Purpose: Social Innovation

In tech, we have no shortage of interesting problems to solve - but generally they are not important problems. I want to transition from creating products and services that solve merely interesting problems, and move towards solving problems that are also urgent and important. For these larger, more complex problems, I see design strategy & thinking as the key to building the right thing.

- Me, 5 months ago, in my SOP for AC4D

These were the thoughts I started with at AC4D and as the first quarter is winding down and I’m reflecting on what I’ve learned and how my thoughts have evolved, this topic has turned out to be an ideal prompt for documenting the understanding and the ideas so far and maybe iterate on this very writing assignment at the end of each quarter and see what has changed!

So - right now what is my Theory of Change? I think the starting point is discovering or acknowledging that change is indeed needed. That status quo is no longer acceptable and that we can no longer ignore our pain. After that acknowledgement everything looks like a messy ball of yarn and I don’t know where to begin unraveling it. I keep hearing at AC4D that there is no single place, one must just begin. In words of one of the instructors: You pull on a thread and that pulls on other threads, it’s never ending but you start to discover how interconnected things are and start to understand the relationships between them. So I will present, in a loosely organized manner some things I consider to be a part of my Theory of Change.

Discover and/or Acknowledge That Change Is Needed

Threshold of Pain

I’ve been using this metaphor lately, that we as individuals only change something when we feel pain above a certain threshold and it’s usually acute pain we respond to with swift action towards fixing it. Living in this messy world is more like chronic pain though - we’ve become used to it. It’s always there and we feel we can do nothing about it. We’ve adapted, because we’re resilient.

Whatever the reasons for finally acknowledging that change is needed - in either our personal lives or a larger sphere of existence, how might we go about it?

Seek Information To Understand

Understand Self

Our world is complex and messy because it’s made up of us humans. We are complex and messy. So let’s first understand ourselves. There are many layers to this endeavor and many areas of research as well as traditions that can assist us such as:

• Meditation

• Philosophy

• Formulating our Core Values and General Guiding Principles in life and operating based on that

• Understanding the cycle of Perception, Action and Behavior

• Understanding our evolutionary biology

Sphere of Influence

It’s important to recognize our sphere of influence so we don’t get overwhelmed and we don’t waste our energy towards something that truly is outside our influence.

Sphere of Empathy

It’s important to recognize how far out does our empathy go? How big or small is our tribe that we truly and actively care about? Has it changed in recent years?

One of the ways of helping someone who might be on a different part of the political spectrum as us is by helping them expand their sphere of empathy. We humans, we do care about fellow humans, we just like to draw a line and that is such an ingrained part of us that it can’t be erased completely but we can keep recognizing it and keep expanding it.

Understand Communities

Just as we can understand ourselves through the lens of science (neuroscience, evolutionary biology, psychology, sociology) we can also understand why we behave the way we do in our core groups. How do we form these relationships?

Understand Societies

Taking the exploration a step further - we can understand better why all societies have some common shortfalls and why we in large numbers have certain predictable patterns and how might we break out of those patterns?

We as individuals, with the ‘errors’ in our thinking along with our beliefs and desires and skills - we collect in groups and manipulate the world around us. In our groups (tribes) the errors have an additive effect and the distance between tribes continues to grow. By understanding ourselves in isolation and in different contexts as well as understanding society better - we might be able to reframe problems in ways that we can then solve or at-least make progress towards solving.

Power, Ethics, Morality & Justice

The learning, defining and implementing of these will never be complete.

[I’ll be using the definitions of these concepts from Laura Weinsteing and Leyla Acaroglu’s writings]

Power is the ability to influence outcomes.

Ethical conventions are the product of social dialogue and debate resulting in a normalized collective agreement of approaches that fit the most humans for the most benefit.

Someone with good intentions for the work and changes they want to implement but with a big power imbalance:

• In the best worst-case scenario we might see low adoption for an ineffective solution because it was based on too many assumptions

• In the worst worst-case scenario we’ll be creating a new flavor of colonization.

In one of the classes for AC4D this quarter I took a deep dive into the period of the Russian Revolution. It was one of the most successful revolutions, perhaps the only successful revolution (both times, the governments were overthrown and the revolutionaries came to power to implement whatever the heck they wanted) but very quickly the revolutionaries who were in positions of authority, particularly the leader of the movement started committing the same atrocities in the name of protecting the revolution. No where in their manifesto one could have read the vision and drawn a line to the realities of its implementation. What was the problem then? I think power. I think the failure of the revolution and Lenin as a human being is a beautiful example of absolute power corrupting somebody.

There’s a question that I answered for myself after that project. A question that was always in the abstract and never needed to be answered until that day I finished processing my thoughts about the Russian Revolution. My answer to the question “Do the ends justify the means?” is “No. They do not.”

