A change gonna come

This week was a big week for systems change.

On Monday, legislators in Mississippi, Tennessee and South Carolina called for banning the confederate flag. On Thursday, the US Supreme Court affirmed national, tax subsidized health care. On Friday, the US Supreme Court affirmed gay marriage.

Freedom and justice are evolving concepts. Moving and morphing with the passage of time.

Last week was a big week for the limits of systems change.

In 1954, the US Supreme Court affirmed the end of segregation. Separate was not equal. All lives – regardless of color – deserved equal protection of the laws.

And yet 61 years later, one disaffected young person with a gun – espousing white supremacy – walked into a bible study group in Charleston, South Carolina and senselessly took away nine lives.

“None of us can or should expect a transformation in race relations overnight,” President Obama orated in his eulogy to one of the nine, the Reverend Clementa Pinckney. He went on, “Every time something like this happens, somebody says, ‘We have to have a conversation about race.’ We talk a lot about race. There’s no shortcut. We don’t need more talk… An open heart, that more than any particular policy or analysis is what’s called upon right now, I think.”

For those of us in the ‘business’ of social innovation, we would do well to remember that. Sure, we’ve got methods cards, toolkits, facilitation guides, and fancy workshops. But do we have whole heartedness?

What’s been goose-bump, hair-raising inspirational has been watching people, mobilizing in the streets and in the pews, with such emotion. The personal and the public have intertwined. Vulnerability and humaneness have taken centre stage.

Vulnerability and humaneness can, at times, feel in short supply in the social innovation community (and that’s despite the trend of human-centered design). Indeed, part of my discomfort with the social innovation label is it seems so disconnected from the passion of social change. We talk about projects rather than people. We talk about scaling a solution versus mobilizing a movement. We talk in terms of future disruption, rather than historical continuity. Change feels rather abstract, rather removed, rather impersonal.

Meaningful change, I believe, starts with something deeply personal. Like knowing somebody who is gay, and recognizing that their lifestyle isn’t an affront to yours. 60% of Americans now have a close friend or relative who identifies as gay. Not surprisingly, it’s the same percentage – 61% – who support gay marriage.

This is one reason why we at InWithForward are such big believers in deep ethnographic methods and live prototyping as the genesis of longer-term change. Somehow, we have to create personally transformative moments. That bring out the energy and emotion necessary for tipping over the status quo.

We’re attempting to do this with The Fifth Space, where 29 staff from across three agencies have been through a confronting six-months. We have asked them to question what they think they know. We have demanded that they put an idea into the world and open themselves to failure. Along the way we have, hopefully, brought out equal parts humility and tenacity.

Of course, we don’t always succeed.

Sometimes we expend too much energy and emotion too soon. We exhaust rather than energize ourselves and those around us. Still, we believe in putting ourselves – the good and flawed parts – into the work. Because we don’t really see social change as work, but as a lifestyle.

In this way, I feel more connected with couples on the steps of the Supreme Court and with churchgoers in Charleston than with some social innovation colleagues who see our approach as extreme: too labor intensive; too visceral; too idealistic. No doubt it is all of these things. But attracting and activating passionate people is ultimately how we think change is gonna come.