Facilitating systems innovation and culture change
Social innovation doesn’t have fixed boundaries […] we define social innovations as new ideas (products, services, and models) that simultaneously meet social needs and create new social relationships or collaborations. In other words, they are innovations that are both good for society and enhance society’s capacity to act.
— Robin Murray et al. (2010: 5)
As individuals, communities and societies we are faced with rapid and profound changes, the breakdown of old structures, institutions and ways of working. We are already in the middle of profound systems innovation and cultural change. In the absence of effective political leadership and faced with the increasing inability of national governments to provide important public services, we are seeing a resurgence of self-help initiatives based on community-level citizen collaboration.
Many of the examples reviewed in the last two chapters are part of this (r)evolution in social innovation. Increasingly, such initiatives will find the active support of local, regional and national government. In the UK the emerging ‘co-production sector’ is offering a culturally transformative alternative to providing public services.
Co-production means delivering public services in an equal and reciprocal relationship between professionals, people using services, their families and their neighbours. Where activities are co-produced in this way, both services and neighbourhoods become far more effective agents of change.
— David Boyle and Michael Harris (2009: 11)
The 2009 Nobel prize winner for economics, Elinor Ostrom, pointed out the importance of co-production as early as the 1970s when she investigated why large-scale, top-down deliveries of public services without the human face of direct community involvement were frequently not as effective as more participatory approaches based on human-scale collaboration between service providers and the communities receiving these services.
When service users are only passive recipients and their skills, time and knowledge are not valued, community cohesion and collaboration atrophy and systems become stagnant. If you ask people for help in providing the services that are important to their communities and find ways to use their skills, systemic change occurs with renewed vibrancy.
The people who are currently defined as users, clients or patients provide the vital ingredients which allow public service professionals to be effective. They are the basic building blocks of our missing neighbourhood-level support system — families and communities — which underpin economic activity as well as social development.
— Boyle & Harris, 2009: 11
Edgar Cahn, the inventor of time banking, summarizes 20 years of experimenting with this complementary exchange mechanism as a means of enabling co-production. Time banking can help to build neighbourhood-level mutual support networks that are not dependent on the rules of the market economy. It enables widespread and equitable participation, and creates community.
It will take massive labour of all kinds by all to build the core economy of the future — an economy based on relationships and mutuality, on trust and engagement, on speaking and listening and caring — and above all on authentic respect. We will not get there simply by expanding an entitlement system which apportions public benefits based on negatives and deficiencies: what one lacks, what disability one has, what misfortune one has suffered. We have to begin creating a new species of entitlements: earned entitlements that vest by virtue of how one contributes to rebuilding the core economy. That is the new path we must blaze through co-production if co-production is going to transcend professionally defined domains of problems and rebuild an organic world of community that reunites the human family. Timebanking supplies a tool and a medium of exchange to help do that.
— Edgar Cahn (2008: 3–4)
Time banking is one way to unlock the flow of mutual support between people and organizations in a given region. Instead of using money as a medium of exchange, people and/or organizations are able to collaborate and organize themselves around a common purpose simply by keeping track of the amount of hours each person dedicates to the project at hand. “For every hour participants ‘deposit’ in a time bank, perhaps by giving practical help or support to others, they are able to ‘withdraw’ equivalent support in time when they themselves are in need” (Time Banking UK, 2015).
This system enables the growth of social cohesion and social capital, by making it easier for people to get to know and help each other in ways that allow everyone to share what they are good at or what they are able to offer in support of others. Time Banking is one of many innovations in the design of complementary exchange systems of currencies; others include the Metacurrency Project, Open Money and a wide range of regional and local currency projects (for examples, see Rogers, 2013).
If they don’t take care of social capital, societies will fail. Social capital is rooted primarily in the social economy with its home-base in households, neighbourhoods, communities and civil society. Co-production aims to strengthen and re-grow this core- economy. “Co-production involves reclaiming territory for the core economy — territory lost to the commodification of life by all sectors of the monetary economy, public, private and non-profit.”
Edgar Cahn argues that “we will be unable to create the core economy of the future so long as we live in a bifurcated world where all social problems are relegated either to paid professionals or to volunteers whose role is typically restricted to functioning as free labour within the silos of the non-profit world” (2008: 3). For-benefit social enterprises and cooperatives based on social innovation, peer-to-peer collaboration and co-production are ways to overcome this blockage.
The rise of the so-called ‘fourth sector’ unites a wide diversity of such initiatives. In a nutshell, the fourth sector creates social, ecological and economic benefit by using some of the effective tools of the ‘first sector’ (private for-profit) to address some of the core challenges that the ‘second sector’ (government, public administration) is struggling with, and is informed by the social and environmental ethics and values of the ‘third sector’ (civil society organizations, non-profits, NGOs).
