Mastering system change in social innovation

System change is a popular approach among those aiming to solve big problems like poverty, preventable disease or poor education, but system change is no “silver bullet” on its own, write Professor of Organization, Strategy and Leadership Johanna Mair and Hertie School Adjunct Christian Seelos in a newly published article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

“Steering system change requires that we nurture and develop our levels of competence and ambitions in sync,” Mair and Seelos assert. Conjuring the image of J.W. Goethe’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice, whose naïve wizardry leads to disaster, the authors offer some “effective ‘spells and gestures’” to avoid pitfalls when undertaking system change.

“We were reminded of the apprentice’s story when reflecting on the growing interest and sometimes outright infatuation with system change,” they write. “If an intervention withdraws without having robustly transformed the causal system architecture, things may be as bad as or even worse than before,” they note.

But this is not to dismiss efforts to change systems altogether. Instead, Mair and Seelos outline two approaches for pursuing system change that they have identified during their research, providing “examples of how organizations can master the cause-effect architecture of systems and enact effective change.”

Their award-winning book, “Innovation and Scaling for Impact: How effective social enterprises do it” was published by Stanford University Press in 2017. It was the recipient of the 2017 Terry McAdam Nonprofit Book Award, sponsored by the Alliance for Nonprofit Management, and the winner of the ONE Book Award, chosen by The Academy of Management (AOM) at its annual meeting in Chicago in August. ONE is the Organization and Natural Resources division of the AOM.

In their book, Mair and Seelos share deep insights and offer diagnostics on how organisations create impact. The book draws on a decade of research, exploring how social sector organisations create value. There is an overlooked tension, according to the authors, between organisations’ need to innovate - or implement new ideas, and how they build on existing strengths - a process the authors call “scaling”. An organisation, and ultimately its impact, can be fundamentally defined by its ability to manage this tension.

Innovation and Scaling for Impact includes four case studies which detail effective strategies for combining innovation with scaling. This ultimately leads readers to better understand how to drive progress and which tools can help organisations to learn and become more effective in tackling social problems and societal challenges.

Read the full article on Managing System Change in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Excerpts and reviews of Innovation and Scaling For Impact can be found at Stanford University Press.

Find out more about Johanna Mair's executive seminar on Social Innovation.