As anyone contemplates and moves towards making revolutionary changes, just a friendly reminder: don’t become a power elite. Definitely don’t become Lenin.

Let’s Not Be Fearful of Technology Itself

The technology that we’re most fearful of right now is AI.

Intelligence itself is benign. Unless we purposefully build in selfish drives, motivations, and emotions, intelligent machines will not pose a risk to our survival.

Human intelligence however is not benign. The possibility that human behavior might lead to our demise has been recognized for a long time. Since 1947 the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists have maintained the Doomsday Clock to highlight how close we are to making Earth uninhabitable and Climate Change was added in 2007 as a second potential to cause great human suffering.

An excerpt from one of my favorite books, A Thousand Brains.

A poem that expressed something similar:

No matter how completely technics relies

upon the objective procedures of the

sciences, it does not form an independent

system, like the universe; it exists as

an element in human culture and it

promises well or ill as the social groups

that exploit it promise well or ill. The

machine itself makes no demands and holds

out no promises: it is the human spirit

that makes demands and keeps promises.

Lewis Mumford

Technics and Civilization 

It is scary - there are many ways in which we might self-destruct but I don’t think we should fear technology - we should fear ourselves and prevent the scenarios that lead to the behaviors and decisions that lead to the outcome that we want to avoid.

I do not (at this time - I reserve the right to change my mind about this) propose going back to primitive existence. As lovely as it sounds sometimes - I’ve romanticized it because I feel very much at one with nature when I’m surrounded by it and past me (who was somewhat anti-social) wanted to be a true hermit. But, a complete rejection of society may be a solution for some individuals but is not a solution for our species. It is in our nature, evolutionary biology, to create, to solve problems and to form groups and cooperate for mutual benefit. We just need to do it better. We need to grow our tribes and our spheres of empathy. We need to lift up more people with the advancements we collectively make. We need to do that without further harming the flora and fauna of our planet.

We Need To Live In Balance: Civilization & Mother Nature

We have this really odd place in nature, as an apex Predator who can’t give up being the apex predator but who is aware of its own and the suffering of all living organisms due to that position.

Be a Designer. You Already Are.

“Design can be used as a catalyst for positive change, but much design is done without the intent to create outcomes that do so. As a result, we end up living with things we don’t need, and solving problems that don’t exist…” - Leyla Acaroglu

I read a tweet one time that captures this feeling as well: “The world is a museum of people’s passion projects” - how exciting and terrifying.

One of my classmates brought up passion and what its role might be in designing the world. I think passion is a necessary factor in the starting (and for sustaining) conditions for an individual to take action and participate in the world in things that don’t offer instant gratification. And act at a level and in a way that affects it. Passion isn’t sufficient though. One also needs tools to channel and focus that passion.

So, could we as individuals and groups affect the world with passion and tools? Absolutely.

We also affect the world, design the world by not doing anything. Choosing inaction is doing something so, certainly if one is passionate and learned the tools to apply to any part of our individual or collective experience, we would effect change in those areas BUT is that a good change? What is the change we’re intending to make? Who decides what changes we should / must make? These are the next and more difficult questions that I’m now learning to think about.

Before these eight weeks at AC4D, I thought this was not that difficult a question. You just go out there and work towards changing things that you find to be not serving humanity. As someone who is in the minority in this country and has lived in places where I might belong in the majority but are a former colony - I thought, or not thought, intuitively felt that I had enough perspective and empathy to choose changes appropriately and fairly.

That intuition has been shaken and undone a part of the AC4D’s first quarter and particularly the class on Public Sector, Innovation & Impact.

I felt qualified and equipped because I’ve been oppressed and when my own privilege and socio-economic status has perpetuated injustices and inequalities in the caste-based Indian society, I’ve recognized it. I’ve talked to friends and family about it to understand it in a deeper way and tried to think of what decisions at individual / family levels need to be changed in light of that learning. But - there was a before and after for that learning and acknowledging.

If I - someone who has experienced oppression at a large time scale (ancestry) and in the present through the world we inherited and has experienced inequality (gender) and sexism and has experienced the harmful artifacts of patriarchy, and all of these in two flavors - Indian and American - could have had blindspots about how in ways I exist and interact with the world can harm people with different histories than myself and different lived experiences from myself - then on principle I must not operate based on my judgment and intuition. I need a process I can apply often.

It’s kind of like the  cognitive biases - they don’t happen because of lack of raw intelligence or lack of good values. Cognitive biases are not the same as mistakes either. These are interesting artifacts of the human mind because of our evolutionary biology and because of the way our fast and slow thinking - the two modes of thinking we have, interface. We can learn about cognitive biases and slow down and apply the knowledge to minimize them in our decision making but learning about them doesn’t change the underlying mind and its processes that lead to them. We have to live with our old brain (primitive brain / lizard brain).

