As more and more organizations see a need for social innovation, we find ourselves facing a supply challenge: who will do this new kind of work? Right now we’re part of a small group of practitioners with hands-on experience. We struggle to find and recommend people who can work inside and outside of systems, top-down and bottom-up. We teach, train and develop curriculum so more people will be able to recognize, ask for and do good problem-solving.

We do socioethnodespolbizsci

We use a hybrid problem-solving approach that brings together tools from lots of different disciplines. Our core tools are drawn from our training in policy, social science, education and design, but we also borrow heavily from business. Policy gives us the tools to debate end outcomes, develop intervention logics, manage stakeholders, and negotiate compromises. Design gives us tools to collaborate and to generate, try, and improve on ideas. Social science gives us access to a range of research methods, from ethnography to better understand people’s lives to literature reviews that collate evidence of what works. Education helps us to bring learning and development into everything we do. Business offers tools to plan, strategize and ensure solutions are viable and sustainable.

We’re developing a curriculum

In every project, we work with doers and thinkers from different sectors and disciplines. We adopt and adapt approaches and frameworks that we think get underneath ‘what is’ ‘why’ and ‘how different’ questions. The curricula and teaching methods we use are constantly evolving as we are exposed to new things. Right now, we’re organizing our curricula around the key decision points practitioners, managers and community leaders face as they do social innovation: setting-up projects, identifying problems, resetting outcomes, developing ideas, prototyping ideas, and sustaining those ideas.

If you think we’re missing something, we’d love to hear from you.

GOOD
PROJECTS		 GOOD
PROBLEMS		 GOOD
OUTCOMES		 GOOD
IDEAS		 GOOD
PRACTICE		 SUSTAINED
PRACTICE
THIS IS ABOUT How to set-up an incremental versus radical social innovation project How to identify and think differently about social problems How to rethink what success looks and feels like, and for whom How to generate new ideas and theories of change How to make ideas real, test and iterate them. How to grow ideas and identify vehicles for scale
THIS LOOKS AT
  • - Project scope
  • - Resourcing & structure
  • - Problem size
  • - Definition
  • - Symptoms
  • - Causes
  • - History & context
  • - The good life and how to measure it
  • - Balancing  stakeholder motivations and goals
  • - Logic modeling
  • - Creative techniques
  • - Scenario building
  • - Paper prototyping
  • - Practice prototyping
  • - Policy prototyping
  • - Metric design
  • - Business planning
  • -  Organisational change
  • - Storytelling
THIS DRAWS ON
  • - Public Management
  • - Social sciences
  • - History
  • - Policy
  • - Social sciences
  • - Philosophy
  • - Design
  • - Policy
  • - Design
  • - Logistics & Operations
  • - Community organising
  • - Evaluation
  • - Business
  • - Public Management

We think change comes from doing

Too many times we’d facilitate sessions on good problem-solving only to return and find little had changed. We think that’s because we ran sessions as away days, in clean spaces, on fictional problems, removed from everyday practice and everyday limitations. When the session finished, people went back to their day jobs, to old habits & rituals, in an unsupportive environment – frustrating for everybody.

Doing and managing social innovation requires changes to behavior and context that can only really come from immersive practice. We think it’s best to teach in-context, through projects that solve real problems and directly relate to day-to-day work. That’s why we run short week-long teaching projects, as well as build capacity as part of our longer projects by bringing managers & practitioners into the prototyping team.

We love to teach (& learn)

Sarah has a master’s degree in education from Stanford; she’s designed and run trainings on user engagement with civil servants and community leaders in Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Wyoming; and in England, Wales, and New Zealand. Chris has taught service design to design students in Italy, France and Germany through week long projects focused on local social problems, and as a part of RED developed a curriculum for transformation design.

Next →

Teaching is the second kind of work that we do. We hope that it builds peoples’ capacity to take part in our third kind of work: Enabling change by starting and sustaining prototypes.

What we do → We promote interest → We build capacity → We enable change

Teaching, courses & curriculum development
WHY To build capacity for problem-solving.
WHO Practitioners, managers, community leaders, policymakers, students.

Supported by
Educational institutions, professional development networks, social innovation funders, government.
WHAT Courses: 3 days – 1 week

Curricula, internships & opportunities to shadow.
OUTPUTS Hands-on projects, case studies, reading, frameworks
OUTCOMES Participants …

  • — Know how to structure a good social change project
  • — Understand the difference between incremental and radical change
  • — Have a hunger to do different

actionlearning_small

Civil servant action learning

EXAMPLE CAPACITY BUILDING

usanzuk

We have run action learning sets with civil servants in the US, NZ and UK. Civil servants convened every two weeks for three months to reflect on their day-to-day practice, explore how they approached problems, read how others have approached problems, and try out some new ways of doing things.

These were things like starting a meeting with a story of a user and discussing what success would look like for him and his family. Or broadening what counted as evidence in the policy process, including ethnographic and observational data. Or coming up with a new metric to capture how people engaged in services, rather than just what services did for people.

All small steps towards shifting civil servants’ relationships with practitioners and users, and increasing their readiness to do change.