Sprint 2 - Aligning with Core Values

Sprint Objective – To appreciate the Core Values of Societal Thinking, surface and resolve tensions and align on what to hold steady while orchestrating positive exponential change.

Our beliefs have a profound effect on our actions. Anchored in the big question, we arrive at a shared understanding of how we will work towards our big question anchored in the Core Values of Societal Thinking. These values are essential to clarify our beliefs, resolve existing and emerging conflicts and align with other actors who share our beliefs.

Core Values help us ensure the change we create is positive and restores agency, nurtures dignity and enables choice for all participants (individuals and institutions) of society. Exponential change at scale and with speed becomes possible when actors across society have the ability to be active participants in changemaking. Moreover, exponential change may inherently carry the risk of unintended consequences. These unintended consequences may affect historically marginalised communities adversely and disproportionately. Designing with Core Values offers the opportunity to address such consequences.

Together, we will surface the tensions that may emerge due to the context we are in, related power structures, and motivations and incentives of the ecosystem that we need to orchestrate. Here we discover what we must hold steady on the journey ahead. Restore agency – Every individual is born with the will and desire to fulfill their potential. Under unfavourable external circumstances, an individual’s ability to do so may get hampered. Agency gets restored when these individuals have the power and resources to fulfill their potential.

• Nurture dignity – An individual’s social and economic location may be taken to be a marker of their worth. Dignity is believing that all individuals have inherent worth, treating them with respect and shaping systems in ways that ensure everyone is treated fairly.

• Enable choice – An individual’s choices could be limited or predetermined, not because of lack of aspiration but due to socio-economic and cultural factors. Choice is the ability to explore multiple pathways. To enable choice, barriers to decide between varied pathways need to be lowered.

• Catalyse interactions – One actor of society alone can’t solve a large problem. It needs civil society, government and market to come together and solve. System Orchestrators need to facilitate proactive participation, value exchange and co-creation between these actors.

• Resolve for diversity – A large and complex problem may look very different context to context. It cannot be addressed by one solution or type of solver. System Orchestrators need to engage with the problem from multiple perspectives and invite key actors to co-create inclusive solutions.

• Inspire co-creation – A unilateral and / or top-down solution may not be inclusive or easy to adopt for participants. System Orchestrators need to design a shared space for people to come together, learn, build upon one another’s work and create new relevant solutions.

• Open value-creation – If each ecosystem actor has to find and build what they need (information, technology, data and more), it will be time- and resource-intensive. System Orchestrators need to empower every actor to freely develop solutions that create value in response to their needs.

• Empower with data – Many solvers hesitate to share data with others, especially participants. To see and solve better, System Orchestrators need to empower actors across the ecosystem with information and insights. These help strengthen existing solutions and explore new ideas.

• Build public goods – Changemaking efforts require many resources, such as tools, knowledge, technology, processes and data. These are often scarce and unevenly distributed. System Orchestrators need to make these resources openly available to use and build upon for all.

• Seek rapid evolution – It can be tempting to make the most complete, most perfect solution. However, while dealing with a complex system, System Orchestrators need to start with simple imperfect solutions and leverage feedback to drive continuous improvements and innovation.

Reimagining Education Leadership

To better appreciate the sprint journey, we are following the story of how ShikshaLokam has been developing 4.5 million education system leaders in India. For this sprint, we will illustrate the Core Values they resonated with and those they had to work towards to align with, and why.

ShikshaLokam had framed their big question: “How might we enable 4.5 million school leaders to drive continuous micro-improvements in their contexts across 1.5 million schools?” To enable 4.5 million school leaders, ShikshaLokam resonated deeply with the Core Value ‘Restore agency’ They wanted to ensure all education leaders had the tools, capacity and capability to enact change in their context.

The team agreed they wanted to bring together diverse actors instead of implementing all programmes themselves, and thus, ‘Inspire co-creation’ stood out as important. This organically led them to ‘Open value-creation’ so as to equip actors across grassroots organisations to build upon what existed. This was scaffolded by their belief in ‘Build public goods’ to drive discovery, sharing and reusability of assets.

While these values offered a starting point to think about solving at scale, with speed and sustainably, ShikshaLokam experienced tensions with a few values too. One such value was ‘Empower with data’. This seemed challenging in government partnerships as conversations around data centred around giving national and state administrators the ability to see what was going on, not around enabling school leaders directly. ‘Seek rapid evolution’ too clashed with the mindset of building a complete, perfect product.

As the ShikshaLokam team clarified their beliefs about positive exponential change, they began seeking and identifying the diverse ecosystem actors they need to innovate and work with… More in the next sprint!

Now to Prepare for Our Sprint Together… Please reflect on these questions from your perspective.

• What are the three Core Values that resonate most with you, why?

• What are the three Core Values where you are seen as the role models, why?

• Which Core Values you feel most challenged by / conflicted about, why?