[MUSIC] There are five system questions that are helpful when trying to to understand the potential impact of social innovation. These questions map out the complexities of the social system at play. Right, so they are, who does what and how? Who decides what? Who gets what? Who connects to whom? And why are we doing what we're doing in the first place? And any social innovation is going to be challenging the answers to at least one of these questions within the system that it's working and maybe many more of the answers. So, let's start with the first question. Who does what and how? So this is really about roles and routines. The way that we're performing social system in the day-to-day. So think about mothers2mothers. As we talked about, in the beginning that system had two very clear cut defined roles. One is the medical professional, the doctors and the nurses. They go through many years of education, develop lots of particular technical expertise and know how to play that role. The other role, although it's not a formal role or as formal of role, it's still just as powerful and that's the patient. The patient is someone who has a need, who comes in, signs some paperwork, consults, receives advice, treatment, follows through with that, and hopefully is taken care of, is cured, healed, helped in some way. Mothers2mothers, they're great moment of innovation, for me, is when they reconceived those roles, and they said, wait a minute. A patient has so much expertise specifically about this technical issue but also about the community and cultural context that it's in and the personal experiential nature of it. What if that person becomes a medical professional, a caregiver? And we can add training to supplement that. So this is a very powerful shift and I think it's really at the heart of why mothers2mothers was able to be so impactful. The second question is, who decides what? And this is really about authority and power. Let's take Airbnb again and look at it as an example of challenging authority and power. On the surface, it's a matching platform connecting consumers, customers, tourists with bedrooms. But really, at the heart of the innovation is a challenge to the power and authority of the hotel industry and of governments who want to regulate hospitality. So we're not necessarily commenting on whether or not this is a good or bad innovation, but we're really seeing where the innovation lies in Airbnb. And we'll stay with that example for a minute, because Airbnb also, or it represents a challenge to the third question, who gets what? This is about resources so the resource in question maybe money. How money is flowing through the system and clearly something like Airbnb changes the money flow from going through the hotel industry to going directly to homeowners. So people are renting out their spaces. And it may also affect the flow of resources to government if one form of this service if going through a form of hotels is taxed, and another form is not. But resources could also, they wouldn't just have to be money. It could also be information. So, with mothers2mothers, you see information which had previously been kind of captured and controlled and contained within those formal caregiving roles now starting to be shared through the mentor mothers, former patients, into the community in a different way. So because they can spend more time out in the community sharing the information around the HIV and around transmission. This information that becomes a kind of community property and much more generalised than it was before. The fourth question is who connects to whom? Again, this is about groups and boundaries, social groups that we create in society. The example of Humanitas really demonstrated to us how they connected students in Amsterdam and this young generation, with senior citizens in residential care facilities. And so, what they started to do was challenge the group boundaries that we have created in society by creating a connection point, a bridge in the model that they ran in Humanitus. And we see this happening in other spaces where social innovations can challenge group boundaries across economic divides of class, educational divides, racial and gender divides. And probably the last question, the fifth one, is the most powerful although it's the hardest to wrap our heads around, and that the why question. Why are we doing what we're doing in this social system? What's the explanations that we're giving ourselves? What are the goals that are orienting how we've organised ourselves. So this may seem very philosophical but at the root, if you can challenge the deep why, you're going to have a very provocative innovation for good or bad and you're going to have quite a reaction to it. So one of my favorite examples comes from the country of Bhutan in the Himalayas. Pretty much every country in the world for many decades has oriented their social and economic policy, national policy around increasing GDP or GNP, gross domestic product or gross national product. It's an economic measure of productivity and consumption, and certainly it matters what the GDP or GNP of a country is. But Bhutan says it's not the only thing that matters and it's actually just a step on a longer journey. A deeper why, which is why do we care about GDP? Well because we want people to be happy and fulfilled. And part of how we'll get there is economic, but that also It also will include health and it will include connection and relationship. It will include creativity and the arts. All of the things that go in to making a happy fulfilled life for the people in this country. So, they created a new index called Gross National Happiness, GNH. And this contains some traditional economic measures, but it had many other kinds of measures as well. And other people in the world have been working at that why level of policy in the same way. For example, the United Nations developing the Human Development Index to give us other ways of looking at progress. And so, I think that the deep why, in a sense will connect back through most of the other questions we have. And the way we answer it will set the boundaries of our innovation. So for example take education. If I think a school is to help people get good jobs, that's one thing. If I think a school is to create happy productive self relying people, that's another thing. If I think a school is to help people become good citizens in a democracy, that's another thing. If I think a school is to help people orient toward a spiritual or religious system, that's another thing. And you can see that the answer to that question why do we have schools, what are they for, is going to inform the pedagogy and the structures, everything about that school. And if I'm trying to shift, why we're doing what we do in our educational systems, I'm going to probably, the most profound room for innovation but also The biggest chance that people reacting to that. By asking these five questions, what we're actually doing is mapping up the social system and the rules that govern it. The innovation questions overlaid over these are, how am I challenging these rules? How am I disrupting them? In the next video, we'll start to explore how using these sets of questions and with an innovation lens of how am I challenging them, will allow us to think about the stronger and potentially more impactful innovations. [MUSIC]
