There are many ways to share your message with supporters, call a community to action, and ask for feedback or support that will ultimately help you spur social change. Organizational communications are increasingly personal and direct, thanks to social media platforms and the prevalence of public access points. Yet despite the increasing number of methods for reaching out to and communicating with your constituents, certain guiding principles remain the same. Like houses, there are many different architectural styles, but certain elements are critical to structure—no matter what, the walls must support the ceiling and the doors must align with their frames. Whether you have a modern brownstone, a farmhouse, or a large Colonial style home, there’s a foundation under the floor, nails and screws joining pieces of wood, and insulation in the walls and ceiling.

The same is true for campaigns, appeals, and for building a movement. During our work with organizations of all sizes and missions, we’ve identified five principles as integral to a structurally sound campaign or movement. These five principles are the “make it or break it” checkpoints, regardless of whether you are a community group or enterprise-level organization, creating a political or advocacy campaign, or launching into short-term or year-round fundraising efforts.

1. Identify your community from the crowd
2. Focus on shared goals
3. Choose tools for discovery and distribution
4. Highlight personal stories
5. Build a movement

Keep these principles in mind as you develop your strategies and communications. In the preplanning stage, let these principles shape your decisions about audience, voice, and which platforms to use—they will help you and your colleagues navigate many conversations and add focus to your strategic planning.

You should also use these principles during the active phase of events, campaigns, and projects. As anyone who has ever sent out an email to more than one person or who has organized an event knows, your work only increases after you hit the send button. As the reach and traction of your message grows, you need to evaluate and evolve your work continually to ensure that you are still on target. You need to make changes to reflect any shift s in your community, goals and accomplishments. These principles serve as reference points for that reevaluation of your work during the active phase, and also afterward.

Regardless of the channels you use or the goals you set, these five principles should influence the way you operate and contribute to the potential success of your endeavors. Let’s look at each of the principles in detail.

PRINCIPLE 1. IDENTIFY YOUR COMMUNITY FROM THE CROWD

The words community, network, and crowd are often used interchangeably. They are not, however, interchangeable. These three words indicate very different segments of people, and you should use them to denote not just whom you engage and communicate with, but also how and why.

Your Community

The ring closest to your organization represents your community. This is made up of people you can contact directly. Their email addresses, phone numbers, or mailing addresses are in your database. They receive your email messages and appeals. Maybe they attend your offline events. There is nothing preventing you from communicating with them directly.

Your community members have opted in to engaging with you. That opt-in comes in various forms—for example, maybe they signed up on your website to receive email updates from you, “liked” your Facebook Page, or subscribed to your YouTube channel. If you buy a list (that is, you acquire new names and contact details from similar organizations or campaigns), those new “names” aren’t part of your community until they confirm their participation or connection.

Your Network

The next ring represents the people who are just one step farther out from your organization: your network. You can make some educated guesses about the people in this category—they tend to be the family, friends, colleagues, and coworkers of the people in your community. Your messages, information, and updates reach your network through your community. Your community members are the messengers, not you. The community may share your links or posts via Facebook; they may let their friends and family know that they support you or donate to your campaigns. Maybe your organization creates and posts beautiful, compelling photographs that community members enjoy sharing across the web, or printing and posting in their office or home. Whatever the content or platform, your messages move through the community to the network. And when members in the network find a message interesting, exciting, or compelling enough to sign up for your email list, like it on Facebook, retweet it on Twitter, or subscribe to your organization ’s blog, they convert themselves from a member of the network to a member of your community.

The Crowd

The last ring, farthest out from your organization, represents the crowd. In the most general and literal sense, the crowd is everyone else—the whole world.

However, in planning and evaluation, the crowd comprises all the people we hope to reach who aren’t connected to us through the network. The way we communicate when we speak to the crowd is very different from the way we speak to the community—we can’t be as personal and are guessing at how to make our message relevant. The crowd is the biggest segment, but that doesn’t mean it is the most influential or most important of our multichannel strategies.

Information about online networks and the web shows that you should focus on how to best tap the power of your community and network to spread your message, and not overestimate the chance of the crowd stumbling across your message and distributing it for you.

For example, if your organization were the Northwest Indiana Times, a regional newspaper, you would not actually engage with every member of your service area, since that could reasonably translate to every resident in northwest Indiana and even the southeast suburbs of Chicago—you don ’t know who they all are or what they all do. Your community is thus composed of the people who subscribe or buy papers, connect with your reporters or stories by following them online and commenting on posts to your website, and attend your offline events. Their friends, colleagues, coworkers, and family are the network—the people you reach through your community. The network knows about you but isn’t yet directly connected. Maybe a friend of someone in your community told them about a story or a featured series they read recently, or they have family members who attend an annual event sponsored by the paper. The crowd is everyone else who lives and works in the neighborhoods in northwest Indiana; yes, they are part of your service area or audience, but you haven’t reached them yet.

Ultimately, you should have a plan for each of these segments of your audience. Communicating with the crowd, network, and the community are very different but can be really valuable to the success of your campaign or call to action. Setting goals and defining your message for each group at the start of your process will help you effectively engage with each group.

The core elements in building relationships with the crowd, network, and community are time, action, and people. You can use these three elements to help you identify the various options for any given engagement.

Time

Is this a one-time or sustained engagement? Is it just an event, and do you have the capacity to maintain or support a community around it once the event is over? Recognize the limits or options within your organization—what capacity do you have to maintain the action you’re considering?

Action

The action you want people to take—remember, even if your message or campaign doesn’t have a “call your Congress person” or “sign this petition” action, you are still asking them to do something. Actions can be passive or active. An active call is more appealing to your community and less appealing to the crowd, because the community members already know you, trust you, and have opted in to support your work. This kind of action might include sharing a personal story or experience, recruiting a friend to join the campaign, or signing up as a volunteer.

Similarly, a passive action isn’t very interesting to your supporters, considering that they are already taking passive action by following you on Twitter or signing up for your email list or campaigns. But a passive action can be attractive to the crowd if it is simple and provides value directly. For example, posting an infographic showing important facts about a piece of proposed legislation provides valuable information to someone whether or not they know about your organization; and it is an easy request to ask people to share it with their friends. These actions are usually things that the community may do as a way to show they are listening and connected but can be of more interest to the crowd because of a focus on a larger topic, news story, or even an interesting issue.

People

Who do you need to reach? Is it the crowd, community, or a hybrid? It is important to have a plan for each segment and an understanding of what your message is for each group. You may run a campaign or promote a targeted call to action to your community that asks a lot of their time, energy, or support. During that same campaign, a message for the crowd would focus on sharing information or learning more about the focus of the campaign—things that require less commitment.

Opportunities for your organization to build trust, catalyze action, and affect change exist at all levels of the human landscape. To be successful, however, it’s crucial to recognize which group to target, how to communicate, and what to say. Some of the best metrics of success are the size and engagement level of the community ring. Is it growing? Are people taking on more responsibility and leadership? Are you increasing the number of people who are volunteering or stepping up as champions of your cause or superfans? It’s important to achieve a balance between your goals for crowd-to-community conversion and your goals for leadership development within the community.

Reprinted by permission of the publisher, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., from Social Change Anytime Everywhere by Allyson Kapin and Amy Sample Ward, copyright © 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Read co-author Amy Sample Ward's introduction to this text.

The following is an excerpt from the book.

Shannon, the head of a small consulting firm, is agonizing about whether to fire Clive, her IT director. Over the past year, Clive has consistently failed to do more than the minimum required of him. He’s not without his talents—he’s intelligent and has a knack for improvising cheap solutions to technical problems—but he rarely takes any initiative. Worse, his attitude is poor. In meetings, he is often critical of other people’s ideas, sometimes caustically so.

Unfortunately, losing Clive would cause problems in the short-term. He understands how to maintain the company’s database of clients better than anyone else.

What would you advise her to do? Should she fire him or not?

IF YOU REFLECT ON the past few seconds of your mental activity, what’s astonishing is how quickly your opinions started to form. Most of us, reflecting on the Clive situation, feel like we already know enough to start offering advice. Maybe you’d advise Shannon to fire Clive, or maybe you’d encourage her to give him another chance. But chances are you didn’t feel flummoxed.

“A remarkable aspect of your mental life is that you are rarely stumped,” said Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in economics for his research on the way that people’s decisions depart from the strict rationality assumed by economists. In his fascinating book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, he describes the ease with which we draw conclusions: “The normal state of your mind is that you have intuitive feelings and opinions about almost everything that comes your way. You like or dislike people long before you know much about them; you trust or distrust strangers without knowing why; you feel that an enterprise is bound to succeed without analyzing it.”

Kahneman says that we are quick to jump to conclusions because we give too much weight to the information that’s right in front of us, while failing to consider the information that’s just off stage. He called this tendency “what you see is all there is.” In keeping with Kahneman’s visual metaphor, we’ll refer to this tendency as a “spotlight” effect. (Think of the way a spotlight in a theater directs our attention; what’s inside the spotlight is crisply illuminated.)

The Clive situation above is an example of the spotlight effect. When we’re offered information about Clive—he does only the bare minimum, he doesn’t take initiative, he has a poor attitude, and his boss might fire him—we find it very easy to take that readily available set of information and start drawing conclusions from it.

But of course a spotlight only lights a spot. Everything outside it is obscured. So, in Clive’s situation, we don’t immediately think to ask a lot of obvious questions. For instance, rather than fire Clive, why not change his role to match up better with his strengths? (After all, he’s good at improvising cheap solutions.) Or maybe Clive could be matched with a mentor who’d help him set more ambitious goals and deliver less scathing criticism.

Furthermore, what if we dug deeper and discovered that Clive’s colleagues adore his crusty, straight-talking ways? (Maybe he’s the IT version of Dr. House.) And what makes us think that Shannon’s take on Clive is impeccably accurate? What if she is a terrible manager? When we begin shifting the spotlight from side to side, the situation starts to look very different. We couldn’t possibly hope to make a good decision about Clive without doing this spotlight shifting. Yet developing an opinion was easy without doing it.

And that, in essence, is the core difficulty of decision making: What's in the spotlight will rarely be everything we need to make a good decision but we won’t always remember to shift the light. Sometimes, in fact, we’ll forget there’s a spotlight at all, dwelling so long in the tiny circle of light that we forget there’s a broader landscape beyond it.

IF YOU STUDY THE kinds of decisions people make and the outcomes of those decisions, you’ll find that humanity does not have a particularly impressive track record.

Career choices, for instance, are often abandoned or regretted. An American Bar Association survey found that 44% of lawyers would recommend that a young person not pursue a career in law. A study of 20,000 executive searches found that 40% of senior-level hires “are pushed out, fail or quit within 18 months.” More than half of teachers quit their jobs within four years. In fact, one study in Philadelphia schools found that a teacher was almost two times more likely to drop out than a student.

Business decisions are frequently flawed. One study of corporate mergers and acquisitions—some of the highest-stakes decisions executives make—showed that 83% failed to create any value for shareholders. When another research team asked 2,207 executives to evaluate decisions in their organizations, 60% of the executives reported that bad decisions were about as frequent as good ones.

On the personal front we’re not much better. People don’t save enough for retirement, and when they do save, they consistently erode their own stock portfolios by buying high and selling low. Young people start relationships with people who are bad for them. Middle-aged people let work interfere with their family lives. The elderly wonder why they didn’t take more time to smell the roses when they were younger.

Why do we have such a hard time making good choices? In recent years, many fascinating books and articles have addressed this question, exploring the problems with our decision making. The biases. The irrationality. When it comes to making decisions, it’s clear that our brains are flawed instruments. But less attention has been paid to another compelling question: Given that we’re wired to act foolishly sometimes, how can we do better?*

Sometimes we are given the advice to trust our guts when we make important decisions. Unfortunately, our guts are full of questionable advice. Consider the Ultimate Red Velvet Cheesecake at the Cheesecake Factory, a truly delicious dessert—and one that clocks in at 1,540 calories, which is the equivalent of three McDonald’s double cheeseburgers plus a pack of Skittles. This is something that you are supposed to eat after you are finished with your real meal.

The Ultimate Red Velvet Cheesecake is exactly the kind of thing that our guts get excited about. Yet no one would mistake this guidance for wisdom. Certainly no one has ever thoughtfully plotted out a meal plan and concluded, I gotta add more cheesecake.

Nor are our guts any better on big decisions. On October 10, 1975, Liz Taylor and Richard Burton celebrated the happy occasion of their wedding. Taylor was on her sixth marriage, Burton on his third. Samuel Johnson once described a second marriage as the “triumph of hope over experience.” But given Taylor and Burton’s track record their union represented something grander: the triumph of hope over a mountain of empirical evidence. (The marriage lasted 10 months.)

Often our guts can’t make up their minds at all: an estimated 61,535 tattoos were reversed in the United States in 2009. A British study of more than 3,000 people found that 88% of New Year’s resolutions are broken, including 68% of resolutions merely to “enjoy life more." Quarterback Brett Favre retired, then unretired, then retired. At press time he is retired.

If we can’t trust our guts, then what can we trust? Many business-people put their faith in careful analysis. To test this faith, two researchers, Dan Lovallo, a professor at the University of Sydney, and Olivier Sibony, a director of McKinsey & Company, investigated 1,048 business decisions over five years, tracking both the ways the decisions were made and the subsequent outcomes in terms of revenues, profits, and market share. The decisions were important ones, such as whether or not to launch a new product or service, change the structure of the organization, enter a new country, or acquire another firm.

The researchers found that in making most of the decisions, the teams had conducted rigorous analysis. They’d compiled thorough financial models and assessed how investors might react to their plans.

Beyond the analysis, Lovallo and Sibony also asked the teams about their decision process—the softer, less analytical side of the decisions. Had the team explicitly discussed what was still uncertain about the decision? Did they include perspectives that contradicted the senior executive’s point of view? Did they elicit participation from a range of people who had different views of the decision?

When the researchers compared whether process or analysis was more important in producing good decisions—those that increased revenues, profits, and market share—they found that “process mattered more than analysis—by a factor of six.” Often a good process led to better analysis—for instance, by ferreting out faulty logic. But the reverse was not true: “Superb analysis is useless unless the decision process gives it a fair hearing.”

To illustrate the weakness of the decision-making process in most organizations, Sibony drew an analogy to the legal system:

Imagine walking into a courtroom where the trial consists of a prosecutor presenting PowerPoint slides. In 20 pretty compelling charts, he demonstrates why the defendant is guilty. The judge then challenges some of the facts of the presentation, but the prosecutor has a good answer to every objection. So the judge decides, and the accused man is sentenced. That wouldn't be due process, right? So if you would find this process shocking in a courtroom, why is it acceptable when you make an investment decision? Now of course, this is an oversimplification, but this process is essentially the one most companies follow to make a decision. They have a team arguing only one side of the case. The team has a choice of what points it wants to make and what way it wants to make them. And it falls to the final decision maker to be both the challenger and the ultimate judge. Building a good decision-making process is largely ensuring that these flaws don’t happen.

Dan Lovallo says that when he talks about process with corporate leaders, they are skeptical. “They tend not to believe that the soft stuff matters more than the hard stuff,” he said. “They don’t spend very much time on it. Everybody thinks they know how to do this stuff .” But the ones who do pay attention reap the rewards: A better decision process substantially improves the results of the decisions, as well as the financial returns associated with them.

The discipline exhibited by good corporate decision makers—exploring alternative points of view, recognizing uncertainty, searching for evidence that contradicts their beliefs—can help us in our families and friendships as well. A solid process isn’t just good for business; it’s good for our lives.

Why a process? Because understanding our shortcomings is not enough to fix them. Does knowing you’re nearsighted help you see better? Or does knowing that you have a bad temper squelch it? Similarly, it’s hard to correct a bias in our mental processes just by being aware of it.

Most of us rarely use a “process” for thinking through important decisions, like whether to fire Clive, or whether to relocate for a new job, or how to handle our frail, elderly parents. The only decision-making process in wide circulation is the pros-and-cons list. The advantage of this approach is that it’s deliberative. Rather than jump to conclusions about Clive, for example, we’d hunt for both positive and negative factors—pushing the spotlight around—until we felt ready to make a decision.

What you may not know is that the pros-and-cons list has a proud historical pedigree. In 1772, Benjamin Franklin was asked for advice by a colleague who’d been offered an unusual job opportunity. Franklin replied in a letter that, given his lack of knowledge of the situation, he couldn’t offer advice on whether or not to take the job. But he did suggest a process the colleague could use to make his own decision. Franklin said that his approach was "to divide half a sheet of paper by a line into two columns, writing over the one Pro and over the other Con.” During the next three or four days, Franklin said, he’d add factors to the two columns as they occurred to him. Then, he said:

When I have thus got them all together in one view, I endeavour to estimate their respective weights; and where I find two, one on each side, that seem equal, I strike them both out: If I find a reason Pro equal to some two reasons Con, I strike out the three. If I judge some two reasons Con equal to some three reasons Pro, I strike out the five; and thus proceeding I find at length where the balance lies; and if after a day or two of farther consideration nothing new that is of importance occurs on either side, I come to a determination accordingly. [Capitalization modernized.]

Franklin called this technique “moral algebra.” Over 200 years after he wrote this letter, his approach is still, broadly speaking, the approach people use when they make decisions (that is, when they’re not trusting their guts). We may not follow Franklin’s advice about crossing off pros and cons of similar weight, but we embrace the gist of the process. When we’re presented with a choice, we compare the pros and cons of our options, and then we pick the one that seems the most favorable.

