Introduction
Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination;do not become the slave of your model. ~ Vincent Van Gogh
Societal Muse inspires change leaders to tell stories of their emergent journeys that enable social change at scale.
You will witness quests, dilemmas and turning-points as change leaders muster the courage to reimagine a different, better future for all. Embedded in each story you will find a small simple idea. Small simple ideas are like children. They need to be nurtured to take shape, scale and create impact. You will need to play along by bringing forth your childlike curiosity, eager to learn from the twists in each journey as it passes through difficult terrain.
As you progress through this hide and seek, please look for three important moments. Moments when dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs, the slow rate of change and the limited magnitude of impact turns into anxiety about what is possible, how and by when. This is when questions of ‘what-now’ and ‘why-not’ show up. They don’t always do so at the beginning of a journey. Just keep an eye for this Muse of Possibility , lest she slips by unnoticed.
Then, look for moments when anxiety turns into adventure, when the Muse of Curiosity bubbles with questions such as ‘can-we’ and ‘how-to’. Ideas, different from current ways of solving, with the potential to engage actors across society, start to emerge. Can disaster-induced poverty be limited by reducing the time it takes for communities to recover? How to improve healthcare by facilitating the exchange of knowledge through better interactions between people? The child grows restless to move away from the much trodden paths. So must the child in you.
Finally, the expansion, when small simple ideas turn into actions that enable many actors in society to get better at what they do. Leaders across civil society, government and markets converge to action. You may not see the end result of this change now, but look out for progress. Like, millions of youth beginning to connect to new jobs, thousands of citizens starting to solve hyper-local issues. The Muse of Agency reveals that once agency of people is restored and their ability to solve their own problems is strengthened, we make progress at societal scale.
This would be a good moment to reflect on the Societal Thinking Purple Arch that appears across the pages as a translucent overlay. What is it trying to say? How does the picture look without the Purple Arch? How does it change with the Purple Arch? What is the difference?
I am humbled by the seven change leaders whose journeys will unfold across this edition of Societal Muse. I am grateful for the encouragement and insights shared by Don Gips and Rohini Nilekani. This is a child-like beginning, full of play and exploration. Over the pages you will meet many children. Dressed up and posing as adults, they are here to remind us that impact at scale can be achieved if we retain a sense of possibility, curiosity and imagination. They stand for small simple ideas that restore the agency of all.
I will meet you again at the end of each story to reflect on how the Muse of Possibility, Muse of Curiosity and Muse of Agency have inspired the change leader. Here we go!
Reimagine Resilience
I will never forget my days being caught in the 1997 Gujarat floods! With fast-depleting coping systems, millions never recover from the impact of one disaster before the next one strikes. This is getting bleaker with rapid climate change. I see hope in how SEEDS is investing in restoring the agency of people and communities to plan, assess and rebuild between successive disasters. This resilience is vital for the survival of the most vulnerable. Rather than scramble after a disaster, it is better to build a trusted digital backbone that helps people understand and keep an updated record of their loss potential. This spurs preventive action at scale before a disaster strikes and aids rapid response after one does.
Scale Quality
The approach of ECHO is akin to a fractal, a never-ending self-similar pattern of interactions between the hubs and spokes of a learning network. In healthcare, it prompts me to imagine a global professional network that diffuses knowledge as fast as it is created. I believe that the impact of this approach rests on the quality and quantity of human interactions. I am curious about how iECHO will scale as the backbone to analyse data across thousands of interactions and generate a feedback loop that improves quality. A high-quality interactive network that strengthens the agency of remote healthcare professionals gives me hope that a scalable and sustainable response to our challenges is emerging.
Localise Leadership
Can I, myself, consistently solve the problems that I see around me? This idea is empowering. It is hard to make progress if I always have to depend on someone else to solve my problems. Restoring individual agency as the epicentre of any large-scale change is important. The Solve Ninjas of Reap Benefit demonstrate that hyperlocal leadership can be nurtured to see, sense and solve some of the most difficult and complex global challenges, locally. As this idea scales using a digital backbone as a connective tissue, I can already imagine a wide variety of possibilities. Why should I limit this idea to urban citizens? Maybe Solve Ninjas can mobilise sustainable change across all areas, for all.
Share Solvability
I loved the moment of realisation that instead of distributing pre-defined solutions, it is solvability (the ability to solve) that needs to be shared with others in the ecosystem. This led to implementation of initiatives required to build confidence that sharing solvability is effective, that it works. In this context, the digital backbone acts as a foundation to provide transparency and build the trust required to forge effective relationships between government, local communities and civil society organisations. If we share the ability to solve, it may slow us down. That causes anxiety. However, we must align our actions such that even if we go forward slowly, we go forward together.
Solve Together
When I mix yellow and blue, I get the colour green. Green is neither yellow, nor blue. To me, the development of the National Pathway Management Network is the making of green. It is a shared backbone to face the numerous challenges of unemployment and aiming at them as the common enemy. I see the emerging national network as the meeting ground for all actors across civil society, government and markets to create value for the millions of youth across South Africa. Harambee in kiSwahili means ‘we pull together’. I believe this is to be the most important word to create impact at scale. Together, we bring our ideas, our yellows and blues, to make green.
Forge Beyond
Staying uncomfortable with problems may lead to better ideas than getting comfortable with tested solutions. ShikshaLokam looked at the problem of ‘how to set up a training institute’ and redefined it as ‘how to build a platform’ to develop 4.5 million education leaders. The training institute would have taken 5,000 years to achieve the goal. In hindsight, the decision to reuse Sunbird, an open-source technology to build the platform seems prudent. Besides saving years and millions, it led to innovations beyond what had already been created. I often reflect on the moment when they were at a fork to make this decision. Reusing and forging ahead is a mindset of such change leaders, and not a tactic!
Build Public Goods
Orchestrating a perfect symphony is different from mastering the piano. Both are difficult, in different ways. I saw this difference when eGov shifted from implementing solutions to building open public goods. Once the anxiety subsided, the excitement was palpable. DIGIT connected eGov with the urban ecosystem. It was not a lonely journey anymore, but shared with the Government, civil society organisations and markets. The difficult part was letting go, shifting from taking control to enabling the ecosystem. I believe their journey illustrates that just building public goods is not adequate, we need to show the way, deliver reference projects and build capability of all actors in the ecosystem to achieve scale.
