Social entrepreneurs must first become system entrepreneurs

This is an abridged version of the original article first published on Lively World’s Journal of Renegerative Theory and Practice, July 2021. It is edited for brevity.

By Shanley Knox and Felicity Tan

In Kibera, Africa’s largest urban slum, thousands of artisans access international markets through a digital platform that connects them to opportunities. The social enterprise that launched it several years ago tells a powerful story of its success in fueling remote workers’ entrepreneurial ambitions through craft. But while the company pays workers more than what they would make in local markets, workers do not necessarily see increased profits out of increased revenue. One recounted how often he has come out “losing money.” To optimize margins, others said they work out of terrible conditions. “You’re squeezed and dusty and there is no ventilation,” one artisan explained.

The solution for artisans in Kibera isn’t as simple as raising prices. Instead, it falls under what is known as a systems problem: a compounding of issues which, in this case, include inefficient supply chain operations, cross-border trade conflicts, systemic oppression of informal workers, and a lack of design education or proper machinery.

The Kibera enterprise isn’t alone: in an increasingly complex and interconnected world, there is a rise in systemic, multifaceted societal problems. And yet, the logic of today’s capitalist markets pressure companies to focus on scalable but single-point solutions. And with single-points also come singular perspectives. Social enterprises are no exception.

The limits of social business as usual

Today’s rise in social entrepreneurship answers a powerful call for a new kind of success: one rooted beyond self-interested, capitalist gains, and into social well-doing. Its potential to re-write the rules of the capitalist game is so appealing a 2018 Deloitte report calls this growth a “seismic change” for business. The implicit assumption is that, if tweaked for social purpose, impact will follow; and that the “‘the market’ — that is, the capitalist metaphor of the market — is a positive (or, at worst, neutral) force that can be readily and unproblematically harnessed for the common good of society”.

The result is that the means (social enterprise) is viewed as ipso facto good, and therefore the ends (“impact”) must be as well. As we have seen in the Kibera example, this isn’t necessarily the case. Perhaps more dangerously, the allure of saving the world from its most intractable problems through market mechanisms leads social entrepreneurs to design solutions for problems they don’t fully understand, let alone experience. Heropreneurship, as Daniela Papi-Thornton calls this phenomenon, becomes a trap that limits a social change-maker from creating lasting impact.

Social entrepreneurs have an enormous opportunity to engage with, understand and approach the complexity and very nature of the problem meant to be addressed, and with it, an understanding of what it might take to actually solve the social challenge. Social entrepreneurs are invited to approach social problems from a systems mindset as a first step in the entrepreneurial journey.

A new lens: From self to system

Melanie Goodchild and many others have suggested that integrative, systems-wide change begins with the self. To discover how lived experience affects our way of understanding, approaching a social problem requires looking outside the social entrepreneur’s own point of view. From others’ perspective, what elements of your upbringing, privilege, or experience might be influencing your approach?

Market-based approaches to solving the intractable problem of plastic waste in Southeast Asia are instructive. Market-based interventions are a dime a dozen in this region, but most are not showing effective results. Many are solutions are transported from Western contexts. One innovation came from social entrepreneurs who sought to launch plastic ATMs in malls and food courts where customers could deposit used plastics in exchange for commercially redeemable points. Their idea failed to catch on, however, as they were unable to address the resultant loss of livelihoods for waste-pickers, who make up about 1 percent of the urban population. Corporations hoping to move away from single-use sachets for shampoo and conditioner are likewise hard-pressed to shift away from such packaging, because millions of low-income consumers can only afford to pay for incremental volume at a time. These examples shine a light on a potential shift for social entrepreneurs from heroes that must own the solution, to a model in which the problem accurately reflects the experience and input of the problem-owners, and indeed include them in the development of solutions.

To contextualize to the experience of the problem-owner requires moving beyond self-defined attributions into developing shared meaning. Interpretations reflected in mission statements, for example, often speak to the empowerment of communities or the sustainability of resources. But we must question whether there is shared understanding of their meaning. Otherwise, organizations, and certainly social entrepreneurs, are free to attribute their impact goals with whatever meaning is most useful for their particular work. According to Jo Rowlands, “the term [empowerment] may be used merely to communicate good intentions”. Intent does not necessarily equate to impact, nor does it necessarily reflect the impact desired by those who are meant to be served.