The pros-and-cons approach is familiar. It is commonsensical. And it is also profoundly flawed.

Research in psychology over the last 40 years has identified a set of biases in our thinking that doom the pros-and-cons model of decision making. If we aspire to make better choices, then we must learn how these biases work and how to fight them (with something more potent than a list of pros and cons).

Chapter 1: Getting There From Here

Imagine for a moment that it is April 1994. David Filo and Jerry Yang have just released the Yahoo! directory, and as yet there is no Internet search engine as we know it today. The Yahoo! directory is not much more than a hand-compiled list of websites. In that same month, Brian Pinkerton releases WebCrawler, the first Internet bot that automatically travels the World Wide Web to index entire pages. AOL is only one year old, and most Americans still don't understand e-mail.

Now imagine someone told you that within 17 years there would be three billion e-mail accounts worldwide, more than eight billion Web pages, and that $177 billion in e-commerce would be conducted annually in the United States alone. Suppose he also told you that you could retrieve driving directions and road maps, complete with satellite and street-view photographs, to any destination you desire—all with a click of a button. And what if he said you could watch TV and movies, and make international phone calls over the Internet. Would you be skeptical? Would you be intrigued?

Now suppose I told you that within the next 17 years local economies could be booming, with an expanding middle class, reduced inequities in income and wealth, less economic power for big corporations, and a growing number of new corporations set up as locally owned, socially responsible entities. Suppose I also said that many business loans would be interest-free, cooperation would be rewarded, and the apparent conflict between economic growth and environmental protection would be resolved. Would you be skeptical? Would you be intrigued?

And what if I said that these gains would stem largely from new monetary and financial systems implemented at the local level, and managed democratically by users?

The purpose of this book is to convince you that such a future is possible, without enacting a single piece of legislation. A blueprint is proposed to achieve this future.

1.1 The age of transformation

Unless you live under a rock, you are well aware that American society, indeed global society, faces serious challenges. This is the Age of Transformation, a period of struggle and change and the confluence of three profound historic trends: (1) loss of confidence in established institutions, be they economic, financial, or political; (2) high population growth, resource depletion, and global ecological damage; and (3) an exponential expansion of technology.

The public's trust in Congress, corporations, banks, and other institutions is at a low point. The specter of a protracted economic recession and recovery looms. Individuals, cities, states, and nations are drowning in debt. And the drive for ever-increasing corporate profits undermines our humanity and goodwill. Too many of us live in poverty or make up the working poor. Wealth and political influence are hyper-concentrating in a small sliver of the population.

Earth now has seven billion inhabitants, double the population of 1968. Many scientists believe that as early as the 1970s we began to overshoot the planet's capacity to maintain ecological services (e.g., a stable climate, clean air and water, fertile soil), as well as renewable and non-renewable resources.¹ Today, for the first time since the dinosaurs disappeared, the extinction rate is faster than the rate that new species evolve.² A recent scientific article suggests that the next great die-off of species could be on the horizon.³

As futurist author Ray Kurzweil notes in his best seller The Singularity Is Near, almost unbelievable technological changes will soon be upon us. Some of these changes will certainly be beneficial. For example, faster computers will lead to improved medical imaging technologies. But others may be terrifying. Genetically engineered plagues and armies of robotic fighters and spies, some as small as insects, are also possible.

The pressure of these trends is forcing human societies to evolve. Life prods us forward with carrots and sticks. If we don't begin to solve the fundamental dysfunctions, inequities, and injustices in our societies, not only will our current problems compound, we won't be able to deal effectively with new ones. On the other hand, if we do invite real change, and use wisdom, we can look forward to greater well-being, sound economies, and a renaissance of the human spirit.

Change that does not reach the core is, by definition, superficial. This book examines new approaches for three of society's core systems: monetary, financial, and corporate. It describes nuts-and-bolts mechanics of how new systems might operate, as well as how they might be governed. The proposal contained herein is intended to bring these core systems into better alignment with our hopes for a better world, our concerns for one another, and the best of science.

1.2 Strategy

The scope of this book is neither national nor individual; it's not about Washington politics or about what you, the reader, can do alone at home to improve the world. Rather, its focus is in between. It offers a practical blueprint by which communities might successfully address the real problems that they face, such as underemployment, debt, poverty, inequities of income and wealth, wasteful consumerism, infrastructure decay, environmental degradation, and underfunding of social services. Here, communities refers to the people and organizations of an urban area, which includes residents, businesses, nonprofits, and local governments. The scale is city, county, or metropolitan statistical area. Think city, suburbs, and surrounding farming areas.

One might expect that a book proposing innovations to core societal systems would focus on the national level. Efforts to improve national systems are critical, but this book describes a complementary, bottom-up approach that does not require any new legislation. It proposes a design for local monetary and financial systems, community-centric corporate models, and their governance. For simplicity, these are referred to as local monetary/financial systems.

Many city and county governments will be excited by the proposal. After all, the new systems should boost local economies, reduce unemployment, and generate funds for schools, nonprofits, and public services. But implementation and management does not occur through local governments. Rather, users of the system are in charge. Residents, businesses, schools, nonprofits, local governments, and others who voluntarily choose to participate form a membership-based community benefit corporation, referred to as a Principled Society Corporation (PSC, or alternatively, Principled Society). The members of a PSC implement and democratically manage their local monetary/financial system.

In essence, a local monetary/financial system is a sophisticated type of local currency system. As will be discussed in Chapter 3, local currencies are springing up in cities around the globe; including many cities in the U.S. Many of these currencies act as “buy-local” programs, whereby residents are encouraged to keep money circulating in their local economy. The more money is spent locally, the more the local economy benefits. This book calls for an expanded version of the local currency concept. It describes a system that creates new money, free of debt, and channels it into a local economy in a way that maximizes public benefit.

The local currency does not replace the dollar, and the local monetary/financial system does not replace banks or other financial institutions. Rather, they act as complements. In fact, the majority of sales and other transactions would continue normally through the dollar. Further, it is likely that only a minority of people in an urban area would choose to participate in the program, especially at its start. If it produced clear benefits for its participants, however, the number of users, and perhaps the fraction of commerce handled by the local currency, would grow over time.

While successful demonstration of new systems in a subset of the population in one city is not sufficient to produce large impacts on society as a whole, it is a crucial and dramatic first step. Thus, this book describes Phase I—developing the design, conducting computer simulations, creating the software to run new systems, and implementing the first scientific pilot trial. If all goes well, Phase I will naturally turn into Phase II—wider implementation of the new systems in new urban areas, further refinement, and a larger impact on society.

1.3 Cooperation

As mentioned, the aim of a local monetary/financial system is to introduce new currency into a region in a way that maximizes public benefit. This implies, naturally, a cooperative effort. There are various types of cooperation—collusion and racketeering being two of them. In this book, the word cooperation refers to fair, transparent, and widely beneficial engagement among individuals and groups. Cooperation is the defining aspect of any society. For example, the Great Seal of the United States contains the phrase e pluribus unum, which translates to “out of many, one.” It is through cooperation, not selfishness, that we achieve shared goals.

A design goal is to make cooperation so easy in a PSC that it becomes the default behavior. To this end, cooperation is hard-wired, as much as possible, into the mechanics of a local monetary/financial system. Simply using the system becomes an act of cooperation. For example, all members of a PSC participate in making interest-free loans in local currency to businesses that apply for them. If businesses receive the funding they need, jobs can be created and local economies can bloom.

Some readers might question whether people are too selfish to cooperate any more than they already do. In this line of thinking, our societal systems are already near optimal, given the limitations set by human nature.

It is not difficult to understand why some would view humans as inherently selfish. After all, news headlines regularly tell of executives, officials, and ordinary people who act out of greed. Even standard economic models developed at top universities incorporate narrow self-interest as a driving component. But new evidence from a variety of fields, including psychology, sociology, behavioral economics, evolutionary biology, and game theory suggests that people are, in fact, prone to cooperate. While roughly 25 percent of people tend to act out of narrow self-interest, a much larger percentage, about 50 percent, tend to act pro-socially depending on the circumstances.⁴ This leaves about 25 percent who tend to act pro-socially, regardless of circumstances.

Thus, given the right societal signals and conditions, about three quarters of the population will readily act pro-socially. And many who tend toward selfishness will also behave cooperatively, if signals are clear and strong enough. Given that the vast majority of people will act pro-socially under the right conditions, the task is to create them.

To this end, two guidelines will help. First, pro-social behavior will be easier to achieve in a society that ensures no individuals or groups receive undue advantages, and that any acts of cooperation are effective in making a positive difference in people's lives. To accomplish this, societies should become fairer, more democratic, and more transparent. As an example, if taxes go into secret funds for hidden purposes, or for projects viewed as wasteful or unpopular, the willingness to pay them decreases.

Second, pro-social behavior will be easier to achieve if the core systems of a society reflect the full spectrum of factors that naturally motivate people to act. Our current financial and corporate systems are driven largely by the profit motive, or narrow self-interest. But as economist Robert Frank puts it, “repeated exposure to the self-interest model makes selfish behavior more likely.”⁵ Although our systems reward narrow self-interest, people are naturally motivated to act by a much wider spectrum of impulses and desires.

Given the opportunity, we want to earn the respect of peers and maintain our self-respect. Most of us abhor injustice and wish to help others. We are driven by creative impulses, curiosity, and the desire for community fellowship. We want to take pride in work that is meaningful. We do not like situations that compromise our reputation or integrity, waste our time, limit our freedoms, or cause harm to others or the environment.

We can build happier, wealthier, healthier, and more peaceful societies if we cooperate. The price for this is to become fairer, more democratic, more transparent, and more realistic about what drives human behavior. Principled Societies are a step in this direction.

1.4 Framework of a Principled Society Corporation

A PSC is a local entity, but its infrastructure is designed to address major weaknesses seen at the national level. In this way, Principled Societies build on the experience of existing systems. The proposed framework consists of three core elements:

1. A local currency model, called a Token Exchange System (TES). The token is an electronic currency that circulates among members of PSC in conjunction with the dollar. Tokens are used by members to purchase goods and services, and are channeled by a TES to fund businesses and support local schools, nonprofits, and public services.
2. A socially responsible corporate structure, called a Principled Business. The types of business models funded by a TES include the standard corporation, sole proprietorship, partnership, and cooperative, as well as a new community-centric corporate model called a Principled Business. A Principled Business is a for-profit corporation that retains the social mission, transparency, and accountability of a nonprofit.
3. A corporate governance system, called the Collaborative Governance System. A PSC is governed by its members via an efficient online system of direct democracy. The system allows all members to take part in creating and amending rules and setting policy.

Although this book proposes a blueprint for local monetary/financial systems, the blueprint is only a rough draft. Many questions are left unanswered and details left unspecified. It will take time to develop the concepts further, and this effort will benefit from input from potential users, including interested citizens and business, academic, and community leaders. As a science-based project, academic experts from fields as diverse as computer science, political science, statistics, sociology, law, ecology, business, psychology, and linguistics are encouraged to play a role.

Read author John Boik's introduction to this text.

Paying the Homeless to Stand Outside Your Business: Schenectady Bridges Project Turns Poverty Upside Down

Interview with Michael Saccocio, conducted by Jesse Conrad

Introduction

Michael Saccocio is executive director and CEO of City Mission in Schenectady, New York, which has taken the lead in a movement to implement Bridges Out of Poverty (Payne, DeVol, & Dreussi-Smith, 2006) concepts in a variety of helping organizations in the broader Schenectady area.

Interview

Jesse Conrad: What made you decide to develop and implement a new strategy?

Michael Saccocio: We’ve always been focused on a need to see transformed lives, and from those transformed lives we can work toward a transformed community. We’ve come to understand that the only way to make the transformed community sustainable is that the folks themselves have to be the leaders of it. We were saying, “Maybe we’re trying too hard to be the leaders ourselves, and we need to reverse that by giving folks we’re working with an opportunity to participate and be on the team. We give them ownership, they’re the leaders of the team, and we can be on the team.”

I started reading Bridges Out of Poverty, and the biggest thing that broke through was how much we didn’t understand. We were vulnerable to thinking we were experts because many of us had spent almost our entire careers working with people from poverty, so you kind of assume that you know everything there is to know. Bridges materials and trainings really got us to better realize that there’s a lot we didn’t understand, but from that understanding, a whole new strategy could emerge in which our folks were being trained to be leaders and to really be part of community transformation and change.

I’m not sure, in terms of physics, if you can have twotipping points, but we had an in-house tipping point and a community tipping point. In-house, as we embedded Bridges constructs, things started working. One of the participants was in drug court at the time, living at the mission, and the judge called us and said, “I’ve never seen such remarkable transformation in an individual.” The judge challenged her to get Supreme Court approval in New York State to bring Getting Ahead to drug court participants. She made two presentations to two New York Supreme Court judges. I had the privilege of driving her there and saying a few words. Right off the bat that flip—where she was becoming the leader and I was on the team—she was leading it, and by virtue of her testimony, we got permission to start offering Getting Ahead classes to Schenectady City and County drug court participants, and that’s still going today.

The second tipping point was in the community. We were getting enough successes in-house that we decided it was time to share it with our collaborative partners in the community, and everywhere I went, people who had great hearts to help people in poverty but also great struggles and probably great frustrations, they experienced continuous aha moments. I came back from that saying, “There’s a universal quality to these trainings.” So the tipping point was when we decided that this needed to be a communitywide movement.

Because the mission has been in the community for more than 100 years, we had good relationships, but I think the open door was not just the fact that people knew who we were, but really that I could share these concrete victories—and everybody wanted in. That led us to submit a grant to the Schenectady Foundation. They gave us a $21,000 grant in 2011, which gave us the resources to offer genuine two-day Bridges Out of Poverty trainings for staff members. In 2011 we trained 144 staff members from seven participating agencies in Schenectady, including City Mission.

It wasn’t that the number 144 is stunning, but we were able to connect seven moving parts and get them to commit to learning and embedding the Bridges ideas. I learned it’s much more valuable to make sure there’s a diversity of agencies represented, even if that slows you down in terms of generating numbers. One of our partners is Ellis Medicine, the only hospital in Schenectady County. If we had worked solely with them, we probably could have trained 200 people just through them, but we really wanted to get everybody on board.

JC: What was the most valuable resource you discovered and utilized in the process of getting started?

MS: People who were excited about it really became the lead resource. It’s great that CEOs and vice presidents are committed to this, but the biggest breakthrough was that front-line people who had the training went back to their worksites and started developing new policies and models based on what they learned in that Bridges training.

A great example is Ellis Medicine’s dental unit. They worked with Schenectady Head Start and created one day a month that would be reserved for Head Start students without appointments. So now the Head Start people know that, on this day of the month, we fill up the van with kids who need dental work, we literally just show up, and they make it work for us. And Ellis is now considering expanding that concept to other parts of the hospital.

What’s really going to make this become a tipping point communitywide is that the front-line folks are becoming the innovators, the inventors, the creators of systems change.

JC: What kinds of results are you seeing?

MS: I’ll give you one example that has really stemmed from Bridges. Our downtown went through a decline, where the downtown became nearly vacant, boarded-up buildings everywhere you looked. Because the property got cheap downtown, a lot of social service agencies moved their offices downtown. That’s where the cheapest rents were and where the bus lines are, so the downtown got increasingly populated with folks coming from poverty.

A group called Metroplex committed to a revitalization of downtown Schenectady about 10 years ago. They’ve been highly successful, and one key to that is Proctors Theater, a 2,700-seat theater that used to be a venue for vaudeville, and as Proctors has grown, they’ve seen in the last 10 years new restaurants, hotels, and businesses open up nearby. A genuine revitalization of downtown.

Okay, so what’s the problem? There are still these social service agencies smack dab in the middle of downtown, and often those two don’t mix well, right? A new restaurant opens, and folks are coming in next door for mental health treatment. At City Mission we are almost on the main block, and we have a 100-bed shelter for men, women, and children. So that is a pretty tense reality, and I understand the issues involved. Long story short, as it was evolving into an either/or battle in downtown Schenectady—we’re either going to have economic development or we’re going to be populated by folks in need of social services—the mission staff was getting trained in Bridges concepts, and we led a movement to adopt a third way. It’s not either/or, not either economic development or helping people in need. We can do both, and ideally the people in need are becoming stakeholders in that economic development.

So here’s what we did: We worked with Proctors Theater and created the Downtown Ambassadors Program. City Mission residents who have been through Getting Ahead training go out every night there’s a show and greet the guests that are coming in. They have uniforms and flashlights, and they help people across the street, direct them to parking, get them to restaurants, hold the door open—it’s really like a sidewalk concierge service. This went so well that the economic development agency offered to pay our people if they’ll continue doing this. So now Proctors has a contract with us, and other businesses nearby want ambassadors to work in front of their businesses, so what we have in Schenectady is the top businesses holding fundraisers to generate money to get more ambassadors. I like to tell people, and Bridges has been a big part of this, that downtown Schenectady may be the only urban center in America where the businesspeople are paying the homeless to stand in front of their business and greet their guests.

JC: That’s a really interesting solution. Finding that third way that doesn’t displace people is incredibly impressive

MS: Thanks. What we realized was—and this was the great breakthrough—we realized we had to teach our folks who became ambassadors what the rules of the middle class are, what the rules of the theater are, what the rules of restaurant life are. Here was the Bridges breakthrough: Although it was very easy for them to learn the rules of the middle class, the fact that they also knew the rules of poverty was an extra benefit for them out there because when issues did come up that were more poverty-based, they knew how to deal with them.

