Second Class Social Innovation
Social Changemaking 101 is the Second Class version of social innovation, for citizens. The primary or First Class version is for public sector and community sector managers. This two tiered model of social innovation, one for Insiders (the managerial class in government, corporations and NGOs) and another for Outsiders (citizens, consumers, users of services) misses the point entirely. It misrepresents, and undermines, the core of the social innovation agenda. Real social innovation is about transferring information, power, capacity and resources AWAY from the Insiders (the managerial class) and directing it TO the Outsiders. This is the key theme in all the quality writing on social innovation. It is certainly the key theme in the work of Charlie Leadbeater. This is junk social innovation, a bastardisation of the real thing. Read Charlie Leadbeater’s The User Generated State: Public Services 2.0 (http://www.partnerships.org.au/Library/Public_Services_2.0.htm) or Making it Personal (http://www.civilsociety.org.au/Making%20It%20Personal.pdf), and let’s have the real thing please, not the junk version. Vern Hughes
But a funny thing happens when the managerial class hears the Charlie Leadbeater message – they smile and say they like the rhetoric, and then proceed to ignore the devolution of power theme. They treat social innovation as a managerial prerogative. And like every managerial / ruling class, they prefer to retain power and capacity in their own hands rather than transfer it to Outsiders.
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Re: Second Class Social Innovation
Typically punchy and direct, Vern and I'm going to agree with some of it and disagree with much. These are my quick thoughts in response (not in order particularly):
1 Charlie and Geoff and others certainly talk alot about the role and impact of the non-institutional innovator, but I'm not sure they'd agree that social innovation isn't a conversation that managers and organisations and institutions also have to get their heads around? Perhaps we should ask them? It may well be true that funded organisations and formal organisations might have some built in conservatism on this agenda, especially to the extent that innovation is often a highly disruptive and even sometimes subversive activity. They may not in the end be the source of innovation- although they could be - but to argue they are not in the mix seems perverse.
2 The idea that independent and perhaps more disruptive innovators may be kept out of some discussions seems a shame. Not sure how conscious that is but you're right...if it's happening, more fool the people keeping them out. I agree with you that sometimes these discussions get too narrow and too comfortable. But it's actually harder than you think for people to deliberately disrupt their own patterns of thinking and behaving, even if they know it's good for them!
3 The ASIX changemaker community of some 350+ people is mostly made up of individuals and entrepreneurs, not managers per se. They are there too, of course, but it's quite wrong to suggest that the ASIX platform is somehow tilted away from individuals and towards the "corporates" in this space. Quite the opposite. Not really sure we can lay claim to much 'chic' at all, to be frank. That's not to say the risks you articulate aren't real...I'm certainly keenly aware of them. i just don't feel, after the short time we've be tracking, we've quite hit the "GO BACK" wall you claim.
4 The SI Camp last year was full of people with ideas as individual entrpreneurs or groups of people getting together on a shared passion. There were a few 'managers' there (like me, I guess, from Cisco) and even the occasonal stray public servant. Part of the value was linking perhaps unexpected and unusual partners who might not even know, until they bump into someone, that the skill or the resources (including institutional) they represent might have a value to someone else. Sometimes the very thing an innovator needs is a connection to a large institution - say a bank or a government department or a legal or marketing firm - who can help them make their way to another level of sophistication or development with their project.
5. Ezio Manzini spends his whole life talking about society:) very strange to think you felt he was somehow spruiking the corporate or managerial line. Designers and academics tend often to abjure that kind of thinking as much as you evidently do. His whole focus and the focus of much of his writing, so far as I have seen it, is precisely on society-wide impact and change more than institutional per se.
Re: Second Class Social Innovation
You avoided the issue, Martin. The series of forums held last year auspiced by ASIX, the Centre for Social Impact and The Australian Centre for Social Innovation were forums for managers to speak about a managerial agenda - there was not one reference to society, or any component of society, in the presentation by Ezio, for instance. The sole actors in the drama are managers - society is but the object of their managerial prerogative, the targets, or recipients, of their initiative and professional acumen.
Whatever you want to call this activity - 'new wave public sector management', or any alternative formulation - it is NOT social innovation.
To call this 'social innovation' is to bastardise the concept. How it is possible that three respectable organisations can run a series like this that so conspicuously disabuses and degrades the concept of social innovation?
The only explanation I can come up with for this misuse of the term social innovation is that the culture of these three organisations is the same old managerial culture. In the case of CSI and TACSI, this is what happens when public funds are used to establish new organisations, staffed with former public sector officials - the managerial culture of the public sector is just transferred from one place to another. The old assumptions still play out - society is but the object of managerial prerogatives.
Hence, the current CSI series of forums around the country on "Are community organisations at the crossroads?", with the sole speakers on this topic being CEOs of corporatised NGOs. The fact that the organisers could not involve a single contributor to this discussion who is not a manager of a funded agency, says volumes about its culture. Who are the actors on this stage? Answer: CEOs and managers of funded agencies. What does this tell us about what community organisations are? Answer: Community organisations are entitles that are funded by governments and managed by CEOs to delivery the goals of their funders.
This is profoundly wrong and damaging. It distorts our whole understanding of what society is and what community organisations are. The 'social impact' of this Centre for Social Impact series is negative and socially damaging.
In the case of ASIX, the culture, as I see it, is a mix of private and philanthropic managerial chic, rather than public sector managerial chic. The result is the same pre-occupation with funded capacity and management cred rather than with the ideas or initiatives of unfunded individuals and organisations in civil society. An individual or organisation without funded capacity is NOT deemed worthy of partnering with. This is a second class status.
Social innovation, in the writings of Charlie Leadbeater et al, is actually the opposite process, where groups of people in society devise new arrangements and create new forms, dispensing with or renovating old institutional organisational forms and methods, which enhance social well-being and social connectivity. And in Charlie Leadbeater's case, the areas most in need of social innovation are the areas of conspicuous state and market failure - that is, areas such as family dysfunction, provider-centred health care, and service-bound disability systems - where the managerial class in both public and private sectors has FAILED to enhance social well-being.
When organisations that say they are about social innovation just reproduce the same failed managerial class in new clothes, we should jump to our feet, and shout from the rooftops that THIS IS THE WRONG WAY.GO BACK. RE-ASSESS AND START AGAIN.
Vern Hughes
Re: Second Class Social Innovation