A Model of Design Thinking in Social Innovation

While there exist countless philanthropic organizations that are striving to make the world a better place, it can be a challenge to find institutions that are capable of effecting and sustaining social change. Many charities get bogged down in budgetary problems, or implementation issues, or scope creep that renders their mission unattainable. Although there are many factors that contribute to these difficulties, I think the most central factor is a lack of design thinking. The importance of strategically designing every and all aspects of an aid project or social innovation from the very start is often overshadowed by the philanthropical nature of the endeavor: your motives are charitable, so any work you do is innately good, right?

Wrong. A poorly designed project does no-one any good, and ultimately amounts to little more than a waste of time and resources. It is just as critical to emphasize good design and strategic planning in a social enterprise as it is in a Fortune 500 company. Unfortunately, it seems to get overlooked more often than not.

However, there are some organizations that really understand how important designing projects to fit cultural needs and norms is to achieving social innovation. One such organization is Ashoka, a network of social innovators that supports "changemakers" around the world in their endeavors to bring about social change.  In the book "How to Change the World", David Bornstein paints a detailed
picture of the lengths Ashoka goes to in order to ensure they support projects that are well designed to address the problem they are meant to address. Ashoka's founder, Bill Drayton, and other members of the staff will visit a country to find potential fellows and will talk to dozens, possibly hundreds of people to identify those individuals who have the capacity to achieve greatness. By networking through the population of the country, Ashoka can ensure that they are targeting people who have already made an impact in their community. They can talk to the people who will be directly impacted by an innovation and find out what works and what doesn't, and who in the community understands how to get things done. They use a system of referrals--whenever they speak to someone who mentions a potential changemaker, they record it on an index card as someone to look into--that, in essence, lets them survey the population to determine who the strongest source of innovation may be.

Each potential changemaker is then intensely interviewed and investigated, and their idea for social change is put through the ringer. Ashoka understands that social change is complex and only supports ideas that they truly believe have been strategically designed and planned sufficiently to actually attain success. And their attention to design thinking and reliance on community referrals has enabled them to realize tremendous levels of social change thus far. To date, they are supporting 3,000 social entrepreneurs in over 70 countries around the world, who are improving their society every second.

Ashoka should be looked at as a model for how to affect social change as an organization. Their insistence on intensely vetting all potential projects should be viewed by other social change organizations not just as a best practice, but as the only practice you should undertake when looking to spur social innovation.



See www.ashoka.org for more about the organization