As we implemented the ambassadors program, we thought, well, our folks will get it started, and then they’ll hire students from Union College and let them do it. But do you know why they don’t? Because our folks are in a sense bilingual: They can learn the middle class stuff, but they know the rules of poverty, and that is an asset for them. And that’s right out of the Bridges playbook, that these rules aren’t wrong, they’re just different. It’s all about understanding the context, building on people’s strengths, so the Bridges material has really been a catalyst and an accelerator. And the ambassadors program is something that’s off the charts. Now we’re talking about creating healthcare ambassadors in the hospitals and health centers.

We have them go through a training that really teaches the hidden rules of middle class. But then maybe they’ll encounter someone who’s been drinking too much, or someone who’s passed out in the cold, or someone who’s just disoriented, and they immediately go into action. They know how to get them help. So I think they’re very proud that both parts of their background are now a resource that they’re taking with them into this job.

JC: Talk a little bit about some key lessons you’ve learned.

MS: The main lesson is twofold: First, you can train people and equip them, but then you have to give them the latitude to be innovative at ground level. There’s a tendency with organizations where they train and then choke the life out of it. Bridges isn’t going to work like that. You have to train and then empower people to be creative.

Second, I’ve learned the training can never end. It’s like exercise: You’ve never worked out once and for all. The Bridges concepts are so different from the way we’ve always thought, that for us, even after several years of using them, there’s still an almost reflexive retreat back to what is comfortable and familiar. Bridges to me is like exercise in your workplace. You have to do it every day. If you do, you will love the results. If you think you can coast along using the momentum from prior trainings and that will carry you, I think there’s going to be disappointment.

With the Bridges constructs we’re really bringing new voices to the table. You’re changing the way you’ve always done things, you’re giving a much bigger voice to folks who are receiving services, you’re granting leadership to them, you’re losing some control yourself, and that’s hard work. The results make it all worthwhile, but you have to stay intentional about working with these concepts every day and keeping them fresh in your mind.

Gross domestic product is the main economic indicator in use today and probably the most politically influential of all indicators. Its importance in policy-making is hard to overstate. New policies and technologies are assessed in terms of their impact on GDP. Government budgets are evaluated in terms of their predicted effect on GDP. National progress has become synonymous with increasing GDP. But what is GDP, and is it a good indicator of progress?

In simple terms, GDP is a measure of economic activity—of money changing hands. Consumer spending on food, clothing, or entertainment contributes to GDP. Government investment in education also counts toward GDP. These are expenditures that most people would consider to be desirable. However, if there is an oil spill, such as the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the money spent by government on cleanup also contributes to GDP. If more people get cancer and require treatment, their medical costs count toward GDP. The costs of war, crime, and family breakdown all cause GDP to rise. In the language of economics, GDP does not distinguish between benefits and costs, but lumps everything together under the banner of economic activity.

Although GDP per capita has been on the rise (it has more than tripled in the United States since 1950), surveys of life satisfaction indicate that people have not become any happier. Beyond the level of income required to meet people’s basic needs and provide for some comforts, additional income does not appear to improve our lives. Studies suggest that a variety of other factors, such as living with a partner, enjoying good health, holding a secure job, having trust in institutions, volunteering, and limiting the amount of time spent watching television, do improve well-being, however.

Our main economic measuring stick, GDP, appears to be a very poor indicator of progress, even in an economy where the goal is growth. It would be an even less useful indicator of progress in a steady-state economy, where the goal is to achieve sustainable scale, fair distribution, efficient allocation, and a high quality of life. GDP provides little information on whether we are achieving these goals. Although GDP growth and increases in resource use tend to go hand in hand, zero growth in GDP would not necessarily be indicative of a steady-state economy. Zero growth in GDP could still be accompanied by declining stocks of natural capital or increasing inequality, both of which are counter to the goals of a steady-state economy. For these reasons, new indicators are required to replace GDP.

Several initiatives around the world are investigating alternatives to GDP. These include the European Commission’s Beyond GDP initiative, the OECD’s Better Life Initiative, and the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress launched by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, which released a landmark report.

Governments in many countries, such as France, the United Kingdom, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Bhutan are seriously considering alternative ways of measuring progress. They are doing this partly because of the criticisms of GDP, but also because of growing recognition that societal goals and priorities are changing. A U.K. poll found that 81 percent of people support the idea that the government’s main objective for its citizens should be the “greatest happiness” rather than the “greatest wealth.” Similarly, an international survey found that three-quarters of respondents believe health, social, and environmental indicators are just as important as economic indicators and should be used to measure progress.

Even with such popular support for change, society still employs measures that are failing to get the job done. Members of the mainstream media religiously report the Dow Jones Industrial Average, with cheers of delight when it rises and howls of protest when it falls. The Dow Jones is an index that tracks the stock prices of thirty supersized US corporations. If Boeing’s stock price increases because it is expected to sell more weaponry, or if Exxon Mobil’s stock goes up because it can exploit tar sands (with accompanying impacts on the landscape and climate), then the Dow Jones tends to go up. Are the activities that increase these stock prices necessarily good for society? Newscasters, investors, and the public overlook the repercussions of a rising Dow Jones because they have become accustomed to shooting for a higher score. CEOs manage corporations specifically to maximize their stock prices.

Just as an obsession with stock prices can promote corporate growth that may harm society, obsession with GDP can promote economic growth that may also be detrimental to society. The current state of global ecological overshoot was at least partially caused by our focus on, and attempt to maximize, a narrow set of economic indicators. Economic growth could not have become such a high priority if indicators such as GDP had never been invented. GDP has undermined the goal of economic welfare that it was supposed to support because people have ended up serving the abstract (but quantitative) indicator instead of the concrete (but qualitative) goal.

“We manage what we measure” is a cliché often uttered in business boardrooms, but it rings true. You could also say that we “mismanage what we mismeasure.” In this case, we mismanage the scale of the economy because we’re treating an indicator of its size—GDP—as if it were a measure of social performance. If we want to achieve a sustainable and fair economy that provides a high quality of life, it’s crucial to get the measures right.

Read authors Rob Dietz & Dan O'Neill's introduction to this text.

How does one apply a business model to social change? While few would argue that one can take an entirely capitalist model to carry out social good, many in the field look to facets of profit-seeking behavior and traditional business models to explain and develop the field of social entrepreneurship. Jim Fruchterman, CEO of Benetech, put it this way:

“Entrepreneurs must understand their market. Just about every social question and issue you may address can be recast into market questions, such as: Who is the customer? What is the value proposition? And who is the competition? Understanding your customers, their environment, and their needs is crucial to any social venture.”

Elkington and Hartigan write in their book The Power of Unreasonable People that “the real measure of social entrepreneurship is a direct action that generates a paradigm shift in the way societal need is met.” Within a business context, this is the goal of creative destruction, the term rehabilitated by Joseph Schumpeter to mean system change or transformation as a result of an extraordinary innovation. In Schumpeter’s theory, new innovations destroy the need for old, as cars replace horses, computers replace typewriters, and so on.

This notion of an innovation changing the status quo has been embraced to a breathtaking degree by those within Silicon Valley. While social entrepreneurship has captured the imagination of people around the world, nowhere is this more true than in Silicon Valley, where many of the most successful men and women devote extraordinary resources to the continued stimulus and support of the field. As we will see throughout the book, there are significant parallels between the goals of a high-tech entrepreneur and those of a social entrepreneur. As Daniel Bornstein wrote in his groundbreaking book on Ashoka and the social entrepreneurial movement, “Everywhere you look, conceptual firewalls that once divided the world into social and economic realms are coming down and people are engaging the world with their whole brains.”

Aside from the overarching goal of widespread social change, the transfer of a business mind-set to civil society has brought about strategic and behavioral changes to how individuals and organizations conduct their work. These changes have primarily manifested in three ways: (1) a blurring of the demarcation between for profit and nonprofit activities; (2) an increased emphasis on results and measuring impact; and (3) a focus on scale—how to find successful innovations and cause them to proliferate widely to create the greatest societal change. Throughout this book, these three themes will provide important frameworks within which to look at the field as a whole and how it is changing nonprofit management and strategy.

The first theme, the “nonprofit” versus “for profit” question, and an increased blurring between these two, continues to be a hot topic of debate, as you will read in the various chapters of this book. Nonprofit organizations are still alive and well in the United States. We have a long history of robust civil society organizations, and this continues to gain strength: From 1995 to 2005, the number of nonprofit organizations registered with the IRS grew by 53 percent. However, the traditional definitions of the nonprofit are being challenged. The term nonprofit organization implies that the organization, focused on social change and impact, does not make a profit. In the past, this equating of social service work with nonprofit balance sheets was sacrosanct. To do good, common practice and wisdom told us, we could not also do well financially. Now that notion is being turned on its head. Not only do social investors believe that it is possible to do good and do well, but other aspects of an old mind-set are also falling away. Many of these organizations come with skilled and passionate people, innovative funding streams, and new ideas about solutions to our social problems. And many nonprofit organizations are developing profitable income streams to help both their constituencies and the sustainability of their organizations. For example, Juma Ventures, a pioneer in the field of integrating non- and for-profit activities, works holistically with youth at risk by helping them to build job skills, prepare for college, and develop business acumen. Throughout this book, stories of individuals and organizations who blur the distinction between profit and nonprofit will be presented.

The second important theme is an increased focus on and attention to results. Again, this impulse stems from the business world, where measuring results is fairly straightforward. Are we making money? In the world of social change, other measurements need to be put on place. What is success in the nonprofit world? What is the difference between a dreamer and an effective do-gooder? Social entrepreneurs are keenly interested in understanding impact. There is great effort to measure efficacy and seek means of improvement. The Acumen Fund has created a management system called Pulse that establishes metrics to determine these very things in delivering social good. Room to Read measures every dollar against the number of schools, libraries, books published and distributed, and the time it takes to accomplish each task.

The third spirited discussion taking place within the field of social entrepreneurship is about scale. While there are numerous examples of extraordinary people overcoming obstacles to create and put in place innovative programs, many of these are rather small and confined in scale. How does one take an individual intervention and scale it up to have an impact on larger sets of communities, nations, and even the world? Social equity investors believe that private enterprise must play a role in such a pursuit. Others believe that, within the nonprofit paradigm, scale is achievable.

Read author Ruth A. Shapiro's introduction to this text.

The Digital Village Initiative

The Digital Village was a $15 million Hewlett-Packard initiative designed to help bridge the digital divide. Former HP Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Carly Fiorina, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, and human rights activist Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr., helped launch the HP Digital Village Project. It involved a partnership between Hewlett-Packard, Stanford University, and three ethnically diverse communities of color throughout the United States. It was a large-scale community-based initiative.ⁱ It helped these communities build their own technologically-oriented businesses, improve their education systems, and improve their economic health.

Hewlett-Packard and Stanford University

The Digital Village sponsor, Hewlett-Packard, invested their time and energy in the Digital Villages because they believed they could help them accomplish their goals and objectives.

Hewlett-Packard was confident about their ability to deliver the equipment and technical training. However, they were less confident about answering a few simple questions:

How do you know if you have accomplished what you set out to do?

How do you know if it made a difference?

How do you do these things while keeping the program where it belongs—in the hands of the people living in their own communities?

Evaluation was the tool needed to address these critical questions and Stanford had the requisite expertise. Stanford’s agreed to conduct the evaluation and in the process provided faculty and students with real world learning opportunities.

The Three Digital Villages

The overarching mission for the Digital Villages was simple: to leap frogⁱⁱ across the digital divideⁱⁱⁱ. The written mission was to:

Provide people access to greater social and economic opportunity by closing the gap between technology-empowered and technology-excluded communities—focusing on sustainability for the communities and HP.

The Digital Villages ranged from urban to rural settings and could be found on both the east and west coasts. They included the: Tribal Digital Village (San Diego area), Baltimore Digital Village (East Baltimore), and East Palo Alto Digital Village (northern California).

The Tribal Digital Village was comprised of 18 Native American tribes and reservations. The Baltimore Digital Village involved the Baltimore City Public School System and a collaboration of African American community-based organizations, including Blacks in Wax (an African American featured wax museum). The East Palo Alto Digital Village consisted of programs, ranging from Plugged In, a high tech community resource center, to Opportunities Industrialization Center West, an employment training program. The residents were primarily African American, Latino, and Pacific Islanders. Each site was awarded $5 million, including cash, equipment, and services over a three-year period.

These were communities left behind in the digital age, leaving them systematically disenfranchised from information and opportunities. HP’s role was to provide each of the Digital Villages with the necessary funds, equipment, and consultants to pursue their strategies and accomplish their objectives.

Outcomes

Tribal Digital Village. The most significant Tribal Digital Village accomplishment was the creation of “the largest unlicensed wireless systems in the United States,” according to the former head of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The FCC continues to recognize the Tribal Digital Village’s accomplishments, characterizing them as “one of the shining examples in wireless unregulated spectrums that’s connected several tribes here”^iv. It became the digital backbone of the tribes’ communication system, connecting the 18 reservations, tribal offices, community centers, schools, and individual residences. The Tribal Print Source represented another Tribal Digital Village success story. It provided digital imaging and printing services. The HP initiative was designed to jump-start small entrepreneurial businesses in the community. In this case, the press not only generated a profit, it represented an alternative to gaming and helped to support other programs on the reservations.

East Palo Alto Digital Village. One of the East Palo Alto Digital Village’s notable achievements involved the Belle Haven 1-to-1: E:learning Project. It provided laptops to 400 students in grades 4-8 at Belle Haven School. Teachers also received laptops. The project transformed the learning environment. The Internet became a core resource and transformed teaching and learning in the school. In addition, East Palo Alto Digital Village’s Small Business Development Initiative contributed to the community’s economic development by building small business’ technological capacity.

Baltimore Digital Village. The Baltimore Digital Village adopted five schools and integrated computer equipment and training into the Baltimore City Public School System’s school curriculum. Over 185 teachers were provided with computers and technology training. According to Carmen V. Russo, former chief executive officer of the Baltimore City Public School System, “The technology and support that the Baltimore Digital Village has provided our teachers and students has proved invaluable in our efforts to develop an outstanding curriculum.”

The Baltimore Digital Village’s Small Business Development Initiative also provided 35 local business owners with technology packages, a five-week skills training program, and business services consultations. The initiative fostered the development of 50 small businesses in the community. The Baltimore Digital Village also touched the lives of individual families, providing 300 families with their own computer equipment and computer skills training courses.

These are solid outcomes with tremendous face-validity, designed to generate sustainable economic and social development in the community long after this influx of seed money and support.

Empowerment Evaluation

Definition. Empowerment evaluation^v was selected to help plan, implement, assess, and improve their work. This approach differs from many other forms of evaluation or strategic planning because the groups or communities remain in control of the process. The definition of Empowerment Evaluation provides a more concrete description of the approach.

Empowerment evaluation is an evaluation approach that aims to increase the probability of achieving program success by (1) providing program stakeholders with tools for assessing the planning, implementation, and self-evaluation of their program, and (2) mainstreaming evaluation as part of the planning and management of the program/organization (Wandersman, Snell-Johns, Lentz, Fetterman, Keener, Livet, Imm, and Flaspohler, 2005). Theory. The theory behind empowerment evaluation is that the more that people participate in evaluating their own program, the more likely they are to buy into the findings and the recommendations—because they are their findings and recommendations. The approach cultivates pride and ownership. Empowerment evaluation helps people align what they say they are doing with what they are really doing, by providing them with a continuous feedback loop designed to refine and improve their practice. Concepts. Empowerment evaluation is guided by many concepts including: 1) building a culture of evidence to make decisions; 2) using cycles of reflection—helping people think about their data, act on it, and then reflect on the impact of those decisions; 3) building a community of learners—where everyone is learning from each other along the way; and 4) cultivating reflective practitioners—people who think about how they can improve their performance on a daily basis. Empowerment evaluation is also guided by a critical friend or coach who values the effort but also asks the hard questions to keep things rigorous and on track.

Steps. The Digital Villages used a three-step approach to empowerment evaluation including: 1) mission; 2) taking stock; and 3) planning for the future. Once they agreed on their overall mission they took some time to assess how well they were doing in relation to their goals. This honest critique set the stage for them to plan for the future or establish new goals to accomplish their objectives. The 3- step cycle was deceptively simple because there was no end to it. Once a Digital Village implemented its plans for the future it was immediately time to evaluate or assess its effectiveness, make mid-course corrections, and implement a revised plan of action. It was a never-ending process, much like the continuous quality improvement approaches. (See the empowerment webpage and blog for details).

Empowerment Evaluation Summary. Empowerment evaluation is honest and rigorous. It is designed to help people accomplish their objectives. It is as concerned about contribution as it is attribution. Empowerment evaluation is not a short-term episodic observation and judgment, it becomes internalized or institutionalized. Empowerment evaluation becomes a part of the fabric of an organization. It fosters life-long learning on both an individual and organizational level. Although, there are no guarantees, empowerment evaluators improve the probabilities of success. Empowerment evaluation is designed to build capacity for the long haul, contributing to meaningful community sustainability.

Building Capacity

The hidden story behind these accomplishments is capacity building. Capacity building is about helping people learn new skills and competencies in order to more effectively manage their own affairs. Capacity building is a hand up, not a hand out approach.

