Social innovation is about thinking like an ecosystem—a very big ecosystem. If we take an eagle-eye view of our social landscape, we see social systems, economies, and the environment under stress. We see that many of these systems are headed for crisis if they continue down their current path. We see accelerating demands on diminishing resources. The challenges are interrelated and complex, and there are no obvious solutions.

We also see green shoots of innovation—people within and outside institutions trying new approaches, collaborating across boundaries, and prototyping promising alternatives. Like any green shoots, these innovations need the right conditions to grow and evolve. They need an environment that stimulates rigorous experimentation and then rewards and sustains success.

Social innovation is about redirecting the resources we have towards generating the outcomes we need. Everyone has a role in this effort. Government, the private sector, and academic institutions can encourage, invest in, and help sustain a culture of social innovation, just as they have generously fostered business and technological innovation in the past. In the words of Tim Brodhead, former CEO of Canada’s McConnell Foundation, the community sector also needs to shift its role, taking on “a new self-image, not just as the caring sector but as the creative sector.”

The shift of thinking toward social innovation is driven not only by an entrepreneurial spirit and the long view, but also by immediate financial realities. In the aftermath of the recent financial crisis, the UK institutionalized a social innovation agenda at the political and government levels. Geoff Mulgan, now head of NESTA (the UK’s National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts) and former policy advisor for Tony Blair, has become an influential champion of social innovation. In a 2009 TED talk, he outlined a compelling argument for social innovation as a strategic response to the financial crisis in his country and beyond—rather than continuing to pump endless funds into failing systems, invest at least a portion of those resources in human ingenuity.

In a rapidly growing wave of initiatives around the world, governments, business, academia, NGOs, and foundations are working together to set up social innovation labs, encourage social enterprise, and create more innovation-friendly tools of accountability and sources of funding.

In Canada, SiG (Social Innovation Generation), a national network of partners dedicated to fostering a “culture of continuous innovation,” has been a leader in this field, tying together research, education, policy advocacy, and hands-on practice across the country—or at least as far east as Montreal.

This June, ALIA and its partners will host SiG in Nova Scotia, as we shine a spotlight on initiatives that apply “ecosystem thinking” and “rigorous, systematic innovation” to complex social challenges. At the ALIA Summer Institute we will feature Nova Scotia-grown examples of social innovation, while also hearing about experiments and lessons learned in other parts of the country and the world.

Social innovation is not a panacea, but it does provide a framework and way of thinking that brings together our best, sometimes dispersed, efforts into a more complete picture. It gives us a way of keeping our shared interests in focus, and it redirects precious resources towards unlocking creative potential and moving towards the future we want.

Find out more about social innovation at these ALIA events:

LEADERSHIP STARTS HERE
Resilience and Innovation in Turbulent Times
June 18, 9:00 am – 4:00 pm

With Peter Block, Tim Brodhead, Danny Graham, and Frances Westley.
Fee: $195, includes lunch.

HOW THE WORLD IS CHANGED
Seeing and Shifting Patterns in Systems
June 18-23

With Vickie Cammack, Tim Draimin, Al Etmanski & Cheryl Rose

A skill-building track co-sponsored by Social Innovation Generation (SiG) within the four-day Leadership Intensive.
Fee: $2500, includes all meals. Contact us for special team rates and information about the Atlantic Canada Scholarship Fund.

Visit the Summer Institute website here.

Download a program flyer here.

I glide ….for a moment and whoosh, my feet shoot up in the air. A stranger swoops down and picks me up. I start again, thrilled by each tiny, perilous moment of gliding. A stride or two later I am down again. And so it goes. Painful falls spurred by the possibility of me in a red velvet skating dress. It was all just a matter of balance.

And it still is. It strikes me that balancing the fine edge of pain and possibility is what is being demanded of me today. I must hold the pain of a planet in peril alongside the promise of technology; a health care system that has forgotten healing alongside the global increase in longevity; a photo shopped self image alongside my deepened appreciation for the beauty of aging; a society consumed by consumption alongside the inspiration of the love based occupy movement fuelled by young people who can see beyond the destructive divisions of us and them.

