More Social Innovation - Just When we Thought it Was Safe..

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." I say this as I’ve just read an email by our illustrious ‘leader’ reminding me of the torcher, that the UN would love to investigate, as I am sure our human rights were suspended in our away-day. Okay, I know it was at a posh hotel, with posh coffee and a posh room, which I am confident cost in excess of £3000 (this is without the top 60 brains in the UK being costed in to this amount!) at a time of severe austerity. It was a day in which all the positive research; individual core beliefs and research agendas were to be suspended in order 'to do'... ‘Social Innovation’ in all our ‘products’…. I hate that word. Do Universities supply ‘products’….I’m sure they don’t and any self-respecting academic would never refer to their work as a production process, linear, simplistic and measurable! Its not, so I would suspect that the Vision of the Business School (I don’t believe that you can have a ‘corporate vision’…its more management speak, as if the organization is a single human-being) would allow for this and the fact it cannot be measured. Ahhhh nope…… they want an audit of the modules which have Social Innovation, and don’t, so those that don’t, can have the words ‘Social Innovation’ placed in at regular points.

Look my point is simple. Social Innovation is action, not just words, it’s a belief system not just ‘products’, it’s a way of life not just a form. You are ‘Social Innovation’ or you are not. Most academics are, but that does not impact of their stance or belief, their ontology and epistemology. Multiple discourses in education and life shape what we include in our life, what are we able to think, speak about and imagine. Our lives are embedded in educational systems, documentation and policies, which may stem from academic and research and literatures but would also include professional magazines and the experience and practices per se. This allows the complexity of the present indicated by talk within the social world to offer useful ways to attempt to understand for example leadership. Giddens (1994) has called "manufactured uncertainty" of the present where many of our contemporary problems are the result of previous human interventions including those based on scientific knowledge in their natural and social worlds. We know, indeed it was presented by two external speakers that ‘democracy’, freedom, trust, bottom-up leadership were the way forward and underpins ‘Social Innovation’, yet we get ‘commands’ to place into all modules irrespective of the ‘social’ values of each academic! It seems the mechanical engineering metaphors still dominate most management discourse (including ours), Education and thinking and whilst ‘organic’ approaches may have a higher feel-good factor, it fails to influence those charged with satisfying shareholders.

The traditional view of the linear supply chain and ‘controlled employee’, while useful for academic analysis for example, is well recognised as being unrepresentative of the true operating environment of many organisations, who’s reality requires them to function effectively within a structure better described as a dynamic, random network built on relationships. Rules, procedures and regulations used by managers to control staff limit the enterprises ability to evolve and achieve a level of fitness so that delivery of consumer requirements are achieved in spite of shorter lifecycles and higher customer expectations, which is why ‘Social Innovation’ exists as a subject in the 21^st Century.

The classical ways of teaching is in reality management in a different guise that imposes critical mass thresholds on people and many organisations are finding this unrepresentative of how they actually operate particularly with today’s educated peoples as stated by our second speaker at the posh away-day, and try to discover ways in which natural systems, themselves are the generators of influence and not control where there has to be a controller and a controlled.

Theories such as SWOT or Six-Sigma, so much ridiculed on the day claims behaviour is specified from the top down and suggests that through a process of reduction everything can become ‘knowable’ via linear causality with perhaps some exploration of the edges where the gloom is not quite impenetrable, but never moving to the ‘unknowable’ dark. It is here that the perception of the survival of the fittest is the route to success where progress is made through the influence of one person over another by means of the force that they use over them. From time to time someone manages and my Council, like the guest speakers to switch on a new light; a paradigm shift, and a new area of exploration is opened up and a new way of doing things occurs i.e. Social Innovation, or Human Systems Thinking. Until recently, the light by which science was working was only able to illuminate simple, linear systems where metaphors hide the detail, with logic and averages working to direct organisations toward their futures. Leadership will need to address this non-linear thinking in organisations and provide additional thinking to challenge the conventional thinking in Business, if we are to survive as a society if not academics.