So similarly at the level of thinking about complex things - we need to slow down and utilize the slow thinking mode (along with the tools that I’m learning at AC4D) instead of relying on our instincts.

Judgment and intuition will improve with time as I learn more about and apply design justice principles but the first step is to have a process that doesn’t rely on intuition and let go of the attachment with some previously envisioned worlds. I’ll rediscover them again through the new process if these are good visions to work towards.

I shudder as I think about the colonizers believing they were doing good in the world.

Scale is an interesting and complicating factor.

If we only operate from values, at an individual level, we might not cause harm but at scale it’s important to see that good, empathetic, aware individuals can also cause harm and harmful ripple effects so we need to understand the complexities at systems levels and learn from the various ripple effects and unintended consequences that we live in, that were triggered 50, 100, 200 years ago.

I see Design Justice as a framework that compliments training of rationality and refining of our collective core values.

“Everything in the material world leaves a mark on us as humans, on the species we share this planet with, and on the cognitive experiences that we collectively experience.” - Victor Papanek

Using DJN principles, design methodology that leans towards participatory design and tools like Equalizer Cards, there is hope that we might break out of the cycle of designing systems of further oppression.

PS: A Love Letter to Humanity

I had a lovely conversation with someone who is working towards improving access to the outdoors and I want to share their words because of how beautifully they summarized the conversation thread about how we could bring about change without repeating mistakes of the past, which is:

Love. Love needs to be one of the core values.

If Love is one of the guiding principles, kindness will be an outward expression of it. Genuine care of fellow humans will be an outward expression of it.

I feel that.

No matter the complexity, the levels of awareness and tribal loyalties - if people moved in the world from a place of love and compassion, we might be able to untangle ourselves a little from this messy, wicked ball of yarn and be closer as people and feel less threatened by each other.

I’m in love with humanity and this is why when I zoom out and look at the world and its complexities - I feel more energized & grateful than depressed or daunted.

Experiencing awe often also helps tip the scale on the side of a healthy perspective for me.

As a species that has only existed for a blink of an eye in the last 24 hours of the existence of the universe, we’ve been incredibly destructive. At the very least, we’ll keep course correcting and I’d love it if we made it.

References & Tools

DJN

Equalizer Cards

Laura Weinsteing’s writings

Leyla Acaroglu’s writings

My Core Values

[I’m feeling the itch to update / refine these]

Curiosity & Truth

• Learn as much as I can about as much as I can

Secular Rationality

• Believe more true things than false things

• Seek information often to update my mental models

• Help others also believe more true things than false things

Compassion

• Build it and practice it

• (It doesn’t always come naturally)

Awe & Beauty

• See the awe & beauty everywhere

• (This is what keeps me healthy more than anything else)

Connect deeply with people

• Ask difficult questions

• Share difficult things

• Create nucleation sites in people’s minds

Contribute to my Communities

• (I’m still finding them)

My Philosophy / Inspiration Lineage

These books have greatly affected the way I think about change and the information I seek to further understand the world. I might not have quoted direct thoughts but as a new practice I’ve adopted from one of my classes at AC4D, whenever I create something, I try to note down the lineage of the inspiration for it. These books have fueled my mind and will continue to (most of these books were 30-50% completed and I find re-reads are very helpful)

• Jonathan Livingston Seagull

  • [From 2008. That’s the earliest I could trace back the thread in my mind about wanting to change something in my life and this simple book helped me take action]

• Storms of My Grandchildren

• Churning The Earth

• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

• When Breath Becomes Air

• We Were Eight Years In Power

• How To Change Your Mind

• How To Really Change Your Mind

• Irrationality

• Whole Earth Discipline

• Algorithms To Live By

• A Thousand Brains

• Moral Tribes

• Minds Make Societies

• Jacobin Publication

• America By Design

• Design Justice

  • [the most recent addition to the list]

Side note - The discovery of each of the books is a story in itself. People who introduced me to it, places where I found it, dots it connected at the time. I wish I had written it all down.

Podcasts

• Hidden Brain

• The Huberman Lab

What additional topics do I want to learn more about? I’m sure there are other missing pieces of the puzzle that is ‘Effecting Change’, but two areas I want to focus on next:

1. Systems Thinking

2. Indigenous Philosophies and Wisdom

Gratitude (not an exhaustive list :))

People of Orro - my former work family

For four years this place provided a living example of going against the grain of industry wide culture in many ways. An average tech company (traditional or startup) isn’t quite as kind, warm and people focussed as Orro was. I want to live in a world where the culture we had as a group is the norm.

People of Try Hard Coffee

It’s a community focused coffee shop that I love to support. There is no place like it really. It is my creative sanctuary and I feel gratitude for the existence of this place everyday. I’ve had lovely conversations with people who work there and people who are regulars there. A minute long conversation has fueled pages of writing at times.