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!
NOW FOR THIS WEEK’S QUESTION…
Think of a set of rigid categories you frequently encounter when working on your problem. These often come in dichotomies (black and white, left and right) but any number of categories will do as long as people say “everything must go in one of these boxes.” Now imagine that your sole purpose in life is to come up with something new that can’t be easily sorted in that system of categories. What would you come up with, and how would you demonstrate that it deserves a new category?
Like many a consultant and freelancer, I spend a lot of time working in coffeshops, and more often than not that means Starbucks. While I have plenty of local joints I love, there is something comfortingly neutral about Starbucks that can’t be found quite anywhere else. Where I live, that neutrality draws other laptop jockeys, but also wedding planners, Bible study facilitators, and after-school tutors. I feel confident none of these people asked if it was okay to hold their activities at Starbucks — it it just understood.
One thing I learned during an Insight Lab with the company many years ago is that this atmosphere of welcoming neutrality was intentionally designed. It’s called “The Third Place.” Starbucks did not come up with the idea — it refers to all sorts of places between home and work, such as barber shops and libraries. But the company’s business model took advantage of a lack of Third Places in American life. They were bold enough (or brazen enough!) to assert that a chain coffeeshop could fill that void, and this informs all their design choices.
This exercise calls upon you to be just as ambitious, designing a new category that disrupts the world of your problem. Here’s how it works.
HOW TO DO IT
Consider your options. There are all sorts of categories that structure the world of any social problem, from fundamental categories like good and evil to highly technical distinctions that only a few people may understand. It is always a good idea to list such categories, because tinkering with any of them could open up new strategic options. But this exercise works best if you choose categories that seem particularly hard to change. These are typically dichotomies, because if you’ve already got 31 flavors of ice cream, it’s not hard to imagine that there could be more.
Break the paradigm. How do you actually come up with that third category? (Or fourth or fifth or whatever.) This generally goes one of two ways. The first situation is that it is honestly intellectually difficult to come up with a new category. In this situation, try questioning the rationale that generated the categories in the first place. For example, many stories like Star Wars include two teams that represent absolute good and absolute evil — it sounds ridiculous to say that there is also a Purple Side of the Force. But if you set aside the need for a story with simple heroes and villains, more complex categories can emerge.
The second situation is that it’s easy to imagine new categories, but for some reason no one is putting in the effort. If that’s the case, skip to the next step.
Note: focusing on breaking the paradigm also prevents your new category from becoming a miscellaneous junk drawer, which is a frequent mistake made during this exercise.
Populate the new category with meaningful examples. On its own, your new category won't do any good. You have to imagine new people, places, things, organizations, or ideas that make the category useful.
For example, ask a high school class to brainstorm for five minutes, and you'll come up with new ideas for political parties in the United States that are more interesting than “Republican” and “Democrat.” But real political actors don’t invest time in such ideas because various structural barriers prevent third parties from gaining power. For the category to matter, it must include an idea that could plausibly disrupt the two-party system in some way.
The same problem applies to the Starbucks example. There are thousands of “Third Places" outside home and work, but the success of Starbucks came from developing a version of the "Third Place” that was also a successful business. Take these factors into account as you populate your category, rather than just assuming anything that falls outside the usual boxes is a brilliant idea.
Derive lessons for the real world. Sometimes the new category generated by this exercise is extremely useful to participants. More frequently one of the ideas that populates the category is useful, and the new category’s importance fades as that idea is developed. But the most frequent result is that outside the exercise itself, the rigid categories remain intact. Nevertheless, the exercise should give you insight into the categories, why they exist, and what can be accomplished within their boundaries.
For example, even if you feel like you have no shot of disrupting the two-party system, coming up with a new party might give you ideas about new policies and tactics you could adopt as a Republican, Democrat, or Independent. Or seeing common weaknesses among your new third political parties could give you insights into why the two parties have remained so strong. In any case, I recommend you always try to take away some lesson from the exercise that isn’t "We need to tear down these rigid categories.”
CAN YOU GIVE ME AN EXAMPLE?
I’d love to. A while back, my colleagues and I did a project where we attempted to find new sources of hope in a run-down post-industrial city. Preliminary research indicated that the most hopeful group in the city were teenagers who did not carry older generations’ expectations of what their town should be. But there was a problem: after high school, the students either “succeeded” by leaving town and going to college or "failed" by getting a local dead-end job, getting pregnant, or dealing drugs.
We asked several groups in town to imagine a new “third path out of high school” — a version of "success" that did not involve leaving town. It was easy to name the category but hard to populate it. Some people imagined the kids taking extension courses from the local community college. Others imagined more radical ideas like students owning a bodega together or marching to City Hall and occupying it after they graduate.
In the end, all these ideas helped inform the design of a fellowship program where graduates would serve their city for year after high school. But we also decided that the category of “success by going away to college" was too important to disrupt, so we made the program compatible with those kinds of ambitions. You may also find yourself making peace with the original categories after doing this kind of work, so don’t treat it as a failure so long as you are achieving the impact you originally hoped to achieve.
COOL, SO WHAT MAKES THIS WORK?
This question is an example of how to jump-start creative thinking about your problem using the configuration 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.
Image: the first Starbucks in Seoul, via Wikimedia Commons.