Impact: Six Patterns to Spread Your Social Innovation
Al’s writing style is warm and frank, he did a great job of providing considerations we can use to evaluate our organizations and make them more effective. The book is full of excellent examples, mostly Canadian, and draws on his wealth of experience earned by working for social change over the past few decades.
The framework he offers provides a lot of food for thought and is also good at illuminating our own areas of hubris. Definitely a worthwhile read for anyone in the NFP / Social services sector, but frankly, I think there are a lot of great considerations to get just about anyone thinking along the lines of social change and innovation.
At the beginning, he introduces the concepts of wise travelers and passionate amateurs, and speaks of the importance of recognizing and leveraging patterns and systems-level thinking.
Wise travelers are necessary for social innovation – the image of someone using their wisdom to resolve problems and issues they encounter as they travel the walks of life. We all possess the wisdom to notice when something isn’t working correctly and to innovate our way through the problem.
Passionate amateurs are the lifeblood of social innovation and change. Experts tend to inhabit the status quo, or have a vested interest in reinforcing it, and the existing systems that exist tend to exist as a result of the experts involved – it is fair to assume that existing systems are a product of the experts best efforts. Al says ‘passionate amateurs are motivated by necessary and inspired by love.’ Passionate amateurs bring their life’s energy into resolving a challenge, committing their efforts and resources beyond the requirements of their jobs. They bring their passion for the cause and a willingness to learn, a recognition that they do not have all the answers. This is a very powerful combination that forces progressive conversations as they seek to change established conventions. They also tend to be quite resilient and don’t quit – often, there is something precious to them on the line – in Al’s example, the future well-being of their families’ children. Quitting is not an option, so dealing with rejection becomes a required skill, building grit.
He further breaks social innovators down into three categories, which can overlap – disruptive, bridging and receptive. It usually sits in relation to the status quo – disruptive innovators bring the vision, ideas and initial push for change. Bridging innovators see value in the disruptors’ vision, and work to act as a link for them into formal organizations and institutions, where more resources to incorporate and spread the change are available. Receptive innovators are the actors inside those organizations and institutions who act as internal champions and help the change take root and develop into the new status quo, leading to a fundamental change in the paradigm.
Here are the six patterns Al outlines as being conducive to spreading social change:
Pattern One: Think and Act like a Movement
There is a strong need to identify beyond just one’s immediate self. We have a tendency to work on issues in isolation and not raise our eyes beyond the work that we do, to see who we could work with. Institutional change cannot happen without movements – movements are required to create enough prevailing currents to change political and cultural climate. Al provides five characteristics of social justice movements.
1. They ignite our imaginations – change requires a shift in our imaginations beyond the status quo, inspiring us to strive for the limits of what is possible. Imagination is required for bold vision.
2. They are multi-generational – movements get embedded in the fabric of society, inspiring people across multiple generations to participate. ‘Movements are the connective tissue for the identity and sense of belonging that characterize struggles for social justice.’ They become something we teach our young about, creating a continuous push towards the goal that doesn’t expire as the founding generation does.
3. They comprise small acts – John McKnight quote: “If you have enough small stuff that’s right, the big stuff will change.” Movements are a collection of small acts – it’s a large number of people doing a series of small things. Every contributions counts, and grooves the path further for those who come later.
4. They are self-organizing – there isn’t a central control on a movement. There are community organizers and charismatic leaders, but there is no one person with final say – leadership is diffuse. In many senses, everyone is a leader, as they set the example through their actions. ‘It’s more important to a movement’s success that people complement one other’s efforts, because that’s what it takes to create a groundswell.’
5. They marry art and justice – art becomes a tool for social justice that inspires movements and deepens connection, commitment. Judith Marcuse quote “Art bridges the silos that separate us as we confront today’s pressing issues. Art creates new visions and engagement, connecting the head and the heart.” A picture is worth a thousand words, different mediums can translate meaning and inspire a sense of purpose very effectively to a wider range of audience.
Summary of Pattern One:
– Acknowledging the movement(s) we are part of
– Choosing which parts of a movement’s visions we are capable of implementing and which parts should be left to others
– Making our contribution, no matter how small or insignificant we think it is
Pattern Two: Create a Container for Your Content
Mike Harcourt quote “Ten percent of any new initiative is the idea. the rest is implementation.” finding the right medium of media to transmit the message is essential to creating the conditions for social change and innovation. Al puts it well – ‘Metaphors are essential to how we humans communicate, learn, discover and invent. A good metaphor alters the way we see things. It converts the complex to the vernacular. it creates an aha moment that insinuates itself into our consciousness.’ Metaphors are essential for communicating with people who aren’t already steeped in the issue and familiar with the jargon. They are key for bringing people into the fold. A new metaphor for something is a fresh take, it can expand perspective by providing lines of lateral and parallel reasoning. Five characteristics of effective containers:
1. They are playful and fun
2. They are non-judgmental
3. They ignite our imaginations
4. They personalize the abstract
5. They tell a story
“The medium is the message” – Marshall McLuhan – with the right container, we “widen the tent, reach out to the larger society and offer people new and better ways of doing things” per Beth Haddon.
