The Story of SOLVE
Here was a neuroscientist, here a CEO, here a technologist. Welcome to MIT’s SOLVE conference, where I found myself — as the day-old Community Manager of Agora — last week. The three-day conference brought experts from across sectors — academia, business, nonprofit, government — to co-design solutions to the world’s most pressing social issues. SOLVE is based on the power of collective intelligence — the idea that making headway on our toughest global challenges can’t happen in siloes. The folks at SOLVE are the best and brightest in their fields — and the conference tapped into new ideas by bringing them together.
My Three Takeaways from This Year’s SOLVE Conference:
Great Ideas Are Already Out There…It’s Our Job to Find Them
One idea that really stuck with me — especially as I start a new job with experts. Instead, SOLVE is based on the idea (one that Agora’s platform helps to activate): amazing ideas are waiting in untapped places, often in overlooked communities. In a room filled with pretty intimidating experts, that was heartening to me, especially as a relative newcomer into the tech world. SOLVE reinforced the idea that you don’t actually have to have all the answers, you just have to have to be willing to share your story. Look no further than a creative enterprise called Me/We, which puts the tools for transformative storytelling into the hands of young people who, by sharing their own voices from conflicted regions like in Syria, shift limiting mainstream media narratives. Programs like Me/We believe that sometimes the most radical thing we can do is listen because the truly great ideas are in the hands of untapped changemakers. Inspired, I finally found the courage to speak up and share my own story in a Women in Tech session, where found I actually did have a lot of ideas about alternative mentoring models to promote and retain women in leadership!
Relationships drive change.
On my first day of working at a company dedicated to democratizing the world through collaboration, it was really interesting to see practitioners at SOLVE focus on busting down silos and fostering collaboration…basically, caring a lot about relationships. I come from the field of dialogue across differences, where all we talk about are how to foster relationships across differences. But I haven’t witnessed much conversation about that in other fields. Practitioners at SOLVE, though, talked about questions like how the community is engaged and local knowledge harnessed, how trust is built, and how conflicts are navigated. For example, Social Finance uses a “pay for success” model that connects investor capital with effective government programs, and they have to deeply consider to build authentic relationships across sectors. Brokering between partners requires constant communication, navigating hurdles with adaptability, and being willing to pivot when you encounter the unexpected.
Change starts with you.
One of my favorite parts of the conference was getting to hear from Agora’s founder (and my new boss!), Elsa Sze. I’d heard Elsa tell her story about growing up as an immigrant in Hong Kong, where sharing your voice is a privilege and not a right — which resonated with the theme of giving voice to the voiceless that I heard throughout SOLVE. What I hadn’t heard was Elsa’s reflections about how she had found her own voice as a leader — and as a minority in the male-dominated (and primarily white) tech sector.
“Female entrepreneurs,” she said, “start by building your MVA — minimum viable agency — to believe that you’re the right person to lead your innovation.”
As I started my new job, her words really resonated with me; I was intimidated by the brainpower at SOLVE and encountering my own imposter syndrome about what I was doing and why I was there. But if I learned anything from SOLVE (and as I’m seeing modeled in Agora’s model), it’s that every voice matters because we’re smarter together. To truly become the sum that’s more than the makeup of our parts, we have to embrace the concept that our differences shouldn’t be overcome (or even “solved”); rather, they must be leveraged to drive social change.
