What’s going on here? For one, humans are good at using our big brains to know a lot. But it doesn’t always translate into doing a lot. Second, we are on sustainability overwhelm. Staying current is like drinking from a fire hose – everyday.  And that’s hard to swallow.  Third, amid this explosive growth in knowledge and information the very meaning of sustainability has been diluted to the point of meaning just about anything, and thus meaning nothing.

We all support motherhood, apple pie and sustainability. We know what the first two mean and we know how to create them. Not so for sustainability. Even the Brundtland Commission’s definition – development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs  – is difficult to apply to the here-and-now of one’s daily life. Paper or plastic?

Without an explicit shared agreement about the meaning of sustainability even the well-informed and well meaning among us cannot make much progress. Indeed, this lack of clarity enables avoiding the most neglected problem in sustainable design today: time. There are many projections about when catastrophic environmental events will take place (GHG, ice shelf melting, sea-level rise, water wars). It’s hard to know how accurate they are and it doesn’t matter. The plain fact is that we don’t have time to wait and find out if the projections are correct. What matters is taking smart bold steps now because here’s what we do know: the longer it takes to start meaningful healing of the earth, the less likely we are to have a viable future. In short, we don’t have time to waste.

Is there any hope? Yes, and its not false hope. Design – and design thinking – as a set of solution-seeking tools is spreading to every corner of the world. Indeed, we are all designers now and optimism is an onboard skill of every designer everywhere (sustainable or otherwise).  More importantly, healing the earth is igniting the largest movement of human energy in the history of the planet. It is a movement without precedent; amorphous, unorganized, instinctive, and blessedly uncontrollable. Literally billions of people are on the job. It is already the single largest public works project ever.

In the end, if we can get as good at creating sustainability as we are at creating motherhood and apple pie we could find ourselves being happy, well fed and living long, balanced lives. Cloth or disposable?

I was, to be honest, a little skeptical myself.

But that is exactly what happened when we facilitated a recent experience for the World Business Council on Sustainable Development (WBCSD) in order to understand the values and behaviors that will shape consumers of the future. To set the stage, we created an online world rich in detail (drawn from our own primary research and WBCSD’s extensive resources) about how people who care about sustainability will eat, play, learn, work, entertain themselves, communicate and get from place to place in the year 2050.

Because the project’s participants are part of a global consortium of companies who share a commitment to environmental sustainability, those members in our event were executives responsible either for marketing or for the sustainability agenda per se in their organizations. They were highly motivated to understand the lifestyles of the sustainable consumer 10, 20, 30 and 40 years in the future. To make this happen as viscerally as possible, we created an online platform that let them walk in the shoes of 60 fictional consumers, interacting with others along the way, before bringing the group together in a face-to-face collaboration in the UK.

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At another level, I’m not surprised at all that people jumped in so earnestly. Clients of all kinds have proven quite willing to engage in imaginative processes as long as they see a substantive link to their “real” strategic work. The precept that transformative experiences lead to transformative ideas is born out of a series of experiences over the last 15 years, beginning with the design of the Museum of Unintended Consequences for Global Business Network (GBN) in which we took 150 business leaders through an audio tour of ideas and products that have led to unanticipated outcomes, including plate glass, the birth control pill, and, finally, the telescope. In the last gallery each visitor found himself alone, enrobed by a twinkling night sky, listening to Galileo talk about what his contraption had taught him about the cosmos. The final act was for each person to answer (on a 3×5 card) this question: “how did you come to be sitting here today?”

I have kept those cards for over a decade because the responses we received were extraordinary. They wove together lives and careers, events planned and unplanned, epiphanies that could only have resulted from being asked this question at this moment after this particular experience. And they showed me that whatever professional personas we adopt, we are all looking for ways to make meaning out of the actions we take, the experiences we have, and the ways in which we wield our power in the world. As one CEO said in a different context: “what people don’t understand is that, if you want me to take risks that affect thousands of people, I have to be moved first. It’s not just an intellectual decision.”

