Balancing the parts with the whole: The productive tension at the heart of co-creation
Why collaborative solution-finding is all about embracing polarities
In a world that seems more divided than ever, polarized opinions can catalyze civil unrest and political instability. As of last year, roughly six in ten U.S citizens said they found conversations about politics with someone who might disagree with them “stressful and frustrating,” indicating a concerning shift towards separationism that has been mirrored in geopolitical developments across the globe.
But what if polarity could be used for good? What would a community that used its divisions as a source of strength look like?
As part of Making More Health, the global health partnership established between Ashoka and Boehringer Ingelheim 12 years ago, we asked the Ashoka Fellow Jimmy Westerheim and Ashoka team members, Belén Cavanagh, Ifeyinwa Egwaoje and Léna Borsoi, about their experiences with successful co-creation.
Drawing on their work in Communities of Practice (CoPs) — an initiative created by Making More Health across Africa, Latin America, and Europe — here’s what they taught us about leveraging dissent to drive solution-finding.
A ‘mosaic of solutions’ beats a one-size-fits-all approach
“Back when we started the CoP in Africa, it was a problem for us to be able to balance the individual interest against the collective interest,” reported Ifeyinwa, describing the challenges she faced when coordinating a group of eight social entrepreneurs who were identifying and addressing issues affecting health access in Africa.
Initially seeing this as a “weakness” she needed to fix, Ifeyinwa soon realised that the differences in opinion she encountered in her CoP could become a source of creative power. “We developed a tool or a model that we would call ‘the mosaic of solutions’ — what this helped us do is identify the individual interests when it comes to facilitating this for ourselves. And then, rather than having one option against the other, it now becomes a collection of different ideas or different solutions to solving this problem”.
In the same spirit, Léna described how the CoP she directed in Europe dispensed with “the lowest common denominator that suits everyone,” instead “coming back to the need for recognizing polarities and balancing [them].” By naming individual interests, co-creators could find a sense of community and shared purpose that united them, as Belén put it.
Just as different individuals come up with different solutions to the same problem, they also have different motivations driving their solution-finding approaches.
As Léna realized through her experiences with the European CoP — consisting of five Ashoka Fellows working to address a lack of support systems which resource and equip communities to take a leading role in their own health journeys — “naming and recognizing what is important to a person so that you don’t undervalue it” is an essential step in getting collaborators to invest in a shared vision, mission, or goal.
Leaders can (and should) be led by one another
Even the most experienced social entrepreneurs stand to learn from being led by each other. For Jimmy, Ashoka Fellow and Founder of The Human Aspect, “the beauty of being part of an initiative [like CoP] was the ability …to come into a space where we’re allowed to bring all our knowledge, all our experience good and bad, into a room with other people with different kinds of experiences [and] just be a participant”.
Far from contributing to a hierarchical system of dominance, the diversity between CoP Fellows (in background, knowledge, and experience) enabled an environment where they could lead and be led by one another — a situation many found liberating after coming from environments where they were accustomed to calling the shots.
“You get this authentic diversity” according to Jimmy, “it’s not a forced diversity…it’s an actual diversity of actual human beings that are different.”
With it comes an opportunity to inhabit the roles of teacher and pupil — “to connect as human beings, not just as professionals,” as Belén described. It’s the nature of working together in difference that Making More Health’s CoP initiative found to be the driving force behind its success.
Success is as diverse as the individuals driving it
Just like the Fellows that powered them, no two CoP’s visions of success were the same. In Latin America, the group primarily focused on finding more innovative strategies to amplify healthcare access in the region, especially during isolation, and recently created a new CoP to advance gender inclusion in health, which is led by Nerea de Ugarte, Ashoka Fellow and Founder of The Body Rebellion.
For the African CoP, success looked more like joining forces with a Fellow from India, creating the resource toolkit needed to address issues with COVID-19 messaging to increase vaccine confidence and create a culture of disease prevention and healthy living, as opposed to a solely treatment-focused system.
In the European CoP, there are plans to recruit new stakeholders and use specific forums to bolster their mission to allow patients to take an active role in their healthcare journeys, creating a more dynamic, integrated, and equal partnership between individuals, communities, and the medical experts that care for them.
Polarities can be productive
As we can learn from the collaborative solution-finding of social entrepreneurs across the globe, division, polarity, and difference are not impediments to mutual understanding and creation. In any community, although the whole may be more than the sum of its parts, each part brings with it a different set of experiences, motivations, and values that do not need to be the same to be a force for change.
