Recently read:
Driving Social Change – How to solve the world’s toughest problems (Paul C. Light)
My grade (1 to 5): 3 – informative but not greatly written (mostly 1 notable insight, rest can be flipped through quickly, too many buzzwords)
Key Ideas:
- Fundamentally argues that if we truly want to effect lasting social change, we are not seeing the full picture if we keep idolizing individual social entrepreneurs without recognizing that they only play one role among many others that contribute to what the author calls social “breakthroughs”
- Depending on the problem to be solved, social breakthroughs require one or more among 4 key concepts: (1) new ideas (social entrepreneurship), (2) defense and expansion of past breakthroughs (social safekeeping), (3) research, data and trend analysis (social exploring), (4) demand for change in social networks (social advocacy)
- Critical difference between the effects of “normal business” innovations and “social” innovations; while the former can permanently disrupt/destroy existing industries due to new products, processes, etc. and rarely allows for a return to the past state of things, the latter can be quite short-lived since: (1) the prevailing wisdom, e.g., institutions/government, ways of thinking, is called that because it tends to PREVAIL and strongly resist changes, (2) a change of government or sponsors of the original social breakthrough can always threaten to stop or even reverse any progress made by the original change-maker, (3) despite the threat of (2) not enough emphasis is placed on investing in how to defend and uphold the state of “better” social outcome and (4) what can be today’s “breakthrough innovation” can become tomorrow’s “prevailing wisdom” that ironically prevents further necessary innovation from taking place
Why this matters:
- I agree that we have to stop thinking that the desired “product” of social change is propagated and long-lived like a conventional product of industry. Just as we salute and celebrate the new thinking and models introduced and scaled by social entrepreneurs, we have to focus on the entire “breakthrough cycle” and its 4 individual components, which means realize what we are funding/supporting must be carefully chosen, and moreover, may require essentially permanent attention and monitoring if we truly want certain changes to last long into the future
- This fundamental shift in mindset will be both hard to recognize and implement because (1) we are attracted to the idea of the heroic individual entrepreneur tackling and changing the world, (2) if it were us we would not like to think how fragile the change is we wrought – heck it may outright discourage many would-be entrepreneurs if they knew how hard their life-long battle for their championed causes in fact will be, (3) in keeping as frame of reference the “business entrepreneur”, it is not necessarily encouraging to realize how slow and, truthfully, thankless the job of being a social innovator can be; in fact, many tasks that are absolutely crucial to social breakthrough such as “safeguarding”, e.g., the work of (occasionally bureaucratic) government institutions, may be voluntarily overlooked since we may consider them lacking excitement, glory and other attributes that nowadays make people so motivated to try their luck as change-makers
