Day 2 ⏐ Session 1
Keynote
The Force Field for Change:
how to become a system shifter
Even though Madhav Chevan, Founder of Pratham (IN) didn’t set out to shift a system, that’s exactly what’s he and his team found themselves doing. Their experiment with a low cost pre-school programme in a Mumbai slum became a movement to transform the Indian education system.
We hear in this session how Pratham creates a shared societal mission that speaks to all levels of the system, from policy to product, with parents and policymaker. 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.
“When you keep on pushing something… eventually it starts moving. It’s like a mad elephant in a bizarre. The elephant is sleeping. Everybody’s trying to get together and say ‘run’. And the elephant doesn’t move… when it starts moving you better get out of the way!”
Quotes from the session
“If you are a system shifting entrepreneur you are pivoting around purpose” (Charlie Leadbeater)
“We are telling people that you have to look inside your homes [to ask], is there a problem?… Wake up, you know, you’ve got to figure it out, take it to the government, to everybody and say there's a problem.” (Madhav Chavan)
“…if you point one finger at somebody, three fingers are pointing at you. It's not about the system being accountable… we've not said that the government has failed and the government is not doing the right thing. This is systemic, the whole thing is a failure. Right?” (Madhav Chavan)
“...the [system] failure is because there is a gap. There's a huge distance between the school and the home” (Madhav Chavan)
“…you're creating a system and you're creating problems with the system, problems that cannot be solved. So, I'm coming to the point where I'm saying it's not about fixing the system…. The system is so far gone.” (Madhav Chavan)
Emerging questions
Are you trying to scale a solution or are you trying to shift a system?
What scale do you need to make a shift in a given system?
