A new field of practice is emerging at the intersection of design, management, complex systems theory, facilitation, and social change. This practice, sometimes called Design for Social Innovation, is giving birth to approaches for creating with social complexity from the inside. It offers "managing emergence" as a complement to traditional management. And it treats culture as a working material rather than a mysterious and difficult barrier to change. This workshop will provide a survey of Design for Social Innovation: key approaches and practices, case studies, and opportunities they present to the Sustainable Brands community.
Design for Social Innovation: Redesigning at the Intersection of Business, Complex Systems and Social Change
1.
2. Marc Rettig Fit Associates LLC @mrettig
Design for Social Innovation: Redesigning
the Interplay Between Business, Complex
Systems and Social Change
#SB14sd
3. Design for social innovation
Marc Rettig
Fit Associates LLC
2 June 2014
Co-creating at the intersection of business, complex systems and social change
4. Marc Rettig
Principal, Fit Associates LLC
marc@fitassociates.com
www.fitassociates.com
@mrettig
(check our news section for other talks and books and such,
including our course syllabus and a student-made book,
Fundamentals of Design for Social Innovation)
license: creative commons, attribution, no derivatives
5. We do this through…
Short or long-term project work Training and capacity development
Working alongside your
team: moving a difficult
situation quickly forward
through facilitated studios,
or collaborating through an
extended program of
exploration & transformation
Courses and learn-by-doing
programs: equipping teams
with the methods of system
sensing, design, facilitating
co-creation, and managing
emergence
We help teams, companies,
and institutions create effectively
in complex social situations.
7. What is this workshop about?
The starting assumption:
Developing a “sustainable brand” is a social challenge.
Today’s question:
What can we learn from the emerging practice of shifting
communities – teams, biz units, companies, institutions,
systems – from their old story to a new one?
How might those apply to sustainability efforts, and toyou?
8. Big global car company
The goal: connect long-range planning !
to real life in unfamiliar places
15. BUT!...
The team was left in a position of having to
advocate for something that mattered in a
context the most senior executives had not
experienced for themselves.
The story had shifted for the team.
But it had not shifted for management.
Business and technical innovation,
it turns out, are SOCIAL.
16. What is
design for social innovation?
It’s just this term that someone made up,
because we needed a name other than
“something is going on….”
Whatever is really going on,
it might be too soon to give it a name
17. What is
design for social innovation?
A way of seeing…
in terms of dynamic social wholes, mostly made of identities,
relationships, and conversations
A way of working…
that nurtures the conditions for something better to emerge
from within groups of people / communities / social wholes
A way of being…
that makes people and teams capable of creating in and with the
uncertainty and long horizons that are inherent in this work
A growing body of approaches and practices
A growing number of institutions and firms
It’s difficult, relatively new, and
we’re all just trying to figure it out together.
18. Topics
1. The challenge of social complexity
2. Introducing two approaches for
fostering lasting positive change
3. Key building blocks
4. The long haul: managing emergence
19. What are we going to do today?
Intention:
My intention is for you to internalize these ideas,
consider how they might apply to your world,
and have great conversations about them.
Here’s the plan:
Gather ourselves
Have a series of cycles:
- dose of concept (with emphasis on approach/way of working)
- a minute or three to reflect in your notes
- a few minutes to discuss, learn from each other
21. Who’s here?
Think about either your current situation, or your aspirations
and intentions – whatever is closest to the excitement or
challenge that brought you here today.
How would you describe the key challenge
of what you’re trying to do?
Which of these best categorizes your situation or challenge?
1. Shifting big organizational culture: values and beliefs
2. Shifting small organizational culture: values and beliefs
3. Bridging or connecting organizational silos,
redesigning cross-organizational processes,
4. Starting a new organization
5. Leadership
6. Affecting a whole system
(e.g., food system, healthcare system, supply chain,…)
7. Something else: ________________________
24. (Peter Senge)
The typical change effort…
This is because of what Peter Drucker calls
organizational inertia. The system resists change to
“The way we do things around here.”
As Drucker says, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
The way things are
Back to the way things are
25. “The universe is made of stories, not atoms,” poet
Muriel Rukeyser famously proclaimed. The
stories we tell ourselves and each other are how
we make sense of the world and our place in it.
