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Labs as a Large Systems Change Strategy

The concept of “labs” as a way to address complex issues is a relatively new concept.  Zaid Hassan, in the Social Labs Revolution, estimates it to be about 20 years old.  His intimate involvement in developing a number of them provides valuable insight into what they are, the current state of the art and guidance for those interested in developing one – guidance derived from perhaps more pain than pleasure, exceptwhenviewed from this side of the experience!

These labs are exploding in number.  They include the Ecosystems Labs that I’m active with and are still in early stage of development Social Innovation Generation (SiG) at the University of Waterloo, and the Innovation Co-Creation Lab at London School of Economics.  Zaid has been involved with an impressive number associated with Generon Consulting and Reos, including the Sustainable Food Lab (also a Global Action Network), the Finance Innovation Lab, a Yemen lab, and the Bhavishya Lab for child nutrition in India.

The labs are an innovative response to the distinct challenges presented by complex issues.   Including climate change, environmental degradation, health challenges and most social issues, complex issues are not, as Zaid emphasizes, amenable to traditional planning approaches that assume a high degree of predictability, the existence of known solutions and low variability in context.  He writes that “The situation in Yemen is a textbook example of a complex social challenge because of three characteristics: (1) the situation is emergent, (2), as a result, there is a constant flow of information to negotiate, and (3) this means actors are constantly adapting their behavior.”

Zaid defines a social innovation lab as a “strategic approach”.  He further explains that:

  • “The strategy is social, in that it shifts the locus of efforts purely from already-stretched government technocrats to a wider stakeholder base.”
  • “A social lab is a gathering, a coming together of people across the silos that characterize dominant social structures in order to attend to a social challenge for as long as necessary to shift the situation.”
  • “Social labs…require that participants operate from a place of inner volition and drive.”
  • “A social lab must also undertake to work in an experimental and iterative way to address challenges. A program is very different from a lab.”
  • “…they must be systemic in orientation, aiming to address social issues at their root cause.” (But do systemic challenges have “root causes” or do they arise from knotty interactions?)
  • “Labs, whatever their focus, must put inquiry—and not just advocacy—at the heart of their activities.”

“Experimentation” is a core activity of a lab, with important collective reflection and learning processes integrated into action.  Stakeholders in an issue identify and undertake actions to address the issue through “prototype” projects.  “The point of a prototype,” Zaid explains, “is to start to deliver results as soon as possible and, in the process of iterating, to improve. That is the difference between a pilot and a prototype.”

A big contribution to understanding labs as a maturing methodology is provided by distinguishing between two generations of labs.  The first, explored through detailed description of Zaid’s Bhavishya Lab experience, had the weaknesses of attention to engaging elites as initial participants, and lack of clarify about how to proceed without falling into a traditional planning mode.

The more recent generation addresses these.  “Elites” are distinguished from people who have influence and passion.  In place of planning with quite long time horizons, products, pert charts, and objectives defined in advance, there is a general direction and clear articulation of an agile processes that “…are all about timely responses to the unplanned event in order to create more value.”  These are operationalized with a pace of work around “scrums” that might be week-long periods and “sprints” that are day-long periods.  These are organized around time for review and check-in to continually adjust actions and direction based on experience and learning.  In other words, there is a disciplined learning process with conscious feed-back loops.

“Prototyping” is associated for Zaid with practical wisdom, in contrast to theory and technology that are the basis for traditional approaches to complex issues.  It seems to me that in addition to the labs, there is an emerging body of impressive experience elsewhere that is producing value insights in how to advance practical wisdom approaches.  In particular, I’m reminded of much of what Global Action Networks do – they are always prototyping.

Zaid is wonderfully reflective on his own experiences that provide the powerful foundation for the book – reflections he acknowledges as being supported by a rich network of colleagues.  Like many pioneers, he sometimes gets carried away with the value of the pioneering approach he’s developing, as he continually criticizes traditional planning.  At the beginning of the book he points out that the labs have three core characteristics:  they are social, experimental and systemic.  It’s important to remember that many challenges do not require responses with these characteristics – such as street maintenance or even putting a person on the moon (largely a technological challenge).  Therefore, it’s important to understand his critique of planning as being about its inappropriate use.  Our ability to recognize when it is inappropriate is particularly important in creating powerful responses to complex challenges.  To this end, the book makes an important contribution.

