SoCap08 Wisdom Nugget: The hubris of social change

by Nathaniel Whittemore · 2008-10-14 11:46:00 UTC
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I'm sitting at the "Design in the Developing World" panel with field giants like Tim Brown from IDEO and Paul Polak, and there was a great little recognition a moment ago about the potential for hubris in social change.

Tim Brown shared that IDEO includes anthropologists, psychologists and other people from a social science background on all of their design teams for the precise reason that they don't think in terms of "what's the solution?"  He said that "as a designer, my brain goes straight to the solution and I stop listening to the people I'm working for and miss the important details."

This is an insight, and a recognition of the limitations of a perspective of "problem solving," that should impact the way that every individual and organization involved in philanthropy, development and other fields of social change think about their work.

The process matters, details matter, and there's an important irony around the fetishization of adopting "business models for the nonprofit sector." One of the great disagreements that I hear between nonprofits and consultants who are supposed to help them is around "increasing efficiency." Many people with a business background can't understand why a nonprofit would waste resources with broad-based democratic decision making processes when it possesses the expertise to make decisions.

The reality is that stakeholder engagement that treats the "served" as equal partners in the decision-making process is in the very fabric of succesful social benefit creation. It doesn't matter how good your solution seems if no one cares to adopt it. Sometimes, efficiency isn't about reducing the number of people involved; it's about providing new systems to value their input and "get to yes" together.

Nathaniel Whittemore is the founder of Assetmap. Previously he was the founding director of the Northwestern University Center for Global Engagement.
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