Creating the #systemschange rock ‘n’ roll video
The process behind the video
Why we made this
Change is complex, it’s not always obvious how change comes about. We often talk about creating change when, when in fact, it’s happening all around us all the time.
We’ve been working with Innovate UK for a number of years now. Much of our work together has been about wanting to help people expand the boundaries of innovation, acknowledge that there’s more to successful innovation than technological invention and that you need to consider your context and the trends that affect society and the uptake of innovations too.
We wanted to tell a story that challenges existing assumption about how innovation happens and inspire new and divergent thinking. A story of how innovations actually come about — highlighting that not one entrepreneur or innovator can dictate change no matter how good their idea or invention is. We wanted to tell a story to demonstrate that landscape factors really influence how and why change happens and that change takes decades and depends on a whole manner of interventions coming together.
Why Rock ‘n’ roll?
The story of rock ‘n’roll shows how social and technological developments in the 1930s and 1940s helped set the stage for the music revolution of the 1950s. It debunks the myth of the single hero by demonstrating that true systems change requires the coalescing of social-cultural trends and technological innovation. Is highlights that change doesn’t come overnight, but rather through repeated recon guration of different systems. It’s a complex story that illustrates how systems change in a surprising way.
Read more detail about what we can learn from rock ‘n’ roll here.
The process
We wanted a subject matter that would resonate with people — after all, music is a uniting force. It’s fun and not what you’d think about at first to communicate systems change.
We knew about the academic paper by Frank Geels — “Analysing the breakthrough of rock ’n’ roll (1930–1970): Multi-regime interaction and reconfiguration in the multi-level perspective” and felt this provided the perfect content and background to tell this story.
Not everyone has time to read and digest academic papers, so we spent some time picking out the really salient points of the story and the elements that would resonate. We’re increasingly spending time translating academic papers for practical usage.
As a first step, we developed a set of slides that we used to star to illustrate the story, but couldn’t help but feel we needed to animate the story to really bring it to life, but to do that we needed to find a creative outfit to realise these ambitions.
We’d wanted to work with Glider for some time — so this felt like the perfect project to begin a collaboration with them. Here’s their Artists Statement on the video:
Music moves us.
It is essential to human existence.
It shapes our cultures, our attitudes, our language, our dreams.
A marker of our society at any one point in time.
The elements of music — its notes and tempo — form metaphors for change.
The script takes the shape of lyrics.
And the music recreates the emotion of the moment — what one would have felt at the birth of Rock’n’Roll.
Elemental black and white graphics are playful and energetic, with colour indicating potent moments of change.
Those moments are attributed to influences.
Individual patterns assigned to landscape, regime and niche changes.
They are the fundamental shifts that move us forward.
And will shake things up.
Forever.
What next
We hope that this story will serve as both a provocation and an invitation to help shape tomorrow.
The hope is that by sharing the stories of how systems have changed in the past, it will encourage more awareness and deliberate action to bring about the change and innovation we need to foster for the future.
We plan to use the animation in workshops as a basic intro to systems change and have designed a whole series of exercises (from 10 mins to half a day) to do just that. We plan to make workshop resources available for you to share more about the story (more coming soon), so do let us know if you’re running a session where these resources might be useful too.
We’d love to create more stories like this for the School of System Change — so if you have an idea for a story or are interested in collaborating to tell more stories —do get in touch.
Or perhaps the video inspires you to do something else — if it does, we’d love to hear from you about what that might be.
Join the conversation #systemschange
