On Friday November 25, 500 or so people gathered to talk about ‘Collective Impact through Social Innovation” ;it was billed as a Non-Profit Partnerships Summit and the host was the Honourable Stephanie Cadieux, Minister of Social Development. The event was MC-ed by the effervescent and tenacious (on the subject of Social Innovation) Gordie Hoag, and featured Adam Kahane, Tamara Vrooman, Geoff Mulgan, Janice Charette, and Tim Brodhead. Info can be found at www.innovatebc.ca.
Here are some high-points from Adam Kahane…
Adam Kahane: Working Together to Address Tough Problems
Adam is a partner in the Cambridge, Massachusetts office of REOS Partners and an Associate Fellow at the Saïd Business School of the University of Oxford. He talked about three things he has learned in his work:
1. Working together is critical — friends, colleagues, opponents and strangers We need each other. We need to be interdependent and interconnected. The world is characterized by unfamiliarity and unpredictability — so we can’t do things the way we did in the past. There is increasing fragmentation and polarization — and social complexity. Most of this can’t be solved by experts — it needs all of us.
2. It is possible to work together – but it’s not easy — Adam talked about the Sustainable Food Lab project which is a “change lab” — structured by convening people on the site (co-initating); immersing in the system (co- sensing); making sense of structure (co-presencing); stepping back and reflecting to get deeper knowledge (co-creating and co-evolving).
3. Focus. Very important. He rippled through characteristics of change labs: a) places for people to work together — an alliance to see what is going on in government, business and civil society; b) places that enable people to do work — open, neutral, safe; c) places of experiment — fail safe and early to move forward; d) places to pay attention and shift the way we listen and understand; e) places that require drive and stepping forward to work together.
Focus on what we are trying to do. Sounds like good advice.