[MUSIC] Understanding that social innovation is system innovation can help us appreciate why social innovation is so difficult to do. Even when we may agree that the world needs changing, actually changing it turns out to be very hard. So think about, for example education, suppose that many of us agree about, in our concern that student dropout rates are too high and pass rates are too low. And we think, you know if we could figure out a way to get student more engaged and connected and committed to school. That would be great and maybe that would go some way to addressing this problem. Everybody nods. Now suppose I say, what if we had students actually design their own syllabuses? What if they come up with what they want to read and they kind of vote on it and they put it together. We're going to start seeing lots of reactions and reasons why that might be a terrible idea. Teachers are the ones that have the expertise that know what students should be reading. The students don't even know what the potential books or readings are. What if the students don't assign themselves challenging enough material? That's part of the teacher's role, etc. And we'll quickly see that this is not only a series of rational arguments It's logical arguments saying why this might be a bad innovation. But that there'll be a lot of emotion and reactivity attached to that. And a lot of that will be around whose role is what. It's the teacher's role to do this and it's the student's role to do this. And this is how it works, and this is the meaning of education. So very quickly, something that could be a nice experiment anyway will often get shot down before we even have a chance to try it out and see if it challenges some of the assumptions we might have held about whose role should be what, or about the nature of young people and what they are and aren't capable of. It becomes very difficult to experiment in that kind of a context. And this is very typical in any sort of setting. In the 50s and 60s, the sociologist Harold Garfinkel was very fascinated by this, by how fiercely we hold to our existing social patterns of interaction and he used to design these experiments that he called breaching experiments and these were tiny little disruptions in the normal way of doing things and so he would send out his students to do these experiments in the real world. So for example, a student might go into a grocery store pushing his or her shopping cart along. And then reaching into somebody else's shopping cart to take an item out and put it in theirs. And of course the person would say I'm sorry you took that out of my cart and the student would say yeah it was closer, It was easier for me to reach. Or he might have a student go into a store and start treating a customer as if they were a sales click, hey would you mind getting me another size of this jumper? This is a little too big, and of course the person would immediately say I don't work, I'm just a customer. And the student could say yeah it's fine I know, but I could really use the other size. I think they're just over there, do you mind running to the get that? Or he would send them home to act like they were in a hotel when they were interacting with their parents. Or they might get on a bus And go up to somebody that was seating the seat and say, do you mind if could I have that seat? No explanation. And watching what would happen as these little things are give as I'm talking about that you probably can feel in your chest, how you might react to something like this. I feel it and I told the story 100 times. A couple things would happen right? The first thing would be that people would try to rationalise what was happening within the existing rules of the system. So clearly this person must be confused or has a condition. You're asking me for my seat on the bus because I can't see anything wrong with you physically but maybe there's something wrong or you clearly you took something out of my shopping cart because you didn't realise that was my shopping cart or you're asking me to get the jumper, because you think that I work here. Then, when the student would not follow along with that, the rational explanation within the existing system and use another logic of another system, saying, yeah that was closer or I don't care that you don't work here. Could you help me out here? I really need you to go miles away, grab this jumper, bring it back, and Help me with what I'm doing, even though I don't know you and it's not your role. Then, the second thing would be anxiety. Lots of anxiety, lots of emotion, anger even, as people started to feel really aggrieved that their social world was getting disrupted in this way. They're being asked to play a role that was not their role that they're typically used to or that was legitimate role within that system. So, one of the things that this experiment did and many other sociologist contributed to this was help us to build in understanding of these big social systems like education, like commerce to understand that those aren't, they don't just exist out there or somewhere, it's not a bunch of rules that somebody has written. But that, they actually exist in a day to day micro-interactions over and over again of all of us performing our scripted parts within the system. And it's not robotic, we don't just go in and kind of follow rules unthinkingly. We actually perform them, we have to adapt them to context, but we know the boundaries. We know what's acceptable to ask and what's not acceptable to ask in different situations. And so in that sense, these big institutional patterns, these big social systems, are actually living in a moment, in the day-to-day. And when they're disrupted, we experience considerable anxiety. because whether we like our institutions or not, whether we like these patterns, we at least are comfortable with them. We know what we're supposed to do. I know what my identity as a customer, as a rider in a bus, as a parent or a child, I know what that identity is. I know roughly how to perform it. I know what to expect of other people so I don't have to feel too nervous that they're going to do something crazy or completely unexpected. So this can reduce our kind of existential anxiety that the world is a messy and possibly dangerous place. And this helps us understand that in some sense, social innovation itself Is a big breaching experiment. And when we do this any kind of social innovation that's starting to get at these systemic roots that we talked about in the introduction to this week. We're going to be provoking anxiety so it's quite helpful for us to be able to understand not just that we're doing it but how we're doing it. What parts, what aspects of the social system are we actually innovating in? Where are we challenging? Where are we breaching? And do we want to be doing that? Could we be doing that even better in the work that we're doing or in potential work that we might think about. Could we be more creative in how we're doing that? And more conscience about it. So, in the next section we will take a look about how to do that more specifically about your innovation. [MUSIC]
