A Day of Solution Design with Social Venture Philanthropy and The Value Web.

The day began bright and early. It was 8:30 am and the room on the 5th floor at the Center for Social Change in Miami was filling up quickly. Everyone was eager to get to work at The Value Web’s “DesignTribe/ Solution Design” put together for Miami’s Social Venture Partners.

Everything was in motion, with participants jumping into the first activity quickly. As Jodi Engelberg, a founding member of TVW, explained later:

“We don’t do official breaks. We treat people like adults- when they need a coffee, they agree with their team that it is a good time and they take it when THEY need it, not some arbitrary time.”

This allowed people to really sink their minds into what they were doing without constant, unnecessary distractions.

When you level the field by making everyone be a mediator of a session you create a sense of community that makes everyone feel the same responsibility for the outcome of whatever problem they are trying to solve.

The first activity put everyone into groups of five or six people to come up with different solutions to these questions: how do you introduce something completely new to a city? How do you start a movement? How do you best work with adults to get them to recognize and embrace a new model? This allowed for everyone in the room to feel like there was no leader or person-in-charge, but rather that we were all equal partners. When you level the field by making everyone be a mediator of a session you create a sense of community that makes everyone feel the same responsibility for the outcome of whatever problem they are trying to solve.

Some groups were asked to come up with activities to break the ice and create a comfortable environment, others were asked to use their creative spark and make an AD using two images to promote SVP.

One group took their task a little bit further. Suddenly, there was a woman who appeared to have a panic attack. As everyone rallied to help her, to do their part, they were told this was their way of demonstrating what happens when people work with empathy to start a movement . Some thought it brilliant, some thought it dangerous, everyone appeared to be a a little bit in shock.

“We wanted to create something for you to rally around,” Daniela Cadena, Social Entrepreneurship Coordinator at Florida International University, explained after her Oscar-winning performance. Make people feel the need to mobilize, isn’t that what social impact is all about?

The next activity called for each participant to brainstorm by themselves before joining a group to find common threads between their ideas and others’ that could help identify the closest-to-correct ways to solve to the issues presented.

Looking at problems inversely, the future possibility first and the stepping stones that would then be the past second, was the small change implemented by The Value Web to reach a more profoundly analyzed result.

The questions informed them on a possible future for SVP as being embraced by the local community of corporate and individual partners. Their task was to analyze the process that had led them to success. We often look at things from point A to point B; the past is first and the future second. At a glance it doesn’t look like anything out of the ordinary, but when you begin to observe traditional problem solving you realize how innovative small changes to systems can be. Looking at problems inversely, the future possibility first and the stepping stones that would then be the past second, was the small change implemented by The Value Web to reach a more profoundly analyzed result.

In between every activity there was time for presenting results and discussing, which allowed everyone in the room to take into consideration what others might have seen in the solution, that they didn’t. In the corner, at the front of the room, there sat a young graphic facilitator Sunny Benbelkacem, who captured the essence of our conversations and report outs, and pieced together all of our ideas into one, complete, understandable vision.

The last two of the seven hours were spent on creating a First Draft, a plan of action, to help SVP engage the local community of philanthropists and social impact investors, as well as the nonprofit investees. Once again, everyone joined a group composed of new people and came up with different solutions and ideas on how to educate different types of potential partners about the importance of SVP’s triple bottom line proposition: do good; make money; improve the planet.

For a newcomer like me, getting to experience such a disruptive type of collaborative process was an eye opening moment. You have to be able to observe the peculiarities that are not apparent at first sight; the small changes in big processes that completely revolutionize the outcomes. How you ask questions, the ways in which you create a work environment, how you direct people to interact, how many different perspectives you are taking into consideration.

You have to be able to observe the peculiarities that are not apparent at first sight; the small changes in big processes that completely revolutionize the outcomes

All of these might seem like small adjustments, but they led The Value Web’s session on Saturday to conclude with a first, complete draft of a fully formed idea of what was necessary to achieve SVP’s goals: to understand the ecosystem they are moving within and educate “those institutions that are working for the most vulnerable people” on the need to move from a single-point “people-focused” model, to an all encompassing, “planet focus” design.

Click below to see more pictures of the event: https://www.flickr.com/photos/thevalueweb/albums/72157677102995123