Introduction
The world faces an onslaught of urgent threats. Poverty continues to corrode hope and opportunity, disease threatens lives and well-being, intolerance marginalizes hundreds of millions and fuels genocide, political instability and corruption produce failed states and genocide, global warming continues its onward march toward environmental devastation, the global recession maintains a tight grip on inequality, and the world remains vulnerable to a host of known and yet-to-be-known catastrophes.
These threats are urgent if only because the world has little time to act before reaching tipping points that will create decades, if not centuries, of havoc. They threaten the very fabric of the world’s social, economic, and political systems, and almost certainly guarantee a declining quality of life for every citizen. They must be tackled soon.
The cover of this book makes this point perfectly. The leaves of social breakthroughs are part of the trees of new and still-vibrant breakthroughs alike, and the trees are part of the forest of change. Every leaf is nurtured by the forest as a whole, and is linked in some way to the broader effort to move from the darkness of winter through the many colors leading to a vibrant spring. The challenge is to reach the green and hold it, in part by supporting the forest as a whole.
This book is based on the notion that intractable problems can be solved if agents of change have the purpose and perseverance to confront the status quo. The path to a more just, tolerant, and equitable world is never easy, but its twists and turns can be marked and informed.
Drawing upon my own research and new insights from recent studies, the book asks three sets of questions.
- First, are we relying too heavily on lone wolves to produce social entrepreneurship and change? How do we end the definitional debate about what does and does not constitute change? And what is the entrepreneur’s role in protecting past breakthroughs? Simply asked, are we overselling social entrepreneurship as the primary, or even only, driver of social breakthroughs?
- Second, what are other drivers that can be used for social change? How do they work? What is their role in pushing through the key stages of impact? And where do they fit in the breakthrough cycle? Simply asked, have we neglected other actors in both challenging the prevailing wisdom, addressing urgent threats, and honoring the promises we make?
- Third, how do breakthroughs actually occur? What are the key steps in creating momentum toward disruption, breakthrough, and durable social change? What are the most promising targets for further research and investment? And what are the essential characteristics of robust movement through the breakthrough cycle? Simply asked, how can collaboration advance success?
Although each chapter stands separately, they all relate to the breakthrough cycle discussed in Chapter 3. Social entrepreneurship is a critically important part of the agitation needed for change, as are social safekeeping, exploring, and advocating. So is the infrastructure of change that supports social breakthrough. Viewed as a whole, this book focuses on the overall pieces that must come together to solve the world’s toughest problems.
Along the way, the book focuses on the need to protect past social breakthroughs from complacency and counterattack. Unlike business breakthroughs that sweep away entire industries with a single product, social breakthroughs rarely destroy the industries of deprivation that profit from human suffering. These industries not only survive most breakthroughs; they sometimes return to power in the very next election or war.
Defining Breakthrough
Social breakthrough is a nearly perfect term for describing the ultimate output of social action. When successful, social breakthrough pushes a fundamental change in the prevailing wisdom about who gets what, when, where, and how from a society. Social breakthrough occurs when the demand for an end to deprivation, marginalization, and inequality finally overwhelms the resistance. Some breakthroughs involve the faithful execution of new laws and treaties, others create measurable changes in public behavior, and still others actually dismantle a whole industry of deprivation by restoring human rights and liberties.
However, social breakthrough is not a synonym for social entrepreneurship or innovation. Rather, it is the destination of all social action, and involves a cycle of engagement that can act as a map for deploying resources and energy. Although a breakthrough can come from the new combinations of ideas that underpin innovation (social entrepreneurship), it can also come from the aggressive defense, delivery, and expansion of past breakthroughs (social safekeeping), careful research on trends and solutions (social exploring), and the unrelenting demand for change embedded in social networks (social advocacy). The choice of one driver over another depends entirely on the problem to be solved, not the popularity of a particular approach. The urgent threat comes first, while the choice of a particular driver for achieving impact comes second. Form follows function, path follows purpose, and driver follows destination, not vice versa.
