Social Innovation is a cross disciplinary approach to addressing some of the world’s most intractable problems. They are innovations that radically change our social interactions. Some typical examples are the Internet, public healthcare, insurance and many more. Social Innovations can be private, non-profit, public sector or cross-sector initiatives. Working in a space where you are expected to generate innovations can be frustrating in many ways. Often clients or stakeholders want new and innovative approaches, but they also want you to provide examples of where the approach has worked before. The point of innovation is that you are operating in a zone where few have gone before, so there are no road maps. Innovators find themselves building the plane as they fly it.
Social innovation practitioners work to disrupt the status quo. These status quo disruptors or practitioners usually find themselves on the receiving end of rejection, doubt, uncertainty and being challenged by those who are unintentionally reinforcing the current status quo. Given that this work is so frustrating I have found metaphors to be very helpful in trying to decrease my anxiety in working in these exciting, yet challenging spaces.
Imagine the status quo as being analogous to the frequency of a radio station. With time and experience, most people will learn which frequency or radio station plays the genre of music they like. If we cannot remember the radio station and tune into 95.2 when it should be 95.7, we tend to get static or noise. What some of us may not know is that the space between these radio stations frequencies is referred to as white space. If two radio stations are broadcasting at frequencies that are too close together, they interfere with each other. Governing bodies tend to allocate radio stations with enough white space between them to ensure that radio stations can broadcast their signal without interference from competing stations.
Now suppose your favourite radio station decided to improve its programming with better music, better programming, and less advertising, but the only way they could do so was by broadcasting on a new frequency that was too close to their current frequency. Most radio stations given this option would shut down their old frequency and begin transmitting on the new frequency. In the social world we cannot shut down existing systems like healthcare, education, transportation, etc… Instead, we need to transition from the old paradigm toward new ways of being and doing. Unfortunately, the transition is often like listening to two radio stations with insufficient white space between them. The interruption in the listening experience would come in the form of training on new models and ways of working, organisational restructuring, unusual or unfamiliar partnerships, job loss, job creation and many more anxiety inducing changes. Just as a radio station encroaching on the well established white space would upset many listeners. Encroaching on the well-established boundaries of social systems generates very similar reactions which often reveal themselves in the form of contestation, conflict or tension.
If we think of status quo as being analogous to the radio station, and social innovations as the process of transitioning from an old radio frequency to a new frequency, then when we encounter the static or the noise, it is is easier to understand why we can get so much resistance. Metaphors help us make sense of the uncertainty, which also help us manage the anxiety of working in spaces of innovation.
Photo by: Bernhard Benke – Radio Raheem – retrieved on Flicker under a Creative Commons license.
This is a cross post. The was originally published on Village Seed Solutions.