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After a week of working online with the WBCSD participants, we met them all in Weybridge, Surrey, the UK, for a day and a half. In that setting we focused on exactly the kinds of things that CEO was talking about: the motivators, influencers and behaviors that will affect decisions in the future, moving people to make–we all hope–decisions that are both ethical and environmentally conscious. Our bet is that by sharing in this sort of experiential process, the companies involved will similarly be moved to risk building the products and services that will support the best intentions of consumers–now and several decades hence.

Strategic and affiliate partnerships are not new in business, but there are particular ways in which the challenges and opportunities of the current time make new demands on leaders. Increased knowledge and connectivity show us more of the complexity in the problems we want to solve, the goods and services we want to create, and in the relationships between producers and consumers, social activists and beneficiaries, including the blurring of those lines. However, they also show us how concerted collective creativity and actions can prove a match for that complexity. No one person, organization, or government will solve the global economic problems, just as no one agency or type of intervention will solve a social problem such as homelessness. For leaders this provides both a requirement and an opportunity, to enter the bigger picture and embrace the generosity of cooperation.

Perceiving new value

A decrease in the kinds of resources – capital and markets – that for-profit and non-profit organizations have become used to, leads to intensified competition. Partnerships have to demonstrate some higher order value – the activation of a social movement, increased learning, better service, new potentials, the opportunity to work on larger problems than a single organization could tackle alone. A leader has to perceive and understand that value, and then persuade others, internal and external, to pursue it, even at the expense of the old norms of competition.

Innovating chains and networks

Globalization will not stop, despite recession and consequent tendencies towards protectionism. In an inter-connected world, where current trends suggest that the ethical provenance of goods and services will increase in importance, partnerships can be a way of ensuring that provenance, as well as innovating along supply and distribution chains, and throughout networks. Through partners we can have knowledge of each stage of the chain, or node in the network. That knowledge creates a collective responsibility, and also the opportunity for collective creativity.

Clarity

Partnering requires absolute clarity about an organization’s own area of work and sphere of influence. In many ways this becomes easier in times of straitened circumstances as organizations scale back to core business, and partnerships become a way of extending services. The difficulty then is to continue to innovate, in order to cultivate and develop the core business, in such a way that viable partnerships aren’t threatened. Pursuing joint ventures is one way to do this, although it adds complexity, especially in calculating the contribution of intangible assets. It also catalyzes the issues of power and control.

Power and Control

Probably the hardest part of collaboration for organizations is working out the respective areas and levels of control, and the decision-making processes to be used. As a baseline, good practices around this require that leaders of each organization come together with a genuine desire to share control and responsibility, to shift into being a part of a larger whole, rather than remaining the whole of a smaller part. It requires the ability to hold uncertainties in a spirit of curiosity and optimism, to stay loyal to earlier agreements about decision-making without being uncritical, and to act swiftly once decisions have been taken.

Managing Dilemmas

In the work of social innovation the problems tackled are complex and imbued with tensions. They are embedded in various systems, and within and between those systems, subject to competing agendas; they require innovation yet inhibit experiment; they demonstrate compelling overt symptoms and causes, and hold quieter, more covert, but equally influential ones as well. Scalable solutions require the concerted actions of policy-makers, leaders, program managers, field workers and venture funds, as well as the skills of top-sight, insight, foresight and know-how.

Join the conversation

One of the many leadership dilemmas around partnering is currently up on our Leadership Forum. If you’d like to join the conversation please click here.

To discuss partnering as it pertains to collective invention, join the discussion here.

In the past two decades, we’ve seen seen explosive growth in bio-, info-, and nano-technologies. But in many respects our social structures–in education, health, and government itself–have not kept pace. While the potential and need for social progress is now greater than ever, its record in recent years has lagged. Institutionalized structures and practices that reward waste and pollution have caused massive environmental destruction. The concentration and deregulation of financial power has led to worldwide economic crisis. Billions of children and adults who could contribute to future progress are malnourished and poorly educated. Fortunately, we believe that a new force for social innovation is being born, one that we call “collective invention.”

For the full text of the manifesto, click here. To sign up for email delivery of our bulletin, please go to our homepage and sign up in the upper right corner.