As such, we must search for change through all means possible, whether beneath the lamppost that illuminates individual heroes or just beyond the light among those who aggregate the pressure for change. If our purpose is to change the world, we must concentrate on every driver possible, not just the ones we can see.
A Sheldonian Moment
Ironically perhaps, I came to this conclusion after attending the three-day 2009 Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship, which took place in Oxford, England. It was a remarkable event—intense, inspiring, and engaging. All the people I admire were there—Bill Drayton, Pamela Hartigan, Darell Hammond, Victoria Hale, Sally Osberg, Larry Brilliant, and even Jeff Skoll himself. I attended the forum ready to embrace social entrepreneurship as the key driver of social breakthrough and did everything I could to make the conversion. But the event convinced me otherwise.
On the one hand, the forum offered plenty of inspiration through stories and films about the heroes who work so hard to achieve social breakthroughs. The forum also featured grants to a host of social entrepreneurs, such as Bart Weetjans of Apopo, Nader Khateeb and Gidon Bromberg from EcoPeace, Martin von Hildebrand from Foudación Gaia Amazonas, Nina Smith from GoodWeave (formerly known as Rugmart International), and Jordan Kassalow from VisionSpring (formerly known as Scojo).
On the other hand, the forum was unsettling. Perhaps it was just the contrarian in me. Or perhaps it was Jeff Skoll’s speech about the state of the world. The more Skoll talked about the urgent threats facing the world, the more I wanted to be anywhere but in the historic Sheldonian Theatre where he spoke. So much money and celebration for so many wonderful start-ups—but so many frightening problems and so much deep uncertainty about the future.
The two themes are now coming together, in part because Skoll and other funders are focusing more closely on collaboration. As the Skoll Foundation argued in announcing its 2010 world forum, heroes will always be an essential source of new combinations of ideas, but catalytic collaboration is the key to eventual impact:
Catalytic collaboration is also an essential tool for achieving scale, which means harnessing enough momentum and power to bring about change. Scale is not about becoming a supersized organization, but about achieving impact. Defined as such, scaling involves a very different set of skills beyond fund-raising and organizational development. It involves “swarming a target,” playing political hardball, setting the agenda, exploiting leverage points, creating coalition where credit is shared rather than hoarded, and fighting back when the old equilibrium begins its inevitable counterattack. Social entrepreneurs surely know how to take punches—this is part of challenging the prevailing wisdom. They need to know how to deliver punches, too.
By definition, an open-source model is both porous and flexible. It cannot be an invitation-only mechanism restricted just to social entrepreneurs. It must involve every source of energy—the entrepreneurs who create new combinations of ideas; the social explorers who monitor the trends and opportunities; the social advocates who twist arms and count votes; and the social safekeepers who protect, repair, reinvent, and implement great breakthroughs.
Structure of the Book
This book is best read as my latest report from the conversation about social change. Although the book focuses first on the role of social entrepreneurship as a powerful source of new ideas, it also examines other, equally powerful drivers of social change that participate in the social breakthrough cycle.
According to many advocates of change, social entrepreneurship is the primary tool for challenging the prevailing wisdom about the human condition. But there are also old ideas that merit protection, innovation, and expansion. There has already been great progress on pulling individuals out of poverty, treating life-threatening diseases, and addressing barriers to equal rights. Social entrepreneurship offers hope for new ways of achieving great social goals, but so do social safekeeping, exploring, and advocacy.
Chapter 1: Still Searching for Social Entrepreneurship
This first chapter of this book addresses the rapidly changing definition of social entrepreneurship. Having studied the term for nearly eight years now, I remain committed to the concept. New combinations of ideas matter. However, the more I study the term, and its links to other terms such as social innovation, which I wrote about in the early 1990s, the more I resist the exclusive approach often used in the field.
My definition of the new social entrepreneurship (circa 2011) is as simple as possible: Social entrepreneurship is an essential but not exclusive driver of innovative social breakthrough. Again, it is an important driver, to be sure, and one with great potential. At the same time, it is not always the best driver for solving a given problem. Again, driver follows destination.
