Guiding Principles for a Social Innovation Lab

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What is a Social Innovation Lab

  • a laboratory: a container of social experiments with  intensive, experimental interventions

  • a strategy for addressing complex ground-breaking social challenges on a systemic level.

  • a space for multi-disciplinary collaboration, bringing together people from across the system aimed at key leverage points

  • seek root causes behind their problems

  • Social Labs consist of a team, a process and space(s) supporting social innovation and experimentation. 

Social Innovation Labs contain 4 elements

  1. They are social. Social labs start by bringing together diverse participants to work in a team that acts collectively. They are ideally drawn from different sectors of society, such as government, civil society, and the business community. The participation of diverse stakeholders beyond consultation, as opposed to teams of experts or technocrats, represents the social nature of social labs. 

  2. They are experimental. Social labs are not one-of experiences. They’re ongoing and sustained efforts. The team doing the work takes an iterative approach to the challenges it wants to address, prototyping interventions and managing a portfolio of promising solutions. This reflects the experimental nature of social labs, as opposed to the project-based nature of many social interventions. 

  3. They are systemic. The ideas and initiatives developing in social labs, released as prototypes, aspire to be systemic in nature. This means trying to come up with solutions that go beyond dealing with a part of the whole or symptoms and address the root cause of why things are not working in the first place.

  4. They are personal. As Scharmer (p.35, 2018) puts it, “if Bill O’Brien is correct that the success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener, then leadership is the capacity to shift the inner place from which we operate.”  In order to bring about outer change you first need to practice the interior condition that you want to bring to the world (-> see Impact loop of inner and outer change of the fieldbook). By practicing the inner condition, you want to prevent mindless action and thus consciously or unconsciously reinforce or perpetuate the patterns that have created the problems in the first place. Shifting patterns ongoingly is probably the hardest, yet the most important work after all. 

Based on our experiences of the past years, we added a fourth component which speaks to the interconnectedness of the inner and the outer dimension of doing this work.

Benefit

  • enable more creativity and avoid the tendency to impose top-down solutions

  • Uses and deploys a variety of tools

  • They enable diagnosis, observation and experimentation to take place at the same time and as part of the same intertwined process.

  • Social labs represent a form of emergent strategy, demonstrating a more effective response to addressing complex challenges. 

Social Labs are social because:

  • they address complex social challenges that are not to be solved by a technological fix approach

  • they require a transformative approach to socio-operational patterns, social design and imaginaries,  institutions,  business models and value chain heuristics,  regulatory and policy practices as well as, potentially, stakeholder identities, attitudes and behaviour.

  • the issue at hand is approached by all stakeholders that reflect the diversity of people affected by and involved in the problem at hand, and the full multi-layered reality of the system, in concert negotiating their stakes as well as positions, engagement and impact.

  • they require a team.

Five ingredients for a transformative process:

  1. A whole-system team. The first prerequisite is a team of influential, insightful actors representative of the system’s many facets.

  2. Experienced guides. Collaboration on problems characterized by overwhelming complexity, confusion, and conflict requires expert facilitation.

  3. A strong container. In order to experiment with new ways of acting, relating, and being, the team needs a structured space to do their work that is suitably set up—physically, psychologically, and politically.

  4. Requisite resources. Social, human, and financial resources must be available at a scale that matches the scale of the challenge.

  5. A generative approach. A creative, experimental method that engages team members’ whole selves— head, heart, and hands—enables breakthrough results. 

What Social Innovation Labs are not

Labs most traditionally can be thoughts of as physical spaces. But they are also institutional spaces that support particular practices, such as research and innovation. The dominant institutions that are currently tasked with addressing complex social challenges are arguably failing because they are not supportive of the types of practices needed to crack these challenges.

What makes a lab;

  1. The focus on a specific challenge or domain

  2. A stable space supportive of the practices required to address that challenge and

  3. A disciplined practice of experimentation.

Social labs are different from traditional labs, in that they require a team that reflects the social diversity of the challenges they’re addressing to do the work. In other words, social labs are different in that they are not run by teams of scientists or technocrats, but diverse teams of stakeholders.

According to this definition then Social Innovation Labs are not:

  • Programmes

  • Projects

  • Networks

  • Co-working spaces – Incubators

  • Accelerators

And of course, simply branding something a “lab” does not make it a lab.