Seeking balance is a surprisingly disruptive act. Finding balance creates something different from the forces being balanced. As we skate, we simultaneously slip between gravity and motion to find ourselves in flow. As I teeter into 2012, I seek the equanimity to hold the pain of an unjust world without being consumed by it, alongside the promise of a better world without being blinded by it. I seek the strength to live with the paradox of our wounded and beautiful world, knowing balance is never a steady state but the space in between.

***

Vickie Cammack is President and CEO of Tyze Personal Networks, a social purpose business that creates private on-line networks that connect families, friends, neighbours and care providers. Vickie is co-leading a track on How the World Is Changed: Seeing and Shifting Patterns in Systems at the 2012 ALIA Summer Institute.

Bernard said he expected there would be some kind of financial collapse in Europe before the year was over. He also said, “The silver lining in collapse is the opportunity for systemic change. When collapse happens we have a moment. Either we do it or we don’t.”

These prophetic words have stayed with me. How do we prepare for such a moment? How do we prepare when we never know exactly what’s coming? Aren’t we, in varying degrees and on multiple fronts, already experiencing the beginnings of a collapse, an undoing of the world we’ve known? How do we become more resilient through all the turbulence of these times?

These questions have shaped my listening over the past month. They have informed conversations about upcoming ALIA programs as well as our work here in Nova Scotia. They have found resonance in chance encounters and readings. They have been at the centre of a personal reflection. Following are a few highlights gleaned from all these sources. Please feel free to add your own.

Be well rooted

On an unseasonably mild afternoon last weekend, I went for a stroll in Point Pleasant Park. The coastline there is an enduring reminder of nature’s force. One night in September 2003, Hurricane Juan blew through Halifax, uprooting literally millions of trees. The trees were especially vulnerable because the topsoil in Nova Scotia is thin in many places, having been scoured away during the last Ice Age.

What does it mean to be well rooted in this digital, migratory age? When Erica Fox’s article “Finding Our Way Back from Exile,” arrived in my inbox, I recognized a piece of the puzzle. Erica talks about the frustration that comes from seeking stability in a world that is constantly moving. Instead, she suggests, we can “find a stable place to stand on the inner ground.” For many of us, that inner ground becomes strengthened through some kind of ongoing practice of reflection or meditation.

We can also be rooted in our sense of purpose and values, our connection to place and to what is important to us. When these connections are strong, we are better prepared to weather any storm. We are less likely to be blown about by extremes and more likely to be present to opportunities as they arise.

It turns out the same can be true for banks. When the collapse of junk bonds sent the world’s banks reeling, community-based banks such as Triodos in Europe and VanCity in Canada experienced a surge of growth. Why? Because their co-operative model meant that they were grounded in their communities and their values. They were transparent and accountable, which protected them from reckless investments. They were seen as trustworthy, and so new customers flocked in their direction.

Have useful ideas (and models and prototypes) lying around

In her seminal book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein documented the philosophical and historical roots of our current crisis. The book’s title is drawn from the neo-conservative strategy to use moments of society-wide shock to push forward privatization and deregulation agendas. These ideas would be “lying around” ready for the opportune moment, and in some cases brought hand-in-hand with politicians who helped create such moments of crisis. Now that we are witnessing the full-scale consequences of these agendas, we may rightly recoil from such dubious intent.

However, in a sense, this strategy is akin to what Bernard was pointing to—the opportunity within crisis. In this case, we are not talking about creating crisis, nor about agendas that open the door to amassing private wealth for a few at the expense of everyone else. Our greatest opportunity now is to use the crisis we are already experiencing to realign systems, or introduce new ones, in a way that shifts society in a more sustainable and equitable direction.

So what do we want to have lying around? Ideas and prototypes that may live at the fringes when the status quo is working well enough, but that can be picked up and scaled up when the time is right. There are countless examples of these, from new economic models and indicators to online education and community-based healthcare networks. The point is not to despair if these green shoots are slow to catch on and if the momentum of the prevailing system seems overwhelming. The point is to continue developing the ideas, applying and testing them, so that when there is an opening they are ready to go.

