Group Think

Tagged with Geoff Mulgan | Illona Kickbusch | Peggy Hora | Thinkers in Residence

The Australian Centre for Social Innovation is itself a product of an innovation. On Tuesday, we joined hundreds of other South Australians at the Adelaide Convention Centre to listen, question, and consider.  We were having a collective think with three of Adelaide’s thinkers in residence:   Geoff Mulgan (Social Innovator), Peggy Fulton Hora (Justice Innovator), and Illona Kickbusch (Health Innovator). Seeing so many people—from the Premier of South Australia to the grassroots arts coordinator—engage in an open, non-partisan conversation about ideas was, well, not something I’ve seen a lot of before.

The Thinkers in Residence program brings thought leaders to Adelaide to develop path-breaking ideas for taking-on emergent challenges and taking-up emergent opportunities. It celebrates the public intellectual and gives good thinking a government-wide platform.  That good thinking frequently becomes action. From new climate change legislation to homelessness programs to early childhood indexes to a health-in-all-policies approach, thinkers have helped to spark new policy and practice. The Centre for Social Innovation was one of Geoff’s recommendations, and here we are today.  Thanks!

The Thinkers in Residence Program subscribes to a slightly different theory of change than our own.  And, that’s great. We think there need to be lots of different theories of change—after all, there are so many different problems and different contexts that we need to try out different approaches to making social change real and impactful. The program emphasizes thinking followed by large-scale action. Thinkers present their recommendations. Government then implements some of those recommendations. These recommendations are informed by international best practice and lots of local conversation. But they are not necessarily informed by small-scale experimentation in context. Our current problem-solving approach tries to meld thinking and doing. We test out our ideas and iterate them at a small-scale, moving back-and-forth between abstract concepts and real things, so we know something about the quality of the idea that might go to full-scale. For us, it’s not just the idea that matters, but what that idea looks like in practice.

So what about building a thinkers and doers in residence program—where sector leaders come together in teams to both dream up and try out new ideas in tandem?

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