In a world in which most of our systems, from food to education to health to commerce, are either under significant pressure (buy any peanut butter lately?) or have broken down altogether (how’s your mortgage application coming along?) there is a lot of emphasis on getting to the “right solution”.

But while we may not know what all the solutions are, we’d submit that we collectively do know how to build the right solutions, and that the process knowledge is at least as important as the solutions themselves, because it’s replicable.

The partners at Collective Invention have worked together a long time, though our collaborations have taken different forms over the years. Arnold and I met as co-founders of The Idea Factory, now a Singapore-based company started here in San Francisco in 1997; it was here that we hosted Clark’s UC Berkeley design students and recruited Fiona to build our ethnographic research practice. Meanwhile, other longtime professional friendships, such as those with Jamais Cascio and Adam Kahane, grew out of our all having had the good fortune to work at Global Business Network (GBN) in the mid 1990’s.

The fact that we have collaborated in widely varied settings over time has helped us collectively to reflect on our work, and as part of Collective Invention’s mission we’d like to share some of our working hypotheses about the practices and principles that support innovation in the social sectors. I invite you to add your own thinking to the mix, and meet others with similar preoccupations, by getting involved in the practices and principles group on the Innovation for the Common Good discussion forum.

First of all, we define collective invention as diverse problem-solvers engaging productively together to generate breakthrough solutions. It’s what the X-Prize seeks to incent through offering prizes: “radical breakthroughs to benefit humanity.” And it’s what we seek to do with reliable processes for collaborative innovation. That’s a powerful combination: it will take both funding and technical support to blast open the problems we face and build new solutions together.

Clark, in his earlier blog post, has begun to lay out some parameters for design thinking. Our experience tells us that there are additional principles that provide the underpinning for collective invention in the social sectors:

Innovation for the common good demands focused cooperation between policy-makers, funders, researchers, leaders, and facilitators. The sheer scale of social problems, and the potential for doing harm through ill-conceived projects, requires the influence of policy-makers, the human-centered focus of qualitative research, the energy of venture funding, the topview of enlightened leadership and the process know-how of program facilitation. None of these factors on its own will catalyze real breakthroughs in healthcare, education or sustainable development, but together we can remake the landscape.

Confident leadership creates the conditions in which risk and error actually result in better solutions. Risk, error and deviation from the norm are pre-conditions for innovation, and leadership must advocate for them. Peter Diamandis, founder of the X Prize, says “especially in the scientific community, people are stuck in how they approach problems. The day before something is a breakthrough it was a crazy idea. If it wasn’t crazy yesterday, it isn’t a breakthrough today. And breakthrough ideas can sometimes be embarrassing if they don’t immediately lead to results.” Perhaps even more around pressing social problems than in the private sector, where innovation practices have been cultivated, leadership must model tolerance for and yes, even advocate for risk, error and deviation from the norm.

Good process generates a productive rhythm between collective intelligence and individual creativity. While experience is the only path to mastery here, there are ways to know when a team needs to be hived off or opened up; when an individual problem-solver needs to work independently and when s/he is ready for new perspectives; when and how to crowdsource and when and how to make meaning from the resulting data. Maybe this is, in part, what Daniel Pink means when he talks about symphony as a skill for this conceptual age.

Innovative teams are cognitively diverse. While it is easier to point to and to accomplish other forms of diversity—geographic, religious, gender, ethnic—when we are building breakthrough solutions what we most care about is cognitive diversity: differing mental models and problem-solving habits. A hypothesis: collective invention requires the ability to identify these differences, recruit participants accordingly, and to provide teams the tools to exploit cognitive diversity.

Mindful organizations, groups and teams are sensitive to their environments. A creative group is mindful of detail and adaptive to changes in the world around them. Collective mindfulness is about the ability to scan for signs of change and monitor particular signals at the same time.

The opportunity of our age is to use both silicon-based and social technologies to illuminate new possibilities. We have the technical know-how to surface and share data from virtually any source. Combined with process knowledge born out of design and organizational development, this gives us the capacity to invent, explore and rework solutions at a scale and speed never before possible. This opens up the potential for new forms of collaboration between technologists, designers and laypeople with shared investments in social innovation.

Thoughts? Comments?