Legacy problems: potential harms of social r&d (social innovation) practices

HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT THE HARM YOUR SOCIAL R&D PROJECT MIGHT CAUSE?

First published Aug 8, 2022;

written by  Louise Adongo and Published by Future of Good

Experimentation is good, right?

In the social purpose world, it’s true that organizations have long been constrained by funding that values practiced methods over innovation, and the uncertainty that comes with it. Meanwhile, we’re in an era of massive, accelerated change, and increasingly complex social challenges. The status quo won’t cut it anymore.

But what happens when we lose sight of people in favour of innovation? When, for example, we go into a community with intent to prototype a ‘promising’ brand-new program, try out brand-new ways of delivering that program, learn a lot of useful information — then leave? What if the program fails? For whom does it hold promise? What promises? And who bears the brunt and costs of the ‘safe’ failures which inevitably happen in experimentation and innovation?

What can happen is this: the members of that community feel like — and, effectively, become — test subjects, rather than collaborators toward their own wellbeing.

Late last year, Lydia Phillips and Emma Beukema wrote a great article on embracing a culture of failing forward. I mostly agree with it, but pull out this quote to unpack a bit further my reflections: “What if we created community impact incubators or action labs to problem solve and experiment? We could prototype, use feedback loops, learn best practices from failing, and continue revising the formula to create solutions.”

This sentiment, one I have heard expressed in different ways over the last decade in my time in social R&D, sounded really generative to me at first (and until) I started to really listen to the ways in which people in communities were saying, ‘Actually, no, this is not working for us, and can be harmful.’ 

* * *

In the latter part of last year, I had the good fortune to spend some time participating in conversations which continually surfaced potentially harmful, particularly if unexamined, patterns of social R&D’s tendency to undertake short-term and therefore necessarily shallow experimentation and prototyping on what are wicked problems — problems like climate change, early childhood education, affordable housing, and various public health issues.

In each context, a similar set of questions emerged from participants and practitioners alike. (To be fair, though, there seemed to be much more courage to name the problematic ways in which social innovation was happening in-real-time among those in the community — those most impacted by these patterns — than with the practitioners who were funded to undertake the work.)

A sampling of the types of questions that arose:

·       What is the longer-term plan for this initiative? What do you plan to do with our ideas that we have spent time gathering and sharing with you? What happens at the end of the funding period?

·       Is it ethical to unearth deeply held and seated systemic inequities during problem framing, only to discard suggestions for prototypes — and not attend well to PTSD and generational trauma in the pursuit of the ‘promising’ prototypes to blog about or scale? 

Or as asked in this podcast : “How do you plan to stop the bleeding?”

·       How might we continue to engage with and activate community members after the work is done, rather than engage for a specific purpose and then end the project — just when trust and desire to co-create is finally established? How do we ensure the timeline of these activities reflects the longer buy-in often required, particularly for equity-deserving groups? 

·       How do we protect practitioners who are also community members, who often must leverage their own relationships to establish deeper connections?

At Inspiring Communities, an equity-centred systems change organization based in Nova Scotia but working across Atlantic Canada, we’ve been asking ourselves an important question lately: 

What might we consider doing differently to reduce or mitigate the potential harm from the way in which we structure our testing, iteration and experiments in communities (aka social innovation)?

In answering this question, there are a few things I’d note: 

First, not all work in the community requires experimentation, and for purposes of social innovation it really should be focussed on intractable problems. I think there are many of us who recognize that to swing the pendulum too far in any direction — experimentation or status quo — is to dishonour the deep wisdom already in community.

And secondly, the change we seek (in systems) is not sustained by short-term project funding with start and end dates for ‘experiments’ that don’t align well with the time it takes to build relationships (and trust) to undertake the work of the project successfully (and who determines what success is — an op-ed for another day). 

Regardless, when we do need to try something new in contexts involving community members, we are learning that there are ways to engage in innovation and social R&D much more responsively and responsibly. It does require a different level of presence, curiosity, attentiveness to what those most impacted are telling us and a reset on the arc of the project timeline.

The beauty of this social innovation/social purpose sector is that we are here to ask the difficult questions and try to work on the difficult things.

I call myself in with this piece, as I hope to call our sector in, to have a conversation about some things we might want to reflect on doing differently and be more generative about. I’m hopeful and energized that we can, because we are in the specific field where we can be creative, nimble, and generative as we try to “do the difficult things” and confront the systems that are not equitable.

For the next few months, thanks to a partnership opportunity with MiTACS and SI Canada, Morgan Rose from Newfoundland will be working with Inspiring Communities as we research social labs across Canada. We’d like to map what social labs are learning about more generative practices and how it is showing up in their work, and we will share what we learn as that research unfolds.