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Complex Change: An emerging field

Complex change challenges are a specific type of change challenge that is the growing focus of an impressive array of work.  An earlier blog distinguished complex environments from simple, complicated and chaotic ones through Dave Snowden’s cynefin framework.  It can be married with my change framework to produce the accompanying Table.

As part of a World Bank investigation, I created a map of traditions that have developed to address complex change, with the goal of defining a comprehensive framework for identifying people, knowledge and methods to advance complex change as an action (and) science field. The accompanying mind map emerged from discussions, including a crowd-sourcing public webinar. The rectangular boxes represent knowledge and action traditions; the ellipses identify some of the concerns in those traditions that have given rise to action and knowledge. The traditions are distinct in the way people talk about their change goals and reasons for taking action, often in terms of methods and knowledge, and also reflect to some extent in academic divisions.

I’m most most familiar with the Business in Society (BiS) and Socio-Economic Development (SED) traditions. These have developed a particularly rich set of methodologies to engage stakeholders:  historically the BiS tradition is focused on questions about the well-being of the corporation as the core stakeholder and the SED tradition is focused on broader societal stakeholder concerns.  In the last five to 10 years these stakeholder perspectives have increasingly interacted as the perspective of corporations has broadened and the SED traditions have recognized the importance of the contribution of corporations to addressing their concerns.  However, both traditions have historically shared what might be described as an institutional-structural focus.  Individuals’ roles have historically been framed particularly in the BiS tradition around the concept of “leadership”, traditionally in an hierarchical heroic model.  Group processes, as “teams” in BiS and “communities” in SED, have spurred a rich tradition that has grown into the shared concept of “stakeholder convenings”.

These approaches historically contrast with the individual one that has developed with the spiritual-psychological one, where individuals’ awareness and insight (as opposed to heroic leadership) are emphasized.  In many cases this has produced transformational intentional communities, such as with monastic traditions or Shaker communities.  Both institutional and individual inter-actions are foci of the peace and conflict resolution ones which have received perhaps the most significant and concentrated attention as “complex change challenges” because of their obvious life-and-death issues.  Conflicts such as those with the apartheid issue in South Africa, the persistent Israel – Arab crisis, Northern Ireland troubles, internecine guerilla activity in Columbia, and violence in Central America have produced an impressive array of methods relevant to complex change from inter-personal strategies to post-conflict reconciliation commissions.

The need for effective government has produced in the political science field notable processes for national conversations around constitutional arrangements and strategies to advance agendas such as regional planning.  Recently developing are the concepts of collaborative governance involving all organizational sectors and, in contrast to standard hierarchical government, and of “experimentalist governance” which integrates flexible, recursive processes.   At an even broader cultural level, other methodologies have developed to support shifts in popular insights and values such as the wide range of media and specific methods such as Theatre of the Oppressed.  Political, cultural, and socio-economic complex change strategies have produced a range of methods associated with community organizing, collaboration and purposeful conflict generation such as with strikes.

The most impressive growth in the traditions over the past decade is associated with environmental concerns with the concepts of “resilience” (there is a “Resilience Alliance”) and “transitions” (there is a “Sustainability Transitions Research Network”).  Inspired by concerns about degradation of the natural environment originally brought biologists and natural scientists into the fray, with a gradual realization that addressing their concerns must categorically address socio-economic concerns.  This has led to holistic stakeholder strategies around natural resource issues ranging from fisheries to, increasingly, climate change.

There is the tradition of complexity science itself that is of course highly relevant to complex change.  This tradition is closely associated with system-related analysis (although other fields such as biology have developed their own systems approaches) and its tools such as system dynamics analysis and modeling.  This tradition has a rich association with complicated/reform change efforts, and a more problematic one with complex/transformational ones.  David Snowden emphasizes the danger with complex adaptive systems of confusing causality and dispositionality;  similar is the danger of taking models as representations of reality rather than as one optional reality, and accepting their goal-oriented structure as the dynamic of complex adaptive systems.

As well as these traditions of several decades, others are gaining recognition with names such as “transitions science” and “sustainability studies”.

