To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing. Raymond Williams
After a decade or more of increased spending across the social space, we still face a plethora of urgent, severe, systemic and seemingly intractable social issues. Einstein, who knew a thing or two about breakthrough thinking, famously stated that ‘no problem can be solved by the same level of consciousness that created it.’
If we heed Einstein’s words and look at most of our social problems under the steely gaze of systemic thinking their root causes are revealed to be, by and large, psychological – whether they are the assumptions and beliefs of the end-users of services; those of the people who create the problems in the first place; or those of the folk that work so hard to help solve them. By being so mental, so hidden and so unmeasurable, they become eminently unsexy to discuss, let alone fund or tackle. So unfortunately the welfare systems do what they are good at – managing the chaos – and rarely penetrating to, and resolving, the root causes.
In the near future we are likely to be threatened by problems of significantly greater magnitude than even the ones we are currently faced with: sever global water shortages, rapid and poorly planned urban growth, global shortages of quality food, further environmental degradation, peak oil, increased ‘post-industrial’ diseases such as obesity, heart disease and stress-related illnesses, increase in poverty and malnutrition; rising rates of depression, anxiety and mental stress and manageable illnesses such as malaria or TB; resource waters, ethnic conflict and human rights abuses and above all potentially lethal climate change effects including further species extinction and possible our own.
The most successful corporations in the private sector would never let the situation become so pressing; nor allow the barriers outlined above to remain in place. They know that to create the disruptive innovations that give them a disproportionately large market share in the future they must ‘think differently’. In doing so they successfully challenge long-held assumptions to imagine that computers can be playful (Apple’s iMac) or that flights can be basic and cheap (EasyJet or Jet Blue). It is only by challenging the conventions and myths that maintain the status quo that radical innovations can come into being.
Now is the time to bring this wisdom into the social sphere and think anew about the real truth behind our most pressing issues. We can achieve much headway if we have the courage and foresight to place the gloriously challenging human psyche at the centre of many policy initiatives and social innovations. We can reinvent the future if we bring together experts, end-beneficiaries, businesses, private and third sector leaders to collaborate on both understanding the root causes of problems and developing breakthrough solutions to them. We can crack the big ideas we need if we incentivize and support those with passion and skill to explore, trial and pilot the most extreme ideas that might just work. Sectoral thinking, conventional approaches and ‘business as usual’ are powerless and redundant in the fight for humanity’s future.
This is not about huge new welfare programs but about smart, strategic and systemic ideas that transform things. As the International Future Forum wrote in a recent report: ‘You cannot control complex systems, only disturb them. And even a small disturbance, artfully designed can have large systemic effects.’9
If we truly want to serve society by bringing to life the kinds of ideas that can not just manage but permanently disappear our problems, we must question the assumptions that guide so much policy and so many social programs. If we want to create the significant changes that so many are working so hard to see, and not merely pass our problems from one administration to the next, from one part of the system to another, we have no choice but to think differently. The tools exist. Just not the mindsets to wield them. We don’t need deep pockets to do this. Just deep thinking. We hope the 20 recommendations below, and this paper as a whole, can stimulate the radical reinvention of the future that so many of us are so collectively committed to.
Good stuff!
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