Get connected

Two resilience-builders I’ve learned about in the past month come from opposite sides of the globe. One is Tyze, an online platform for person-centred care networks, founded by Vickie Cammack in Vancouver, Canada (Vickie will be co-leading one of the tracks at the ALIA Summer Institute). The other is the Australian network Family by Family. In both cases, a light infrastructure facilitates people helping people, which is empowering to individuals, families, and communities. As Peter Block and John McKnight remind us in their recent blog, “All that is required is a shift in thinking from consumer to citizen. From ‘You are valuable to the economy when you shop’ to ‘You are a neighbor who has something important to contribute.’”

Networked citizens, networked leadership, networked resources, networked learning…these can all be harnessed for a more resilient society. Recently I attended a neighborhood viewing of an inspiring talk by Jeremy Rifkin, who has been closely involved with Germany’s renewable energy program. In that country, local energy production is being married to the internet, creating smart, flexible energy networks. This way, solar and wind energy, which are intermittent, can be continuously redistributed according to supply and demand. This infrastructure, combined with political will and a feed-in tariff, has taken Germany into a new era of energy independence and economic growth that is setting an example for the rest of the world. Renewable energy installations already produce more than 20 per cent of Germany’s electricity, and the green economy has created 350,000 jobs. The spirit of innovation has crossed into other sectors, creating a “sustainable revolution” that encompasses design, architecture, urban planning, and fashion.

By connecting the dots, Germany has become a source of “good ideas” and prototypes, ready to be adopted by other governments and/or demanded by their citizens. However, as Rifken points out, even when other governments pick up such winning ideas, they may be still trying to implement them using old, more centralized, linear ways of thinking. The lesson from Germany is to “think like a network,” introduce minimal enabling conditions, and then learn and innovate as you go.

Marry entrepreneurial spirit with the common good

We lose resilience when we become fractured, fragmented, when the parts lose awareness of the whole. That is why so many of the new approaches to revitalizing economies and communities start with bringing the parts back together.

For example, both the private and nonprofit sectors have a role to play in a well-functioning society. But traditionally these two players tend to lose sight of the whole picture, instead looking through a specialized, narrow mindset. Business measures ROI in dollars and ignores externalities; nonprofits adapt to a funding culture in a way that dilutes its innovative capacity and wastes public money. Both are contributing to a system that is increasingly unsustainable. Both become defensive, blaming the other for society’s ills. In times of crisis, these tendencies become exaggerated.

What happens when we bring together the best of the parts? Hybrids such as social entrepreneurship and social finance are finding a place under the broad umbrella of social innovation. In Canada, a leading champion and supporter of this approach is a partnership called Social Innovation Generation. This June SiG will be visiting the ALIA Summer Institute, bringing their expertise, research, examples, and inquiring minds. (See, for example, the track How the World Is Changed.) For SiG, cross-sector collaboration and innovation are all about resilience. Their funding partner, the McConnell Family Foundation, defines resilience this way:

A resilient system is one that remains healthy and successful while responding to shocks or disturbances. In other words, without losing its essential qualities, it adapts. This goes beyond simply coping, or “bouncing back” to a prior state; it involves learning and integrating new and old in a fresh synthesis.

What strikes me about this definition is that it brings rootedness and innovation together. In Nova Scotia, many of us are now talking about the importance of collectively naming our essential qualities—and thus renewing our collective narrative—as an important step in creating the “fresh synthesis” that will guide us into the future.

Celebrate

In the year 1606, in the dark days of a Nova Scotia winter, the French explorer Samuel de Champlain instituted the Order of Good Cheer—a policy of feasting and celebrating—in the tiny frontier settlement of Port-Royal. This was a survival strategy, for many of the original settlers had not made it through the previous winter. The fresh feast food provided by the Mik’maq people was an important part of the equation, as it fended off scurvy, but so was the rousing of spirits in the middle of a long uncertain winter.

As the McConnell quote above reminds us, true resilience is more audacious than “simply coping” and enduring through times of uncertainty. Perhaps the greatest opportunity presented by a disruption in the status quo is that we can switch off auto-pilot and step off the treadmill of serving systems that ultimately don’t serve us. We can rediscover abundance within the ordinary, wealth within simplicity, and celebration without reason.

Postscript

There is always a danger of oversimplifying complex situations and ideas, for the sake of finding a hand-hold. There is no telling what lies ahead and what it will take to be “ready” to turn crisis into opportunity.

