What business entrepreneurs are to the economy, social entrepreneurs are to social change. -David Bornstein
The following blog entry was written in April 2010 as part of my coverage of the Skoll World Forum 2010. Please add your comments to the original post on Social Edge.
At this year’s Skoll World Forum, an unusually contagious and bold energy flowed through the conversations, panel topics, and tweets. Perhaps the new energy was a direct response to the incredible effort of the Forum organizers, who clearly set out this year to acknowledge, celebrate, and encourage participation from the talent that shows up to the Forum each year.
Perhaps the Skoll Centre doubled the caffeine in the coffee and added extra powder to the social entrepreneurship Kool-Aid we all drink. Or maybe they changed the mix altogether, substituting the original flavor with a new top secret blend called social interpreneurship.
What is social interpreneurship you ask? I’m not entirely sure, in light of its classified nature, but I would hazard a guess that it’s two parts Internet, five parts Interaction, and ten parts Interdependence. Flipping through the Skoll World Forum program and rerunning the highlights in my head, I see evidence of social interpreneurship at every turn.
The sessions on “social media” and “reimagining networks” inspired new ways of thinking about how Internet culture is reshaping our field into one characterized by open platforms and peer-to-peer communications.
All five sessions located in the “Reception” room were designed for Interaction among delegates in small groups, tapping the immense renewable energy of activated smart people. (The “compelling action” session ran twice due to popular demand and an innovative panel format resembling musical chairs.)
As for the Interdependence piece, plenary speakers, panelists, and audience questions reminded us that large scale impact requires a new appreciation and harnessing of the Interdependence of people, planet, and purpose initiatives. These reminders gave new meaning to the sometimes tired rituals of conference networking.
The ascendance of Internet, Interaction and Interdependence is to be celebrated. As the saying goes, you are what you eat. Personally, I’m hoping that social interpreneurship stays on the menu at the Skoll World Forum.
The questions I have for discussion are:
- Have we, as a field of study and community, evolved beyond social entrepreneurship?
- To what extent does the ascendance of Internet, Interaction, and Interdependence represent a new paradigm in which to consider our work?
- If you could drop everything and become a highly influential social entrepreneur, social intrapreneur, or social interpreneur, which one would you choose?
The prospect of volcanic ash from Iceland raining down on Skoll World Forum delegates, grounding them in the City of Dreaming Spires, as they share with one another their lessons learned from years of trying to change the world is beyond poetic. It serves as an awesome reminder of the power that Earth wields on the movements of people. And it casts each great mind participating in the Forum this year as an animated statuette, rendered gray with ash, in the museum of social entrepreneurship.
Here is Federico Bellone of Fundacion AVINO, unable to return to Brazil, reminding us that collective impact is best captured by narrative, not matrix. Narratives are perhaps less rigorous than standard evaluation procedures, and subject to bias. But they are low cost and simple to comprehend. They allow for continuous reporting and are great at illustrating scale in a way that anyone can relate to.
Here is Jim Berk of Participant Media, unable to return to Los Angeles, open sourcing the recipe for creating compelling films that move people towards action. “Start by finding your story.” he says. “Then find your tone. Then find your audience. But above all, recognize the limitations of the form you’re working with.” The recipe works for film but can be heeded by anyone blessed with the raw materials for communication.
Here is Rafael Ramirez, already at home in Oxford but cast as a living statuette nevertheless. His words are prophetic. “The future is not something we enter. It comes at you.” His advice: use advanced scenario planning to build multiple narratives of what the future may hold for the context in which you work. The art of scenario planning can help you make decisions in the present that account for accelerated change and guaranteed uncertainty.
As delegates adjust their travel plans in the face of Earth’s rumblings, some leave with a new appreciation for how effective story-telling fuels brilliant impact measurement, brilliant communication, and brilliant strategic planning.
Moments ago, I was one of several hundred delegates streaming out of the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford University. We had just experienced the opening plenary of the Skoll World Forum 2010.
The event opened with a beautiful performance by South African Singer-Songwriter and Poet Activist, Vusi Mahlasela, including a song about two birds in a barren land, one with no wings and the other with no eyes. Together, they find a way to fly to a better place. The song, no doubt picked for its relevance to this year’s theme of catalyzing collaboration for large scale impact, breathed new life into the ancient lecture hall and appeared to move the audience deeply.
Speakers at this evening’s opening plenary included Jeff Skoll, Founder & Chairman, Skoll Foundation, Participant Media, and Skoll Global Threats Fund; Lakhdar Brahimi, Veteran United Nations Envoy and Advisor; Ann Cotton, Executive Director, Camfed International; and Paul Farmer, Co-Founder, Partners In Health. Below are selections from the opening plenary, weaved together with a gentle nudge to Skoll World Forum delegates and people following from afar to consider the possibility that the ingredients for catalyzing collaboration are coming together somewhere other than the Sheldonian Theatre and the Saïd Business School.
Senior statesman Lakhdar Brahimi’s presentation included a humorous anecdote about a peace agreement he helped broker between Afghanistan and Iran. After a lengthy negotiation with a Taliban leader, Brahimi helped secure a commitment to peace. Later he found out that his Afghan interpreter had taken the liberty of neither fully translating what the Taliban leader or what Brahimi had said. The interpreter, however, had responsibly said what needed to be said.
Later in the evening, Ann Cotton of Camfed was asked if collaborating with local organizations requires international aid organizations to let go of some power. A strange question, but Cotton responded with the highly tweetable and poignant observation that, “You can’t empower people without giving up some power.” The round-table discussion with Cotton and her partners highlighted the value of letting go of control by placing the people you seek to serve at the center of your work. See the Accounting to the Girl report released today for more information.
