Connecting the dots:
People are the lines that make peace building an innovation
A considerable dot:
Peace building and Innovation
The Impact week is a non-profit program that fosters social entrepreneurship and intercultural exchange. As a Colombian expat, being part of SAP Design, I thought it would be an amazing opportunity to bring the Impact Week to Bogotá.
The goal: the possibility to link peace building with innovation as the country pursues the implementation of the peace process.
I left the country at a time when peace dialogues were seen as something utopic, and violence was part of daily life. We were used to living under armed conflict, and violence was so natural for us that it became a way of living. It redesigned life around us. A small example, during night, traffic lights were always yellow to keep people from stopping at the streets and to recreate a sense of simple security. Life was fun and warm, don’t get me wrong, but we didn’t know better, as there was nothing we could compare it to. Yellow lights were part of normal citizen behavior for us.
But this is no longer the case, as the country is currently undergoing a deep polemical transformation. The peace process has created a big controversy because people who have been on opposite positions with opposite opinions during the 50 years of conflict now have to move towards one peaceful society. And this is not easy.
During the pitch to partner with the University Jorge Tadeo Lozano in Bogotá, Sandra Borda, Dean of the faculty of social sciences, and I, rapidly realized the big relations between the transformation Colombia is going through and some of the core values of innovation: “Be comfortable with the unknown”. Having visualized this parallel, the peace process seemed like a great possibility for innovation.
The program was then designed to promote the innovation value that the peace process could bring to the country. Generating a working space where people from different backgrounds and opinions, were mixed.
An incidental dot:
Diversity is not only an ethnological point of view
For those who haven’t heard about the Impact Week, the event consists of two weeks. The first week, “Train the Trainer”, prepared 24 junior coaches, including international professionals from SAP, Lufthansa group, Help Alliance, the Design at Business community, as well as academics, and professionals from the Ministry of Information Technology and Communications of Colombia, for the Design Thinking methodology and mindset. Training local coaches is a sustainable approach, allowing the initiative to continue on its own in the future.
In the second week, the newly trained coaches, together with former IDEO Design Thinking evangelist Alex Grots, guided the students to create new solutions on topics relevant to the peace process such as public policy, education, tourism, fair trade and regional development. 75 students from mixed faculties (design, social sciences and life sciences, engineering), participated, encouraging co-creation in trans-disciplinary teams and coaching social innovation from scratch.
In such a diverse environment, it was great to realize one thing: Diversity wasn’t defined by culture but by disciplines and corporate backgrounds, a mindset. One thing I liked about interacting with the corporate partners was to understand the culture each company fosters in regard to Design Thinking. As this is a very dynamic field, it was an experience to understand how other coaches from other companies implement different methods – or avoided some. For instance, the use of Personas, which is a method widely used in the industry, was avoided by some experts because of the biases a design can be reduced to.
The take away: Diversity shouldn’t be understood as only a difference in cultural backgrounds, but also as the difference between how each corporation defines the same methodology. That point of view makes the interrelation between corporations very indispensable in terms of innovation coaching.
An attitude dot:
Never trust plan A.
The event seemed like an experiment in every aspect: We were going to promote innovation under the umbrella of a highly challenging topic. It was the first time, the Impact Week was going to scale from its original event in Nairobi, Kenya. It was the first time, the university was organizing an event together with international coaches outside of academia, and it was the first time we, as coaches, were going to meet (for some it was the first time in South America). The students were also going to be mixed between faculties.
For me, it was the first time to organize such an event and to go back to Colombia for work after 10 years abroad. I had forgotten how the working culture functions there and how people prefer to communicate informally in comparison to the very formal German way of working. There was only one outcome: Things had to work…they did.