The Digital Village provided community members with a nurturing and supportive training ground. They assumed new roles and exercised responsibilities in settings previously placed outside their reach. This opportunity allowed them to operate in what Vygotsky (1978) called the proximal zone.^vi This is a place just beyond a person’s reach and experience. It is somewhere between what a person can do on their own without help and what they can do with the assistance of a more experienced person. It placed them outside of their comfort zone. However, the proximal zone is a place conceptually where people learn to stretch themselves and reach another level of insight, understanding, and capacity. In this case, the Digital Village placed community members squarely in the proximal zone as planners, designers, managers, employers, and employees in training.

Conclusion

Digital Village learning was learning by doing. Digital Village members found this experiential approach to education, intellectually and emotionally intoxicating. They accomplished their goals. People began to see obstacles as opportunities. The Digital Village started as an effort to bridge the digital divide and evolved into a series of learning organizations. The entire experience for Hewlett-Packard, Stanford, and three ethnically diverse communities became something much larger than a race to completion. The Digital Village became a race toward social justice.

Read author David Fetterman's introduction to this text.

Chimpanzee Politics

In the African bush, Dr. Speede considers her biggest achievement not to be a Goodall-like understanding of chimpanzee behavior but rather a clever bit of primate social engineering. She’s helped to create new social groups out of disparate chimpanzees who – left on their own – would tend to mistrust, or even harm, each other. Over the past few years, I’ve seen just how difficult it is to create such social groups. My education began late 2005 when, during a visit to the Dr. Speede’s sanctuary, she received a tip that a baby was available for sale deep in the Cameroonian forest.

Her immediate reaction startled me. At the time, she was busy preparing for an annual festival held at the village nearest to her sanctuary. She’d spent weeks in meetings with locals, planning for the event, which would be attended by chiefs from around the region and even government officials from far away. Managing relations with local leaders a high priority for Dr. Speede. Even though she’s paid local villages for the use of the sanctuary’s land, claims come regularly for additional payments – or for her to deliver enhanced benefits, such as healthcare or schooling to people nearby. The festival is the most visible annual symbol of her commitment to the surrounding African community. She provides food, drink and entertainment – all for the enjoyment of her neighbors and employees.

Only two days before one annual festival, a crisis broke out over whether to serve fish or meat. Dr. Speede is a vegetarian and immediately decided to refuse to pay for any meat served at the festival. On hearing of her decision, the paramount chief grew incensed. Dr. Speede tried to placate him by offering to pay the chief’s friends to catch fish from the Sanaga River. The chief held firm: either he and his friends ate meat at the festival or they would boycott it.

So when she heard that a baby chimp might be for sale, Dr. Speede was understandably distracted. Indeed, she’d planned to spend the afternoon defusing the meat crisis. I selfishly implored her to chase the chimp. She told me that, however tantalizing, these tip came often and most turned out badly.

I asked her to reconsider and she changed her mind, though mainly because this very day a soldier in Cameroon’s special army forces was at the sanctuary. She sometimes received unofficial protection from the army. This soldier was a tall, dignified and fierce-looking, attired in a brown khaki uniform. A pistol was strapped to his waist.

The three of us, and two local employees, set off in a truck. My excitement expired after two hours on dirt roads. Temperatures reached 100 degrees. When we reached the Sanaga River, at a very wide point, we stopped. Waiting for a logging boat to ferry our truck across the river, I suddenly felt foolish and full of regret for sending Dr. Speede – right before her biggest event of the year – on what I feared was becoming a fruitless search.

Overcome with guilt, I told Dr. Speede to call off the hunt. We shouldn’t bother crossing the river. We should return at once to her sanctuary. In the sweltering heat, she looked at me with empathy. “Let’s keep going,” she said quietly.

In the hot sun, on a pier at the edge of the river, we waited for the logging boat. The journey across the river cooled everyone because there was a breeze in the middle of the water. After about 20 minutes, we reached the other side.

Now the driver drove the truck faster. He veered off a dirt road and into tall, thick bush. He barreled ahead, flattened everything in his path. He seemed to know where he was going and I concluded he was either foolishly confident or brazenly lost. Then I wondered how many times before had Dr. Speede come so close to a rescue and then accomplished nothing?

Just when I lost hope utterly, the truck burst into a clearing and nearly ran over a pile of dead animals. Two hunters, their guns drawn, looked at us with astonishment, surrounded by their women and children. Our soldier bolted from the car, gun in hand. Dr. Speede ran after him and then I couldn’t see her any more, my gaze instead fixed on the soldier (whom I stood behind in an effort to secure my own safety).

Honestly, I feared violence. But the hunters spoke calmly to my soldier, and asked whether the foreigners (they actually called us “whites”) had come to buy the chimpanzee. It was then that I saw the baby, tied by the neck to a pole, sweltering in the heat.

I raced toward the chimp, the hunters matching my strides. They were now eager to cooperate. One tried to untie the chimp, but he snarled at the hunter, baring his teeth.

Dr. Speede untied the rope from the baby’s neck. A Cameroonian caregiver, a woman named Marie, collected the chimp against her chest.

For a moment, I pondered how we might detain the hunters. But the soldier decided we should leave, quickly, and we did, driving fast back to the river, the baby in the backseat, bundled against Marie. I marveled at her calm. “He’s a boy,” she said.

While we waited for the boat, Marie stood alongside the river, the baby in her arms. A crowd gathered and she went back into the car.

On our return to the sanctuary, two European volunteers took charge of the baby. That night, they slept with him in their hut, acting as surrogate mothers, taking care of his every need. The next morning, the ladies let me hold the chimp and, seemingly by accident, Dr. Speede passed by and casually informed everyone that the baby would be called Zachary, after my surname.

An hour later, Dr. Speede encouraged me to hold Zachary. I resisted but she insisted. Finally, I held the baby chimpanzee in my arms. A caregiver from Europe took our photo, and while she did, as I held Zachary proudly, he urinated all over me.

That was the last time I held him.

More than three years later, Zachary remains in limbo, wary of other infants at the sanctuary, not yet part of a social group. These groups are central to restoring some sense of normalcy to an individual chimpanzee who’s original world has been shattered. That Zachary remains in transition, so long after his rescue, carries a powerful message about the profound destruction occurring to chimpanzee society in Africa – and the long hard road to rebuild these societies.

Just as broken chimp societies must be re-engineered, so must human societies.

There can be no peace for chimpanzees until their human neighbors treat them differently. While outsiders such as Dr. Speede drive the protection movement in Africa, there’s a growing awareness among Africans themselves of the economic, moral and psychological consequences of failing to value wildlife. Janet Museveni, the wife of the president of Uganda and a member of the country’s Parliament, has noted, “It seems futile to me that the rest of the world should know and struggle to protect African wildlife while Africans themselves, the natural stewards of this wildlife, continue to hunt and kill or, at best, remain indifferent to it. This has been the tragedy not only for the animals but for Africa in general.”

To be sure, chimp-loving is associated with Western elitism, yet Africans are changing, partly because conservationists realize animals and humans must benefit together. “When you work with chimpanzees, human need doesn’t supersede our conservation mission,” Dr. Speede says. “They have to go hand and hand.” The elusive solution is to make preservation of forests – and quality of life for chimpanzees – economically sustainable. In Cameroon, as elsewhere in tropical Africa, deforestation occurs because of rising population, demand for lumber both locally and globally, mining exploration, hunting – and the reality that for ordinary people jobs and money are scarce in tropical Africa, driving people who live near forests to use what they can today with little thought of tomorrow.

To help better balance the scale between chimpanzees and humans, Dr. Speede assists schools financially and buys produce from local farmers. She also contributes to a national campaign to make it socially unacceptable to kill, capture or eat chimps. On health grounds alone, the message makes sense; after all, the eating of chimps in Cameroon some 50 years ago is now believed by many scientists to have been the original source of HIV in humans. Habits are changing. “In many parts of Cameroon, eating chimp meat has become taboo,” says Wilson Atteh, a conservation officer in the country’s one urban sanctuary, in Limbe.

Changing attitudes is part of the answer; stronger law is also essential. In Cameroon, a private organization has teamed with government wildlife cops to clamp down on poachers. The arrangement isn’t perfect: Dr. Speede and other conservationists sometimes must pay the costs of an enforcement action; without such “incentives,” the police often won’t act.

The real question of course isn’t whether change comes, but whether it comes fast enough. Chimpanzee populations are difficult to tally with confidence, but some studies show alarming declines in some places. As recently as 60 years ago, experts believe several million chimps – covering as many as 14 different sub-species – lived in a band across Africa from Gambia to Uganda. Today, an estimated Africa-wide, 100,000 to 200,000 chimps (and four subspecies) remain in the wild. The decline may even be accelerating. Last October, for instance, researchers reported a decline in the chimpanzee population in Ivory Coast of 90 percent in less to 20 years, to a mere 1,200. In Gabon and Congo, the two countries home to the largest populations, numbers are believed to be declining by 5 percent a year.

With alarming trends, conservation measures remain urgent, and the preservation of Africa’s chimps and its forests must co-evolve. Efforts to save one will reinforce the health of the other. Dr. Speede is a long-term player in this faraway drama. “I’ll never walk away from this challenge,” she says.

Read author G. Pascal Zachary's introduction to this excerpt.

In Bungoma, the main city in western Kenya about an hour’s drive from Leonida’s shamba, activity was also accelerating in warehouse 10 at the National Cereals and Produce Board. The sun was just coming up on a late February morning, peeking over the grain silos that were the tallest structures in Bungoma. At their base was a row of cavernous, concrete warehouses. In the warehouse at the end of the row, rented by One Acre Fund, Andrew Youn began to scale a mountain of seed bags.

He stepped awkwardly from bag to bag, as though he were ascending wobbly stairs. The earthy smell of burlap merged with the dank odor of sweat. Thousands of dust specks twinkled in the rays of sun that streamed through the open warehouse doors. When he reached the summit, Andrew looked down on a conga line of strong-backed men carrying twenty-five- and fifty-kilogram bags on their shoulders. The workers wore an array of rags to protect themselves from the dust—one decided to wear a dress—as they snaked their way through a labyrinth of towering columns of farming ingredients to the fresh air of the loading dock where a fleet of trucks waited.

The One Acre founder looked terribly out of place amid the grunting warehouse labor. He was a skinny, bespectacled, bridge-playing, thirty-two-year-old details geek from Minnesota, the earnest son of Korean immigrants, a Yalie with a Northwestern MBA who would likely stagger under the weight of a big fertilizer bag. But Andrew did his heavy lifting with numbers, calculating his task ahead as nimbly as the burly Kenyan warehouse workers completed their task at hand. Andrew really was in his element. From his lofty perch, he filmed the scene with a small video camera cradled in his right palm. Below the camera was a broad smile. For in each bag of seed or fertilizer he saw a prospering farmer. “One of my favorite days of the year,” he declared to no one in particular.

This was an Input Distribution Day on the One Acre Fund calendar. It was a day when farmers would receive their seed and fertilizer in advance of the rains and the planting season. It was a day of great anticipation. Singing and dancing and prayers of thanksgiving would greet the arrival of the trucks.

For Andrew, it was a day of great fun that provided a measure of how much the organization had grown. But it was also a day of sober assessment of how much more work needed to be done. He descended the mountain of seed sacks and joined Andrew Wanyonyi, One Acre’s purchasing manager who was standing on a stack of empty burlap bags near the warehouse door. He, too, was a slender, bespectacled, numbers man, a Kenyan who had worked with One Acre almost from the beginning when they didn’t even need a warehouse to service the first couple hundred farmers. Now he carried a clipboard heavy with computer printouts, which recorded the needs of every farmer.

“How are we doing?” Andrew Youn asked.

“It’s really hard to imagine what we’ve become,” answered Andrew Wanyonyi (named for the time when weeds were pulled). “I look at what’s going on in this warehouse and say, ‘Wow!’”

Wanyonyi knew his boss wanted hard numbers to back up the exclamations. Flipping through the printouts, he came to the warehouse totals: This year, he reported, they would be moving 201 metric tons of maize seed and 2,010 tons of fertilizer to their farmers in Kenya who were ready to plant a total of 20,100 acres. It would all fill about four hundred ten-ton trucks.

“That is pretty ridiculous,” Andrew Youn said gleefully in his own burst of astonishment. Ridiculous was a favorite word of his. “In our first year, we couldn’t even fill one pickup truck. And this year, four hundred? In five years I hope we’ll laugh at how small this operation today was.”

Actually, he had a little chuckle now, a melancholy little chuckle, as he put this operation into perspective. “Every time I think about the need, it’s amazing how big it is. Four hundred trucks seem like a lot, but each truck is just an eye drop in the ocean of need. A meaningful eye drop, but we need so many more.”

As the warehouse emptied of stock, it filled with a great sense of urgency, for this would be a pivotal year for One Acre as well as for the farmers. It was a year that would test the organization’s ambitious growth projections. On that February morning, One Acre was working with about fifty thousand farmers in western Kenya and Rwanda after only five years of operation. Andrew was eyeing expansion to Burundi and Ghana and points beyond, perhaps even to Asia; he plotted an annual doubling of the number of farmers served. It was a tremendously rapid rate of growth for a humanitarian organization—a “nongovernmental organization,” or NGO, in the parlance of the development world. But for Andrew it was hardly satisfying; in the corporate realm, where he had worked for a couple of years as a consultant to Fortune 500 companies, such ambition was expected. His mid-range goal was to be serving 1.5 million smallholder farm families by 2020. His long-term goal was mindboggling.

“Today we’re satisfying a fraction of 1 percent of the market,” Andrew told his colleagues who had gathered around him on the warehouse loading dock. “The total potential market is over one hundred million farm families in the world. We think fifty million at least in sub-Saharan Africa. We have our work cut out for us.”

Andrew and his One Acre cohorts knew their warehouse work was in stark contrast to what was happening in warehouses in other parts of Kenya. The newspapers had recently been filled with stories describing the escalating relief effort to feed Kenyans who had been left hungry by the spreading drought. The United Nations’ World Food Program (WFP) was distributing maize and rice and beans, most of it coming in from foreign countries, to feed about 1.6 million Kenyans; predictions were that the number of hungry would soar to more than five million in coming months. Thus, in warehouses in the eastern and northern parts of the country, it was bags of food aid that were being loaded into trucks also making their way to hungry farmers.

Andrew shook his head and frowned when he contemplated the contrast. He appreciated the need for emergency food aid to keep people from starving. But, he wondered, “How much more efficient is one bag of seed than one bag of food? Each bag of seed produces ten bags of food.” Indeed, in One Acre’s experience, one five-kilogram bag of hybrid maize seed produced an average of ten ninety-kilogram bags of maize. “The idea of bringing in food aid to feed farmers, whose profession is to grow food, is totally absurd, feeding them, creating dependence, rather than empowering people to grow food themselves and feed themselves.” There was a rare flash of frustration in his voice. “That’s terribly uncreative. The human race is much more creative. We can do better than that.”

This determination—“We can do better than that”—placed Andrew and One Acre at the vanguard of a new wave of social entrepreneurs who were upending the development doctrine and practices of the past generation. Talk of poor African farmers succeeding, of growing enough to feed themselves and others, of managing an agricultural enterprise that would improve their standard of living, would have been preposterous a decade or two earlier when those same poor African farmers were being ignored by the development community. At institutions like the World Bank, proposing an agricultural development project was a surefire way to be booted down the career ladder. Hungry smallholder farmers were seen as the problem; they must get out of farming to end their poverty.

Now here was Andrew Youn in a warehouse filled not with food aid but with farming aids, sounding like a revolutionary with his talk of catering to the needs—the business needs!—of the world’s poorest and hungriest. He dared called them “customers.” He refused to see them as welfare recipients and wanted One Acre’s approach to stand in contrast to NGOs that came to Africa and freely handed out food and supplies for a couple of years and then left. “The minute you feed one person, another one hundred are lined up with their hands outstretched,” he told his colleagues. “You realize that handouts won’t solve a thing, unless you’re ready to feed millions of people every year, forever. The only way to make a real difference is to somehow empower the poor to solve their own problems.”

Andrew and One Acre were determined to go beyond the old Band-Aid approach of charity relief and emergency aid and pursue new business-based methods of long-term, sustainable agricultural development. He had the audacity to believe that Africa’s farmers should see farming as a business, as a way to make a living, rather than merely farming to live.

In the past, very few enterprises had been willing to take on Africa’s smallholder farmers as clients. That was why the higher-yielding hybrid seed that had boosted yields in the United States seventy years earlier was so minimally used across Africa, why fertilizer use—even just a thimbleful per plant, as the continent’s agronomists prescribed for smallholders—was so rare, why the farming methods were so ancient. Agriculture suppliers simply dropped off seed and fertilizer and tools at supply stores in the big cities. If the remote smallholder farmers needed any of that, the suppliers reckoned, they would come into town and get it.

Andrew didn’t understand that philosophy. From business school, he knew there were plenty of case studies that emphasized distribution. He had zeroed in on Coca-Cola’s strategy to put a bottle within arms’ reach of every person on the planet. Indeed, Coca-Cola had pushed its products out to the remotest points of the African bush. He had also studied the ubiquity of cell phones in rural areas and the customer service tailored to those needs. Similarly, Andrew believed it was possible to inundate every corner of Africa with farm services. “Our secret business ingredient,” he often told the One Acre staff, “is distribution.”

In passion and ambition, he was the agriculture version of Paul Farmer, the American physician and anthropologist who for twenty years had been challenging the way the world was dealing with health inequalities, be it HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis treatments or horrible hospital infrastructure. Farmer cofounded Partners in Health and went to work in some of the most difficult places on earth, such as Haiti and Rwanda. Andrew greatly admired Farmer. He liked how Farmer lived with the poor to understand their problems, liked how he tirelessly pushed for greater innovation, liked how he asked questions too daring for most set-in-their-ways development organizations. Andrew particularly liked the question, “How can the world do this better?”

