Innovative leaders think outside-in

We had a great chat the other day with Well Told Story — who use radio shows, comics, social media channels, online video and SMS to tackle social change in Africa.

Simon Penny goes into more detail here but the bit that’s stuck with me is:

“If you start with gender or age you just get distracted”

So much of the work we do in the social sector is founded upon distraction:

Older people wouldn’t want service like that

Millennials expect to deal with you like this

People who live in social housing have problems like this

All of these are just lazy assumptions that put huge and diverse groups of people into convenient boxes.

Very soon 1 in 5 of us will be over the age of 65 — that’s a pretty big group to stick into one homogenous heap.

and

Young people — by which we mean anyone younger than ourselves- don’t share any common beliefs or behaviours. The entire idea of “generations” is unscientific and, frankly, stupid.

and

The belief that anyone actually has a specific set of interests or problems just because they live in affordable housing is condescending and false.

As Well Told Story articulate — when designing services we should first look for a ‘world view’ rather than trying to focus on a specific age group or gender.

Too often we view life through the lens of the organisation we work for rather than from the world view of citizens.

This leads us to think inside-out and view the outside world as a predictable market rather than as a collection of humans.

Innovative leaders think outside-in. They put individuals at the centre of everything they do.