Social Science Is Harder Than Rocket Science
One day last March, Steve Wozniak really pissed me off.
He was talking about being an entrepreneur, and all of the things he was excited about, and then he started talking about how much money he was investing into space projects.
I love space, I fully feel all of the wonder and recognise the opportunities to transfer some of the technological lessons to other challenges.
My son loves space, he talks endlessly about the dwarf planets and the moons of Jupiter.
But I don’t love space more than I love people.
I can’t help but feel like we have reached the stage where social science is either too hard, or too invisible for those who have the power to change things.
Either these people don’t see the problem, don’t appreciate the problem or don’t think they can solve the problem.
I worry that social innovation is harder than rocket science.
Social innovation is harder to define and solve, but probably also harder for people to get their money back from their investments, which is more telling.
Action
No politician or investor should be able to rest knowing there are foodbanks in their communities, that OAPs are waiting in ambulances outside A&E departments for 24 hours+, that our economy is so unfairly tilted. We need these problems to feel like shared missions in which we all have a role to play.
When Covid hit, one positive was how quickly the call to arms was heard and acted upon. People worked all hours to play their role in creating solutions, whether that was designing and manufacturing ventilators, building software to help small businesses deliver locally, or enabling communities to communicate and stay connected.
Without getting too Camus about it, we could argue about whether those efforts were a justification of the energy invested, but the overall agreement of the group to take action led to boundless innovation and creativity.
The social issues facing us have not had that moment of immediate and pressing crisis.
Like the boiling frog, these issues have developed over an extended period but have seemingly never felt so uncomfortable as to trigger the kind of response that Covid did.
They’re also less visible and their impacts less distributed.
You’re not worrying about the housing crisis if you’re mortgage free and not at risk of being moved on at the whim of a landlord hundreds of miles away.
Chances are if the system has served you well then you don’t agree that there’s much wrong with it.
ESG
I think there was once hope that an ESG investment strategy might start to turn this tanker, but more recently it feels like that was a false dawn.
ESG stands for environmental, social, and governance, and indicates a fund or funder’s interest in investing in projects that have strong qualities in these areas.
In reality, this led to increased investment in green projects that could clearly be identified, but the social and governance objectives were never fully understood.
In the last 12 months ESG has been blended into an idea of woke, or more the narrow-minded perspective of the “anti-woke”.
The idea that we do not need to focus on ensuring investment reaches companies that are creating social value or are practicing good and fair governance seems daft to me, unless seen through a very narrow perspective of introducing unnecessary obstacles.
This is probably fair if your mindset sees the role of investors as solely getting a financial return.
If you can’t see value in different ways then you’re not going to see the responsibility to make your investments work for a better world.
But this is all also symbolic of a larger virus influencing the way that people see giving fair equity as being “woke” and that being “woke” in itself is a negative. Probably a topic for another day.
Social Innovation
There are some quite obvious reasons for why we don’t see social innovation, and why we are now faced with so many expensive social challenges.
I don’t think we can ignore the cost if we want to make it a more credible destination for investment.
There’s a lack of lived experience which is being perpetuated in bad solutions coming through which are doomed from the beginning.
There’s knowing where to start and why to start.
Earlier this year we had the announcement of which towns, cities, and communities will benefit from Levelling Up funding. Some administrations were overjoyed and saw it as a “vote of confidence” while some felt more left behind than ever.
The narrative of the Levelling Up white paper was that it was targeting “left behind” places.
The idea of “left behind” is a tricky one. The language is bad, it implies an acceptance that it has happened almost intentionally.
But this is not a new trend, this is the way of life for centuries and centuries. People leave behind their hometowns in the belief that they can achieve a better quality of life elsewhere. It isn’t even limited to humans, it’s our mammalian instinct.
But there’s a bigger issue at hand here that building some shiny buildings and new cycle paths (so many cycle paths).
Social innovation is hard. Really bloody hard.
We need R&D funding and infrastructure in the same way we do for the sciences and technology. This is funding, but also access to expertise to capture best practice and better research how to make good solutions travel better.
Local Leadership
When you work with local authorities and governments you see the full range of engagement with this topic. There are whole regeneration departments these days, it’s a profession and a career path. That’s such a weird thing.
When it works well, you see people who are in the right place with the right amount of passion, commitment, and conviction to do something about the locally present issues.
What happens too often in reality is that a couple of scenarios play out:
Officers do a great job and get a better offer to go elsewhere, losing continuity
Funding bids are written with the right language but delivered by officers who don’t really believe in the mission but know the right language needed to secure the funding
Everyone is looking at a different idea of success and nobody has the language needed to define and articulate what everyone wants to get
Nobody learns anything, or maybe more accurately: nobody learns enough. Learning doesn’t have its own KPI.
Projects sit in this weird limbo between capitalism and socialism.
We have local authorities who are having to take on this burden, but it’s the same logo on your bins and recycling as on the business support service.
We want social value, but we don’t know how to value it.
This all plays out in a culture which rewards inertia. It takes a lot of bravery for an officer to commit to a project for a decade, sacrifice personal gain when attractive offers come their way, and miss out on opportunities for promotions, all the while knowing they will be the one in the firing line if anything goes wrong.
There’s more to this, which will come in the next two weeks and talks a bit more about shared missions and the missing ingredient needed to make social innovation happen for good.
What do you think? Is building a basecamp on Mars more important than rebuilding communities closer to home?
This is a three part post, you can read part two here.
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