Introduced as a social entrepreneurship ‘rock star’, Paul Farmer of Partners in Health presented on the earth quake relief and rebuilding effort in Haiti. He walked the audience through a intense slide-show of images from Haiti, read from the country’s Declaration of Independence, and concluded with a shopping-list of what’s needed in Haiti to “build back better.” Farmer also confessed that he didn’t know what remarkable tools could possibility make the provisioning of his entire shopping list possible. Nevertheless, he concluded that the “between us and among us lie the tools and resources to rebuild Haiti.”
This very brief review of tonight’s opening plenary of the Skoll World Forum 2010 concludes with a response to Paul Farmer, in the manner of the interpreter from Afghanistan, and with the interest of placing the people we want to serve at the center of our work.
As a migrant from the social tech universe, I may be one of handful of people attending the Skoll World Forum who are remotely familiar with a revolution in collaboration brewing at the edges of geekdom. Few people have heard of the Open Linked Data Cloud, and even fewer people can easily interpret its significance to social entrepreneurship. (See Tim Berners-Lee’s TED Talk for a primer.)
I won’t attempt to explain #LinkedData here, but during the course of this evening’s plenary, I realized that the breakthrough tools for collaboration that not even Paul Farmer can envision are quite possibly not “between us and among us” but down the street at the University of Oxford’s Computing Laboratory.
If by some stroke of good fortune, a translator from the world of code is reading this and can explain how the Open Linked Data Could could facilitate deep collaboration, data sharing, and empowerment of the people we want to serve, I will return to Canada a happier person and Paul Farmer may someday soon be able to seamlessly assemble the resources necessary to have his shopping list crowd-sourced.
Let me attempt to prompt the discussion by tagging @viewchange, @webfoundation, @phase2tech, @zemanta, and @semuni.
The words “social entrepreneurship and collaboration” don’t exactly roll off one’s tongue. Nevertheless, as the Skoll World Forum 2010 gets underway, I have been reflecting on whether the Jazz musician Louis Jordan should have included the coupling in his 1949 song “Beans and Cornbread“.
Please humor me for a moment and consider these lyrics from Jordan’s song:
Beans hit Cornbread on the head, Cornbread said I’m almost dead
Beans told Cornbread now get up man, you know that we go hand in hand
Beans told Cornbread, it makes no difference what you think about me
But it makes a whole lot of difference what I think about you
It’s that second refrain that delegates attending the Skoll World Forum 2010, and following from afar, should pay the closest attention to.
Proponents of collaboration can write volumes on the potential they see in social entrepreneurs aligning their work for greater impact. (Read, it makes no difference what collaboration thinks of social entrepreneurship.) These calls for collaboration will amount to small change until business, foundation, and nonprofit leaders see collaboration as an indispensable discipline and practice it daily. (Read, it makes a whole lot of difference what social entrepreneurship thinks of collaboration.)
In this year’s theme for the Skoll World Forum, I like to think that we’re experiencing a turning point for the often trumpeted but seldom practiced discipline of collaboration. I am hopeful but not convinced that the attention drawn to collaboration this week as a vehicle for large scale impact will help make “How are you going to collaborate with others?” as common a question for would-be social entrepreneurs as “How are you going to reach critical mass?” and “How are you going to sustain the project once launched?”
If the tipping point in favor of collaboration is now, it comes despite enormous systemic and cultural obstacles.
The reality of how social entrepreneurship and collaboration interact is captured in the first refrain quoted above. The day-to-day practice of social entrepreneurship regularly puts the imperative to collaborate on life support. Grants and fellowships are awarded to individual organizations. Fan pages and Articles of Incorporation are singular. The time, funding, and incentives needed to prompt multiple organizations to work together are hard to come by. And most importantly, the courage and humility needed to pursue mission-serving collaborations are often painfully absent from the organizations we celebrate as exemplary social enterprises.
Long story short, there’s a lot of work to be done before social entrepreneurship and collaboration can go together “like beans and cornbread, “like bread and butter”, “like hotcakes and molasses, and (if all goes well this week), like the Skoll World Forum and Oxford Jam.
Social Entrepreneurship and Collaboration Go Together Like…
The following review was posted on the Stanford Social Innovation Review opinion blog in March 2010. Please leave your comments on the original post.
One of the best things that can happen to a social entrepreneur is to have the right book fall in your lap at the right time.
Recently, I was fortunate to have The New How: Creating Business Solutions through Collaborative Strategy placed in my hands by the author herself. On a chance visit to Montreal in the depths of winter, Nilofer Merchant lit up a small group of tech entrepreneurs. Her message to the group: If you want to be successful innovators and lead motivated teams, then pay as much attention to how your strategies are created and implemented as to the form they ultimately take.
Nilofer Merchant’s presentation in Montreal and her book have drawn me into a deep meditation on the how of social innovation precisely at the moment when I need to be focusing on it. The New How has helped me acknowledge that the strategy creation processes I have overseen in the past have been inconsistent – at times demonstrating highly collaborative traits (with great results) and at other times resembling what Nilofer Merchant calls, the Chief of Answers syndrome.
The Chief of Answers is someone who arbitrarily directs his or her team in a new direction without first consulting those who are tasked with implementing it and those who the strategy is meant to serve. From experience, I know that when the Chief of Answers has made cameo appearances in the projects I work on, the results have been less than stellar. Read the rest of this entry »