Part of the challenge of building a cultural bridge between European and Colombian culture (while I tried to re-assimilate my own culture) was the understanding of time and to ensure that both sides could modify this. In a country where informality is part of life, time is not usually linear and people tend to bend around it. The food didn’t arrive on time, the speakers were stuck in traffic, schedules had to be reformatted and students were usually late. This was a challenge for the coaches to get used to but we all adapted, as we learned that things were just being achieved in a different way. The students took their tasks home; they worked extra hours; they would eat their lunch while working. One team which, we thought had disappeared for the award ceremony, was actually preparing since 6 am in a classroom. In simple words: Lack of punctuality wasn’t a synonym for disinterest – just a different way of doing things and seeing the world.
We also included speakers that were not typical in the Impact week curriculum as they were not precisely entrepreneurs but explained about the actual scenario of innovation in the country. For example, Ivan Dario Castaño, Sub-Director of the Ministry of Technology and Communications, explained what the challenges of the Industry 4.0 are in a country like Colombia. Free arts, such as philosophy and anthropology, could take a big role in building the country’s local development, directing the focus to ethics rather than only technology itself. Another speaker was invited to explain the political situation of the country and what the peace process means. These last-minute changes, brought everybody on track, so that the coaches, international and national, could guide the students to a solution that could actually make a sustainable local impact.
Keeping things flexible was the key ingredient to the event’s success. The more we understood “Plan A” as just a guideline, the more we enjoyed the rest of the alphabet.
A crucial dot:
Don’t put lipstick on a pig, or a computer. (Doing harm by making good)
Peace building cannot be achieved when solutions are imposed without the empathy of understanding what our users want, and sometimes our users don’t want technologies. Technology can be scary and it can be an elitist solution when it comes to a topic like peace building, which seeks to integrate different people.
For this reason, it was strategically important to Invite C-Innova, a local lab with experience in “appropriate technologies”, a term which categorizes solutions by context, knowing that only with context a positive impact can be brought to a certain community. By defining innovation through “appropriateness”, it challenges the necessity of technology itself. In other words, without appropriateness, you can create harm by thinking that you are doing good.
Imposing a new technological infrastructure where is not needed causes damage and dependencies. This was the reason why many teams were encouraged to think outside “the app innovation” and really research options that could bring more value to each of the topics. Furthermore, the partnership with C-Innova allowed for a long-term development of the project, as they committed to run a mentor program for the winning teams.
A good example of this was a team that had a design challenge to bring politics back to the people. During their research, it was concluded that, after 50 years of conflict, adults were frustrated with politics, making them indifferent towards political participation. Interestingly enough, the team realized that school children were more likely to actively participate in a debate or in social activities and wanted to know what voting felt like. They were more positive towards transformation.
Inspired by the school children’s motivation to actively participate in society, they decided to develop a board game that could be used by everybody (since politics should be for everybody), avoiding digital technologies so that it could reach even the most remote places. The game also consisted of role gaming and a political lexicon for people with little access to written education. This type of “appropriate innovation” would have never worked if the word and the investment of “innovation” had been limited to the terms of digitalization.
In a society that has adapted to living in constant fear and conflict, it is important to adopt a perspective that can open the doors to new ways of finding solutions for the problems that have prevailed for many decades.
In the end, it would be delusional to say that you can achieve peace building with a short event and the usage of Design Thinking as a tool. Doing real impact needs more than just a tool. But what can really be said, is that it became a space where people got together and forgot about the political divisions. And that is something we were scared of because people are sensitive to the topic. Regardless of the solutions created during the event, it was an opportunity for people to look beyond the conflict and to understand the amount of possibilities that exist once you bring new methods into play.
Finally, this experience was a way for me to connect with the current situation in my country, a way to bring back what I have been able to see, what innovation can bring when you don’t import solutions but create them from your own resources. The Impact Week in Bogota was interesting for me because it wasn’t about a method or about politics. It was about having a space to play in, concentrating on a matter (the Peace Process) that doesn’t currently invite dialogue. It was a way to exhale how minds can expand, as the political restrictions of a conflict that is no longer there lift, and to be amazed by the solutions that can be discovered in such a post-conflict society.