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Ecosynomics: Transforming to a Collaborative Future

Transformation involves changes in basic assumptions.  Changing the basic economic paradigm assumption from managing scarcity to an “ecosynomics” one of great abundance is a transformation that my good colleague Jim Ritchie-Dunham is working on.  In his new book Ecosynomics, he presents this transformation as a theoretical perspective, a data-based analysis, and perhaps most importantly a lived and applied experience with a range of organizations that all have a very deeply collaborative culture.  From work with some of the most commercially mundane companies – a sock manufacturer, a pet food company and a toy company – as well as multi-stakeholder organizations and NGOs, Jim provides a pathway for developing transformative collaboration.

14-08-06 ecosynomics book cover

Jim’s exploration began with “positive deviants”, popularized as black swans by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.  Why do some organizations simply seem to do so much better on a range of outcomes, than others?  It’s a popular topic, but Jim developed a unique framework out of his own inquiry.

“Vibrancy” is a core concept of his framework – a term that arose frequently as a description of what people experience when things are going really well.  He found people talked about experiencing vibrancy in terms of five relationship aspects:

  • The “self” or “me”:  do you feel that you are fully participating and working to your potential?
  • The “other” or “you”:  are others participating fully and expressing their potential?
  • The “group” or “us” which can mean the network as a whole:  are people fully experiencing the “we” as an energetic, empowering whole?14-08-06 Levels of vibrancy
  • Nature and the “levels of perceived reality”:  what is considered “real,” just outcomes and things, or development and learning, as well as possibility and potential?
  • Spirit and creativity:  is there a flowing and development of ideas and innovation that generate a feeling that “anything is possible”?

He also found that for each of these, people focus on three aspects of “reality”:

  • Possibility-light:  experiencing inspiration and seeing possibilities
  • Development-motion:  seeing the process by which a particular possibility can be realized
  • Things-matter:  focusing on the realization of possibility, the here and now

The traditional economic perspective focuses on the “things-matter” – products and outcomes.  The capitalist tradition focuses on the self, the socialist on the other/you, and the communist (theoretically, if not as enacted) on the “group”.

The five relationship aspects are represented by the five lines moving from the center in Figure 1 and the three levels of perceptions of reality represented by the three circles.  Jim proposes that high-performing organizations and societies have healthy relationships across the three levels of the five relationships.  Traditional economics is not replaced, but rather subsumed by ecosynomics.  However, Jim says, if we start by looking at possibilities rather than by focusing on mechanisms to control scarcity, evidence shows that we will be much better off.

Core Tool:  Agreements

The core tool, if you will, in this transformation is agreements.  These are the “rules of the game”—guidelines that are usually implicit, although they include explicit ones such as contracts.  These agreements address four questions at each of the levels:

  • Resources – how much?
  • Allocation – who decides?
  • Value – by what criteria?
  • Organization – how shall we interact?

Low vibrancy where the agreements are not working result in meetings that make you want to reach for medications, versus high vibrancy meetings that you leave feeling more energy than when you began.  He aims to support the latter experience being part of daily life by supporting development of agreements that support high vibrancy.

Phew.  A lot to condense that is pretty heady.  However, this provides a framework to analyze an organization and networks with a relatively simple survey.

The book presents a detailed description of what ecosynomics is like as a culture and its routines…Jim operationalizes it by describing where he has seen it operating in the positive deviants (black swans).One is with a multi-stakeholder initiative in the US, meeting 90% of the state of Vermont’s energy needs through renewable energy and increased efficiency by 2050.  Work is developing in numerous settings around the world, growing out of expanding data-collection with 2,200 respondents to the survey in 90 countries.

Jim’s most in-depth work is with THORLO, a very successful sock manufacturer in North Carolina, where he is a part-time member of the management team. This is promoted by a pretty amazing owner of THORLO, who is also CEO, nick-named JLT.  Jim writes that “People talk about supporting each other in being their higher selves or bringing out more of their contributions, about seeing possibilities and converting them to probabilities, and about the diversity in the room.” He describes the on-going process of ensuring a high-vibrancy leadership team and organization with “harmonic vibrancy moves” that arise from a pace of on-going “integrated collaborative conversations” (the process is described in detail) around the concept of “brand stewardship”.  One employee describes his own shift by saying:  “I began to no longer provide input to them (other employees) as an expert, but instead I engaged them in conversations about our higher purpose and about the “what and why” of what we were doing.”

Take the 1- or 12-minute version of the survey now to test the level of harmonic vibrancy in your life!

