outdated view of its own subject (“First World” – really?) and it ignores the deeper, dare I say, foreign policy implications of a middle class that may yet reach the critical mass needed to slow the 1% and redirect that serious wealth to needier parts the rest of the 99%.
In the rest of the world, I wonder if this is what the new middle class is doing. In North America we do a whole lot of “I’ve got mine.” Class mobility in this continent is woeful, and class nobility, especially among the local 85% (of which I am a member) even worse.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how many of us there are. It matters what we do with these numbers.
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“Conversation demands equality between participants. Indeed, it is one of the most important ways of establishing equality. Its enemies are rhetoric, disputation, jargon and private languages, or despair at not being listened to and not being understood.”
– Theodore Zeldin
To sit in the presence of one another, to open to each others deepest longings, o host the space that makes room for silence and the most earnest murmurs of the heart. To see another as they see you, to pay respect to the story of a human being who sits with you and who is curious about your own.
All this is the greatest practice for restoring our humanity and our relations to one another. And this practice should not be deferred to some future time when the conditions are ripe. To sit in the present act of conversation is to be creating the preferred world now.
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Working with 8 programs in the state of Minnesota this week, all of whom are putting together projects in local communities that work on acute health issues by creating upstream solutions. This is the third residential retreat with the 8 propoenent groups. all of whom are engaged in a year long planning process through which they are learning participatory leadership practices and are getting soaked in the Art of Hosting.
There are two things going on here. First is the design of an actual project that will move “upstream” and tackle one or more social determinants of health. For example, a group working on indigenous health and nutrition issues is building an indigenous food network that aims to bring people into better relationship with food through growing and cooking while addressing the need for available healthy food. While there is a program aspect to this there is also a capacity building aspect to it too.
Alone, small projects that are are linked to social determinants of health don’t stand much chance of long term success, especially if the long term sustainability of the project is anchored to a three year implementation grant. But a key piece of the work we are doing is also teaching hosting practices. Our cohort last year began work on their projects around creating healthy communities but have since been using participatory methods to organize in the community. They have been tackling racism, systemic abuses in the education system and saying no to arbitrary policy decisions. One hundred people in the community are signed up for Art of Hosting training in the fall which will probably also result in 25 new projects – safefail probes if you like – activated to effect changes in the community.
I’m skeptical about any given project to make a difference, but projects that are led with the purpose of learning how to lead help to develop practices that launch and spread leadership throughout the community. To me this is “there” to get to from “here.”
Now if only evaluators would catch up.