From the book The Last Hunger Season by Roger Thurow. Reprinted by arrangement with PublicAffairs (www.publicaffairsbooks.com), a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2012.

Read author Roger Thurow's introduction to this excerpt.

The challenge: be realistic, imagine the impossible

What do these have in common? A car company built around a global community as an organisation, enabled by combining flex manufacturing techniques, open source platforms, open legal frameworks and social communication technologies premised upon cooperation, fuelled by the desire to be a great company and green; that can build cars 5 times faster at 100 times less the capital costs. A crisis management platform and organisation born out of the Kenyan post-election crisis of 2008 that can record critical information of events unfolding on the ground via a blend of location-based data, eyewitness accounts and mobile telephony, from often hard to reach places which visualises those unfolding events so that others can act and direct action at internet speeds. And now utilised for free in many parts of the world. Or, the largest organic diary farm in Britain, that have evolved a methodology that allows them to remain autonomous, profitable and sustainable in a market that is acutely volatile, because large-scale agricultural farming is mostly run on an oil-based economy, plus diary farmers are at the calculating mercy of the marketing needs and whimsys of large chain supermarkets.

They are collectively representative of a new reality of living, working and organising. All organisations or companies have quested to find a means to serve humanity better, to search for meaning in the work that they and others do, and offer up new viable alternatives for the ways that, in the past, these things were done. They seek an outcome that is more distributive of wealth, ideas and resources. In fact, one might argue an outcome that is more humane and community centric. An ungrading to what I call the Human-OS (operating system) This OS wants greater opportunity, greater freedom, greater empowerment, a revitalized sense of justice, a world where mutualism and participatory cultures are the default setting, where openness is seen as resilience and diversity is understood as a good thing, where we have greater autonomy and that seeks a greater aesthetic in everything we do: beautiful buildings, civic spaces, organizational design, it is as easy to make something beautiful as it is to make it ugly. So why choose the latter over the former? That question has always baffled me other than knowing ugly thoughts realize ugly realities.

This OS is the key driver to the systems change we are witnessing. I see this Human-OS in the transformational change of all the examples cited in No Straight Lines: from agriculture, hospital design, and healthcare service design, educational programmes, the response to complex civic challenges, manufacturing, NGO’s, the nature of finance, innovation and commerce itself. This OS is the story of why our networked world with its new Human OS is directing the shape of our post industrial future.

Rather than premised upon the extraction of wealth, and resources, whether they be physical, mineral or otherwise, these very different initiatives represent both moral courage and a collective purpose, if you will. And why is that important? Because it does not matter if you are an employer, a worker, VC fund, an NGO, an organisation, a local council or a government, you will miss out on the energies and capabilities of your people who will increasingly seek those new realities to discover a better way of living, working and being, when better and viable alternatives are on offer. And the fact is we now have the possibility to truly transform our world, to be more lightweight, sustainable and humane, through the tools, capabilities, language and processes at our fingertips. As Tony Judt argued, ‘why do we experience such difficulty even imaging a different sort of society? Why is it beyond us to conceive a different set of arrangements to our common advantage?’¹

Which brings me on to the title and the challenge of this project. Be realistic, imagine the impossible is taken from a poster from the 1968 Paris riots. In making sense of its meaning for our time, I would argue that what we face at the tail end of our industrial society is a design problem. The reason is that we are witness to a systemic failure of many of the institutions that have brought us so much prosperity and it is this convergence of failures that requires us to understand the challenge from a whole systems approach.

Many of the institutions, organisations and systems that we still use were designed and built for a less complex world, the increase in the complexity of our world is placing an unsustainable load upon those institutions, organisations and systems. One could argue our industrial world has reached the edge of its adaptive range. Consequently, faultlines are running through our society which present a trilemma based around interlocking social, economic and organisational tensions and questions. The design challenge involved in resolving these questions comes because the non-linearity is causing a comprehensive restructuring of society at large, breaking old models of organisation, and the trilemma heralds the coming of the age of uncertainty. All three tensions are in flux, and cannot be addressed without considering the other two. So each and every part of this story reflects upon and relates to this trilemma: the relationship of the individual to companies and other organisations and forms of power, economically, socially, politically.

Now is the time when we need a way of evaluating of what comes next, when we face a world that has gone in a very short period of time from seemingly linear (simple) to complex and non-linear (chaotic). When we move into a world that is inherently more complex, the result is concussive, its disorientating effects surround us, and our responses either individually or at an organisational level result in reflexes and perspectives that can be dangerously corrosive or inappropriate. And yet, this chaos seems to be, if anything, accelerating. At this very moment, great debates are raging. The spanners are in the works, defined by 9/11 (we now talk about asymmetrical warfare) and the near collapse of the world banking system (and its asymmetrical impact on every single one of us). And, as the global centre of economic gravity moves east, this has set off a series of events that are having significant asymmetric economic effects on societies around the world. These are but three examples of faultlines creating battles, ideological or otherwise, that are exploding and imploding at the same time. They all surfaced in a single decade. Though it is important to add that their gestation period has been much longer and are indeed multidimensional. These challenges are highly interlinked and interdependent, so a one-size-fits-all response just won’t do. There are no longer simple problems; what we face is the trilemma of a complex world. This book does its best to face them, because we are in more than just an economic crisis; it is equally political, educational, spiritual and moral.

The biggest challenge we face is cultural. How we contextualise (make sense of) the world around us determines how we engage and what action we take. Those actions then determine the outcomes we must live with and this requires a change from our industrial mindset and behaviour to one that is more cognisant of what is now seen as a non-linear world. This is where I want to return to the idea that what we face is a design problem, where answers exist not at an unattainable theoretical level but on the floors of our factories, in the streets of our towns and cities, the classes of our schools, the waiting rooms of our hospitals. These answers will manifest themselves as true acts of creation, originating new ways of getting stuff done, informed by the decisions we collectively take. So in re-designing the world, we need human creativity in the sense of the capacity to ‘make’, we need visionary leadership in the sense of making a difference. And we seek the craftsman’s critical eye, steady hand and creative mind. It is this process of seeing – realising new pathways to success, by bringing two ‘unlikes’ (new information, tools, processes etc.) together in close adjacency – that we create, and make new things. Then we can meaningfully apply that capability.

Why is the idea of craftsmanship significant at this epochal moment in time? Because it is about shaping our future and the ‘engaged’ craftsman brings the full power of humanity to bear upon his work. His hand is guided by his eye, informed by his creative mind; his productivity the act of unique creation. Indeed, the master craftsman is adept in using a philosophical framework, as well as tools and materials, to deliver useful things to the world. But more than that, the craftsman must be open constantly to new ideas; he is essentially always in beta. Therefore, we cannot engage with our uncertain non-linear world with the linear and inflexible orthodoxy of logic alone. The craftsman’s critical eye and creative mind is vital to evaluating new possibilities; he must be open to new ideas, information, tools and materials to make things that enable humanity to flourish. This approach is inherently more creative in that it synthesises all aspects of what make us truly human. But the 21st century craftsman does not only exist in the dusty workshop of a forgotten age; a games designer is a craftsman, a Linux programmer is a craftsman, innovative organisations like Local Motors and Ushahidi, which are discussed in more detail in Chapters 3 and 8, embed craftsmanship into everything they do. These are well designed responses to what real life previously perceived as intractable as the plot line in Catch22.

And so I come to this project with a strongly held belief, that there is an opportunity to bring a way of thinking to many of the seemingly intractable problems that confront us today. But this requires us to think and act as craftsmen and women and apply our critical thinking to understanding our non-linear world, which is in part shaped by participatory cultures, open, complex and seemingly ambiguous systems that are highly interdependent of each other. We need to be inspired to be epic, to seek epic wins, to make informed choices and co-author innovative new possibilities that can enable humanity to lead a life not constrained by the crushing reality of industrial-age thinking but one designed around the primary needs of humanity. We need to explore our non-linear world, not exploit it.

I believe there is much evidence demonstrating the possibility of this society. It exists in philosophical frameworks, language and literacy, legal frameworks, tools and technologies, and real stories of how others have been motivated by a real desire to create new and better answers to what others would call unsolvable problems. And it has been my mission to bring together these separate component parts to offer to you a vision of the world which is both realistic and eminently possible. But to create this regenerative society requires us to take a voyage of discovery and to look upon the world as Proust would say with fresh eyes. This is the world of no straight lines and this project is how we make sense of this non-linear world, and then act in it.

Alan Moore, Cambridge 2011

Read a blog related to this excerpt, "System Change Through People Power."

Chapter 12—Assessing Responsibility

Like many people, I often wish I knew the degree of responsibility practiced by the companies I do business with. I particularly wish I had this kind of understanding when I make investment decisions. Though some companies are very transparent about this kind of information, current rules and executive mindsets make it difficult for most people to really know the companies they buy from.

But it is possible to make evaluations with publicly available knowledge that provides pretty good indicators of intention and direction. For example Google, WR Gore, and Apple are three companies about which so much has been written, that it is possible to look beyond corporate rhetoric to get a glimpse of their intentions with regard to responsibility. All three of these companies are very successful. But to what degree can they be described as Responsible Corporations? And where are the arenas for improvement?

I interviewed two-dozen executives from companies who have done business with these three corporations, or have studied them carefully as competitors. Many have also been my clients and all are familiar with the ideas offered in this book. I engaged them in small group dialogues, the same method I recommend for companies that wish to do their own assessments. All the executives who participated in these dialogues wondered aloud how these three companies would assess themselves. In what follows I have summarized their thinking and agreed to keep them anonymous.

Customers:

For the executives I engaged, user experience was seen as driving everything that Apple and Google do. Google explicitly states that if a customer has difficulty using its offerings, then it is Google’s problem. Google commits to reading the minds of its users by tracking patterns in their entries, much as a spouse learns to finish a partner’s sentences. It interprets spelling, so that users don’t necessarily have to figure out how to spell an inquiry before they can be helped. Google doesn’t ask its users to change, it continually changes itself to anticipate what’s needed and give better service. “I want a husband like that,” one of my executives said.

How was this possible? Although everyone agreed that Google competed vigorously to hire brilliant minds, there were clearly other factors that enabled it to “adopt a customer’s problem” as its own. Unlike Microsoft, Google manages the software for its users. Microsoft addresses problems every two to three years when it releases new versions of its products. Or it provides downloadable on-line upgrades that customers must be reminded of and agree to accept. By contrast, Google can correct a problem within weeks or days, because management of the software remains entirely in its hands. There is no reason for the user to modify, or to upgrade to a new version. The on-going service to the customer remains uniquely seamless, even invisible. Amazon and Salesforce.com have also developed strength in this arena, but the executives I spoke with saw Google as the master.

Google has also mastered the ability to manage multiple levels of offerings. A user can enter an amazing variety of options into a Google search box (including math questions) or go to Wonder Wheel and find a new organization of information. With such complex software, it would take many disks to load a program and many manuals to understand it. But Google makes a sophisticated search immediately available in many forms. . A single portal makes layers of questions with levels of background possible.

Google definitely offers a better life when a searcher can make mistakes and know someone has your back. A user does not want to be educated or sold on how great something would be if you could only learn to use it. Google or Apple offerings do not require a user’s manual. If it is not intuitive and even filled with surprises in how well it serves you, it is not adding to or giving the customer a better life. All the executives felt that both companies excelled here. And both have been focused on getting better over the last five years at creating a better life for customers.

Co-Creators

For all three companies, a rare distributed understanding of customers was seen as a fundamental difference that gave them a competitive edge with customers in all markets. Each keep design and creative persons connected to the experience of the customer and user. The marketing department is not seen as a place to aggregate, hold and direct knowledge of the customer experience, much less be the interpreter for product design. In each organization, design and production members work from a real experience of customers, not an aggregated survey or functional filtered experience. In Google, product engineers are product managers.

Google tests and tracks continuously to interpret for people what they want and how they can work. This direct access to customer experience not only fosters creativity but instills in co-creators more passion for their role in the business. The contribution to the lives of others, literally in the case of Gore’s medical offerings, is compelling and fulfilling.

Google has famously provided its engineers an allotment of time with which they can do anything they want. A couple of the members of the dialogue group who work closely with Google revealed that this time is still available, but is being more focused in the direction it might take rather than leaving it wide open. There was also a criticism among the dialogue executives that this creative time is separated out from ‘real’ work rather than imbedded into all work. The executives drew on their own experience with Promises Beyond Ableness, which made ideation more wide spread with a higher return on the invested time. They had found that, using this process, the rate of implementation of new ideas, almost 100% after their refinement in the alignment process, gave everyone a sense of contribution. It is not just the freedom and autonomy that counts, but the contribution that matters for how that time and creativity is used. They also noted that having all members of organizations involved and not just the engineers as in Google’s case, also amplifies the sense of honoring the worthiness and the unique ability to contribute of all employees.

For Google, a couple of engineers known to our executives had mixed feelings when hired—not about working there but about being brought on with no defined role and being asked to find where they fit. They didn’t want to be fit into a round hole when they might be a square peg, but the sense of contribution and fulfillment that comes from teaming seemed delayed. In each case it took about nine months to find a home in which they knew they would belong. Each suggested they wanted to design a process that could support the discovery and creative nature of the unique opportunity they had identified, and they did find mentors who helped. In fact, one is using the 20% allotted open time to work on evolving the entry process without losing the character and motivation building it offers.

Google is not a heavily managed company, making expression of uniqueness more available for engineers at least. Microsoft is heavily hierarchical; 4 to 6 direct reports for each manager. This makes for many levels to manage a large team—5 managers for every 25 people on average. In Google, there are 40-50 people per manager. Google counts on a bottom up approach for innovation. The culture supports people feeling important without the number of direct reports indicating status. They empower people at the bottom with their 20% open time, freeing them from the management chain, and encouraging new directions for innovation. Without this there would be no amazing search engine, clever marketing and YouTube. Even the Android operating system stands out as a result of this open time.

But Google has started to modify and shape this time. While it promotes entrepreneurship, enables responsibility to the customer stakeholder, and provides the co-creator’s an opportunity to contribute, it seemed too much was being launched too fast. The large number of engineers, combined with incentives to launch new ideas and get awards was expanding both the number and frequency of new ideas. There were so many launches that it confused customers. So Google, a couple of years back, revamped the 20% time to focus on key strengths of the businesses.

Community:

One story of Google was especially enlightening on the subject of community. And it made the group understand how they might have thought of it. In 2009, FCC auctioned off the frequencies that has previously been analog as they converted to digital. This was expected to bring $10 million into the US Treasury. The government’s job was to get the highest price for taxpayers. In theory it was an open auction for the bandwidth, but it was likely that it would be bought-up by existing carriers in cable and wireless services in order to shut out competition. The bandwidth was auctioned in packages. Established carriers have a big lock on the whole thing and were expected to control it all. It was not an auction where anyone would have expected Google to be one the parties. But is was an issue that would affect their customers and they decided to act in a way to benefit them.

As it is now, a wireless customer cannot participate directly in the use of bandwidth but can only access it though someone who licenses and controls use. You have to contract with a carrier to play, and use their wireless or cable frequencies. But customers want to buy phones and go where they want without restrictions. Google could see this. So they announced to the FCC that they were willing to bid at a higher rate to set a higher minimum, which could greatly accelerate the bidding, thus serving the FCC’s mandate to return value to taxpayers. To do this they required that the FCC change the rules for how bandwidth can be used, and to ask for legislation to that effect. This new rule would offer a spectrum of bandwidth within which wireless service customers could go anywhere. Google succeeded in getting the FCC to change the rule for part of the bandwidth, even though they did not win the auction. They are credited with single-handedly setting FCC regulations in a new direction, knowing there would be no innovation without it. The taxpayer as an investor won, the consumer won. You still have to go to go to a carrier for cable, which holds back innovation in the field of recording and broadcasting. But maybe Google will find a way to tackle that next.

This was an act of community service. Why and how could Google do this? They hire people in all fields who are likely to think of such possibilities. And the entire culture is focused on pushing the limits. This is imbedding responsibility into HOW one does business, not carrying it out as a separate Corporate Responsibility program.

Google was also seen as using the Ten Things, a statement of Google’s values, as principles that affect communities of all kinds who have an investment in its success. The “do no harm” idea of the medical establishment has found a place in Google’s list. In their frame, it means it is quick to fix something if its communities see negative exposure or impact on them as users of Google offerings. The dialogue group did not see Facebook with the same overarching principles and ethic.

Google explicit states this as “you can make money without doing evil”. The executives found this exemplified in Google’s explicit disallowance of ads that are not directly related to the search terms. They want to have everything on the page be relevant to what the search was about. The advertiser must be able to provide useful information that the search party is searching for or the ad and money are refused. Google further adds transparency as to advertising vs search results, with the overt specification of advertised info as a “sponsor link” just below its ad. Also, no can buy a better page ranking than you earn by the algorithms search results.

Investors:

Every executive involved felt that the Google’s IPO (Initial Public Offering) was an innovation of the same nature as their intervention with the FCC. And that it represented understanding regulatory dynamics and leveraging them for the good of all stakeholders. It is typical for investment banks to underwrite such ventures and set a floor or initial price. In exchange, they get a percentage of the stock. Of course, they set the floor price as low as possible so as to participate in the up side. Goldman Sachs is the biggest player in such IPOs. They promise that all the stock will be sold and to buy any remaining if that is not the case. They also get a fee for their effort. Prior to the IPO. Goldman Sachs takes a share and proceeds to sell more in a second round of offerings to other investment banks. They also get a percentage for this sale. They do this to ensure the IPO gets reasonable reception because the price is stabilized. However it is an artificial structure not reflecting any market value. It is not a free market model.

