That nagging ethical question

The question that never goes away: Are we increasing inequality?

Ethical outrage

The first in a series of posts about why the value set underpinning ‘social design’ work matters. ‘Ethical’ values of equality & fairness are fundamentally different to ‘managerial’ values of innovation & empathy.

Hard week & then a holiday

A few of our hunches turned out to be not quite right or a little too right this week. How do you encourage divestment? How do you teach? How do you spread? As always, more iterations required.

Talking with people is fun

We’ve been building civil servant’s capacity to meet & hang out with people. We’re finding it harder to build organisational capacity to support & use what we learn.

Disruption without change?

It’s been a year with a lot of disruption – but has it been a year of change? A few reflections from last year’s work in Australia, and a few musings for 2012.

Sixteen Days, Eight Cities, One Question

An article for Stanford Social Innovation Review comparing what we learnt about social problem solving our tour of North America and how it compares to what’s happening in Australia.

Measurement & the feedback loop

How do we know we’re getting results? We take measurement pretty seriously – which is why we don’t always measure everything stakeholders want to know in the way they want to know it. As July’s edition of Wired shows, measurement can shape behaviour.

Where do ideas to (re)solve social problems come from?

Visits with design schools, social innovation orgs, and interesting people in Austin, Chicago, Boston, Toronto, Montreal, New York City, San Francisco, Oakland and Canberra has sparked all sorts of (disordered) thoughts. Read our first reflections on the differences between social problem solving in the US, Canada, and Australia – and what we’re inspired by…

What I learned on my summer vacation: Thoughts from SIX in the City

I left summer school with some new friends, some new ideas, and some new questions: When is incremental innovation warranted – and when does it actually make it harder for radical transformation?

Health Promotion or Social Innovation?

I’m attending (and speaking!) at the 20th IUHPE World Conference on Health Promotions and reflecting on how our work on social problem-solving fits within health promotions versus other fields like social innovation. Lots to learn from both, but neither are the perfect fit.

Hello and what do you do?

Now that we’re finally getting to work in South Australia with The Australian Centre for Social Innovation, people want to know what we do. Finding a job title that can fit on a business card is hard enough, let alone figuring out how to frame social innovation: is it about problems, methods, solutions, or all three? The Young Foundation’s ‘The Open Book of Social Innovation’ offers one starting point.

The prototype and the pilot

We’ve been called out on our InWithFor jargon–particularly the word prototype–so we try and clarify, explaining the differences between prototypes and pilots and arguing that prototypes are much better tools for social policy innovation.

The year of the tiger + creativity & innovation

I’m celebrating the Chinese New Year in Malaysia, where the Prime Minister has also declared it the year of creativity and innovation. I pose the question, do government targets enable or constrain creativity and innovation?

Leave the right outcomes to the people

Should we just hold the state accountable for providing a base level of services, given the outcomes of those services depend on what people do? We respond to a blog post by the RSA’s Matthew Taylor on the topic, suggesting that while government and people should be held jointly accountable for outcomes, how we define outcomes matters.

Browned off with design thinking?

Design thinking, and Tim Brown are everywhere. Tommorrow I’ve been invited to take part in a reading group at Central Saint Martins that will debate some of the issues raised and questions not answered by Brown in his talks and book.

Measuring social impact

We live in the information age, but what does all the information really tell us? How can we design measures that actually capture useful information, and more importantly, can gauge social impact? We share version 1.0 of our principles for good measurement. Good measures are (1) useful, (2) actionable, (3) purposeful, (4) ecological, and (5) positive.

The real design thinking

Real design thinking, as opposed to the new & trendy design thinking, starts with the premise that social problems are wicked: they can never be fully defined or solved; only re-solved with solutions that are inseparable from our values and judgments.

Deepening, broadening and scaling up

A new publication looks at the role experimentation can play in addressing societal challenges, but focuses more on structures and processes than people.

Living before good living

Are certain cultures unable to change? David Brooks thinks so. Writing about what good could come from the human catastrophe still unfolding in Haiti, Brooks sees space for a counterculture to take hold. He argues Haiti’s development has been hampered by its ‘change-resistant’ culture including ‘the influence of the voodoo religion’ ‘high levels of social [...]

Design thinking is not enough

We respond to an article by Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt on design thinking as a tool for social innovation, arguing that design thinking alone can’t solve social problems.

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