Some stories become so sticky, so pervasive
that we internalize them to a point where we no
longer see their storyness — they become not
one of many lenses on reality, but reality itself. …
stories we’ve heard and repeated so many times
they’ve become the invisible underpinning of our
entire lived experience.”
Maria Popova (Brainpickings)
26.
27. STORYwe are homo narrans
Unless we change our story, we will not
create sustained change in our behavior.
29. The tools most of us have been using are
aimed mostly at Form and Structure
- advocacy and persuasion
- policy, incentives, compliance-based methods
- expertise, design, iteration
- heroism, leader-driven movements
- education: if they KNOW what’s right,
they’ll DO what’s right.
30. If we choose to try to change the future, then we
must choose how. More often than not, we choose to
push. We have an idea of the way we think things
ought to be, and we marshal our resources—
arguments, authority, supporters, money, weapons—
to try to make it so. But often when we push, others
push back, and we end up frustrated, exhausted, and
stuck. Over and over we encounter such stuck
situations, in all kinds of social systems: families,
teams, communities, organizations, nations.
Adam Kahane
31. These tools came from the industrial age:
manufacturing, invention, and marketing
They basically rely on “experts” who
“decide,” then implement.
32. Social systems aren’t just complicated, they
are truly, fundamentally complex. They are
complex adaptive systems.
a. They are not causal, they are dispositional. Cause and effect
can only be seen in retrospect, and you cannot reliably predict
the affect of an intervention.
b. The goal is not to make something, but to shift the system
from State A to a more preferable State B.
And there’s two things to say about State B:
• It will mostly be made of the same people who are living State A
• The important differences – the ones that will make State B a
living, resilient, persistent state – will be mostly invisible: beliefs,
identity, care, relationships, conversations, values, and the way
those things are expressed in structures, processes, and policies.
33. Social / Participatory
involve the people who live the current state
and who will make up tne new one.
Systemic / Holistic
involve the whole community or system
Experimental / Emergent
provide for something new to emerge from the
community or system, unfolding over time
We need approaches that are…
34. How do we create intentionally when our
materials are not physical or digital, but social?
What does our work look like when the results
are not technical or business systems, but
human systems – communities?
How do we shift the story that underlies our
organizations, our communities, our work, our
acts of creation and care?
The questions of design for social innovation
36. Reflection
Two minutes
Make a list of the biggest challenges you or your team faces.
One minute
Categorize your list as best you can:
S – Simple: we know what to do and how to do it.
C – Complicated: it’s difficult, but we we could work out what to do and how
to do it with more research, more experts, or more iteration
X – Complex: it’s socially and systemically complex in the way Rettig is
describing – we can’t see what causes what, we can’t reliably predict the
effect of our actions in advance
Five minutes to discuss among your group:
What stands out for you so far?
What do you see in your list?
38. Some of our sources
• Positive Deviance (Sternin)
• Theory U (Scharmer, Senge, et al)
• Social Labs, aka Change Labs (Kahane, Hassan, et al)
• Transformative Scenario Planning (Kahane)
• Cynefin, Distributed Ethnography, Safe-to-Fail portfolio,
SenseMaker software (Dave Snowden)
• Facilitation (e.g. Skilled Facilitator Approach)
• Dialog methods (World Café, Open Space Technology)
• Theater-based methods (e.g. Theater of the Oppressed,
generative improv)
• Gaming and simulation
• Models of change and transformation (e.g., addiction)
39. In the 1990s, Tufts University nutrition professor Marian Zeitlin compiled
a dozen surveys that documented the existence of “Positive Deviant”
children in poor communities who were better nourished than others.
She and her colleagues became advocates for using this concept to
address childhood malnutrition issues at the community level by
identifying what was going right in the community in order to amplify
it, as opposed to focusing on what was going wrong in the
community and fixing it.
Jerry Sternin and his wife, Monique, experimented with Zeitlin’s ideas
and operationalized the PD concept as a tool to promote behavior and
social change, and organized various PD-centered social change
interventions around the world.