The chapter also explores the assumptions that underpin our understanding of social entrepreneurship—for example, the notion that social entrepreneurs usually work alone, are different from other high achievers, work in similar ways, and produce their greatest impact in new, small, and often isolated organizations. While several of these assumptions are true—social entrepreneurs do have special skills for change, for example—several are still in play.
As the chapter argues, for example, social entrepreneurship may actually come in several flavors, including “Type A” social entrepreneurship driven by the heroic, 24/7 lone wolf working within a start-up organization, and the less prominent “Type B” social entrepreneurship ignited by collaborative creativity across teams working within an existing setting. The choice of one type over another should depend entirely on the overall strategy for achieving social breakthrough—again, driver follows destination.
Chapter 2: Agitating the Prevailing Wisdom
The second chapter of this book argues that social entrepreneurship exists in a world of many options for change, including three other powerful, often neglected drivers of social breakthrough: social safekeeping, social exploring, and social advocacy. When combined with social entrepreneurship, the three increase the odds that new and old ideas alike will actually penetrate the prevailing equilibrium and survive.
Each of these four drivers has its own role in social change:
1. If the breakthrough requires a new combination of ideas for change, then social entrepreneurship is likely to be the preferred driver.
2. If the breakthrough demands the protection, repair, maintenance, fine-tuning, expansion, and further innovation of past breakthroughs, then social safekeeping is likely to be at the forefront.
3. If the breakthrough stands on an effort to anticipate key threats, monitor trends, and evaluate what does and does not work, then social exploring is likely to be the means to the end.
4. If the breakthrough achieves ultimate policy impact through lobbying, pressure, partisanship, and long-lasting social movement, then social advocacy must be engaged.
This second chapter begins with a definition of social safekeeping as a contributor to social change. The term is particularly appealing as an alternative to social service provision, which is often used to describe the day-to-day delivery of public goods and services. Contrasted with the heroic social entrepreneur, social service providers become little more than metaphorical cafeteria workers of a kind who serve the same tired food on metal trays each morning. Safekeeping challenges this traditional, sometimes unintended but still dismissive image through a job description that includes the execution, defense, repair, innovation, and expansion of breakthroughs. On the notion that the best offense is a good defense, social safekeepers must be proactive in defending the past but never protect it from needed change.
The chapter then introduces the concept of social exploring, which encompasses a range of tools for understanding past successes, anticipating alternative futures, and testing vulnerable assumptions. These exploratory tools are central for creating, hedging, and shaping strategies for achieving desired futures. They are also essential for avoiding surprise. As a professor of mine once told me, “It’s what you don’t even know that you don’t know that can hurt you.” Social exploring provides the tools for knowing.
The chapter continues with a short discussion of social advocacy as a tool for creating breakthroughs, and turns to the concept of blended agitation as a way to bring together the unique strengths of all four drivers of social change.
The chapter ends with a discussion of the need to protect the great breakthroughs that social entrepreneurs have already created. Past breakthroughs do not sustain themselves, especially in an era of retrenchment and complacency. We too often assume that past breakthroughs will take care of themselves, but unlike business entrepreneurship, which often renders existing products obsolete for good, social change is painfully easy to reverse.
Chapter 3: The Breakthrough Cycle
The third chapter of this book describes the social breakthrough cycle, which provides a new approach for framing the debate about urgent threats. The cycle is built rather like the traditional links in a logic chain, albeit with a continuous plan-do-check-act rotation. However, unlike a traditional logic chain composed of inputs, activities, outputs, and outcomes, the social breakthrough cycle involves nine stages:
1. Committing to social change through personal purpose and perseverance against potential resistance.
2. Mapping the assets and obstacles surrounding success, while developing strategies for exploiting the former and surmounting the latter.
3. Sorting the potential components of a breakthrough proposal.
4. Designing a breakthrough proposal and finding an organizational home for pursuing change.
5. Agitating the prevailing wisdom through social entrepreneurship, safekeeping, exploring, and/or advocacy.
6. Aggregating pressure for change through the creation of robust breakthrough networks.
7. Disrupting the prevailing wisdom by exploiting opportunities for impact and planning for effects.
8. Securing the breakthrough through formal and informal enactment of the breakthrough idea, whether in the form of significant policy change or new norms and expectations for a just world.
