Working together in social innovation
While visiting the MaRS Solutions Lab (MSL) in Toronto as an International Fellow in May 2018 I had the opportunity to observe social innovation in action, and to learn from and with the research and innovation community in Toronto. One of my three key learnings was that I started developing a deeper understanding about how we should work together to improve outcomes for individuals and for society.
MSL excels in working together, in partnerships with other agencies, as well as within their innovation teams. MSL is a relatively small team which works with social design agencies such as InWithForward and Toronto-based design agencies the Moment and Bridgeable when they need human-centred design expertise, and for example universities when they need particular research insights. Within innovation projects they also work with clients, rather than for clients, such as in the Edmonton Recover project. Collaboration is key to be able to draw on diverse perspectives on systemic problems, and to draw on different types of knowledge and expertise required to address these problems.
Collaboration and conversation skills
Collaboration is however a skill that is often taken for granted. In fact, Richard Sennett (2012) argues that modern society has weakened both the desire and the capacity to cooperate with those who differ. The silo effect has put staff in safe, homogeneous and mono-disciplinary functional departments, which, combined with the increasingly short-term character of work, has lead people to avoid the anxieties that working across differences can inspire (p7). Instead, organisations such as MSL recognise that diversity is a resource for innovation, and that we need specific collaboration skills to be able to make use of that diversity. Alex Ryan calls this ‘stretch collaboration’, — a term borrowed from Adam Kahane in his book “Collaborating with the Enemy” - which is a type of collaboration that surfaces tensions and that turns it into a ‘productive conflict’. The skills draw on various techniques as well as the principles of trust, shared understanding, and leadership.
At the core of effective collaboration is conversation. I learned that effective collaboration with people with different perspectives requires ‘dialogic’ conversations, rather than a debate or discussion. Where a debate is about presenting opposing viewpoints, polarisation and winning and losing, dialogic methods surface those opposing viewpoints, but use deep listening and a structured way of questioning to then move towards new insights that none of the people involved in the dialogue had before that conversation. In other words, it makes the conversation productive. Peter Jones from OCADU for example explained how he uses ‘structured dialogic design’ (based on the work of Aleco Christakis) to bring people together around a complex challenge to work towards new ideas. Alex Ryan explained how he uses various techniques to facilitate conversations including for example the ‘soft shoe shuffle’ (from ‘deep democracy’), and MSL’s Claire Buré mentioned how she often uses ‘wicked questions’ as a technique to surface paradoxes in conversations.
An important part of the conversation techniques used by both Jones and MSL is to capture the conversation by making things visible and mapping out interrelationships. This reduces the cognitive load (having to keep the conversation in your mind) while also allowing collective reflection. This way of working is fundamentally different from our Western ways of running meetings, where there is a strict agenda that often does not allow new insights to emerge and where the capturing of the conversation is only presented to the participants after the conversation (in the meeting minutes), which removes the opportunity for reflection.
The importance of trust
Apart from these conversation skills and techniques, working together effectively relies to a large extent on a principle that is more difficult to grasp, which is trust. Without trust it is close to impossible to achieve any impact in social innovation. Trust is important on different levels. First of all, there needs to be trust between the people who fund and decide on the continuation of social innovation efforts and those that execute those projects. The iterative and qualitative nature of innovation approaches results in unpredictable and messy processes which often make people feel uncomfortable. Secondly, there needs to be trust between the people that decide and innovate, and the people that need to be engaged in the process to provide their perspective and knowledge about the problem. For example, in Edmonton it was key that there was trust between the social innovation team and the vulnerable people in the community that were engaged in the ethnography.
In the latter type of relationship, the research method and giving people agency to contribute to the innovation process can help providing that trust. In Edmonton, InWithForward built this kind of trust by taking a lot of time to build relationships with these people in their deep ethnography. It is important that people see what the impact of their contribution is by for example letting them test new prototypes. This trust can be fragile and needs to be maintained to prevent ‘consultation fatigue’. The result of this ethnographic work is therefore not just the data, but also the trust that can support future innovation efforts as part of continuous social innovation.
Developing shared understanding
In relationships between funders and innovation team it is important to set expectations and develop a shared understanding of the process as well as what realistically can be achieved. This is something I have come across many times in my case studies. While at MSL I got a closer view on how that is done in practice. One of the highlights was the presentation of the Recover team to the Edmonton council in a committee meeting. Even though one of the councillors asked some critical questions about the qualitative and iterative nature of the projects, Alex Ryan and Sarah Schulman showed great communication skills by explaining very clearly why this way of working is essential to achieve social and systemic impact. The council and mayor in turn showed great leadership by supporting the continuation of the project, and recognising that social innovation is not a one-off project, but a continuous way of working. This was expressed through compliments for the Recover team and InWithForward, and even a high-five from the mayor for MSL’s Alex Ryan after the meeting (and a tweet!). A couple of the members of the Recover team told me afterwards how proud they were of their work and how this experience kept them very motivated to continue the work. This shows how important it is to invest in building a shared understanding and a culture of trust and respect to keep social innovation going. How do we build shared understanding and such collaborative cultures of trust and respect?
Reference
Sennett, R. (2012). Together — the rituals, pleasures and politics of cooperation. New Haven, US & London, UK: Yale University Press.