Where positive deviance came from
48. Reflection
Two minutes
First gut reaction: what excites you about this approach?
How might it apply to your situation?
Five minutes to discuss among your group
Anything to report?
49. Design for social innovation
Marc Rettig
Fit Associates LLC
2 June 2014
Co-creating at the intersection of business, complex systems and social change
51. A chain of people’s work building on past work, from Chris Argyris and
Donald Schon through Peter Senge (“Fifth Discipline”), Joseph
Jaworski, and most visibly and productively, Otto Scharmer (MIT,
Presencing Institute).
In an effort to understand how profound lasting change occurs and the
role of leadership, Scharmer interviewed 25 remarkable leaders and
seasoned thinkers. Among them: Brian Arthur, Henri Bortoft, Arie de
Geus, Joseph Jaworski, John Kao, Rupert Sheldrake, Francisco Varela.
His book, Theory U, has been tremendously influential.
Adam Kahane at Shell Oil (part of the Scenario Planning days there,
and facilitator in South Africa after the end of apartheid)& others
founded Reos Partners, which has popularized “change labs” a.k.a.
“social labs.”
Where Theory U came from
52. Form
tools, results, what people say & do
Structure & process
how you do your work, command & control, incentives
Identity & purpose
who you really are, what you care about,
your core purposes
54. What we do, say, make, use
What we understand, think & believe
Who we are: identity, relationship,
sense of place and power, care,
purpose,… our highest Self
56. Together, see what’s really
going on. See through many
points of view
Reflect together; let go of “knowing” what
should be, turn your attention inward."
Open to “the future that wants to be born.”
Convene
Together, prototype, "
catalyze, iterate
Establish
57. Social Labs, or Change Labs, are Reos Partner’s
adaptation of Theory U as a repeatable way for
them to engage with complex social challenges.
60. Working together changes the workers.
Example: kids were transformed into “positive deviants” in The
Bronx simply because they interviewed positive deviants.
“The potential of the Food Lab to create innovations to shift
global food systems arose primarily from this potential to create
new, trusting connections among leading actors. “Social
innovation arises not only from new ideas, “ says Angela
Wilkinson of the University of Oxford, “but from new networks of
relationships.” Mary Fitzduff, who for decades played an
important facilitating role in the peace process in Northern
Ireland, once made a similar remark: “In these situations, the
solution is rarely the problem. The solution to the Northern
Ireland conflict had been sitting for many years in a filing cabinet.
What was needed, and what eventually occurred, was for the
protagonists to go together to the filing cabinet.”
- Adam Kahane, Power and Love
A key principle
62. One day, at a global
consumer products
company,…
See the story, “Collaboration and
the elephant that sat on it” on the
Fit Associates site:
fitassociates.com/elephant
72. Our lessons
Theory U really worked!
It doesn’t have to take months
The structure and activities can vary, but
the arc of the creative journey and the way
it is facilitated is a trustworthy framework.
This is thrilling work
76. Convening
• Go into the situation and sit. Be patient.
• Actively interview, using “dialog interviews” –
great conversations that get as deep as you can.
Really listen, without judgment.
• Together with others inside the community,
identify who must be involved for the work to
have legitimacy, power, and diversity
• Craft an invitation that touches on shared deep
purpose, derived from your listening.
• This might take a lot of time! But don’t start
without it.
78. In each of three categories – people & things, organizational
process & structure, and values & purpose – what are your
“seeds”: the possibilities in your group that you would like to
carry into the future, grow larger, make sure to continue?
79. In those same three categories, what are your “stones”: the
things that get in the way of growing those seeds? They could be
internal to your group, or something that comes from outside.
80. What are your “weeds”: the things you have or are doing now
that you would like to stop doing, avoid taking into your future,
or somehow dampen?
81. Sensing together
We usually start simply by making
a “Map of What Is.”
Then see through each other’s eyes.
Go on field trips. Have people make
presentations. Whatever it takes.
82. One popular idea was to develop a “passport” to encourage IT staff to
“travel” into the world of Sales….
83. The person who had the idea built a little prototype of the whole thing.
The passport contains a series of increasingly difficult activities, each
aimed at immersing someone in the world of the Sales group. Each page
describes exactly what you need to do, and has a place for a signature
and a passport stamp that documents your accomplishment.
