Social Innovation Strategy
We have looked at what social innovation is, we have looked at how important it is to know your purpose for being involved, and how to find your social innovation sweet spot. It’s time now to move beyond your philosophy and to look at the strategy for making social impact. Let’s look at the ‘how’. This involves setting major goals for your initiative.
If you don’t know where you’re going, how are you gonna’ know when you get there? – Yogi Berra
Sometimes you have intuition about goals, you have a gut feel. I think it’s worth getting these out and writing them down. Sometimes, especially when working in areas of complexity and uncertainty, you make better decisions based on your gut than on your rigorous analysis. This is because you can never know everything about a complex social situation, there is always randomness, so technical analysis and goal setting can sometimes lead you into the false belief that you can tell what is possible in the future. You can’t. Goal setting and forecasting is educated guessing.
Once you have written down some major goals for your social innovation initiative, you can apply a few lenses and see how these affect your thoughts and goals. The universally conscious lens, the human geography lens and the timescale lens.
The first lens is what I like to call the universally conscious lens. It helps you think more holistically about your initiative. It involves thinking about the goals and impacts of your initiative in the social, environmental, economic, cultural, and political spheres. Ideally you want to be socially beneficial, environmentally sustainable, economically viable, culturally stimulating and politically influential. Of course your focus and priorities are up to you, but I think it is worth thinking about these spheres or systems and how they interact. They are deeply interconnected and decisions and actions can affect outcomes in many of the other spheres, if not all the other spheres. Having a major goal for each sphere is a good idea.
The second lens is the human geography lens. This helps you think about the human impact of your initiative and the numbers of people who will be involved and affected. You need to think about yourself, your family, your team and colleagues, your community, your city, your local region, your state, your nation, your international region and the globe. With the increase of private enterprise in space, such as SpaceX, you may need to even consider the universe. You need to think through how your initiative will impact at each of these levels.
The third lens is the timescale lens. This helps you think about timing of your initiative and gives you a short and long term perspective. You need to think about the moment you’re in, the hours, the days, the weeks, the months, the years, the decades, the centuries and the millennium. That might sound crazy, you might be thinking, who thinks that far into the future? But it’s not crazy. It’s super important we move well beyond the idea of planning for the next 3–12 months. Conventional long term analysis and thinking is thought to be 3–5 years. That’s crazy. First Nations Peoples in the Americas based their decisions on how they would affect the next seven generations. Roughly 175 years. That’s wise. While you can’t possibly know what is going to happen in the next year, let alone the next 10, 100 or 1000, it is important to think about your life, your initiative and your impact from these longer term perspectives. It will affect your decision-making. The Woodford Folk Festival in Queensland Australia has a 500-year plan. The Longnow Foundation works on a 10,000 year framework.
We’ll continue this look at social innovation strategy in the next post.