Learn more by taking an e-course, joining workshops or contact Jim at jimrd@instituteforstrategicclarity.org

—————————–Some Reflections from Jim In our work with 73 groups (large and small, in the global south and north, all sectors) over the past 7 years, I would like to highlight for this blogpost three issues we have found.  One is particular to global efforts, one comes up in networks, and one is common to all efforts. Regarding global efforts, we have used the “harmonic vibrancy” survey to assess the experience and outcomes in 2,200 groups in 90 countries in dozens of languages.  It has been very interesting to see what expressions, of those listed in this blogpost by Steve Waddell, have been easy to translate, and which have been more challenging.  To be clear, the terms we use emerged from listening to people in many cultures describe their experience.  While most of the expressions seem to map to the same constructs, some vary significantly.  The five relationships (self, other, group, nature, spirit) and three levels of perceived reality (possibility, development, outcomes) have turned out to be relatively easy to translate into all of these languages.  The outcomes and leadership quality terms often prove more challenging, varying by language-culture, such as the expression for “collaborative leadership” in German and the technical term for vibrancy in Spanish.  It seems to be an issue of mapping the descriptions people give for their experience of higher vibrancy, harmony, and abundance across cultures. In networks, whether a Global Action Network (GAN) or a city-wide effort, the question of who is the “we” that is being assessed comes up every time.  Some people in the network experience a clear, deep connection to the larger “group” being formed as a network and others experience a nebulous, at best, connection to the larger network, with more direct feelings of connection to their local node within the network.  For example, in our on-going work with the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict, a GAN, members have asked, “Is the “we” the whole of GPPAC, as a global network, or is it my national node that belongs to the global network?  Am I reflecting on the experience when we come together every few years at a GPPAC conference or in my daily experience of communications and sharing across the network?”  We see the same in two on-going city-level efforts in the USA and Mexico.  As a citizen in Tampa Bay asked, “What am I a ‘member’ of?”  This seems to be a connection and experience that is very clear for some people to describe and less so for others. In all 73 groups we have met and in all 2,200 groups we have surveyed, many people find it difficult to see and accept that they can change their fundamental agreements, and that this will enable them to have a different experience and achieve different outcomes.  While the “idea” and the desire for the shift in experience and outcomes seem to be clear and obvious to all, the actual seeing that it is possible to identify fundamental agreements and shift them remains very challenging for many people, even after they have gone through the exercise of collaboratively creating their own Agreements Evidence Map (describedhandbook). These three issues are areas of inquiry that we will be researching over the next couple of years.  Anyone who wants to engage in this research, contributing their own unique perspective, is welcome.  jimrd (at) instituteforstrategicclarity.org

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Changing the Meme of Constant Growth

Constant growth is driving humanity off an ecological cliff, writes Dr. Sandra Waddock (Boston College). She describes how growth has become a “meme,” a core value, and she identifies diverse alternatives, from “thrivability” to “enough.” Dr. Waddock is active with the Ecosystems Labs, an Network for Business Sustainability Thought Leader (NBS), and a world expert on sustainability issues. This is a reposting of an NBS blog, August 13.

It’s easy to take for granted our society’s core principles. It can be difficult to imagine alternatives: even when the status quo threatens our survival.

Memes: The Genes of Culture

Memes, a word coined by biologist Richard Dawkins, are ideas, behaviors, and styles that spread within cultures. Dawkins wanted a word that sounded like gene to reflect something that reproduced ideas or other aspects of culture, much the way that genes reproduce biological traits. Memes affect how we think about the world around us.

Memes can, in fact, shape whole social or economic systems. In complex social systems like our economic and business systems, this glue of memes links individuals, organizations, and societies. To effect change we need to tap into — and change — fundamental memes: the core ideas, values and operating norms of these systems.

The Meme of Growth

In Western society, the notion that constant growth is essential to a successful economic system is such a meme. Most people believe that without growth, our economy and companies could not survive or prosper.

The growth meme may have served a purpose in the heady days following World War II, when it became prominent.  Leaders in that era saw a need to foster growth because the war had destroyed companies’ ability to produce and peoples’ ability to get goods and services. Whole countries, including Japan and Germany, needed to rebuilt their manufacturing infrastructure, so the emphasis was on regenerating productive capacity — and consumption.

But the growth meme no longer serves humanity well; indeed, it is driving humanity off an ecological cliff.

