Skip to main content

Collaborative Thinking as a Social Change Tool



Genership 1.0: Beyond Leadership Toward Liberating the Creative Soul by David Castro describes some tactics for approaching social innovation in a creative, collaborative way. This post introduces three specific ways of thinking collaboratively, or individually, about social change efforts. Castro offers much more detail on using leverage, systems thinking and design thinking.

Three Approaches to Thinking about Social Change:

Whenever a group of social entrepreneurs gets together to plan or problem solve, they can choose to adopt one or more modes of thinking about the challenge at hand. The three modes of thinking that Castro mentions each deserves a book or two, but an introduction is easy to supply:

1. Looking for Leverage - This is a social change approach I’ve advocated for in previous posts. Activists should look for places they can intervene in society to produce the most benefit for the resources invested. A deep familiarity with the problem might be enough to suggest ways to intervene to produce a maximum benefit.
2. Systems Thinking - All social problems have multiple causes and effects. A number of factors doubtlessly influence the problem, making it worse in some circumstances and better in others. To be effective activists requires at least a basic understanding of the system in question. The group needs to look at interrelationships between parts of the system.
3. Design Thinking - Consider how the possible solution will fit into the social environment by developing elements that match the needs of the population. Several posts in this blog have addressed design thinking in more detail.

Creative thinking should be an element of collaborative thinking about how to affect social change. Some groups use an unsophisticated process of just coming up with ideas. A formal approach to generating ideas is almost always going to give better results. Brainstorming techniques like concept mapping or morphological analysis can serve the group well. The group could use SCAMPER to refine or combine promising ideas.

Addressing Gun Violence:

A standard approach to gun violence might be to simply advocate for tougher gun laws. Maybe the city government can ban concealed carry or Congress can expand on the so-called assault weapons ban. Those approaches represent a search for leverage, a way to use the existing system to affect a reduction in gun violence.

A bit of systems thinking would reveal some insights about the factors that influence rates of gun violence for better or for worse. This work might reveal something that could be more easily addressed than gun laws. Perhaps lots of young men don’t have anything constructive to do for money, or just to pass the time, end up running with gangs. A program to address that problem might give us a new design to address gun violence.

A bit of collaborative thinking could produce new ways to gain leverage, or a new social program or policy that offers a new way of dealing with the causes of gun violence.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Steering Your Brain Toward Better Program Ideas

This is a post about asking good questions whenever you think you have a good idea for a program or program improvement. You probably knew that great ideas still need to be examined, questioned if you please. That's what this post is about, sort of. Mostly, I want to offer a few comments on Brainsteering: A Better Approach to Breakthrough Ideas by Kevin and Shawn Coyne. Brainsteering offers a disciplined approach to asking, and answering, questions about product ideas and business ideas. The process also works just fine for program ideas. The book starts by describing some generic questions to ask about a challenge then goes into creating logic trees. A logic tree works by stating a question and breaking it down into subquestions. Simply asking and answering questions might lead to some valuable new ideas. Brainsteering And that's as far as I have gone in the book. I can say that there is a chapter on making your own brainstorming efforts more effective. Other chapter...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to Crowdsource and Experiment Our Way to a Fairer Economy

Economic and social inequality should be treated as design challenges that, like designs in architecture or packaging can be solved by applying some creative thinking. That's hardly a new idea, but the recession and ongoing concerns about economic inequality make crowdsourcing seem like something worth talking about.  Crowdsourcing as an Economic Justice Tool: Most people have an idea of what  crowdsourcing is and how it works - you let a group work on your problem or challenge and see what they produce. Can they produce a better answer (whatever that means) than an expert or a small group of experts? You can't answer that question until you have some real-world examples to draw upon. That's where social experiments and simulations can prove useful. Maybe there should be specific crowdsourcing projects and a place to organize all of them. We could start crowdsourcing campaigns around a range of topics: New ways of using barter to meet peoples' needs Using buying co...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Web Strategy That Works

I was reading a Chronicle of Philanthropy article about online strategies that work in a bad economy. The article presented four different strategies and a nonprofit that used it successfully. This post is about the strategy of using specialized Web sites. Put up a site just for a certain crisis, event, issue, project or program. The Chronicle details how Partners in Health did this for Haiti earthquake relief. Any issue, whether a crisis or not, whether global or local is a potential candidate for replicating the Partners in Health approach. Events of global and local significance are fine subjects for a site. You are probably already familiar with World AIDS Day or World Water Day. Those global events and many others are the subject of special Web sites and advertising campaigns both online and in print. Local events from the mundane, like the beginning of a new school year, to the momentous. A crisis is another good reason to put up a specialized Web site. The epic flooding in...
Post a Comment
Read more