Summary of Pattern Two:
– Using metaphor to make it easy for people to do the right thing
– Telling your story
– Breathing life into issues that affect us all
Pattern Three: Set the Table for Allies, Adversaries and Strangers
Good quote: “Connections are the harness that pulls your wagon.” Guy Vanderhaeghe
The importance of civility in dealing with people – even & especially so-called allies; it’s very easy to lose majority focus on key issues over minor differences in positions.
Community impact takes ‘talking together across sectors, working together without judgment, and thinking differently about how to help those in need.’
The power of conversational space – convening and dialogue are not just means to an end, they are important ends in themselves – it is the best way to restore trust between groups. Dialogue gives us the opportunity to meet one of our deepest needs, the need to belong.
Ego often gets in the way of dialogue.
Four Characteristics of Effective Convening – How we set the table matters.
1. Civility
Politeness can simply be a way of avoiding the tough conversations; civility is a social lubricant for resolving conflict. Need to able to have direct conversations in the cleanest way possible. Civility, Etmanski says, encourages us to :
– criticize with kindness – e.g. acknowledging points of agreement and anything you may have learned from the person across the table
– represent a position without being offensive
– be simultaneously forceful and respectful
– respect the other without necessarily liking them
– move beyond political correctness and moral righteousness
– avoid caricature
These are all very important points that fall in line with the principle of charity.
2. Personal Agency
Answering ‘why is it important you are here?’
A big part of the goal of social change is increasing the proportion of humans who know they can cause change.
3. Hospitality
Everyone counts, and positions based on power, authority and resources must not dominate. Employing an abundance mindset, striving to create a sense of belonging. This is what helps knit people from disparate groups together into a common experience – it is not exclusive, everyone is welcome, and the skilled convener / leader pays almost a fastidious degree of attention to this. It is required ‘to transform the isolation and self-interest within our communities into connectedness and caring for the whole.’
4. Curiosity
Curiosity is an essential part of convening – what is required to learn about the other, the challenge, ourselves or deeper patterns. We strive to bring our curiosity to issues, not out certainty. This allows us to learn the most, thereby crafting the most suitable and authentic responses to the situation, as it is. Conveners / leaders help ‘hold the space’ for the curiosity-driven conversations to unfold – this often needs to be coupled with great patience.
The internet is helping people convene over greater areas and with greater ease – the world becoming ever-more interconnected.
Summary of Pattern Three:
– Working together with those we don’t like, don’t trust, or don’t know, despite our differences or past wrongs
– Recognizing that thinking, reflecting, listening and talking are as essential as action
– Being open to surprise and serendipity
– Rising again and rising above
Pattern Four: Mobilize Your Economic Power
“In a democracy people don’t sit in the social and economic bleachers; they all play the game.” – Rev. Dr. Moses Coady
It is essential when seeking societal change to leverage societal power – usually through the form of economy and money. Forming partnerships with existing institutions is essential to creating a long-lasting, sustainable change. These institutions are used to evaluating options and change in economic terms, and it helps tee it up to consider and speak in their language.
‘We must move away from small-scale silos to collaborations at scale that leverage private, public and philanthropic resources.’
It helps to quantify exactly what resources are available in the extended communities we work with and service, or advocate on behalf of. Beyond just individual incomes, trying to identify the interdependencies and expanding the net of those affected by your platform helps you find a larger voice when negotiating and dealing with institutions.
Understanding our economic power can also help us change things from the bottom up; structuring new economies helps liberate from old paradigms.
Questions Al asks us to consider:
– What are combined economic assets of membership and constituency?
– Who else supports your campaign issue or organization? Companies? Allied professionals? Other organizations? Can you quantify their assets?
– Who are your natural business partners? What products, services, spending patterns and financial assets within your membership may be of value to them?
– What businesses rely on your patronage? Do they invest in the local economy where your members live? Will they hire your members? (May be more specifically focused towards advocating for individuals with developmental disabilities in this case)
Building on existing momentum of credit unions, other community-centric organizations.
Building sustainable funding base – not relying on grants and handouts, social entrepreneurialism.
Changing mindsets – from scarcity to abundance, victim to agent. ‘Do our work with our head up rather than our hand out.’
Five ways to mobilize your economic power:
1. Influencing the operational practice of business
Involves leveraging existing business networks to further cause; if you can effect a change in the operational paradigm of a business you have a very ingrained change.
2. Commercializing intellectual property
Leveraging expertise to create products for the market, typically knowledge-based, that can then be seeded throughout the larger business community. Doing this on a local community’s behalf can have very advantageous benefits.