Google decided instead to create a Dutch auction. There was no setting of an artificial price. All bidding was initially opened to the public. Anyone could, and many did bid for a share. The investor set the price. Once all bids are in, the sales start from first bid and are sold at the rate bid until all shares are sold. Their own lowest price is what every one gets. The shareholder, not the investment bank, decides pricing of the stock. This approach brought authenticity into the IPO, making it operate in an open market. There were no middlemen to get a fee. The ultimate shareholder therefore, did not have to pay that fee. It was a form of unadulterated capitalism that benefitted investors directly and created a responsible market model for investing.

Read a blog related to this excerpt, "The Responsible Entrepreneur."

From the foreword by former New York City School Chancellor Joel Klein:

It is a critical moment for public school reform in America. As the nation continues to struggle with the worst economic crisis it has faced since the Great Depression, there is a gathering consensus that our current level of educational attainment is not remotely adequate for the demands of a high-tech, global economy—an economy that requires many more knowledge workers than it used to, and one that can also look to new, emerging economies to find the workers it needs.

Faced with an unemployment and underemployment rate of more than 15 percent, accompanied by a significant across-the-board decline in real wages for many workers, the divide in America between the haves and have-nots is becoming increasingly acute, and now threatens the values that hold us together as a nation. Whatever else, one thing seems obvious: we need to educate our future workforce to a very different degree or our problems will only intensify. This is serious stuff.

Unfortunately, despite a shared recognition about the need to dramatically improve public education, there remains sharp disagreement about how best to do that. The policies pushed by the reform movement—based largely on bringing accountability and choice to the monopoly-run, adult-interest-driven status quo—have enjoyed a measure of success during the past decade. But, to be candid, the system still hasn’t changed much. Schools, along with those who work in them, rarely pay the price of failure, and for most families in America school choice is nonexistent.

First, let’s recognize some places that have demonstrated how real change and improvement are achievable: Florida, which under Governor Jeb Bush’s leadership adopted aggressive reforms, such as putting a letter grade on all schools and denying promotion to third-graders who can’t read; and New Orleans, which, in response to the destruction of the old public school system wrought by Hurricane Katrina, adopted an all-choice system in which three-quarters of the schools are now independent charter schools. But despite these (and other) examples of success, the forces defending the largely unaltered status quo continue to resist meaningful change, arguing that what the system really needs is more resources and, strangely, less accountability and choice.

Into this debate now sail Joe and Carol Reich, two remarkable people from whom, all things considered, one would never have expected to hear. School reform is messy, involving highly charged, sometimes very ugly politics, which often get played out in some of the poorest, most dangerous parts of our urban landscapes. The Reiches, by contrast, are elegant and, yes, like their name is pronounced, rich. But for reasons that will become apparent to readers of “Getting to Bartlett Street”, they have too much gratitude to this country, too fine a sense of equity and fairness, and too deep a belief in the power of education to transform even the most challenged life, to sit this fight out.

So, having been exposed to sixty underprivileged children to whom they guaranteed college scholarships through the “I Have A Dream” Foundation, the Reiches decided to open up their own public school in one of New York’s most impoverished communities—South Williamsburg, Brooklyn—which is divided largely between an immigrant Hispanic community and an orthodox Jewish community.

Nothing like this had ever previously happened in the city. Until the Reiches, it was axiomatic that the schools were run exclusively by the Board of Education. Not surprisingly, then, from day one, the attitude of everyone involved in the school system—the big shots, the bureaucrats, and the union—was that this must be a joke. But Joe and Carol didn’t think it was a laughing matter. The odyssey they describe is a testament to their extraordinary fortitude. It is also, sadly, a testament to the power of the “blob”—the term used to describe the protectors of the monopoly public school system—to resist outside “encroachment,” or any form of innovation, for that matter, at all costs. The late Steve Jobs, a fierce critic of the public school system, repeatedly analogized the public schools to deeply entrenched business monopolies, like AT&T when it controlled the entire telephone system. Jobs noted, “I remember seeing a bumper sticker with the Bell logo on it and it saying, ‘We don’t care. We don’t have to.’

And that’s what monopoly is. That’s what IBM was in their day. And that’s certainly what the public school system is. They don’t have to care.”

But Joe and Carol Reich did care—cared so much that they fought through the extraordinary resistance and indifference that is hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t been directly exposed to the blob. The beneficiaries are not just the families who chose to have their kids attend the Reiches’ two schools in Brooklyn, but literally tens of thousands of families whose kids go to charter schools throughout the city—schools that might never have existed if it weren’t for the Reiches’ pathbreaking efforts. That is the story they chronicle in this deeply moving book, a story of profound change brought about by a couple of miscast outsiders who just didn’t know how to take no for an answer.

Before talking about the story and its impact, let me say a word about the Reiches. Over the past decade, I have come to know them well. They are friends that I admire and love. As any reader of this book will see, they care deeply about others, especially those who are less fortunate. When they describe the kids from the “I Have A Dream” program (they call them “our Dreamers”) and when they refer to the kids who attend their schools, they talk of them as if they were literally their own children. This reflects an emotional attachment that speaks volumes about the Reiches’ humanity, which is matched by the pointed simplicity of the values that animate both of them. Why did they do it? Why did they keep going despite the impossible odds and the endless ridiculous push back? The answer is served up in what I believe to be the most important words in the book:

Families of means can afford to send their children to private schools or relocate to a neighborhood of affluence where the public schools have greater resources. The poor cannot. We recoiled against this injustice. We made it our own struggle.

To me, these words strike at the core of the current injustice inherent in public education. When I was chancellor in New York City, I would always ask people if they would let me assign their child to any of the public schools in the city. No one said yes, and most, when pressed, said they would only allow their kids to go to a third or so of the city’s schools. Who should go to the others, I would ask? The answer was, “Other people’s children!”

Today in New York City, because of the work that Joe and Carol Reich started more than twenty years ago, many more families in high-poverty communities have a choice as to where they will send their kids. Sparked by the work of the Reiches and others, like Seymour Fliegel and his team at the Center for Educational Innovation, New York State passed a charter school law in 1998, allowing for the first time the potential for a real alternative to the public schools. As the Reiches explain, charter schools are privately operated (typically not-for-profit) schools that admit kids by lottery and receive public funding to provide them with a free education. They are subjected to the same testing and other accountability standards as the public schools, and can be, and have been, shut down for nonperformance or financial irregularities.

In many school districts in America today, charter schools, while authorized, are fiercely resisted, typically by superintendents, school boards, and unions. This trinity is nearly impossible to overcome. But in New York City, because of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s leadership, the support of the philanthropic community, and the commitment of some of the nation’s best multi-charter operators, charter schools have thrived. They now number 136, which amounts to almost 10 percent of all the public schools in the city. And their impact on high-poverty communities, where they tend to be clustered—like northern Manhattan, the South Bronx, and central Brooklyn—is even greater.

There is a raging debate in the education literature about whether charters do better or worse than public schools as a whole. As the Reiches point out, there are a lot of poor charters out there, and some cut corners by not admitting, or discharging, kids that are especially difficult to educate. But the research now makes clear that charter schools in New York City are significantly outperforming the other public schools. Just as important, I would argue, the parents in the city are voting with their feet. For the school year that started in September 2011, there were a total of almost thirteen thousand new charter seats available across the city, for which sixty-four thousand families applied. That is a remarkable number, by any measure. It speaks volumes about the fact that, contrary to conventional opinion, parents in even the most challenged communities will become active and involved consumers of educational services for their children if they are given real choices. Remember, not a single one of the sixty-four thousand was required to apply to a charter school; on the contrary, they each were assigned to a community school that their children could attend. But they wanted something better for their kids, so they took the time to apply to one or more charter schools, knowing the odds would be against them, but nevertheless hoping their kid would be lucky enough to get a better education than the one he would have received at the public school in his community.

What’s sad, as the Reiches point out, is that, despite the demonstrated success of charter schools, as well as the enormous demand for them in New York City, there is still enormous resistance to their expansion. The teachers’ union has sued the city time and again to block them. In part, that’s because, unlike the public schools, which must be unionized, the charters overwhelmingly choose to be nonunion.

In addition, the current workforce in the public schools doesn’t like the competition that the charters provide: if kids leave the traditional public schools for the charters, fewer employees will be needed, and the unions, when push comes to shove, choose to protect jobs.

In the end, I suspect, the parents will prevail. Those sixty-four thousand applicants won’t be denied and, as a political force, they are formidable. They have learned something very important: because their kids grow up poor and often face very difficult challenges doesn’t mean they can’t be well educated. For far too long, the failures of the public schools have been blamed on everything—including the kids—but not on the schools. Well, now parents increasingly know better.

And for that, those parents, and many more throughout our nation, owe a debt of gratitude to a couple of people they have never heard of: Joe and Carol Reich. If you have any doubt that an individual can change the world for the better, read this book. Against all odds, and in the face of persistent, unyielding naysayers, these two people led a revolution in education in the largest school district in the country. In the words of my favorite song from the Broadway show A Little Night Music, “Isn’t it Reich?”

“Getting to Bartlett Street” is available wherever books are sold beginning August 28. To pre-order copies visit Amazon, BN.com, or your favorite independent bookseller’s website.

Mobilizing Legal Forces for the Good

America’s 1 million charities represent a gorgeous array of goodness. They lead efforts to cure diseases, alleviate poverty, advance education, and ennoble through culture.

Although nonprofit organizations can make a big impact, they tend to have tiny or nonexistent legal teams. Even for the lucky few with a lawyer in-house or close by, it’s impossible for one attorney to know enough about all the different areas of law to be able to address all the organization’s needs.

Fortunately, there is plenty of good will in the legal profession for good causes. Pro bono legal services are quite literally yours for the asking. As the General Counsel of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York for the past seven years, I have innovated a new procurement model for legal services by nonprofits through the Lincoln Center Counsels’ Council. Recently I was asked to help scale up, on a statewide basis, the availability of pro bono legal services for nonprofits in need. Together with a leadership committee, we are piloting in 2012 a new joint initiative of the State Bar Association and the State Attorney General’s Office, called Charity Corps: Lawyers Helping Nonprofits. The initiative is being watched for potential adoption by other states.

This article, based in part on the recently published book Good Counsel: Meeting the Legal Needs of Nonprofits, describes how counsel for a nonprofit can source pro bono legal help.

Know Your Needs

The first step to locating great legal assistance is to survey the organization’s legal needs. Issues are likely to cluster around these categories:

• Nonprofit corporate law and governance
• Compliance with the tax exemption
• Contracts
• Copyright law and rights clearances
• Fundraising law
• Laws relating to the finance and accounting function
• Labor and employment law
• Trademark law
• Consumer regulatory law
• Real estate law
• Municipal law/governmental violations, permits, and approvals
• Government relations (lobbying)

Organizations working in technical or highly regulated fields, such as health care, the environment, or education will have specialized legal needs to add to the list, as will organizations undergoing major construction or expansion. Organizations with significant operations overseas face yet other issues.

For those organizations that cannot afford to hire counsel, a number of good resources connect lawyers with deserving nonprofits. Pro Bono Net, www.probono.net, is a nationwide resource that provides resources for pro bono and legal services attorneys and others working to assist low income or disadvantaged clients. State or local bar associations can also refer organizations to qualified attorneys. In New York, the Lawyers Alliance for New York, www.lawyersalliance.org, provides business and transactional legal services locally for nonprofit organizations helping the poor. The Lawyers Alliance website also publishes a list of providers of business and transactional legal services for nonprofit organizations around the country. Other organizations, such as Catchafire, www.catchafire.org, match volunteer professionals, including legal professionals, with nonprofits calling for help. Law school clinical programs may also have resources to help organizations meet their legal needs.

Some of the nation’s largest law firms have institutionalized the practice of providing pro bono legal services to worthy nonprofits. The legal departments of some major corporations have formally launched programs for their attorneys to provide volunteer legal advice to nonprofit organizations as part of their community outreach efforts. Lawyers on the board of an organization may help craft a pitch and facilitate introductions to law firms and corporations with pro bono practices.

Once legal assistance has been referred or suggested, it’s a good idea to independently research and verify the attorney’s or firm’s suitability for the work—even if the services are being offered for free.

How to Ask for Pro Bono Help

How does an organization most effectively cultivate, activate, and manage in-kind contributors? In the same way that it cultivates, activates, and manages other kinds of contributors—with care, foresight, planning, and follow-through. Here are some steps an organization can take to shape an effective pro bono legal program:

• Have a peer ask a peer. If the organization is approaching a law firm for the first time, it helps to bring a lawyer already providing pro bono counsel or serving on the board of the organization.
• Crystallize the project by developing an interesting and well-defined assignment. Accurately estimate the duration of the project and the amount of attorney time needed to complete it.
• Minimize administrative drain on the volunteer by gathering all the information and documents needed to launch the project at the outset.
• Arrange for a face-to-face meeting, if possible, at the beginning of the project, to introduce the people and the problem. An in-person meeting at the end allows for a thorough presentation, Q&A, and sincere expressions of gratitude.
• Clearly state the deliverables needed and the deadline by which they are required.
• Follow up with the legal volunteer to make sure the work is progressing—even if it’s only a brief e-mail at some point between the initial meeting and the deadline with the subject line, “Just checking in.”
• Implement the work—release the memo, file the brief, augment or revise the policy—and be sure to let the volunteer know what a difference his or her work made.

Speak to Legal Volunteers’ Interests

Part of the pitch to prospective legal volunteers is appealing to their self-interest. Describe how doing the work for the organization will benefit the lawyers and their firm. Pro bono work builds expertise, provides training opportunities for up-and-coming professionals, and assists in the recruitment, retention, and morale-building efforts of law firms.

Students from elite law schools working on pro bono projects for nonprofit organizations as part of their summer jobs at law firms report that the experiences reflected positively on the host law firm, strengthening the tie between the student and his future employer. In addition to their sense of contributing meaningfully to the mission, lawyers working on pro bono legal projects report gaining valuable additional insights into what it means to be part of the profession, and an opportunity to evaluate and reflect positively on their association with the firm.

Pro bono work also provides for meaningful client exposure, presentation opportunities, and project management responsibilities that may be far greater than a junior or even mid-level attorney has experienced for paying clients. These experiences contribute to the attorney’s professional development as well as building the firm’s knowledge base.

Pro bono work helps a law firm align with a charity its members care about, fostering a sense of esprit de corps, and enticing future paying clients who may share the firm’s values and mission orientation. If a firm is looking to expand into a new area of practice or break into a geographic market, there may be no better way to burnish its brand than to align with a respected and beloved local organization.

Get Help from Law Students

Other opportunities for pro bono service include law students on summer break and recent law grads awaiting bar admission, which can take up to a year. These soon-to-be attorneys cannot yet practice law, but they can carry out research and writing projects under the supervision of an admitted attorney.

The American Bar Association has recently adopted a resolution urging law schools to more adequately prepare law students for legal practice by providing opportunities to gain the knowledge, skills, values, habits and traits that make up the successful modern lawyer. To that end, a small but growing number of law schools have clinical programs specializing in nonprofit law, or business law transaction clinics that work with nonprofit clients. Neighboring organizations can benefit enormously from the participation of supervised law students in a clinical program. The Chief Judge of the State of New York recently announced that candidates for admission to practice law in that state would be required to fulfill a 50 hour pro bono service requirement before being sworn in. Organizations can also harness the energies of law students looking to fulfill mandatory community service hours required by certain law schools by crafting appropriate projects for students to complete.

Get Help from Lawyers in Transition

Even credentialed and seasoned lawyers sometimes find themselves in transition. They may be seeking to move from private practice to an in-house job, relaunching after their department has been downsized or eliminated following a merger, or returning to the paid workforce after taking time off to be with a child or an aging parent. Volunteering as in-house counsel to a nonprofit can provide a valuable opportunity for transitioning lawyers to freshen skills and rekindle passion for the practice of law. A few forward-thinking law schools even have special internships to help mid-career lawyers regroup or reinvent their legal path. Enterprising organizations can help advance such attorneys’ professional interests in the short to medium term by creating volunteer engagements for a semester or two.

These ongoing voluntary engagements can provide a hands-on opportunity to deal directly with clients on quality work, stretching skills outside of the attorney’s usual practice area, and provide a welcome contrast to the increasing specialization commonly found in the private practice of law. Working as an in-house volunteer can also help an attorney sharpen up skills that are hard to come by in private practice: providing abbreviated advice instead of encyclopedic memoranda; crystallizing an opinion that provides real direction instead of hedging bets with an “on the one hand, on the other hand” approach; and recognizing how legal advice fits in with other important considerations such as mission, tax, accounting, governance, strategic, and other matters. Working within an organization reinforces that legal counsel is not a stand-alone commodity but an integral part of the business objectives of the client.

Thank Legal Volunteers

Wise organizations thank their volunteer lawyers early and often. Be sure these special contributors are listed in the organization’s annual report and other publications where donors are acknowledged. If a project is on the agenda for a board meeting or management presentation, consider inviting the volunteer attorney to present the work or at least attend and be thanked.