Moving from ‘I’ to ‘We’

Once we are aware of the ‘I’ spaces we occupy as individuals, we have the opportunity to move into what Bradbury calls “relational space”: a space defined through mutual trust that allows for a multiplicity of perspectives, models and approaches to collectively inform a vision for change. Adrienne Maree Brown argues that this shifts us from the arena of “competitive ideation….to collective ideation. It isn’t about having the number one best idea, but having ideas that come from, and work for, more people”.

At WeSolve, which incubates cross-sector collaborations for systemic change in the Philippines, this is described as transforming our view of Self from superheroes to “co-heroes”. With shared power, we are able to inquire into social phenomena alongside others in a way that invites the collective to spot, articulate, and correct incongruities between what we say and what we do. Brown suggests gathering the collective — which would include actors representing the interests of the environment — around a strategic intent rather than a plan, the latter tending to be a top-down affair. This decentralizes authority and naturally increases integrity as well as the efficacy of our interventions.

With a shared lens comes new, systemic solutions

The limitations of the single-point solutions rather than systemic approaches can be seen in the rising tension between rural, impoverished ranchers that are both in desperate need of increased income, and responsible for the welfare and protection of many the world’s indigenous cattle breeds. The Bahima keepers of the Ankole cow are said to have migrated with their longhorn cattle into East Africa’s grasslands more than a thousand years ago. Partners such as Land O’Lakes Venture, the aid arm of the Minnesota-based butter company, have worked to help ranchers artificially inseminate indigenous breeds, developing a cross-bred Holstein cow able to produce 20–30 times as much milk as the Ankole and, thus, revenue for impoverished ranchers. And yet, “without the Ankole, we have no culture,” one Bahima herdsman shared.

While increasing revenue matters, ranchers, local horn artisans, and abattoirs also shared that they also care deeply about cultivating holistic value inclusive of the deeper meaning of the Ankole to the tribe. ABLE, a digital platform for informal workers to organize around shared resources, defines such value as one that grows for the individual through their connection to a shared system, ultimately resulting in the scalability of the value being bounded to, and facilitated by, the growth of shared benefit for all across the resource. For the Ankole cow and their stewards, this points to shared economic growth that integrates economic, cultural and sustainable equity through both preserving rancher’s livelihoods, and the cattle breed itself.

Systems entrepreneurship: From mindset to practice

Through examining, diagnosing and interacting with the system holistically before designing solutions, the social entrepreneur has the opportunity to understand the role she plays, become accountable to those within the system, and positions herself to create solutions that are likewise accountable to a more inclusive range of stakeholders and factors, instead of a singular viewpoint. In effect: she has the opportunity to shift from a social, to a systems, entrepreneur.

To answer questions of complexity, we must practice shifting from I to We. Social entrepreneurs can begin to unearth answers from a multitude of perspectives and interests that reveal a more holistic view of the forces that currently drive the system. Borrowing from the wisdom of seasoned systems entrepreneurs, we offer some helpful questions to ask on the pre-entrepreneurial journey:

• What is the individual ‘I’ observing? What is the collective ‘We’ observing
• What are the historic and present dynamics that perpetuate this?
• What are previously unseen or unacknowledged social and environmental forces that drive this?
• What power dynamics (of your own, or others) lend to this dynamic?
• Who stands to gain, and who stands to lose in the current configuration?
• What is emerging as disruptive forces?
• What questions have not been asked, and which individuals have not been engaged?

With a new appreciation of the Self relative to the system, entrepreneurs can begin to unlock new perspectives that allow them to approach solutions with a new lens. By expanding our view from the ‘I’ to the ‘We,’ social entrepreneurs invite the collective to weigh in on a diagnosis of the problem through lived experience and local wisdom, unearthing critical insights we might not otherwise have accessed. The expansion from single-point entrepreneurial approaches to one of system entrepreneurship begins with asking, in the words of Roy and Grant, “whose ‘truth’ is being perpetuated, privileged and positioned” in the context the social entrepreneur is engaging in, and why. Truth, in this sense, can be as simple as the primacy of a solution being developed, and as complex as inter-cultural power dynamics. Oftentimes, it is both.

Hence the very process of engaging the collective as not merely problem-owners for social entrepreneurs to save but as problem-solvers, shifts power dynamics in a co-creative, co-hero process, as well as configures solutions in such a way that addresses the very root causes of a societal problem: the power dynamics that have privileged dominant perspectives and interests at the expense of the rest of the system. By becoming systems entrepreneurs first, social entrepreneurs can design interventions that aim toward sustained, regenerative change over short-term, hero-centric solutions.

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