Questioning Constant Growth

Economic growth is measured using gross national (or domestic) product: GNP and GDP. But these measures, and the goal they represent, are fundamentally flawed: They only assess activity that can be priced. As a result, GDP and GNP don’t consider possible negative consequences of economic activity, such as environmental degradation and social costs.

GDP and GNP also fail to capture vital elements of the economy. They don’t consider human wellbeing and other important values. And they leave out activities with no monetary value but important economic consequences: like, for instance, childrearing in the home.

Numerous studies (e.g., from the Club of Rome) conclude that continued economic growth, as currently measured, is not physically possible over the longer run. As climate change heats up, the need for systems change becomes even clearer.

Nonetheless, the meme of constant economic “growth” powerfully shapes our views about how an economy or society is doing. Just listen to any news broadcast or read any economic report to confirm the bias towards constant growth.

Finding a New Meme

Memes can evolve as the culture around them changes. What new memes can reflect the realities of our resource constraints — and human beings’ place in that world?

We need a meme that allows businesses, societies, and, importantly, human beings and other creatures, to thrive without destructive growth and the emphasis on material consumption — the relentless pursuit of “more” — that we find with the current meme of growth.

By thinking carefully about possible new memes and talking about them with others, we can all play crucial roles in changing the growth meme to something that works better for the long term.

What might this new meme be? Here are some suggestions:

  • Flourishing. Management scholars John Ehrenfeld and Andy Hoffman urge a focus on “the fullness of life, not some material metric,” and specifically on caring for oneself and others. “Corporations’ basic strategies would move from satisfying needs (or wants) to enabling care,” Ehrenfeld writes.
  • Wellbeing. In our recent book SEE Change, Malcolm McIntosh and I argue that humans crave community, balance, connection and artistic and spiritual development for wellbeing, not just material goods and money. A focus on wellbeing could create a saner, more interpersonally connected, and more sustainable world.
  • Plenitude. Sociologist Juliet Schor urges households to diversify income sources and explore small-scale enterprises. She calls for appreciation of “undervalued sources of wealth”: time, creativity and social relationships.
  • Enough. Writing from a religious perspective, Will Davis also emphasizes caring for others.
  • Thriving or thrivability. This is my personal favorite. It incorporates sustainability without that word’s connotation of status quo, recognizing that we cannot “sustain” the meme of growth.

We need a new core meme for our economic, productive, and social systems that connotes thriving in a context of using fewer ecological resources while still supporting the world’s living beings. I call this new meme thrivability.* What do you call it?

*The idea of thrivability was generated by a group I participated in at the Business as an Agent of World Benefit Conference in 2006.

Additional Resources

Davis, Will, Jr. (2012). Enough: Finding more by living with less. Ada, MI: Revell.

Dawkins, R. (2006). The selfish gene. London: Oxford University Press.

Ehrenfeld, J., & Hoffman, A. (2013). Flourishing: A frank conversation about sustainability. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Gilding, P. (2011). The great disruption: How the climate crisis will transform the global economy. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Schor, Juliet (2010). Plenitude: The new economics of real wealth. New York: Penguin.

Waddock, Sandra and Malcolm McIntosh (2011) SEE change: Making the transition to a sustainable enterprise economy. Sheffield, UK: Greenleaf.

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Realizing Large Systems Change

The second in a free webinar series.

Action Networks: Global to Local structures for change

Friday, March 27, 2015:  1-2 PM Eastern Time

Guests: Steve Waddell and Tom Bigda-Peyton

While change always requires local action, change efforts are almost always heavily influenced by large contexts such as national conditions and-with increasing globalization-global ones. New approaches to organizing change move beyond traditions of hierarchy and build on multi-stakeholder strategies and inter-organizational networks. This discussion will build on 20 years of work with such strategies, highlighted in the book Global Action Networks, and will provide examples from U.S. healthcare reform.

RSVP/Register Here  Participation is free.

Steven Waddell, PhD, focuses on collaboration and networks among organizations and institutions in business, government and civil society to produce innovation, enhance impact and build new capacity. His clients and project partners have included The Global Knowledge Partnership, the UN Global Compact, the World Bank, Global Reporting Initiative, the Ford Foundation, Humanity United, Civicus, International Youth Foundation, USAID, International Research and Development Centre, and the Forest Stewardship Council. He is a principal of Networking Action and lead steward for the Ecosystem Labs, which develop large change systems. He has a PhD in sociology and a master’s in business administration. He is author of several articlesand other publications, including the books Societal Learning and Change: Innovation with Multi-Stakeholder Strategies and Global Action Networks: Creating Our Future Together.

