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The SI2 conference brought together an amazing group of academics and social innovators from around the world.  Its key goal was to explore the interplay between social innovation and social institutions by finding different perspectives and looking at examples.  I had the privilege of hearing stories about the brilliant work that was being done, engaging in discussions on past and future actions and discovering different perspectives from individuals around the world.

The conference began with an ice breaker activity led by Judith Marcuse called “Action for Insight”.  While we received the short form of the exercise, it was still a very invigorating two hour session that exercised our bodies and senses.  This helped us to move away from the often restricting logical and rational mind that looks for right and wrong answers and move towards emotional, creative and metaphorical thought.  Our right brain (the creative and emotional side) is often neglected when problem solving.  Thus this session helped to balance out both ways of thinking so that we enter the next days conference activities with both an emotional and logical perspective.

One common theme that many participants picked up on during the conference was the importance of framing.  Often a social innovation cannot change the practices and rules of social institutions is because of the way it was received by the audience.  Donald MacPherson’s talk in the morning about how Insite, Canada’s first supervised safe injection site, demonstrates this point very well.  As those who live in Vancouver are quite familiar, Insite was a highly controversial solution to the downtown east side’s drug problem.  The public and the government perceived it as advocating drug use and downright illegal.  Using the Four Pillars Drug Strategy (prevention, treatment, enforcement, harm reduction) they were able to re-frame Insite in such a way that the public could relate to.  It is interesting to point out that the four pillars are values and as such connect to people on an emotional level.  Here is an example where the logic of “because people are dying on the streets while injecting, we should have a safe place for them to inject” failed because people saw it in a way that would exasperate and condole drug use and therefore cause further harm.  The four pillars were able to re-frame the message in such a way that showed people the positive values that were being leveraged by Insite.

I’ve been reading a book called “Do the Right Thing” by James Hoggan, CEO of PR firm Hoggan and Associates.  There is a section about the universal appeal of story telling where Hoggan quotes Carl Jung’s theory on archetypes.  “…these psychic predispositions, create a kind of story template, provoking universal human behaviors and inspiring images, art, and myths of a sort that seem to arise in all cultures and at all times.”  So, if something can be related to an archetype, it can touch people, regardless of background, at the deepest level.  Thus the Insite’s four pillars would seem to be having a similar effect to this.  Furthermore, the use of a story can help bring an idea to a archetype level, which is what makes stories so powerful.  There wasn’t anyone in the conference that would forget the four beautiful stories that were told during the “Best Story Ever” segment.  These stories succeeded in captivating the audience even though most took place in countries that many of us have never been and in contexts that we will never fully understand.  But they connected to our values of freedom, survival and community.  They connected with us on a human level with real people and real experiences allowing their stories to be much more effective than any statistic or fact.  Because of the emotional nature of stories, they are open to interpretation.  People can relate to them in different ways, learn different things from them and reflect upon oneself.

On the more analytical side, Frances Westley presented a model of how social innovation happens, why it happens, and how it is sustained.

From my design background, I am familiar with this tool as designers often take theories and create information models out of them.  Info models illustrates the underlying mechanics of how a phenomenon is sustained (and how it can break using graphics to more effectively communicate what plain words cannot.  Many people I talked to were highly intrigued to see that even though the work they all did was diverse, they began seeing a common structure and process that all innovations share.  Furthermore, it shows that social innovation does not simply happen randomly but is dependent on many factors.  An innovative idea won’t take off unless variables such as time, place, and context is favourable.

The rest of the conference consisted of discussions into more specific topics and actions.  This allowed members to instantly apply the new knowledge, perspectives and ideas that they had picked up during the conference.  It was also an ample opportunity to connect with others who are doing both similar or completely different work from oneself and gain their insight.

Simon Kwok

www.skwok-box.com

Here are Donald’s slides on Vancouver’s Four Pillars Drug Policy.