4. Nurturing the sharing economy
Person to person economy is thriving in the internet age, also changing business paradigms. Helping to advance your cause through these can create powerful, direct networks. Collaborative consumption is far more efficient than conspicuous consumption, both at a macro and micro-economic level, and helps the resources of the community go that much further, have that much more effect. Individuals who may otherwise not fall into an organization’s area of influence may also be exposed through the greater sharing economy. Cities for People is a cross-Canada initiative to help individuals reap the growing benefits of sharing economies.
4. Purchasing locally
Further builds partnerships with other local communities, expanding reach and growing impact. Local businesses tend to reinvest significantly more into local communities than large multinational commercial giants.
5. Starting a social-purpose business
Social entrepreneurialism; in the vein of working with heads up not hands out, this may be the ultimate key to sustainable growth; supporting businesses of this fashion is increasingly in vogue and desirable. Ideas that can be turned into successful commercial ventures while still progressing the goals of the organization or community can be more difficult to come across, but also more worthwhile to pursue.
Social enterprise – ‘money must serve, not rule’
Summary of Pattern Four:
– Uncovering the force of your market
– Combining your social and economic power
– Building on the momentum of credit unions and the cooperative economy
– Creating a new economy that favours human beings
Pattern Five: Advocate with Empathy
“If you wish to persuade me, you must think my thoughts, feel my feelings and speak my words.” – Cicero
Strategic inquiry is the process of discovering the priorities, language and tools of the group you’re trying to convince. To be successful, you have to be able to penetrate their overloaded consciousness, to break through the clutter. If you want a person or an organization to have empathy for your issue, you must have empathy for their challenges.
Government is inherently conservative; a survival bias towards it.
Solutions-based advocacy – new breed of advocates – proposing solutions and seeking to enhance government’s capacity to make better decisions.
Solution-based advocates don’t seek to oppose government or focus unduly on what’s not working – they work hard to cultivate a proactive mindset and focus on workable problems. Being prudent. seeking to improve relationships among all the players, to attract new allies, to build a base for addressing the next set of challenges. Focusing on the means as well as the ends.
In bringing empathy to the work of advocacy, we:
– strengthen relationships while seeking solutions
– accept that there are no easy answers to our toughest challenges
– create the conditions for joint problem solving
– understand that the vast majority of issues are not ‘either/or’ or ‘we/they’ but lie in the grey area between
– commit to sorting out competing principles and values, rather than leaving that role exclusively to government
– practice civility and respect, addressing the problem, not the character of the individuals involved
Five characteristics of solution-based advocacy:
1. Searching for a heart of gold
Finding the good in your traditional opponents, recognizing that we are all a mixture of good and bad qualities. Often, the person with an opposing position to yours isn’t, in fact, your enemy. There are many points of agreement to be found and cultivated, allowing us to build stronger partnerships and tackle ever-tougher problems to solve. Drama and scandal are but distractions from our main goals.
2. Using strategic inquiry
By focusing on the challenges and issues faced by constituents and partners, you table more effective solutions, that focus on what is most important, as opposed to adopting positions purely out of ideology or ego.
Strategic inquiry is a prelude to more active lobbying. Listen carefully and avoid talking too much. Your job is to gain an understanding of stated and unstated objectives. An important byproduct of strategic inquiry is the chance or ability to educate and influence, even while you are seeking advice. It’s about creating feedback loops to refine and reframe proposals or ideas. Crucial to shaping a realistic question that will be seen to advance all sides’ agendas.
3. Cultivating a network of champions
Solution-based advocacy focuses on relationships. People are more likely to say yes to someone they know and trust – important to cultivate an informal network of champions from a wide range and breadth – each will have their own constituencies and access points. Often, who you know is more of a limiting factor than what you know – and it always helps to have more of both – knowledge, and strong relationships that you can leverage to further effect change.
4. Solving problems together
Having authentic collaboration across sectors leads to new and innovative thinking, new takes on old challenges and new and more adept solutions being tabled for discussion.
Shifting from a mindset of ‘doing for’ to ‘doing with’
Transformation doesn’t happen overnight, and takes a lot of consistent effort.
5. Doing it themselves
As we take on greater and greater challenges, advocates have to do more of the direct work themselves of organizing and creating new and larger partnerships. Everyone tends to be pushed to the limits in trying to achieve within their own bubbles. Growing the bubble through networking and joint problem solving are important aspects, but so is what ultimately amounts to a ‘can-do’ attitude. Needs to be a willingness to roll up sleeves and work directly, recognizing the wide range of perspectives and personalities this will bring you into contact with, and working to find some common point of interest that advances the common good with all.
Sometimes you have to raise a little hell to get attention to an issue or be heard. Understanding where your line in the sand is in terms of social value and paradigms has a huge impact on your ability to stand for what you believe in and advocate for and advance social change for the better.
