The Best Way To Help Innovation Take Hold Is To Design A Co-optable Resource
When Greg van Kirk was finishing up his two-year Peace Corps stint in the small town of Nebaj, Guatemala, he had a simple idea that could have a major impact. By replacing the traditional campfires that families cooked on inside their homes with cookstoves, the lives of the people in the region could be immensely improved.
Yet although the benefits of cookstoves are well documented, getting people to adopt them is more difficult than it might seem. First, while cookstoves save money over time, there is an initial expense that, given the poverty in the region, is a significant barrier to adoption. Second, it asked people to alter centuries of tradition.
This is a problem that change agents of all stripes run into all the time. For change to truly take hold, people need to embrace it for their own reasons. That takes more than a good idea. To make change truly scale to impact, we can’t rely on slogans and incentives, people need to be empowered to co-opt it and make it their own.
The Problem Of Scale
“Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door,” Ralph Waldo Emerson is said to have written and since that time thousands of mousetraps have been patented. Still, despite all that creative energy and all those ideas, the original “snap trap,” invented by William Hooker in 1894, remains the most popular.
The truth is that good ideas fail all of the time. Consider the case of William Coley, who came up with the idea of cancer immunotherapy in 1891. The idea languished for more than a century before Jim Allison figured out how to make it work and won a Nobel prize. Katalin Karikó was nearly fired for her work on mRNA vaccines, yet once the Covid crisis hit, her idea scaled massively
In our organizational transformation work, I’ve been surprised how difficult it is to scale even well-established ideas, such as lean manufacturing , agile development and overcoming unconscious bias, all of which remain woefully under-adopted, even after decades of effort. The simple truth is that whenever you ask people to change you need to expect and prepare for resistance.
That was essentially the problem van Kirk was up against. The benefits of cookstoves are clear. They are much more efficient, they produce less smoke, save families money and are easier on the environment. In fact, there are few things that can improve the life of a poor family in a place like Guatemala as quickly and cheaply as a cookstove. Still, getting people to change ingrained habits is no trivial matter.
Making Change Accessible
One of the most significant obstacles to change is accessibility. Often the problem is simply knowledge. It takes time and effort to learn a new way of doing things and there are always switching costs involved. There are other barriers as well, such as lack of trust, switching costs, competing incentives and change fatigue and issues relating to dignity and identity.
So the first step in scaling change is to make it accessible. In its quest to spread quality healthcare practices at hospitals, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) created “change kits” to make the changes easy to adopt. The global data giant Experian set up an “API Center of Excellence” to power its cloud transformation. Perhaps most famously, the TED conference transformed itself into a global phenomenon through its TEDx program.
Van Kirk’s challenge was similar. He didn’t need to invent a cookstove, its design and efficacy was already well established. The problem was overcoming barriers to adoption, which included not only the costs involved but helping people to understand the benefits of cookstoves over and building the knowledge base to install them on a wide scale.
What he realized was that he couldn’t do it himself. As an American, he wasn’t planning to spend the rest of his life in Guatemala. If he was going to truly make a difference, he would have to build and empower a network of people who believed in the value of cookstoves as much as he did. That’s the only way cookstoves would continue to thrive long after he’d gone.
Design For Impact
To transform an idea into a movement, people need to adopt it for their own reasons, not yours. IHI’s “change kits,” Experian’s “API Center of Excellence,” and the TEDx conferences didn’t try to force—or even really persuade—people to do anything, but rather empowered them to pursue their own ambitions.
In the Peace Corps, van Kirk led microfinance initiatives designed in the mold of Grameen Bank, but he was convinced that wasn’t the answer for cookstoves. Microfinance is designed to help people enter an established business by loaning them small amounts of start-up capital, it’s much less effective in establishing a business that doesn’t yet exist. Asking people to borrow money to sell something that nobody is buying yet is simply not a viable model.
That’s what led van Kirk to develop his model of MicroConsignment. Starting with people he knew in the community, he gave people materials on consignment to build and sell cookstoves. As the profits started coming in, they came back to buy more materials and a new model for entrepreneurship was born.
Today, many have co-opted the MicroConsignment model to spur adoption of everything from water purification buckets and vegetable seeds to solar lamps and eyeglasses. Organizations such as Liter of Light and VisionSpring have used it to scale their operations from small local efforts to major multinational organizations.
Co-optable resources like MicroConsignment, change kits, and Experian’s “API Center of Excellence,” work because they don’t involve mandates, persuasion or even “carrots and sticks.” Rather it makes resources available for people to co-opt for their own reasons. It succeeds because it furthers their own ambitions and makes their own dreams possible. It empowers them to see themselves as heroes within their own story.
Ecosystems Trump Ideas
The global activist Srdja Popović once told me that the goal of a revolution should be to become mainstream, to be mundane and ordinary. If you are successful it should be difficult to explain what was won because the previous order seems so unbelievable. Yet many leaders approach change initiatives as if they were swashbuckling heroes in their own action movie.
The simple truth is that every change initiative starts out weak and vulnerable, without an internal track record of success. People are bound to be suspicious. They already have everyday struggles and don’t want someone else’s idea to add to their burden. Most often, they’ll nod their head, pay lip service, take a “wait and see” approach and then turn away at the first sign of trouble.
To create genuine transformation we need to get out of the business of selling ideas and into the business of selling success. That can’t be done through persuasion, we have to start by identifying people who are already enthusiastic about change. Change isn’t about communication, but empowerment and the best way to empower is to give people resources with which they can pursue their own goals and dreams.
If we can help allies to make change successful, even on a small scale, they can bring in others who bring in others still. The best way to do that is to design a resource that is both accessible and impactful, which people can co-opt to further ambitions and goals they pursue for their own reasons, even if those are different from your own.
Greg Satell is Co-Founder of ChangeOS, a transformation & change advisory, an international keynote speaker, host of the Changemaker Mindset podcast, bestselling author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change and Mapping Innovation, as well as over 50 articles in Harvard Business Review. You can learn more about Greg on his website, GregSatell.com, follow him on Twitter @DigitalTonto, his YouTube Channel and connect on LinkedIn.
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