Chasms on the journey of exponential change
I recently re-read the “Journey to the Centre of the Earth ” with my 8-year-old son and travelled back in time to traverse subterranean oceans, meet dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts, and finally shoot out of the earth’s belly into modern day Italy.
″… I can hardly believe my eyes. Who would have ever imagined, under this terrestrial crust, an ocean with ebbing and flowing tides, with winds and storms?”
Sounds just like the conversations I have been hearing of late with our Journey Partners.
In the C4EC universe, System Orchestrators from across the globe are trying to answer the question “How do we solve the world’s exponential problems faster than they grow and mutate?”
As a co-traveller with them, we hear the wonder of reimagination, we see the hard work of orchestration and feel the effort it takes to mobilise an entire ecosystem. This journey – of tackling exponential problems by catalysing exponential change – is akin to setting sail on an adventurous voyage through many rapids, meadows, whirlpools and sometimes even bigger, unforeseen barriers. We call them chasms.
In the fictional world of a braver-than-thou lone hero taking on the world (like Professor Otto), they just magically fly (or raft!) over the chasms by themselves. But in the real world of tackling social problems, it takes a village to create the bridges that System Orchestrators can use to anticipate and cross these chasms.
What are these chasms though? And, what kind of support do System Orchestrators need to keep going.
Knowledge chasm
To understand what will induce exponential change, the first and the most important step is to appreciate the problem at scale, with all its complexity. Something that Einstein has famously said is “If I had 1 hour to solve a problem, I would spend 55 minutes on the problem”. At scale the problems may look different, one may notice dependencies or actors that are not visible otherwise or in some cases, find that the first problem to solve is very different. But no one person has the entire view. So, System Orchestrators have to find diverse people who can help them piece together this puzzle – a puzzle whose shape or size is unknown.
Reimagination chasm
Disruption requires a complete reimagination of inducing exponential change. It isn’t simply doing more of something but solving differently for scale, speed and sustainability. For example, enabling access to quality education to 2,000 students works very differently from doing so for 200 million students. The solution that will work for 200 million children is not a solution for 2,000 children times 10,000, it is a completely new reimagination of a world that doesn’t exist today. In doing so, what we hear from System Orchestrators is “How do I imagine this bold future? How do I foresee the future in the context of the problem I am solving?”
Design-action chasm
We hear some System Orchestrators say “I feel confused; I know I can’t go back to doing what I was doing, but how do I get started on the things that I want to try” or “How do I prototype and validate my experiments?” This is a problem that requires a variety of “experiment funders” and sometimes small teams of experts who can help prototype and validate the pilots.
Conviction chasm
There is support (acceptance, resources and funding) available for tried and tested solutions, but how can one build conviction in the board, teams and funders to embark on these audacious journeys into unchartered territories?
Coordination chasm
Catalysing exponential change requires gearing up an entire ecosystem (across civil society, markets and government) towards a new theory of change (or, a theory of exponential change) and then building the momentum to act. It needs many types of doers and many types of enablers to work together. Some System Orchestrators tell us “I am a doer, I know how to take action, but how do I coordinate such an ecosystem?”
Mobilisation chasm
Someone asked Nandan Nilekani, the founding chairman of UIDAI, how much the cost of Aadhaar came out to be. He said although it was a billion dollars, at societal scale, it translated to just USD 1 per person. Now, it has even unlocked savings of 1000x more for citizens, governments, markets. Solving at scale requires a sustainable source of funding. This means looking at funders from the sense of who is the right funder at the right time in the journey, who can fund actively, and who can contribute in non-financial ways. “I have a plan of action, but how can I make it sustainable at scale?”
Underpinning all these chasms is a deeply personal chasm, one of Self-Efficacy. An audacious mission that works in a non-traditional avatar, results in questions of “Am I ready? Can I pull this off? Can my team and I change the way we work?” A System Orchestrator’s journey may be lonely, especially for someone who is traversing an unchartered territory.
While many of these chasms are unavoidable, they can be made easier to cross. To do so, we need bridges, ladders or rafts that System Orchestrators can use. They need a network of support. With this network, they can find experts who can help them design the solutions, mentors who can guide them, funders who can fuel their reimagination and peers who they can lean on. C4EC is this network.
Learn how the C4EC network offers support to System Orchestrators.
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