Thomas Bigda-Peyton, EdD, is a system coach and consultant working to catalyze innovation and whole-system engagement in large organizations and networks striving for collective impact. Tom uses methods such as collaborative problem-solving, action learning, and positive deviance to promote culture change in industries such as healthcare, government, and forestry. As a practitioner-researcher for 25 years, and currently as a Partner at Second Curve Systems in Boston, his clients have included multiple healthcare systems, the Federal Aviation Administration, Fidelity Investments, the government of Ontario, and the Forest Safety Council of British Columbia. He is co-author of the books From Innovation to Transformation: Moving Up the Curve in Ontario’s Healthcare System and Safety Culture: Building and Sustaining a Cultural Change in Aviation and Healthcare. Tom holds a doctorate in Organizational Behavior and Intervention from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he worked with two pioneers in the field of organizational learning and system dynamics, Chris Argyris and Don Schon. He also holds master’s and bachelor’s degrees from Harvard.

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Large Systems Change: an emerging field of transformation and transitions

What is meant by “large systems change (LSC)?” How can we “do it” much better? What must change and what are the strategies to realize it? What does a comprehensive picture of the field of LSC knowledge and methods look like? These are some of the questions that a just-published Special Issue of the Journal of Corporate Citizenship on LSC investigates. Contributors include David Snowden, Mari Fitzduff, Otto Scharmer, Rajesh Tandon, Pieter Glasbergen and Derk Loorbach.

The Issue’s lead article, of which I’m lead author, is freely available here. It presents responses to the questions with an eye to the emergence of a new field of knowledge and action that draws from multiple issues and disciplines that remain highly fragmented. One goal of the issue is to support cohesion and community identity, to support development of LSC as a field.

The editors of the Issue went back and forth with terms of “scale” and “complexity” being in the title, reflecting their assumption that these concepts are intimately part of the LSC concept:

By large systems change (LSC), we mean change with two characteristics. One we refer to as breadth: change that engages a very large number of individuals, organisations and geographies across a wide range of systems. Indeed, given the interconnectedness of humanity, we see the need to think about global systems change engaging local-to-global (glocal) dimensions. The second characteristic we refer to as depth: LSC is not simply adding more of what exists or making rearrangements within existing power structures and relationships, but rather changes the complex relationships among these elements at multiple levels simultaneously. LSC means fundamental revisioning of what is possible and ways of sensemaking that lead to previously unimaginable outcomes.

Fragmentation also results from the various points of departure interms of the object of change attention, the lead article notes. Some, such as Scharmer, place particular emphasis on the role of the individual and the need for change to start with them; some focus on the importance of technological change impact, such as those looking at technological innovation systems; some stress the need to transform institutions and structures, which are often the focus of social movements; more recently attention has increased on the role of culture and memes of beliefs and values which create possibilities such as Thomas Kuhn associated with scientific revolutions; and the rise of the anthropocene as an new geological era associated with the period since the industrial revolution, points to environmental transformation of the natural environment

LSC, the lead article proposes, involves spheres of interacting change: although one may be the focus of attention at a particular time and by a particular group or intervention, transformation involves change amongst the spheres. As with the proverbial problem of the blind man determining the actual shape of an elephant by touching different parts, there is a natural tendency for interveners to focus on specific parts of what needs changing to realize transformation.

LSC is also currently characterized by strategic and methodological parochialism: interveners and their interventions tend to have a highly restricted view of what ways transformation arises. They naturally come from what they know and feel comfortable with, supported by a particular focus on a particular part of what has to change. An attempt to distinguish between types of interventions and build a comprehensive picture of options led to the distinguishing between four types of interventions. Most, the lead article notes, focus on strategies associated with a co-creation logic grounded in reciprocal respect and willingness to change, since it embodies the values associated with peaceful transitions arising out of a sense of equity. However, other change strategies such as war and capital strikes can blow collaboration strategies out of the water. Another goal of developing a comprehensive picture of strategies is to explore sequencing and relationships amongst them. For example, it has often been noted that collaboration strategies often only arise after parties have exhausted themselves from other approaches.