I am reminded of another conversation over a decade ago with Peter Senge, just weeks after the shock of 9/11. As we were watching a political agenda driven by fear and opportunism unfold, I had an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. I said to Peter, “Don’t you think it’s too late to really change anything in this world?” He responded, “Nobody knows. The only thing we do know is that it’s too late to wait.”

•••
Susan Szpakowski is Executive Director of the ALIA Institute and author of ALIA’s Little Book of Practice.

One of the best examples of this temperament that I ever met was a boy named Peter on a Sea School voyage. He was barely 14 when he came on board, and he was young for his age. He was competent and quick to learn everything. He was quiet, easygoing and terribly homesick. He cried a lot from being so homesick, but never said he wanted to leave the trip. He never complained about anything, and often stepped up to help his shipmates with knots, navigation, setting the tarp up at night, all the things they wrestled with that he was immediately good at doing.

On the first night of the trip he was crying softly as we all sat together in the cockpit for candle talk. Not sobbing or sniffly, just a few tears on his face. He told everyone how homesick he was, but he said it was okay. The rest of the crew were very uncomfortable seeing another teenager’s tears and tried all kinds of things to make him feel better. But Peter wasn’t uncomfortable about his sadness and didn’t encourage people’s consolation. He sat up confidently, his emotion simply another presence in the circle, genuine and no big deal.

A few days later he was taking a turn as helmsman to steer the boat. It was a windy day and we were sailing for home with the wind strong and fair on the starboard quarter, which means it was nearly behind us. We roared along at our maximum speed down wave after wave after wave. The crew were exhilarated, faces laughing out from the orange and yellow hoods of their waterproof jackets, dripping now and then with the salt spray blowing over the boat. Peter had a hard job steering in those conditions. The strength of the wind kept trying to force the boat to turn, and the waves rolling under us would twist us right and left and back again. Peter had both hands on the tiller, which took some strength to manage, and he was braced against the side of the boat to keep steady, thrilled and focused. I sat next to him to coach him but he was such a quick learner that he was soon doing an excellent job on his own and I turned to look forward and enjoy the ride. I could tell by the way the boat continued to surf on the waves that he was doing just fine, and I began to talk with the rest of the crew.

After a while I turned back to check on Peter, and saw that he was crying again. Steering well, with his whole body and attention, with tears running down his cheeks. I asked him if he was homesick again and he smiled a big smile and said yes, very, he really missed his family. Then he turned forward again and continued to surf the boat down the waves.

The rest of the crew, fully caught up in their teenage worry about appearances, spent the first part of the voyage trying to fix Peter’s problem for their own sakes, so they wouldn’t have to see their own insecurity mirrored back to them by his tears. But Peter didn’t need his problem fixed. For him it was a difficulty which he accepted without embarrassment, without turning it into a problem. He seemed to hold everything, even his sadness, with a light touch. He was not struggling to protect himself behind the role of being the tough teenage boy, or the role of being the awesome sailor, or even the role of being the homesick little kid. He wasn’t struggling to protect himself in any role at all. Everything about him, even his homesickness, was simple, genuine and struggle-free.

Struggle can be exhausting, and tends to make us narrow-minded and self-protective. Not struggling to maintain a role, we can relax, and our state of mind can be big enough to accommodate whatever comes up. This was Peter’s power. Being without struggle, he was inexhaustible. Whatever came up, he could handle it.

When the other teenagers finally understood this, they were awed by Peter. They’d never seen anyone like him. They’d never seen anyone who could be so genuinely sad and so genuinely engaged, so genuinely modest and so genuinely helpful, so genuinely relaxed and so genuinely accomplishing, all at the same time. Usually people in the crew struggle at some point with having to row or being cold and wet or not liking their shipmates, but on this trip Peter’s example inspired everyone to see that they could be bigger than that. Whatever their troubles they could proceed with what they had, without turning it into a struggle.

Peter transformed that crew. He wasn’t trying to take a leadership role, but his natural leadership helped his shipmates become one of the most resilient crews I’ve ever sailed with.

***

Crane Stookey is a Tall Ship officer and leadership coach. He is also founder of the Nova Scotia Sea School, an award-winning experiential education and leadership training program. He is author of the recently published Keep Your People in the Boat: Workforce Engagement Lessons from the Sea (ALIA Press, 2012), from which this article was excerpted.