How Can We Increase Employment of the Vulnerable in Colombia?
The mayor of Cali wants to increase employment in vulnerable communities. How would Apple, Google, Virgin and McDonalds approach the problem?
I was recently invited by the Mayor of Cali, Colombia to be a keynote speaker at a conference in his city. Before heading down, I asked him to give me three of his toughest challenges so that we could run a live group session during my presentation to come up with creative solutions to his problems. Being a former development economist, I selected the challenge closest to my heart — In what ways could we increase the participation of vulnerable people in the workforce?
I decided to use the lateral thinking technique of analogies to stimulate creative solutions. There are various ways you can use analogies to stimulate new thinking. One of my favorite techniques is to think about how different companies would go about solving the challenge. For this exercise, I used 4 companies that I’ve found to be useful in the past with these types of exercises: Apple, Google, Virgin and McDonalds. These are companies that many of us admire for their innovation. It costs us nothing to think like them and it has often formed the basis for new and creative thoughts in our ideation workshops.
When I use the company analogy technique, I choose words or attributes that I associate with these companies as the basis for stimulation as they seem to help me think how these companies would think about the problem. These words change from time to time as my opinion of these companies change, but in Cali I chose the following:
- Apple/Stylish
- Google/Connected
- Virgin/Daring
- McDonalds/Fast
Based on these concepts, I came up with the following potential solutions to the mayor’s problem:
Apple/Stylish
Maybe vulnerable people in Cali don’t appear stylish when they show up for interviews. Maybe they don’t have the resources to afford professional clothing appropriate for interviews. Perhaps the solution is to let people rent professional outfits free of charge when they interview to increase their probability of securing a job. These programs exist in my home city of New York, I don’t know if they exist in Cali, but if not they probably should and if they do they should probably be expanded.
Google/Connected
Maybe companies want to employ more people from vulnerable communities, they just don’t know they exist. These people are off the grid and not on the radar of prospective employers. They are not connected. Perhaps local authorities can build an online jobs database for people in vulnerable communities (and provide internet access where necessary) where they can raise their profile and demonstrate the value that they could bring to potential employers.
Virgin/Daring
Perhaps companies in Cali don’t employ vulnerable people because they don’t truly understand their plight. If company executives would dare to visit these areas, they would get a real feel for the challenges they face and the lives that they lead. Maybe if they could empathize with these people more, they would be more likely to employ them. Developing an exchange program for company executives and vulnerable people where they trade places for a week could increase empathy on behalf of company executives. Companies would benefit too as they would bring fresh ideas into the company from a totally new demographic that they have failed to engage in the past.
McDonalds/Fast
Vulnerable communities often have poor transportation networks. Maybe people have to take three buses to work rather than one, their commutes are just not fast. Such slow commutes would inevitably reduce the participation of vulnerable people in the city’s workforce. Perhaps the solution is to develop direct bus services that serve these areas in Cali to reduce commute times and level the playing field for vulnerable communities.
Like all innovation, there’s no doubt that some of these ideas are better than others, but they’re probably different and sometimes that’s all we need.
Originally published at www.thelatlabs.com on January 11, 2017.