84.
85. Sensing together
We usually start simply by making
a “Map of What Is.”
Then see through each other’s eyes.
Go on field trips. Have people make
presentations. Whatever it takes.
Go out together to see and experience the
system from all points of view.
The outcome: everyone lets go of “I see it the
right way,” opens their minds, gains a sense of
The Big Thing they are a part of.
86. Creating together:
safe-to-fail experiments and
landing strips for the future
KEY: Work together, from purpose, intention
KEY: Learn to facilitate this well
FRONTIER: Social prototypes
91. 1. Listen, synthesize, make connections with community
2. Design a portfolio of safe-to-fail experiments
3. Manage the portfolio, using strategies to amplify or
dampen
4. As evidence grows and spreads in the organization,
move some into the business units and/or community
for development
5. Some of those will become operational
Portfolio of
safe-to-fail experiments
100. An example
A hospital network asks,
“How can we increase
population health in our region?”
101. 3 months 1 year ongoing lab &
capacity building
Immerse
Listen
Form invitation
Convene
Categorize situations (Cynefin)
Conceive first group
of experiments
Manage the experiments
Regular sensing
Amplify & dampen per strategy
Move to pilot, design & development as appropriate
Convene as appropriate
New experiments as appropriate
Build community & organizational capacity
to create together & manage emergence
U-journey with leadership
to help them shift “business as usual”
102. Final Reflection
Ten minutes
By table: nominate three things you would like to say to the
room. Keep them short!
What’s standing out for you?
What’s scaring you?
What’s next?
Let’s hear it!
104. Key ingredients in these approaches
1. Convene diversity and influence
(convening is a major step!)
2. Create space: not “business as usual,” open, safe
3. Facilitate experience + reflection:
open, let go, reframe,…
4. Manage portfolios of experiments
Bold & diverse, managed, monitored,
amplify and dampen
5. Iterate, remaining grounded in “the deep”
and open to what emerges
6. Cultivate the community’s creative and adaptive
capacity, nurture the conditions for it to develop and
adapt on its own
105. It’s not the same as what we’ve been doing.
New community story rather than “solution”
Design with rather than for
Catalyze rather than solve
Facilitator-partner rather than expert
Emergence rather than plan-and-execute
Invisible materials
Approach must give us dance steps for uncertainty:
it’s never going away
Your whole Self is required, not just your brain & hands
You can’t be a prick and do this work
106. FIX PROBLEMS:
Design for…
SYSTEMIC WELLNESS
Design with…
SYSTEMIC SELF-
HEALING / RESILIENCE
Nurture the
conditions for life
NATIONS,
GLOBAL SYSTEMS
ORGANIZATIONS,
CITIES,
LOCAL SYSTEMS
INDIVIDUALS
TEAMS,
FAMILIES,
…
SELF-HEALING
NATIONS &
GLOBAL SYSTEMS
HEALTHY NATIONS &
GLOBAL SYSTEMS
FIXING PROBLEMS
AT NATION & GLOBAL
SCALE
SELF-HEALING
ORGANIZATIONS &
LOCAL SYSTEMS
HEALTHY
ORGANIZATIONS &
LOCAL SYSTEMS
FIXING PROBLEMS
IN ORGANIZATIONS &
LOCAL SYSTEMS
SELF-HEALING
PEOPLE & GROUPS
HEALTHY
PEOPLE & GROUPS
FIXING PROBLEMS
FOR PEOPLE &
GROUPS
DEPTH OF APPROACH AND IMPACT
SOCIALSCALE
107. I believe a new practice
is being born – the
practice of creating
intentionally in and with
human communities.
My work is to advance
that practice. I want a
self-healing world.
108. If you feel excited or
scared or both, you’ve
probably already begun
this same work.
109. For a New Beginning
In out of the way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.
For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness grow inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.
It watched you play with the seduction of safety
and the grey promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.
Then the delight, when your courage kindled,,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.
Though your destination is not clear
you can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is one with your life’s desire.
Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.
John O’Donohue, from To Bless the Space Between Us