Summary of Pattern Five:
– Understanding government or other institutional partners, not ridiculing or ignoring them
– Following Martin Luther King’s advice and conducting ourselves ‘on the high plane of dignity and discipline’
– Refreshing our democratic institutions
Pattern Six: Who Is as Important as How
Interesting quote – ‘We were meant I think to be in a state of wonder. wondre, and a state of abject humility at the same time.’ John Mighton
Internalizing change. Searching for ways to contribute, understanding how we can. Listening and observing helps a lot. Being less certain about solutions and willing to learn. Recognizing our common humanity with those in distress.
‘How?’ can be a very difficult question, that can sap a lot of momentum. It can be more helpful to focus on ‘Who?’ and then the ‘How?’ can come later. Not having the ‘How?’ early enough in an idea isn’t a sign that the idea is not worth pursuing. It is often one of the last things to fall into place, often through a long, iterative process.
‘Intelligence is enlightened by love’ – Simone Weil
Today’s leaders don’t fit the traditional ‘capital L’ notions of leadership. They are no longer just the people at the front of the room – everyone has the capacity to be a leader, whether of an organization or of their families and peers. Embodying attributes associated with leadership is the key – vision, boldness, tenacity and moral character.
No matter how charismatic a person may be, they never achieve world-changing results purely on their own. Ordinary people have extraordinary power.
Two common threads among talented doers of social innovation – the collaborators, communicators, conveners, entrepreneurs and strategists; they ones who know how to get things done – they also tend to have a spiritual dimension to their lives, and they pay attention to their blind spots or limitations.
Moral oxygen – provides nourishment on a spiritual level, similar to what oxygen does for the body. We need to protect the source of our moral oxygen, just like we need to protect our environment and air, otherwise w are vulnerable to heartache, burnout, addiction or cynicism. The loss of soul is painless, Jacques Dufresne warns – pay attention to what nourishes and replenishes us. Commit to becoming more peaceful, joyful and happy while pursuing social change.
‘The longer we journey on the road to inner healing and wholeness, the more the sense of belonging grows and deepens. The sense is not just one of belonging to others and to a community. It is a sense of belonging to the universe, to the earth, to the air, to the water, to everything that lives, to all humanity.’ – Jean Vanier
Moving from hubris to humility – humility allows us to see / admit that we don’t have all the answers, preventing our hubris from blocking our view.
Something about institutions, cultural attitudes, and often, even individual personalities: some of the players / parts may change, but our approaches seldom do.
Hubris refers to people who are overconfident and who overestimate their competency and capabilities. Hubris to some degree is willful blindness. Humility is an awareness of how much you know and, as a result, how much more you don’t know, have left to learn. Humility doesn’t stop you from acting. It makes you more curious, more willing to consider other perspectives and ideas and try other ways.
Five characteristics of social innovators on the journey to wholeness:
1. Emotional maturity
Not upending change or deterring advancement in processes due to individual and personal hang-ups. Conflict and tension are inevitable for change makers, if we don’t take care, those outer pressures will seep inside us. The work itself is often a crucible for personal development and transformation.
2. Voice and agency
Being brave-hearted and courageous. Not letting fear dictate one’s actions. Having grace under pressure.
3. Intuition
Having a sense of emerging reality and being able to move in harmony with it. Most of the best ideas do not start with concrete proof, only a sense of something that is right or could be better.
4. Patience
Change is hard work. The amount of iteration and practice that goes into advancing causes and effecting real change in the world, even in ourselves, requires great patience. This is not the same as delayed action, but preventing a rush to judgment, being willing to work with the situation as it arises without attempting to force it to submit to your will or bend to your way. The time required for a social innovation to have impact can’t be measured in hours or even years, but rather decades, generations or half-lifetimes.
5. Conviction
Without conviction you have no drive to stick with your goal, and often the goal ends up being further away than you may initially think, once you start to understand the ‘who’ and the ‘how.’ What is most remarkable about most of the innovators Al cites throughout the book isn’t their achievements, it’s the constancy of their convictions. Ethics shaping work, instead of the other way around. One notable quote “I don’t take my strategies too seriously anymore. They come and they go. Only my convictions have remained constant.” – Michael Clague
Social innovation is enlightened by convictions. It’s what enables us to take risks, find our voices, trust our intuition – to act.
“Let the beauty of what you love be what you do. there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” – Rumi
Summary of Pattern Six:
– Integrating your inner spiritual life with your outer activity one
– Paying attention to your personal blind spots
– Recognizing that every groove becomes a rut
– Acting on your convictions
Conclusion: Paddling Together
He ends with a short chapter about the need for us to ‘paddle together,’ regardless of whether we like the people we are working with or not – we are all in the same boat, so meaningful progress requires us to transcend our hang-ups and work together.