Dual citizens
What are some other worlds where your stakeholders feel like they belong?
This is Andrew Benedict-Nelson, social change strategist and innovation educator. Each week, I share a question that you and your organization can use to find a new perspective on the toughest problems you face. Reply to the e-mail or comment on the site and we can talk about them together!
One way to gain insight into social problems is by discovering other problems with which they are intimately linked. A surefire way to do this is through following actors — the people and organizations tied to the problem. What other problems are your problem’s actors seriously concerned with? How do those concerns help or hinder efforts to solve your problem?
You may have read that there are various cognitive benefits to being bilingual. To me the most amazing one is how mastery of multiple languages is associated with improved reading and writing test scores in both languages. It's as if you were running two programs on your computer and it somehow made the whole thing faster!
Fortunately, when it comes to entrenched social problems, we are all bilingual — or actually multilingual, since so many different problems are connected in so many different ways. No matter how important your problem may be, the people who are tied to it are usually worried about many other problems as well. The same goes for institutions, which rarely exist to do just one thing.
All of these other problems encroaching on your turf may seem like distractions. But if you shift your perspective, you can treat these shared worlds as assets, letting in what’s helpful and editing out what isn't. Here's how to get started.
HOW TO DO IT
This exercise works best if you already know about some of your problem's actors. For now, just try to make a list of five to ten organizations or groups of people who are really important to understanding your problem. This doesn't need to be a perfect list. (If you are curious about actors, here are a few exercises you can use to get to know your actors better.)
Take a look at each group or organization on your list and think of at least one problem that is just as important (if not more important) to each actor than the one you are currently working on. If you have time, go through again and list another problem with which each actor is concerned, but doesn’t take as seriously as the other problem.
Do you notice any patterns? Sometimes these are obvious, with one external problem dominating the conversation among all the different actors. If that's the case, you probably already know about it, so dig deeper. What other patterns do you notice? Is your problem a place where a few different concerns come together? Or perhaps connections to other problems have divided your actors into rival camps? Any pattern you observe here will be useful.
Now comes the crucial step. Pretend that one of these external problems or patterns actually provides assets that are essential to solving your problem. For the moment, drop preconceptions about the different problems and their relative importance in the world. Just say, “This problem might give the actors the ability to do X, which is crucial to solving my problem.”
It’s possible that you have now discovered assets you can put to work to solve your problem, no questions asked. But more typically, there are practical barriers that have prevented your actors from doing what you just envisioned. So as you think about how to apply what you have learned, consider the best way to remove those barriers. It may be that the insight you have gained by looking at one group of actors can actually be best deployed by another group.
CAN YOU GIVE ME AN EXAMPLE?
Yup, I’ll tell you about the situation that inspired this exercise in the first place. My colleagues and I were working with a group of art therapy providers in a military hospital. These organizations were accustomed to evaluating themselves using metrics designed for arts groups. In our session, we imagined how they could collaborate with hospital leaders and express their effectiveness using the metrics of military medicine. That may sound obvious, but the arts groups saw themselves as helping heal soldiers from war rather than helping the Pentagon wage it more effectively. So even once the critical insight was reached, the arts groups needed to make a detailed study of military medical metrics to decide how they would explain their relevance without betraying their values.
Bonus example: In Kim Stanley Robinson’s book The Ministry for the Future the author points out that the infrastructure developed for fossil fuel extraction could also be put to use for massive climate change mitigation projects. This is a considerable source of hope for me.
COOL, SO WHAT MAKES THIS WORK?
This question is an example of how to critically examine your problem using the parthood dynamic. It’s one of six innovation dynamics I help people master to improve their critical thinking and build strategies for social change. Reply to this e-mail with your answer to the question and I’ll let you know what I think! Or learn more by visiting http://www.teachingsocialchange.com.
Photo of passport stamps via Flickr user hjl