Day 2 take aways: Strategies for shift

This blog is one of a daily series crafted by James Oriel to capture his insights and reflections from the day. They can only hope to provide a quick peek into the rich discussions held, and we hope they offer an invitation in for those who may wish to explore further via the recordings, links and other resources provided.

Convenors with purpose and the enduring power of common cause

Watch the recordings on the festival resources and recordings page.

Charlie laid out a premise; the common logic of social innovation is to scale, to dream of reaching unicorn size; the assumption being that bigger is better. But is a single solution or organisation likely to impact the shape of people’s lives, even at scale? Do the systems at play shift in ways that address the underlying issues, or open up new possibilities? Often the answer is disappointing. Instead, Charlie outlines “if you're interested primarily in outcome and impact rather than organisation, then really the question is, what's the smallest possible organisation I can create that has the biggest possible impact?”.

This focus on outcomes and impact guided Madhav Chavan, founder of Pratham. It naturally tilts the work away from introspective organisational needs, toward outwardly focused systemic ones, to seeing the Indian educational landscape as a whole, and to learning to play the role that system needs, in order to reimagine itself. Or in Madhav’s case, to begin to build an entirely new system, for the old one was no longer fit for purpose. This took a quiet advocacy, revealing the system to itself by naming the problem; kids just weren’t learning much at school. It was a balance found in demonstrating both problems and possibilities, mobilising an appetite for something better.

We heard how, even though Madhav Chavan didn’t set out to shift a system, that’s exactly what’s been happening. Pratham works at all levels of the system, from policy to product, with parents and policymakers. But most of all, they created a shared societal mission. Pratham is ultimately a  “convenor with purpose”, an agenda and aspiration that people can gather around, to help them understand and own a problem and begin to do something about it. Then you have something more powerful than scale, you have leverage.

“If you are engaged in system change, it can feel quite isolating, like being in the middle of the washing machine trying to make sense of where things are going” opened Jennie. Which is perhaps why so much of the work of our second session panellists was in facilitation, on convening, on holding a space for different people to come together.

Nathalie Nguyen described how their local government efforts often began with asking “who else cares for this group of human beings? And then it's our job to bring all these different stakeholders together”. That’s different from naming a problem and trying to fix it, it’s describing a possibility – to care –  and finding who it resonates with. Similar to what Ahmet Günes described as falling into, almost by accident, the role of “system integrator”. When you start to get involved in an issue, with a particular group of people you see who is already connected and who needs connecting, where the gaps are, what’s missing. It’s weaving a network together, reconnecting the dots.

Part of that work is “providing a safe forum where people can evolve ideas and really generate something new” said Julie Repper.  Where first people gather around a shared conversation, only for it to evolve into convening around a common cause or shared principles. So the role our panelists tended to play becomes that of a trusted convenor. Not neutral, as Elana Ludman pointed out, it’s not neutral because your vested interests are in helping shift outcomes. But it’s being trusted by being trustworthy. It’s taking a long view, so that you can lay the foundations on which a new system might be built, and that only travels as fast as the speed of trust.

Creating something from scratch is hard, and doing so while shifting the norms, policies, legal frameworks and ways of working that define what is possible in a given system is harder still. In our third session that’s exactly what our panellists were doing. They were entrepreneurs who put mission before market, and in so doing began to define entirely new markets, constructing new ‘minimum viable systems’ around themselves while building thriving initiatives. As Nikishka Iyengar put it, it’s the work of “building new narratives and building something that is so tangible that then spreads and gets amplified”. This is the definition of trailblazing work; you lead, to smooth the way so others can follow.

The work tends to succeed when it’s a collective effort, unified by a shared goal, said Nora Bloch, and quoting their colleague Robin Hacke “resources follow coherence”. Having a clear mission untaps the potential in communities, but it also unlocks funding, bending resourceflows towards new aims.

The challenge facing people working with one foot in the current system and another in the future, is you’re in two places at once, you face in two directions, from the old to the new. That’s hopeful and purpose driven work at its best, where your success goes hand in hand with the success of your community, said Emmanual Ansah-Amprofi. But it’s almost invariably exhausting. The odds (and existing system) are stacked against you, and as Marc Ventresca noted the risks of burnout are real. How might we better support these types of entrepreneurs, and better distribute the burden of shifting systems? What new system innovation roles and activities might need to emerge?

Our final session focused on how to expand the future. And how, with small interventions you can open up far wider possibilities. Kenneth Bailey works to create lo-fi “productive fictions”, where the “work is about trying to break up the tissue that keeps people apart from each other and to start rehearsing new forms of relation”. This prodding at what an alternative might look and, importantly, feel like can be as simple as setting up an outdoor community kitchen, making the familiar seem just strange enough to prompt people to reflect and think about what might be.

Christian Bason described something similar, with what he called a “portfolio of experiments”. Where lots of smaller interventions added together, might add up to far more than the sum of their parts. When these coalesce around a shared mission they are useful signals of what might be possible, a way of feeling our way into a more desirable future and exploring new terrain. The further we travel, the less familiar things seem.

Two quotes

“For us, it has to be tangible enough that people can actually taste but imaginative enough that people can continue to imagine into, and we call that building productive fictions.” – Kenneth Bailey

“what are the authentic, ambitious collective goals that are chosen by those directly affected, so tapping into the community vision and assets for what they want in their communities? And then what's the pipeline of projects? The tangible things that collectively meet those shared priorities?” – Nora Bloch

And a question

What scale do you need to make a shift in a given system? How can you join up the dots going forward so small can be big? How can small demonstrate an attractive future which unlocks the imagination, and possibilities of an entirely new system?