Savvy nonprofit leaders will offer follow-on projects to keep good volunteers engaged. They will also show an interest in the volunteer’s career development and progress at her firm, encourage her to reflect on her experiences with the organization and how these experiences have contributed to her professional successes and growth.

The Payoffs of Pro Bono Work for the Volunteer Attorney

Identifying and meeting legal needs on a pro bono basis is worthwhile for its own sake. The lawyer who waives his fee has enabled the organization to reinvest critical resources in mission-related expenditures. He may also take satisfaction that his legal work benefits the organization far beyond the narrow definition of meeting the legal needs: It may also fulfill certain donor requirements of good governance, help meet certain grant restrictions, shore up internal controls, and provide reassurance to governmental or private funders. Good legal advice can help the organization better execute its mission – feeding the poor, healing the sick, enlightening through culture, preserving the environment.

In some aspects of the legal professions, being a small cog in a big wheel is a common and mind-numbing experience. If a volunteer engagement permits a professional to work on a project from start to finish, and then see how his work has been implemented or disseminated, the lawyer can obtain professional satisfaction far outweighing the forgone fee.

Working on a large-scale project also provides a better perspective on legal work and how it fits into the overall objectives of the organization. The lawyer can help shape the outcome of an organization’s new business initiative and can take pride in lessening risks or enhancing the bottom line by reducing regulatory implications or tax burdens. These skills translate readily and profitably into the private sector, to the advantage of the attorney and his future clients.

Counseling for the good can make good counsel even better.

"Reprinted with permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc." Lesley Rosenthal, Good Counsel: Meeting the Legal Needs of Nonprofits, 2012.

Like jumbo shrimp or military intelligence, corporate responsibility is considered an oxymoron by much of society. Corporations are among the least trusted of our institutions. As I type these words, anti-corporate sentiment has boiled over, prompting a legion of young people to protest in front of the New York Stock Exchange and across the country in the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. Confirming popular anti-corporate opinion, a global stock trader interviewed by the BBC in September 2011 summed up the current European economic crisis this way: “I go to bed every night and dream of another recession. It is an opportunity for me to make money. Governments don’t rule the world, Goldman Sachs rules the world.”

It’s no wonder that people are skeptical of corporations. The 2008 mortgage meltdown left millions of people in economic ruin. From the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, to the collapse of Enron, big companies have acted recklessly and the cost to repair the damage has been borne by society in the form of taxpayer-funded bailouts and environmental cleanup. Indeed, as the number and scale of corporate misdeeds mount, it is increasingly clear that governments are incapable or unwilling to protect the public’s interest against corporate misbehavior.

With this backdrop, what is the solution? Should policymakers try harder to rein in companies? Should we move away from a capitalist economy and toward a socialist system? Winston Churchill said that “democracy is the worst form of government except all the others.” Can the same be said about market-based economies? Without question, corporate greed and negligence have been a source of misery, but the free-market economy has also created abundance and wealth for more people than at any time in human history. Regardless of your worldview on the benefits or ills of capitalism, it is the system we have.

So, at a time when trust in corporations has reached an all-time low, why is interest in corporate responsibility at an all-time high? Skeptics may conclude that corporate responsibility is merely a smokescreen to mask misdeeds. A more plausible explanation is that increasing numbers of stakeholders are demanding responsibility from corporations. Hyper-transparency of corporate activities, fueled by disclosure laws and the Internet, has increased awareness to the point where corporate behavior is under constant scrutiny. Smart business leaders are aware of this scrutiny and of the high costs of a public scandal. They know that in the long run it is cheaper to act responsibly now than to dig out from a PR disaster later.

But there is a more human side of the story. Having spent most of my career working in large corporations, the simple reality is that companies are just groups of people that make very human judgments. Like any group of human beings, each company takes on a unique culture that can either promote ethical behavior or encourage cutting corners. Without question, business leaders are a very competitive lot, but my belief is that most are moral and ethical people.

In his book, How Good People Make Tough Choices, Rushworth Kidder defines ethics as “obedience to the unenforceable.” With this elegant phrase, Kidder has captured the essence of corporate responsibility: how a business acts when there are no laws or rules to govern its behavior. These decisions are powerful inflection points. The reason I have dedicated my career to corporate responsibility is that by working within large companies, a treehugger like me can steer these decisions toward social and environmental good. And, like steering a supertanker, sometimes a very small nudge in the right direction can produce massive change.

Changing Business from the Inside Out: A Treehugger’s Guide to Working in Corporations is a manual on how to steer the corporate supertanker toward doing good for people and our planet. While being a professional altruist in a for-profit company is a bit like being the designated driver at a cocktail party, it can also be very, very rewarding.

There are many examples I could pull from my career, but one of the most touching came from my time as Apple’s head of supplier social responsibility. After years of work and millions invested, I could see that conditions had improved for thousands of workers. The most memorable moment was when I walked into a classroom we had set up in the factory to allow the workers to take online courses after their shifts on the manufacturing line. Hundreds of the young Chinese workers used the classroom to learn various topics, and most chose to learn English. When I entered that classroom, the students/workers mobbed me with sentiments of thanks spoken with their newly acquired language skills. In any language, their genuine gratitude for the chance to learn a skill that could improve their lives came through loud and clear.

Whether your worldview is that corporations are inherently selfish or are more prone to act in the public’s interest, it is undeniable that the free-market economy is the dominant social institution of our time. The pessimists forecast a race to the bottom where multinational corporations diminish social and environmental conditions. The optimists see an upward spiral of responsible companies working to improve conditions, even making a profit in the process. Whichever view is correct is an abstract academic argument. The reality is that the corporate responsibility movement is real and expanding at a rapid rate throughout the world economy. I wrote this book to help others who feel, as I do, that working in corporate responsibility is the most effective way to make a difference in the world.

Steve Jobs, who passed away recently, was eulogized as an innovator who changed our lives. One lesson from his iconic life that is applicable to a career in corporate responsibility is to know what you want to achieve and never compromise on your goals. Almost twenty years before his death, Jobs summed up his legacy this way:

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me . . . Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful . . . that’s what matters to me” (Steve Jobs, Wall Street Journal, May 25, 1993).

Provocative. Just one word . . . provocative.

Until recently, prospective students at All Soul’s College, at Oxford University, took a “one-word exam.” The Essay, as it was called, was both anticipated and feared by applicants. They each flipped over a piece of paper at the same time to reveal a single word. The word might have been “innocence” or “miracles” or “water” or “provocative.” Their challenge was to craft an essay in three hours inspired by that single word.

There were no right answers to this exam. However, each applicant’s response provided insights into the student’s wealth of knowledge and ability to generate creative connections. The New York Times quotes one Oxford professor as saying, “The unveiling of the word was once an event of such excitement that even nonapplicants reportedly gathered outside the college each year, waiting for news to waft out.” This challenge reinforces the fact that everything—every single word—provides an opportunity to leverage what you know to stretch your imagination.

For so many of us, this type of creativity hasn’t been fostered. We don’t look at everything in our environment as an opportunity for ingenuity. In fact, creativity should be an imperative. Creativity allows you to thrive in an ever changing world and unlocks a universe of possibilities. With enhanced creativity, instead of problems you see potential, instead of obstacles you see opportunities, and instead of challenges you see a chance to create breakthrough solutions. Look around and it becomes clear that the innovators among us are the ones succeeding in every arena, from science and technology to education and the arts. Nevertheless, creative problem solving is rarely taught in school, or even considered a skill you can learn.

Sadly, there is also a common and often-repeated saying, “Ideas are cheap.” This statement discounts the value of creativity and is utterly wrong. Ideas aren’t cheap at all—they’re free. And they’re amazingly valuable. Ideas lead to innovations that fuel the economies of the world, and they prevent our lives from becoming repetitive and stagnant. They are the cranes that pull us out of well-worn ruts and put us on a path toward progress. Without creativity we are not just condemned to a life of repetition, but to a life that slips backward. In fact, the biggest failures of our lives are not those of execution, but failures of imagination. As the renowned American inventor Alan Kay famously said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” We are all inventors of our own future. And creativity is at the heart of invention.

As demonstrated so beautifully by the “one-word exam,” every utterance, every object, every decision, and every action is an opportunity for creativity. This challenge, one of many tests given over several days at All Soul’s College, has been called the hardest exam in the world. It required both a breadth of knowledge and a healthy dose of imagination. Matthew Edward Harris, who took the exam in 2007, was assigned the word “harmony.” He wrote in the Daily Telegraph that he felt “like a chef rummaging through the recesses of his refrigerator for unlikely soup ingredients.” This homey simile is a wonderful reminder that these are skills that we have an opportunity to call upon every day as we face challenges as simple as making soup and as monumental as solving the massive problems that face the world.

I teach a course on creativity and innovation at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, affectionately called the “d.school,” at Stanford University. This complements my full-time job as Executive Director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP), in the Stanford School of Engineering. At STVP our mission is to provide students in all fields with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to seize opportunities and creatively solve major world problems.

On the first day of class, we start with a very simple challenge: redesigning a name tag. I tell the students that I don’t like name tags at all. The text is too small to read. They don’t include the information I want to know. And they’re often hanging around the wearer’s belt buckle, which is really awkward. The students laugh when they realize that they too have been frustrated by the same problems.

Within fifteen minutes the class has replaced the name tags hanging around their necks with beautifully decorated pieces of paper with their names in large text. And the new name tags are pinned neatly to their shirts. They’re pleased they have successfully solved the problem and are ready to go on to the next one. But I have something else in mind. . . . I collect all of the new name tags and put them in the shredder. The students look at me as though I’ve gone nuts!

I then ask, “Why do we use name tags at all?” At first, the students think that this is a preposterous question. Isn’t the answer obvious? Of course, we use name tags so that others can see our name. They quickly realize, however, that they’ve never thought about this question. After a short discussion, the students acknowledge that name tags serve a sophisticated set of functions, including stimulating conversations between people who don’t know each other, helping to avoid the embarrassment of forgetting someone’s name, and allowing you to quickly learn about the person with whom you are talking.

With this expanded appreciation for the role of a name tag, students interview one another to learn how they want to engage with new people and how they want others to engage with them. These interviews provide fresh insights that lead them to create inventive new solutions that push beyond the limitations of a traditional name tag.

One team broke free from the size constraints of a tiny name tag and designed custom T-shirts with a mix of information about the wearer in both words and pictures. Featured were the places they had lived, the sports they played, their favorite music, and members of their families. They vastly expanded the concept of a “name tag.” Instead of wearing a tiny tag on their shirts, each shirt literally became a name tag, offering lots of topics to explore.

Another team realized that when you meet someone new, it would be helpful to have relevant information about that person fed to you on an as-needed basis to help keep the conversation going and to avoid embarrassing silences. They mocked up an earpiece that whispers information about the person with whom you are talking. It discreetly reveals helpful facts, such as how to pronounce the person’s name, his or her place of employment, and the names of mutual friends.

Yet another team realized that in order to facilitate meaningful connections between people, it is often more important to know how the other person is feeling than it is to know a collection of facts about them. They designed a set of colored bracelets, each of which denotes a different mood. For example, a green ribbon means that you feel cheerful, a blue ribbon that you are melancholy, a red ribbon that you’re stressed, and a purple ribbon that you feel fortunate. By combining the different colored ribbons, a wide range of emotions can be quickly communicated to others, facilitating a more meaningful first connection.

This assignment is designed to demonstrate an important point: there are opportunities for creative problem solving everywhere. Anything in the world can inspire ingenious ideas—even a simple name tag. Take a look around your office, your classroom, your bedroom, or your backyard. Everything you see is ripe for innovation.

Adapted from INGENIUS by Tina Seelig, Ph.D. Copyright © 2012 by Tina L. Seelig. Used with permission of HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers.

When Dreams Defy Reality

Currently, social entrepreneurship is as much a field as it is a social movement. A whole new generation of ethical change agents—whether in business or academia or the media—is building a new sensibility about the way we live and interact. For many people, ‘‘social entrepreneurship is now a viable and desirable career path, where work is not just something that you do, but rather something that you are.’’²

All of Ashoka’s Fellows (the people Ashoka deems to be leading social entrepreneurs and elect into a lifelong Fellowship of like-minded people) ripple their innovations through society by influencing other social entrepreneurs, the policy development process, and the actions of the private sector. As I came to know the Fellows I interviewed for this book, I found that they all, at a minimum, possessed four inherent qualities:

• Purpose
• Passion
• Pattern
• Participation

These characteristics have become my favorite manner of determining if the person is starting out with the defining characteristics of what constitutes a social entrepreneur.

Purpose

I have never met an Ashoka Fellow who did not put society above personal interests and was not firmly focused on the fulfillment of their chosen role. Fellows may takemany roads to get there, but the goal is sacrosanct—and they do not get sidetracked by the boulders strewn on the path. Their clarity of purpose is often the decisive factor that brings individual and organizational efforts together. This is because it defines why they are working toward something and why it is worth working on it collectively. Purpose becomes the invisible glue that connects different actions and actors while it bonds everyone with inspiration. It infuses boldness and calculated risk and it creates loyalties by helping people understand why their contribution is valuable and valued. Purpose mitigates fear and allows inspiration to replace fear with action. Purpose leads to a sense of possibility.

Passion

I am not sure if I can separate the passion from the purpose because I have come to believe that both are always present, tightly intertwined and inextricably linked together. Like strands of DNA (which passion and purpose may actually be part of) you cannot pull them apart. Passion connects to spirit and relates to strength—strength of character, of determination, of connection to others. It kindles and nourishes a ‘‘follow one’s heart’’ courage of judgment. Ashoka Fellows have taught me that real strength lies not in the physical realm but in an indomitable spirit, intense passion, and determination aimed toward goals.

Pattern

The entrepreneurs in this book all decorate their own innovation in patterns. They base this on purpose, passion, and personality. But in a bigger sense, these patterns become models or guides for others to follow. The particulars of their patterns differ greatly, and in fact that individuality is the nature of an entrepreneur. They cultivate new ground and put together new combinations of solutions—or maybe they come upwith just one that no one has ever configured in such away. I’d like to say that they ‘‘build a bettermousetrap’’—but in essence, they eradicate the need for mousetraps altogether by figuring out a way to decrease the populations of mice!

Instead of just trying to alleviate the symptoms of problems, their organizations are trying to find the societal patterns that will unlock the clues to solving the underlying issues. To create significant and long-lasting changes, social entrepreneurs must understand and often alter the social system that creates and sustains the problems in the first place. This way of looking upstream toward solving the root cause of a problem is far more sustainable than looking downstream by trying to put a patch on the outcome. To borrow from public health parlance, ‘‘It is not enough to cure the symptom—for a cure to be sustainable, you must treat the underlying illness. If not, the cycle between cause, symptom and illness will continue to evolve causing a spiral of exacerbated and related problems.’’³

Participation

The Fellows discussed in this book all exhibit leadership abilities. They are often unanticipated leaders, but whether they perceive themselves to be leaders or not, their ability to influence people and have them believe, follow, and join is an attribute that is completely natural and a necessary component for impact. It is that quality that attracts involvement and eventually morphs into civic engagement.

Certainly our 2011 current events lesson on the strength and accomplishment of civic participation in Egypt should make it obvious why this last characteristic plays such a huge part in an Ashoka Fellows program. As an old but true adage goes, ‘‘There is no strength like strength in numbers.’’ The role of the citizen, of the parent, of the child, of the street vendor, of the teacher, of the government official, of the person who is differently abled or who has positive distractions in changing an entrenched cultural pattern are all of significant consequence. It is as much the number of participants as the quality of the participation that is essential for supported and sustained social change to take place. To think boldly, act locally, and scale globally, innovators need more than their efforts as individuals; they need to get multitudes of people involved in seeing their vision, believing in the possibility, actively supporting it, and participating in creating change themselves. Leading social entrepreneurs know that if they are going to make a scratch on history, they can’t do it alone. There is a point when they all know they must step back and let go of any ego-limiting ownership of the idea if they are to involve and instigate the rise of changemakers who can help spread the seeds of change and grow them into a movement.

The ability of social entrepreneurs to scale their programs depends on the strength of people’s participation and their capacity to create movements that are strong enough to shake the foundations of poverty and inequality the world over. But what really makes social entrepreneurs unique? Where do they get their inspiration and passion? How do they convert that inspiration into purpose and who empowers them to think in such new ways? How do we clone these people so that we end up with a better world for all?

Jugaad: A Breakthrough Growth Strategy

We reached Ramakrishna Nagar, a village in the desert of Gujarat, a state in Western India, after travelling 250 miles from Ahmedabad, the state’s capital. Our team—a Silicon Valley management consultant, a business school professor from the University of Cambridge, and the founder of a Minneapolis advisory boutique and media firm—had set out a few months earlier on an extensive research and travel project. Our mission: to discover new approaches to innovation in emerging markets such as India that could help Western firms take on the complexity of our tough and turbulent times.

We came to Gujarat tomeet with Professor AnilGupta at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in Ahmedabad.¹ Professor Gupta runs Honeybee Network, a non-profit organization that identifies and cross-pollinates grassroots innovation all across India. Over more than two decades, Honeybee had populated a database with over ten thousand inventions of grassroots entrepreneurs who have created ingenious solutions for pressing socioeconomic problems in their local communities. Professor Gupta suggested we meet with one of these rural entrepreneurs.

As we left an arrow-straight concrete highway to follow narrower and increasingly cratered gravel roads, the temperature rose to a debilitating 120 degrees. Stepping out of our air-conditioned jeep, we could feel the weight of the desert’s oppressive heat.

