Howdy, blog. Long time no see. A transcontinental move, punctuated by appendicitis, captured my attention for a while. But I’m now set-up in Adelaide: I’ve got a place to work and live and am learning about where to play. As I’m introduced to a new city and a new country, people naturally want an introduction from me: what do I do? I’ve learned they’re seeking a couple of descriptive words—a job title—not a run-on sentence, let alone a paragraph. Options include ‘service designer,’ ‘public sector reformer,’ ‘intractable problem-solver’ ‘and ‘social innovator.’ Besides their obvious pretension, these titles raise a bigger question. Do I frame what I do in terms of aims (public sector reform or social innovation), problems (wicked social problems), or methods (service design)?
These are the same questions facing the social innovation field. What defines the social innovation field? Is it about the problems social innovators seek to address? Is it about the methods social innovators use? Is it about the nature of the solutions social innovators produce? Or is it about the relationship between types of problems, methods, and solutions? I tend towards the latter. The Young Foundation’s new publication The Open Book of Social Innovation and its accompanying website, www.socialinnovator.info, tend towards the methods.
While the book’s introduction helpfully describes the social innovator’s problem set (intractable social issues, rising costs, and old paradigms) and solution set (distributed, collaborative,relationship-based, and long-term), methods are listed without much reference to either problems or solutions. Instead, they are organized by stage. There’s clearly value in amassing & disseminating all the different tools in the social innovator’s toolbox. I just wonder how useful it is to de-couple methods from problems and solutions; to talk about process without real content. Solving problems requires thinking about when and how to use tools and to what end. That necessitates some content-specific knowledge about the problem and outcomes; about cause and effect. Take physicians. They are pretty esteemed problem-solvers. They don’t just master a set of tools; they know how & when to use them to enable the body to optimally function. In other words, they know what good work looks in context. Can we social innovators, service designers, public sector reformers, etc. say the same thing?
There’s no shortage of out-of-context solutions; of examples where methods were applied to a problem without ever rethinking the problem. I’ve worked on the problem of teenage pregnancy in several different cultural and geographic contexts. The symptoms are often the same: low birth weight babies, homelessness, unemployment, educational disengagement. The behaviors are also the same: unprotected sex. But the determinants—the complex web of underlying causes—often differ. That means the solutions will differ, as will notions of what constitutes a good outcome: protected sex, abstinence from sex, or something much broader than sex like healthy relationships and connectedness.
Social innovation methods do not, by themselves, pick up on these substantive differences. Methods are only as good as the questions asked. Take the book’s methods #12 (communities researching themselves), #15 (action research), #16 (literature reviews and surveys); #37 (user-led design); #40 (web-based tools for co-design); #58 (suggestion boxes) and #64 (participatory planning). I’ve watched all of them unfold, and the wrong solution set emerge. With methods #12, 15 and 16, the question the community wanted to answer was ‘how to improve access to contraception services?’ except that access wasn’t the underlying issue, consistent usage was. Similarly with methods #37 and 40, the focus was on creating better health education courses, except lack of information wasn’t really the problem, application of the information in context was. And with methods #58 and #64, what young people said they wanted—more interesting places to go and things to do—was different than what young people actually did in real time. When the facilities were built, few young people showed up.
To me this suggests that if we really want to do social innovation with social impact we need to build the capacity to ask better questions, not simply apply the latest methods. More suggestion boxes, consultation exercises, participatory decision-making forums, action research, user-led design, fast prototyping, etc. will do little unless we know when to use a suggestion box or what a good suggestion for the problem at hand looks like.
Not all problems are equal. If the problem is how to cut down waiting times in hospitals, taking user suggestions about how to streamline the check-in process at face-value makes a whole lot of sense. But, if the problem is how to improve peoples’ diet and physical activity, we need methods that can get at the disconnect between what people say they want/do and what people actually do/use. Similarly, if the problem is a byproduct of an institution or system (like hospital wait times), how you might embed or scale the solution will look different than if the origins of the problem lie outside or between institutions and systems.
What the social innovation field needs, then, is to develop an understanding of the fit between problems and methods, and most importantly, a culture and framework around critical question-asking. Asking critical questions means learning content: for a problem like teenage pregnancy, understanding what public health and epidemiology, behavioral economics, feminist studies, and human development offer so we can meld together the thinking and the methodologies to get underneath tricky problems in different, surprising ways. For me, that’s the essence of social innovation.
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