The Special Issue hopefully makes a contribution to the emergence of ties across strategies and fields of action and knowledge that are critical to advancing our capacity for LSC. Unquestionably, this emergence is part and parcel of our ability to respond to the increasing urgency for large scale interventions.

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Social Innovation Labs

Anyone interested in transformation processes will find Social Innovation Lab Guide a must read. For those actually developing a lab, it provides a detailed design, tools, examples, and advice; for those wanting to understand the role of labs in a context of a sea of approaches and historic development, it provides a valuable positioning of labs.

Labs with the goal of supporting social transformation and responses to specific wicked problems have become common over the past 10 years. Positioning itself as a complex change methodology, the Guide identifies five elements that Labs should have:

  1. Hold a deliberate intend to transform (as opposed to incremental change and reform);
  2. Take advantage of transitions, thresholds and crises;
  3. Be focused on not just inventing (prototyping), but innovating (also scaling impact);
  4. Pay attention to cross-scale dynamics; and
  5. Catalyze a range of potential innovations.

Most involved in social innovation labs would be in agreement with these elements. However, they might take umbrage at the very detailed and specific methodology presented in the Guide as a three-step process: 1) initiation, 2) research and preparation, and 3) three workshops: seeing the system, designing and prototyping.   Within this process, detailed advice is provided to the point of alternative agendas and exercises for the workshops.

Labs are presented as a process to identify potential inventions that can lead to transformational innovation, rather than realize the full innovation. The Guide also describes the very important “after” Lab activity, ideally under continued leadership of lab participants. This led me to speculate on Communities of Practice as a potential next structure to support dissemination, perhaps integrated with or followed by Action Networks in the Global Action Networks tradition to sustain the many years and geographic broadening activity necessary to realize most innovations.

This methodology is positioned as the product of four particularly important roots: design labs, whole systems processes, computer modeling, and social innovation approaches. I found particularly valuable the analysis of these roots and the detailed explanation of their contribution to the methodology.

The Guide is the product of the Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience in Canada, under the leadership of Frances Westley who has a leading position historically in the halls of collaboration and social innovation. It draws on the Institute’s experience and that of others, in particular Christian Bason of the Danish Design Centre (and formerly of MindLab) in Copenhagen, Banny Banerjee of d.School at Stanford University in California, Luigi Ferrara of Institute Without Boundaries at George Brown College in Toronto, Bryan Boyer, formerly of Helsinki Design Lab in Finland and Joeri van den Steenhoven, of MaRS Solutions Lab.

Some will find this guide much too proscriptive, but the description provides a good basis for riffs on the approach. It is written with a deep understanding of complexity, a humbleness of spirit, acknowledgement of great work of others, and a clear sense of the role of Social Innovation Labs in transformation processes. Another recent resource is Zaid Hassan’s Social Labs Revolution; as a personal experience with Labs, it is a good complement to the Guide.

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Webinar: Peace-building as large system change

This is part of a webinar series on large systems complex change.

Date:  Tuesday, Sept. 8
Time:  9am PT/ noon ET/ 5pm UK/ 6pm CET/ 7pm Amman
Topic:
Peace building.
Place: https://zoom.us/j/260856719; or  +1 408 638 0968 (US Toll) or +1 646 558 8656 (US Toll) Meeting ID: 260 856 719 International numbers available: https://www.zoom.us/zoomconference
Description:  Mark Clark, the CEO of Generations for Peace is providing a view of their work for sustainable conflict transformation at the grassroots, by empowering volunteer leaders of youth to promote active tolerance and responsible citizenship in communities experiencing different forms of conflict and violence. Carefully-facilitated sport-based games, art, advocacy, dialogue and empowerment activities provide an entry point to engage children, youth and adults, and a vehicle for integrated education and sustained behavioural change. They are working with over 8000 youths in more than 50 countries.

June 2015 saw publication of a Special Issue of the Journal of Corporate Citizenship on large systems change, with an introductory article by the editors Large systems change: an emerging field of transformation and transitions…all summarized in a blog.  The editors felt this work deserves further advancing, and one way of doing this is through a seminar series in conjunction with Emerging Potential…an initiative to address complex challenges at scale.

Download the schedule of webinars here.