For a wider overview see map of 100 Social Labs: Http://social-labs.org/mapping-the-landscape-of-labs-a-google-map/ 

A Lab has the highest probability of success when it focuses on

  • Addressing systemic root causes 

  • Utilizing collaborative, multi-stakeholder, and cross-sector processes

  • Focusing on action, experimentation, prototyping, and iterative processes

  • Focusing on learning, research, documentation, and theory

  • Creating new models of relationship and engagement

  • Returning agency to people as leaders of change and innovation

  • Developing innovations toward a socio-ecologically sustainable future

  • Developing capacity and leadership for systemic change

Guiding principles for Social Innovation Labs

Do No Harm 

When we are working with the innovation of society and capacity building toward a sustainable future, we must take into account the roots of deep meaning and purpose, the imperatives of daily life we all face, and the profound questions and choices this work requires. The invitation to do no harm, borrowed from initiation into the practice of medicine, as a guiding principle, invites us to reflect upon our actions and the repercussions they have, that ripple out into the world through our practice of this work.

Model Socio-ecological Sustainability

In a million different voices, our world is calling us to action. For our innovations to be aligned with the long term success of humanity, they must lead toward systemic global socio-ecological sustainability. To support these efforts we have at our disposal a wide variety of tools and methods that can assist in transitioning society toward sustainability. To this purpose, employing Strategic Sustainability in dynamic and context-relevant ways, including such things as Sustainability Principles and Backcasting toward visions of Success within those principles, can not only assist in the modelling of sustainable innovations, it can also contribute to positioning your efforts at the vanguard of sustainable innovation.

Be Systemically Radical

If we seek to shift systems to work for the whole of the biosphere we will be required to address the root causes within ourselves, our organizations, communities, and systems both on a local and global scale. This is brave work for there is no map forward. We must create the path as we walk it in the midst of increasing complexity, ambiguity, and rapid change; all of which requires us to think, act and collaborate in more radically systemic ways than we ever have before.


Embrace Progressive Success

When focusing on action, experimentation, prototyping, iterative processes, implementation, and scaling toward global change remember to celebrate the small successes along the way, to enjoy the journey of discovery and innovation, and embrace progressive success as a way to fuel the fire of working toward such worthy goals.


Cultivate The Field

When engaging in such endeavors as action learning, research, documentation, or developing theory, we have the opportunity to make valuable contributions not only to our stakeholders but also to the field at large, by sharing our experiences and learning with one another. Whether it is through open source documentation or publication of a variety of methods, the sharing of what we are learning as we are learning it, and the sharing of resources, intellectual or otherwise, can greatly assist in the cultivation of the field and this work in the world.

Develop Leadership Capacity

In order for the innovations created within the Lab Space to be more than just good ideas, they need to have champions and groups who are capable of implementing them in their communities, organizations, and in the world. Developing leadership capacity with the core team, stakeholders, and participants of your Lab can greatly contribute to the implementation of innovations and the transfer of learning out into the world.

Play

Consciously choosing to engage in play, playfulness, and joyful engagement in the challenges and opportunities that are before us is a door way into generative action, learning, and collaboration. Allowing for creative disruption, imagineering and playful prototyping can foster hope, engagement, and inspiration.

Engage in Relational Innovation

One of the great opportunities that this work presents is the active engagement of the personal, social, and systemic and how these three spheres interrelate when developing, implementing, scaling, and leading innovation. Through collective impact, collaborative leadership, and multi-stakeholder and cross-sector engagements we have the opportunity to co-convene, co-design, and co-create Lab Spaces, processes, and portfolios of innovation that have never before been imagined. At the same time through our collaborations, we have the opportunity to empower each other and foster agency in those we work with, as leaders of change and innovation toward a sustainable future for all.

Sources

Further references

Luea Ritter is part of the design and hosting team for collaboratio helvetica’s Catalyst Lab. This learning and design process has been created to support individuals and their teams with the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Switzerland. Luea is also part of the Practitioner Circle and supports different long-term mandates. Luea thrives within complexity, and through a diverse medley of fields she has developed a high sensitivity for context-based social dynamics. She weaves societal and systemic change practices, trauma and healing work, leadership, collaboration and earth-based wisdom traditions to cultivate capacities in individuals and collectives. Besides her work for collaboratio helvetica she works internationally across sectors to guide multi-stakeholder design and transition processes that embrace the challenge and potential of our times and support social innovation. She co-founded Collective Transitions, an action-research organization dedicated to making the implicit valued, and building shared capacities for transformational shifts.

 

Severin von Hünerbein is in charge of the design and facilitation of collaboratio helvetica’s Catalyst Lab, a learning and design process created to support the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Switzerland. He started his career in training and facilitation with euforia 2010. After graduating from the University of St. Gallen (HSG), he has been determined to bring social innovation to the business world through creating brave spaces that allow a diverse group of people who would usually not meet to find new forms of collaboration, dream together and to co-create innovative and sustainable solutions for systemic change.

He is decorated with a MA degree in International Affairs and with a mind full of jokes, joie-de-vivre, and patience.

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