Fourth sector networks are currently emerging in the USA, Denmark, the Basque Country, and on the island of Majorca. The Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), co-initiated by Judy Wicks, is a similar type of network that is primarily focused on strengthening local economies through supporting locally-owned independent businesses, thereby creating an environment where fourth sector activities and co-production can flourish and help to build resilient communities.
“Co-production makes strengthening the core economy of neighbourhood and family the central task of all public services” (Boyle & Harris, 2009: 14). Inspired by the work of Nipun Mehta, Judy Wicks, David Boyle and Michael Harris, and Edgar Cahn, we can ask the following questions as we aim to strengthen our community exploration of what a regenerative culture might be like:
Since people themselves are the real wealth of our communities and societies, how can we invite them to contribute their skills, knowledge and passion to meeting community needs?
How can we value work differently so that we acknowledge the importance of what people do to raise families, look after others, maintain community health and cohesion, and to promote social justice and good governance?
How can we promote reciprocity and generosity (‘giftivism’), giving and receiving, as pathways to deeper trust and mutual respect between people?
Since our physical and mental wellbeing depends on strong, enduring relationships, how can we build effective social networks and foster community?
Co-production, social innovation, social enterprises, fourth sector networks and initiatives like BALLE are just some of the diverse ways we can facilitate the kind of transformative systems innovation that will drive culture change.
Systems innovation is “an interconnected set of innovations, where each influences the other, with innovation both in the parts of the system and in the ways in which they interconnect” (Mulgan & Leadbeater, 2013: 7). This very general definition of systems innovation highlights the complexity — and, therefore, to some extent the unpredictability and uncontrollability — of systemic transformations. It is rare, if not impossible, for a single individual to design and execute a blueprint for widespread systemic change because such changes tend to emerge from the quality of interactions and relationships of diverse agents (participants or stakeholders) in the system.
In aiming to facilitate systems innovation we have to accept that designing and implementing systems-level interventions can contribute to systems change but cannot control it. There is a balance between emergence and design, which I will return to. Transformative systems innovation, in the face of complexity and uncertainty, means getting clear about ‘why’ we design something, our guiding values and visions for a better future. Once we have done that we can evaluate better ‘what’ we design, and how our interventions are likely to contribute to positive culture change.
Clearly there are many other aspects and examples of transformative innovation: the technologies we employ; how we behave as individuals and communities; changes in systems of governance, economic systems, or food, energy and transport systems; changes in worldview and value systems which will require changes in our education system; and ultimately changes in the predominant cultural narrative.
I will offer some perspectives and questions on all of these in the following chapters. But first, here are some general questions we might want to explore in any attempt to drive systems and culture change. They can help to guide our actions as we aim to become positive and effective change agents in the transition towards regenerative cultures (based on Mulgan & Leadbeater, 2013: 18–20).
What are the new ideas, concepts and perspectives (paradigms) that can inform and drive systemic transformation?
Which policy changes, including new laws and regulatory changes, will support positive culture change?
How can we create supportive networks of collaboration and coalitions united by common values and intentions?
What are our new indicators of success, new ways of monitoring progress, and how can we shift what is valued by the market?
Which relationships and power structures need to be transformed for systems change to occur and how will we go about this?
What kind of technological innovation will assist the transition towards a regenerative culture and how will we deploy these technologies and choose not to use potentially harmful technologies?
What kind of new skill sets and new professions are emerging in support of systemic transformation?
How can we catalyse and support social innovation and behaviour change?
What is the appropriate scale on which to focus, and how do we link local, regional and global transformation?
How can we most effectively keep the big picture in mind and take small realizable steps that can offer feedback and learning locally?
Who are the visionary individuals and/or organizations that act as change agents by going beyond the conventional to develop the new?
How can we create projects that demonstrate viable and desirable alternatives to ‘business as usual’?
How can we invite as many people as possible to join the conversation about creating regenerative cultures of thriving communities in local-global collaboration?
[This is an excerpt of a subchapter from Designing Regenerative Cultures, published by Triarchy Press, 2016.]
—
If you like the post, please clap AND remember that you can clap up to 50 times if you like it a lot ;-)!
Daniel Christian Wahl — Catalyzing transformative innovation in the face of converging crises, advising on regenerative whole systems design, regenerative leadership, and education for regenerative development and bioregional regeneration.
Author of the internationally acclaimed book Designing Regenerative Cultures