Mansukh Prajapati greeted us warmly outside his workshop.² A potter by trade, Prajapati had for years been experimenting with clay to produce a variety of durable goods, many of which were on display in the office outside his ‘‘lab.’’ We were parched—and grateful when he asked us if we wanted water. We had run out, and there wasn’t any sign of a store or kiosk nearby to restock. He reached around to a faucet, handed us cups, and, beaming with pride, said, ‘‘Please, have this cold water—from my fridge.’’

Baffled, we looked more closely at the terra-cotta box in front of us. It was made entirely of clay, except for a glass door and a plastic faucet at the bottom. While sipping the refreshingly cool water, we looked around and found no electrical cord, no battery—just clay. Amused by our expressions, Prajapati explained how this clay fridge—the Mitticool (mitti means ‘‘earth’’ in Hindi)—works: water from an upper chamber seeps through the side walls, cooling the lower food chamber through evaporation. The fridge consumes no electricity, is 100-percent biodegradable, and produces zero waste during its lifetime. An ingenious invention!

But this inventor and his personal story are even more impressive. Prajapati doesn’t work for NASA or Whirlpool, and he doesn’t have a Ph.D. in quantum physics or an MBA from Stanford. In fact, he didn’t even finish high school. His R&D lab—a simple open-air room with clay in various shapes and forms arrayed on the floor and an oven tucked away in the corner—is a far cry from the sprawling campuses of GE and Whirlpool, which swarm with hundreds of engineers and scientists.

In 2001, an earthquake had devastated Prajapati’s village and the surrounding area. Reading a report of the devastation in the local newspaper, he noticed a photo caption: ‘‘Poor man’s fridge broken!’’ The photo featured a smashed earthen pot commonly used by villagers to fetch water and keep it cool. And though the newspaper had called it a fridge in jest, it triggered Prajapati’s first eureka moment. Why not use clay, he thought, to make a real fridge for villagers—one that looks like a typical fridge, but is more affordable and doesn’t need electricity? Over five hundred million Indians live without reliable electricity, including most of the people in Prajapati’s village.³ The positive health and lifestyle benefits of owning a fridge in a desert village where fruit, vegetables, and dairy are available only intermittently would be tremendous.

Prajapati’s training as a potter, coupled with his intuition, told him that he was on to something. He experimented for several months and eventually had a viable version of the Mitticool that he began selling to people in his own village. The fridge—which costs around US$50—was a hit. Prajapati worked tirelessly on design improvements, and began selling Mitticools across India, and then internationally. He couldn’t keep up with the rising demand and had to find ways to scale up—fast.

Then he had a second eureka moment. Why not transform pottery from an artisanal craft into an industrial process? He could leverage his traditional knowledge of pottery to mass-produce goods that met modern consumer needs. So Prajapati first developed an entirely new and more efficient method of working with clay. Then he began training women in his village in these industrial pottery techniques and finally hired them to work in his new factory. Soon a ‘‘mini’’ Industrial Revolution in pottery was launched in this remote Indian village.

Mitticool was the first product that Prajapati mass-produced in his factory. He soon built other products from clay, such as a nonstick frying pan that retains heat longer than other frying pans and costs a mere US$2. From one man and one idea has grown a frugal yet fruitful industry, one that employs large numbers of people in his own community and serves consumers in India and abroad. Prajapati’s groundbreaking inventions, which deliver more value at less cost, have earned him accolades from all over the world—including from the president of India. And Forbes magazine recently named him among the most influential rural Indian entrepreneurs, one of few to have made an impact on the lives of so many.⁴

Jugaad: The Gutsy Art of Improvising an Ingenious Solution

The Mitticool, an idea born out of adverse circumstances, shows how a resilient mindset can transform scarcity into opportunity. Combining limited resources and a never-say-die attitude, Prajapati tapped into his empathy and passion for his fellow community members to conjure up an ingenious solution that improved lives in Gujarat and beyond. Not only did he produce a cheap and effective cooling device, but he also created jobs for dozens of undereducated women. In doing so, Prajapati is both driving environmental and socioeconomic sustainability in his community and ensuring the financial sustainability of his own business. Prajapati embodies the true spirit of jugaad.

Jugaad is a colloquial Hindi word that roughly translates as ‘‘an innovative fix; an improvised solution born from ingenuity and cleverness.’’ Jugaad is, quite simply, a unique way of thinking and acting in response to challenges; it is the gutsy art of spotting opportunities in the most adverse circumstances and resourcefully improvising solutions using simple means. Jugaad is about doing more with less. (We feature articles and videos on jugaad on our companion website, JugaadInnovation.com.)

Jugaad is practiced by almost all Indians in their daily lives to make the most of what they have. Jugaad applications include finding new uses for everyday objects—Indian kitchens are replete with empty Coke or Pepsi bottles reused as ad-hoc containers for dried legumes or condiments—or inventing new utilitarian tools using everyday objects, like amakeshift truck cobbled together with a diesel engine slapped onto a cart (interestingly, the origin of the word jugaad, in Punjabi, literally describes such makeshift vehicles).

The word jugaad is also applied to any use of an ingenious way to ‘‘game the system.’’ For instance, millions of cellphone users in India rely on ‘‘missed calls’’ to communicate messages to each other using a prearranged protocol between the caller and receiver: think of this as free textless text messaging. For example, your carpooling partner may give you a ‘‘missed call’’ in the morning indicating he has just left his house and is on his way to pick you up.⁵ Hence, theword jugaad carries a slightly negative connotation for some. But by and large, the entrepreneurial spirit of jugaad is practiced by millions in India simply to improvise clever—and completely legitimate—solutions to everyday problems.

In this book, we delve into the frugal and flexible mindset of thousands of ingenious entrepreneurs and enterprises practicing jugaad to creatively address critical socioeconomic issues in their communities. Jugaad innovators like Mansukh Prajapati view severe constraints, such as a lack of electricity, not as a debilitating challenge but as an opportunity to innovate and overcome these very constraints.

Wicked Problems

A wicked problem is a social or cultural problem that is difficult or impossible to solve for as many as four reasons: incomplete or contradictory knowledge, the number of people and opinions involved, the large economic burden, and the interconnected nature of these problems with other problems. Poverty is linked with education, nutrition with poverty, the economy with nutrition, and so on. These problems are typically offloaded to policy makers, or are written off as being too cumbersome to handle en masse. Yet these are the problems—poverty, sustainability, equality, and health and wellness—that plague our cities and our world and that touch each and every one of us. These problems can be mitigated through the process of design, which is an intellectual approach that emphasizes empathy, abductive reasoning, and rapid prototyping.

Horst Rittel, one of the first to formalize a theory of wicked problems, cites ten characteristics of these complicated social issues:

1. Wicked problems have no definitive formulation. The problem of poverty in Texas is grossly similar but discretely different from poverty in Nairobi, so no practical characteristics describe "poverty."
2. It’s hard, maybe impossible, to measure or claim success with wicked problems because they bleed into one another, unlike the boundaries of traditional design problems that can be articulated or defined.
3. Solutions to wicked problems can be only good or bad, not true or false. There is no idealized end state to arrive at, and so approaches to wicked problems should be tractable ways to improve a situation rather than solve it.
4. There is no template to follow when tackling a wicked problem, although history may provide a guide. Teams that approach wicked problems must literally make things up as they go along.
5. There is always more than one explanation for a wicked problem, with the appropriateness of the explanation depending greatly on the individual perspective of the designer.
6. Every wicked problem is a symptom of another problem. The interconnected quality of socio-economic political systems illustrates how, for example, a change in education will cause new behavior in nutrition.
7. No mitigation strategy for a wicked problem has a definitive scientific test because humans invented wicked problems and science exists to understand natural phenomena.
8. Offering a "solution" to a wicked problem frequently is a "one shot" design effort because a significant intervention changes the design space enough to minimize the ability for trial and error.
9. Every wicked problem is unique.
10. Designers attempting to address a wicked problem must be fully responsible for their actions.¹

Based on these characteristics, not all hard-to-solve problems are wicked, only those with an indeterminate scope and scale. So most social problems—such as inequality, political instability, death, disease, or famine—are wicked. They can’t be "fixed." But because of the role of design in developing infrastructure, designers can play a central role in mitigating the negative consequences of wicked problems and positioning the broad trajectory of culture in new and more desirable directions. This mitigation is not an easy, quick, or solitary exercise. While traditional circles of entrepreneurship focus on speed and agility, designing for impact is about staying the course through methodical, rigorous iteration. Due to the system qualities of these large problems, knowledge of science, economics, statistics, technology, medicine, politics, and more are necessary for effective change. This demands interdisciplinary collaboration, and most importantly, perseverance.

A Large-Scale Distraction

Why don’t we already focus our efforts on wicked problems? It seems that our powerful companies and consultancies have become distracted by a different type of problem: differentiation. Innovation describes some form of differentiation or newness. But in product design and product development, tiered releases and differentiation often replace innovation, although they often are claimed as such. Consider the automotive industry, where vehicles in an existing brand are introduced each year with only subtle aesthetic or feature changes. For example, except for slight interior changes and a few new safety features, the 2012 Ford F-150 is the same as the vehicle offered the year before.² This phenomenon also is true of other industries, such as toys, appliances, consumer electronics, fashion, even foods, beverages, and services.

This idea of constant but meaningless change drives a machine of consumption, where advertisers pressure those with extra purchasing power into unnecessary upgrades through a fear of being left behind. Consultants and product managers craft product roadmaps that describe the progressive qualities of incremental changes. In fact, it’s considered a best practice and a standard operating procedure to launch subsequent releases of the same product—with minor cosmetic changes—in subsequent months after the original product’s launch. For example, between its 1990 launch and the end of 2004, Canon released 11 versions of its Rebel camera (in 1990, 1992, 1993, 1996, 1999, February and September of 2002, March and September of 2003, April and September of 2004).³ And Apple has released a new version of the iPod every year since its 2001 launch.⁴

This constant push is characterized as a "release cycle"—the amount of time between versions of a product reaching the market. For most of industrialized history, a release cycle for a product was a year or more; complicated offerings like vehicles typically took three or more years from product conception to launch. But technology has afforded advances not only in our products but in the way we make them, so the release cycle has shrunk—a lot. Advances in tooling and manufacturing, the influx of cheap and generic pre-made components, and the ability for software-based firmware upgrades have accelerated product release cycles to three to six months.

Tooling ensures only incremental design change. It describes the process of creating individual, giant machines that will cut, grind, injection-mold, and robotically create a particular product. The tools used to produce an Apple computer are unique to (and probably owned by) Apple, and their production is one of the most expensive parts of the product development process. For example, a simple, small die-cast tool to produce 50,000 low-quality aluminum objects may cost $25,000. It’s in the company’s best interest to use the tool as many times as possible before it begins to fall apart, so the tool begins to act as a design constraint for future product releases. Put another way, if our tool was designed to produce 50,000 objects, and we’ve only made and sold 25,000, it makes financial sense for the next version of our product to use the same tool.

Original Equipment Manufacturing (OEM) contributes to the increased speed of product cycles and is another deterrent to quality and innovation. These are generic parts that manufacturers can use rather than producing their own, decreasing the time to market by skipping the tooling process. For example, a camera company can select OEM camera bezels and internal components. After adding the logo to the sourced materials, this hypothetical company can begin shipping cameras. The company can then differentiate its OEM parts by investing time in software, adding digital features and functions to physical products to distinguish these products.

The primary driver behind incremental, mostly cosmetic innovation and a constant push of releases that leverage OEM parts is simple: quarterly profits. Every three months, Fortune 500 companies report their earnings to investors. If a company reports losses—or even less-than-expected gains—the price of a stock drops, investors lose money, and those with the most shares lose the most money. So stockholders want the company to make as much money as possible in three-month increments. And these short increments constrain any activities and initiatives that take longer than three months. Revolutionary products usually take much, much longer than three months to conceive, design, and build. Unlike a Version 3 product that can leverage an existing manufacturing plant, process, and supply and distribution chains, a new product’s infrastructure must be built from scratch.

People who work at big companies try to create these revolutionary products. But each time profits are reported, the inevitable reorganization occurs—management’s attempt to show investors increased productivity, refined or repositioned strategy, and controlled spending. This reorganization can literally move people to another area of a company or to another company altogether, and in this movement, product development initiatives are lost. Witness the early death of Microsoft Kin or HP’s TouchPad—products that internal reorganizations removed from the marketplace before they could prove their efficacy. The Kin barely lasted forty-eight days on the market⁵, while TouchPad was canceled after seven weeks⁶; discussions of their death typically focus on internal fighting, misalignment with a given market strategy, cost minimization, or confusion about the products’ position within the brand—rather than on the products themselves.

Ultimately, then, companies and individuals engaged in mass production are incented to drive prices down, produce the same thing over and over, innovate slowly, create differentiation in product lines only through cosmetic changes and minor feature augmentations, and to relentlessly keep making stuff. If we look to major brands and corporations to manage the negative consequences resulting from their work or even to drive social change and innovation, we’ll be discouraged. Social change requires companies to escape the constant drive towards quarterly profits. Even those who find profitability in the social sector—and there are countless examples—require a longer iteration period than three months, so social change is destined to be ignored by the large, publically traded corporations that possess most of the wealth and capability.

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Women Leaders: Consider Yourself Asked

Women often find it harder to make the leap into campaigns because many of us remain the primary caregivers for our children and our parents, so family time is harder to let go. And public attitudes remain stereotypical, even among close supporters. I remember receiving an award at the pre-Columbus Day luncheon of the Irish-Israeli-Italian Society of San Francisco during my days as a deputy prosecutor. There I was, my speech all lined up about the caring traditions of Trócaire, Tikkun Olam, and Caritas when a family friend approached my table announcing loudly, "I’m praying for your husband." My response, thinking she mistook me for one of my married sisters: "It’s Christine; I don’t have a husband." "I know," she replied, "that’s why I am praying for him!" My colleagues roared with laughter. One who has since gone on to elected office herself said, "When people ask me where my husband is, I say, ‘I don’t know, but if you find him tell him I’m looking for him.’"

It’s not just pressure to have a family—it is pressure from a family member. More recently, two female candidates dealt with family pressure. One was starting her campaign when her mother asked her, "Who’ll take care of your children?" (Translation: "Not Grandma.") The other got a call from home that her daughter’s response to mom contemplating a primary was to dye her hair "one of the primary colors." (Translation: "Mom, stay home.") These are quite legitimate issues—and ones we encounter every day. Primary caregivers of small children find that before we can accept any opportunity, our first question is about childcare. I traveled to over twenty states with my infant daughter, and each boot camp from halfway across my hometown to halfway around the world began with: "How will I care for Isabella?" One person asked me, "Why don’t you bring your nanny?" "I am the nanny," I replied. Every primary caregiver has to answer that childcare question, so candidates must remember this is not a trick question, just a very public one.

A Brown University study addressed the issue of women candidates with a report that asked "Why Don’t Women Run for Office?"- The researchers found that women are less likely than men to have received the suggestion to run for office from party and elected officials, political activists, or family and friends; yet when women receive external support from formal and informal political and nonpolitical sources, they are twice as likely to run.⁷

Ellen Malcolm, founder of EMILY’s List, a national network of 100,000 members who recruit, train, and support Democratic pro-choice women candidates, says the Brown study shows that people who care about public service should encourage others to run. The theory behind EMILY’s List—EMILY stands for Early Money Is Like Yeast—is that early networking and institutional support helps the campaign "dough" rise. Malcolm says establishing a pipeline for women to run is essential because "progress doesn’t happen in a moment, but in battle after battle for our values." Malcolm’s message to potential candidates: "Consider yourself asked."⁸

This sentiment is echoed by Florida congressional candidate Annette Tadeo, now with the Women’s Campaign Fund, who explained during our joint presentation to the Florida Young Democrats, "Women are not asked to run. A woman with a PhD in education won’t run for School Board because she will think she is not qualified, but a man without that degree or kids in the school system will run. Because we need to encourage more women, the Women’s Leadership Fund site established http://www.Sheshouldrun.com for people to nominate people (or them- selves) to run."⁹

These networks are essential as women candidates and opinion leaders find the environment changing as the novelty of female leaders wears off. The feminist Barbara Lee Family Foundation commissioned a poll to study voter attitudes and research female candidates’ campaigns. Some results are striking:

Follow Your Personal Code of Conduct

First and foremost, you have to be yourself. All too often, people will get into trouble when, rather than being confident in their service mission, they adapt their views to more experienced people’s in exchange for a possible advancement, endorsement, or contribution. Bad idea. Your stated values, ethics, and code of conduct should guide your behavior and your decisions on and off the campaign trail. First and foremost, you must be yourself and present the same call to service mission to everyone.

People may offer contributions to your organization, cause, or candidate, in exchange for a particular outcome. Stop the conversation. No contribution is worth your soul, much less your liberty and reputation. Other people may urge you to use negative information about the opposition or will tell unsavory details of their conversations with other people. A simple rule applies: "If they’ll do it for you, they’ll do it to you." Once you ditch your old supporters for new friends, your new friends will know how little you value friendship and could ditch you on the same grounds. Think long and hard before you abandon your values, your friends, or your commitments.

When you undertake the leadership of a campaign, you become responsible for anything that goes out to the public. Establish clear ethical standards and expectations for practices such as fact- finding and fund-raising, and clear policies for endorsements, questionnaires, and Internet use—and stick to them.

Reprinted from the book Campaign Bootcamp 2.0 by Christine Pelosi, with the permission of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. 2012. www.bkconnection.com