9. Protecting the breakthrough from counterattack.
This breakthrough cycle is anything but linear—there are starts and stops along the way, fine-tuning, reassessments of earlier decisions, and new calibrations of strategy in response to changing opportunities and conditions.
The chapter continues with discussions of five particularly important leverage points for creating a new prevailing wisdom: committing, mapping, designing, aggregating, and disrupting. It is nearly impossible, for example, to activate the social breakthrough cycle without a basic commitment to making a difference, nor create momentum forward without assets such as civic demand for change, basic freedom to act, government responsiveness, and faithful execution of the laws.
The chapter ends with a discussion of how to build a robust breakthrough cycle. Some cycles lack the basic capacity to succeed—they lack the alertness to anticipate emerging trends, the agility to exploit opportunities and react to counterattacks, the adaptability to alter strategy midstream, and the alignment to pull disparate interests into a sum greater than the parts.
Chapter 4: Prepare to Expect Wonders
The final chapter provides a short list of findings and recommendations for steering the conversation about social breakthrough. If I have a single recommendation at the top of this book, it is to stop drawing sharp lines between the four drivers of lasting change (social entrepreneurship, safekeeping, exploring, and advocacy), and start building the social networks that play such a key role in the breakthrough cycle. It is no longer enough to imagine and launch bold ideas for solving tough problems. We must also turn possibilities into deep disruptions and breakthroughs.
The conclusion also examines the current condition of the social breakthrough infrastructure, which is essential to both creating and sustaining breakthroughs. Social change does not occur in a vacuum—it is incubated, expanded, and accelerated by a larger infrastructure. Unfortunately, the infrastructure of change is under siege. It is often the first cut and the last investment during periods of intense economic stress.
Lessons Learned
This book draws upon my own journey through the thicket of social change over the past 30 years. If this journey has taught me one thing, it is that social change does not occur in any one sector with any single driver at any specific moment. Change involves an ongoing effort both within and across the sector boundaries, the four drivers, and a long-haul philosophy.
This is only one of the many lessons I learned from my sawtooth journey. Consider six others.
First, social breakthrough cannot occur without a commitment to civic leadership in all its forms, be it full-time, part-time, or occasional, by lone wolves, teams, or networks. Some citizens create social breakthrough by what we are now calling micro-volunteering, which involves very small acts of conscience. Others create impact through very traditional engagement, which involves traditional political activities such as voting, paying attention to the news, writing letters to the editor and members of Congress, and working for campaigns. And still others engage in what we sometimes call strong democracy, thick engagement, or engaged citizenship, all of which are terms that capture forms of advocacy such as protesting, petitioning, litigating, testifying (in many ways), declaring, and so forth. But whatever the form of engagement, the commitment to make a difference, big or small, is at the core of the breakthroughs that redefine the prevailing wisdom.
Second, as the Skoll Foundation and so many other experts argue, social breakthrough almost always occurs through collaboration, partnerships, networks, and even social movements. As I argue in Chapter 1, the field of social entrepreneurship spends too much time focusing on individual heroes, and not enough on the networks forged between and among citizens and communities through grassroots tactics. These partnerships are essential for massing enough power to start the great engines of impact such as movements, campaigns, and even lobbying. We cannot avoid it—power and politics are central to addressing the urgent threats now barreling down on us.
Third, social change must be firmly anchored in what constitutional founder Alexander Hamilton called “extensive and arduous enterprises for the public benefit.” It is the enterprise, not the driver, that matters most for ultimate success in creating a new prevailing wisdom. Social entrepreneurs, safekeepers, explorers, and advocates must be ready to submerge themselves in the overall campaign for change. Much as everyone might want a bit of recognition and thanks along the way, they cannot let this desire, and the funding that often goes with it, become an end in itself.
Fourth, breakthrough does not always require a new organization led by a celebrated hero. Even ancient organizations can create change, and they need not do so through 24/7 engagement. Creating innovative ideas within existing organizations, particularly giant ones, is not easy. Inventing from within is difficult, frustrating, and often unsuccessful. But its value is obvious: Large, old organizations have resources, whether for demonstration projects, education and lobbying, dissemination and replication, or defense against counterattacks.
