Week 12: Telling the story of Common Ground
Explaining how we got here
To tell a cohesive story for our fourth presentation to Microsoft, we decided to start from the beginning, with our ‘how might we’ statement —
How might we enable empathy between consumers and low-income service workers to build solidarity that ensures the dignity of labor?
To further make this statement clearer, we needed to define solidarity. Here’s how we defined it—
Solidarity is a bond between individuals or groups formed by uniting around common goals or principles.
While empathy comes easily to people with shared identities, solidarity has the power to bring groups of people across their difference by providing common goals to work towards– solidarity, therefore, feeds empathy.
Acts of solidarity are also easier to manifest, making it a reliable indicator for the presence of empathy on our platform.
Visioning exercise
With that, we began to zoom out to visualize where we might be able to create solidarity more systematically.
Present day: We recognized that in the current paradigm of our problem, there is limited ability to create space for empathy between workers, consumers, and management.
Probable future: In this probable future, with little systematic change to current trends, workers, governments, and businesses, will all be forced to react to change in a big way.
According to Bain & Co report about labor in the future, the aging baby boomer population will drastically be changing the job market supply and demand. Automation is picking up and income inequality is contenting to rise.
Preferable future: How we might intervene to create a preferable future, one that is proactive, and one that benefits all our stakeholders and generates solidarity through the gates of the service workplace?
Cooperativism
In order to drive towards this preferred future, we looked to Cooperativism as a model for solidarity. Coops currently employ 10% of the world’s workers and are now seeing a revival in the economy. Co-ops are resilient organizational structures, capable of surviving the initial years as well as economic downturns.
Common Ground
Common ground is a digital platform that empowers workers and consumers to cooperate around shared goals.
All three stakeholders i.e. the workers, consumers, and management are part of this system. Workers and consumers use the Common Ground mobile app to collaborate and communicate with each other.
The management uses a desktop platform which translates these conversations using Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning into actionable feedback & analytics connected through the cloud.
This cloud platform allows for scale, specifically the formation of a network of co-ops that can be housed on the Common Ground platform.
Narrating the story
We told our story through a series of photographs featuring our two users- Art, the worker-member of a co-op and Jay, the customer/member.
Jay goes to the coop and meets Art there, who helps him with his purchases and suggests him to download a mobile app called Common Ground to manage his membership online.
Jay finds the co-op on the app and comes across Art’s profile. He finds a way to thank Art for his help by sending him a gratitude card!
Art receives Jay’s card and is quite pleased!
A few days later, Art goes onto Common Ground to post a discussion that he had been talking to other people about — Ban on the use of plastic bags.
Just as he’s about finish his post, Common Ground asks him to either nominate his supporters or allow the app to find them for him. He nominates some of his colleagues that share his thoughts. He is reminded of his conversation with Jay about this issue and nominates him too.
Jay remembers that he and Art talked about customers bringing their own bags to reduce the plastic bag usage. He decides to support this cause!
This post goes live and gathers momentum over the next few days.
Meanwhile, management notice this discussion through the common ground platform. They realize that the majority of members support this issue and decided to bring up the topic on the next board meeting.
This was a condensed version of our story and just one use case. Looking forward, we are building out more scenarios that will help generate, sustain and reinforce solidarity between our stakeholders.