Fifth, higher education must play a more aggressive and unified role in educating the next generation of change agents. Higher education is moving toward the long-needed transformation from a dry, bureaucratic, top-down good-citizen model to a vibrant, collaborative, and inclusive system of leadership that reflects the values and vision of a new generation of young people. That system eschews the still-powerful star system that focuses on finding and supporting a handful of future leaders. In contrast, the new model assumes instead that all students, no matter how young or old, have a capacity to contribute to and participate in something larger than themselves.
This new concept of leadership requires a different kind of educational ethic. Traditionally, young people interested in becoming leaders were directed to the business or management schools, where they learned public speaking, goal setting, and budgeting. Now, as young people become more interested in leadership as public service, there must be new thinking about ways in which we educate and train for those positions, a point discussed later in Chapter 4.
Higher education is critical to this role. Colleges and universities act as gatekeepers into the world of social change and play a crucial role in shaping student attitudes about engagement of all kinds. But higher education too often views change as something students should do in their downtime, AmeriCorps as little more than a ticket to graduate school, and a life of service as a second-choice destination compared to the exhilarating, high-prestige jobs that once existed in the private sector.
Sixth, breakthrough does not occur by accident. Yes, luck happens. But luck is a faithless partner and often runs out. Social change requires strategy and a deep understanding of the complex economic, social, and political factors for creating impact. Political scientists often write about social breakthrough as a blend of four streams of inputs—policy entrepreneurs, ideas in good currency, problems and solutions, and opportunities for action.
The challenge is to cull these streams for opportunities to make a difference. Hence, political scientists also talk about legislative “freight trains” that provide opportunities for impact; “policy windows” that open for brief moments for action; and “punctuations” that occur in history when the prevailing wisdom becomes highly vulnerable. Notwithstanding this metaphor abuse, we must recognize that impact involves more than the power of a good idea—social breakthrough takes place in a political marketplace with its own dynamics. Bluntly put, good ideas cannot compel action without muscle.
What Readers Should Expect
Readers are forewarned that this book contains more questions than answers. We still have much to learn about challenging the prevailing wisdom and sustaining change, especially in a time of great political conflict. Campaign spending is expanding rapidly, social movements are exploding and collapsing on the right and left, and economic uncertainty has never been deeper.
Creating durable social change has never been easy—even a cursory review of the battle for civil rights, environmental protection, and human rights shows the risks ahead. But I cannot think of a more difficult moment in contemporary history to confront the prevailing wisdom. It is well financed, aggressive, and more than willing to distort the facts to its liking. Without the full engagement of every possible ally, breakthrough will remain well out of reach. And even when it occurs, it will not endure without highly motivated safekeepers, explorers, and advocates.
Social entrepreneurs can and often do play all of these roles, but might be infinitely faster to scale and achieve impact if they joined with others outside their community to create breakthrough networks. Not only do these networks aggregate enormous sum-greater-than-the-parts possibilities, but they also protect past breakthroughs from harm.
This is not a how-to book per se. Rather, it offers a series of ideas about how the change process works. Readers are encouraged to explore their own assumptions about key issues such as social entrepreneurship, other drivers of change, the stages that lead to breakthrough toward a new prevailing wisdom, and the central role that the infrastructure of change plays in assuring impact. There are recommendations along the way, but my primary goal is to set social entrepreneurship within the broader effort to address the urgent threats facing the world. Readers should bring their own opinions and experiences to these pages, and interpret, refine, expand, and even reject the overall conclusions. After all, this book reflects one author’s journey, not absolute truth. It should be challenged just as rigorously as social entrepreneurs, safekeepers, explorers, and advocates challenge the prevailing wisdom about how to achieve change. As a social explorer, I bring a naturally contrarian nature to my task. In doing so, I hope to ignite a bit of disruption in the conversation. But my hope is to stimulate movement toward answering the fundamental question of this book: How do we solve the world’s toughest problems? I believe the answer is “prepare to expect wonders.”
