NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

It has been almost 10 years since I last spoke to Bill Drayton — the founder of Ashoka and a seminal figure in the social entrepreneurship movement — on the sidelines of SOCAP in 2015. In that time, so much has changed in the social impact sector (and the world around us) that it’s difficult to process.

But one thing hasn’t changed: Drayton’s focus on organizing thousands of changemakers around the world, empowering them to transform their innovative ideas into lasting impact. Earlier this year, he was given the Skoll Foundation’s Global Treasure Award in recognition of his pioneering contributions to the field of social entrepreneurship, joining the ranks of past recipients like Malala Yousafzai, Desmond Tutu, Jimmy Carter and the 14th Dalai Lama.

In the interview below, Drayton shares his thoughts on the sector he played a key role in establishing, as social entrepreneurship enters a new era full of bewildering new challenges — and exciting new opportunities.

Question 1: What do you see as the most profound changes the world has experienced in the past decade — and which of those developments will have the biggest impacts on social entrepreneurship in the next 10 years?

The rate of change and the degree and extent of interconnection — the two primary historical forces of our era — have accelerated past the turning point at which the old world of institutions and repetition is now in its final death throes. Every day, there are more and more people getting better and better at introducing change for the good, and doing so together. We have gone from hunter-gatherer groups of 100 to 150 people to billions of people networked together.

And if anyone thinks the rate of change is rapid now, just imagine what it’s going to be like in another 15 or 20 years.

This is magic, and wonderful for the 60% of humanity who have learned how to be contributors in this new reality. However, it has left the other 40% cruelly crushed by what we at Ashoka call “the new inequality.” They have not learned the complex skills required to play in the world’s new game, now that it is ever more interconnected and changing ever faster.

Those of us who are in the game are helping each other play ever more skillfully. Your work with NextBillion is a first-class example.

But those who aren’t in the game are not benefiting from everyone-in-the-game-helping-everyone-else. In fact, they are falling further and further behind, day by day. In this way, the new inequality is far more devastating than the static old inequalities.

If one is not able to be a giver, one cannot have a life. That’s why we believe that the most fundamental right is the right to give. This means that everyone must have the requisite changemaking abilities. That’s why Ashoka’s mission is “everyone a changemaker.”

It’s essential that we all reach out and ensure that everyone who is suffering from the new inequality is given the tools necessary to join us as colleague changemakers. This is a matter of supporting equity and ethics on the one hand, and avoiding division and social failure on the other.

The Ashoka community of social entrepreneurs is focused on this. Over the last decade, we’ve developed new methodologies and partnerships that allow us to help some of the most powerful mega forces in society — from major companies and unions, to publishers and universities — understand that the people they serve need to see, understand and be able to play in the new game more than anything else. Our community of social entrepreneurs is pooling its understanding of what’s required in area after area to make this transition. Now it has learned how to build action networks around these mega partnerships, giving us a new tool to help facilitate the transition from a world of institutions and repetition to a new world where humanity moves together toward a brain-like unity that will bring human consciousness to a level never imagined before.

Question 2: Ashoka has had a long-standing focus on fostering change at a systemic level — a focus that many other organizations have embraced in recent years. Are there any key insights from Ashoka’s work that organizations should keep in mind when embarking on systems change initiatives?

It’s useful to understand that there are roughly three very different levels of impact: (1) direct service; (2) systems change; and (3) framework change. All are necessary, but they’re very different and have different measures.

We need the individual teacher in the individual classroom, and we need the lawyer defending a poor person who could not otherwise access the law — these types of direct service remain necessary.

Systems change is entirely different. It requires an entrepreneur who can envisage a different way society can organize and manage important functions. Examples extend from Henry Ford’s assembly line to Ashoka Fellow Dixon Chibanda of Zimbabwe, who has trained grandmothers sitting on “Friendship Benches” to provide key mental health care that would otherwise be almost entirely unavailable. It’s a model that is spreading rapidly, including to New York and even the World Cup.

Framework change helps everyone understand and see the world differently, which then opens the door to myriad changes. For example, when we launched Ashoka 45 years ago, we created the terms “social entrepreneur” and “changemaker,” built a world community of role models (the Ashoka Fellows), encouraged university research and curricula to explore the new field of social entrepreneurship, and worked with carefully selected knowledge intermediaries. We wanted to plant in everyone’s head the idea that it is okay — in fact, cool and feasible — to care and to organize for the good. Promoting the idea that anyone can be a changemaker and maybe even a social entrepreneur helped change the framework, laying the groundwork for the subsequent steps leading to Ashoka’s full “everyone a changemaker” work.

Ashoka and social entrepreneurs only deal with systems and framework change, although these two levels of change then transform direct service. Over the last two and a half years, Ashoka has consciously understood what many great social entrepreneurs have understood intuitively: that there is no permanent pattern in a world defined by rapidly accelerating change and its multiplier, spreading interconnection. It no longer makes sense to be guided by a set pattern or solution. Instead, social entrepreneurs must design and put in place what we now call “self-correcting decision-making architectures.”

In just this short period, we have come a long way in beginning to systematize how social entrepreneurs and others design their futures (the same principle applies to business, religion and indeed, all fields). I believe that this methodology will quickly become essential for everyone, since everyone must be a changemaker to be able to contribute. In other words, we have a major challenge of how to develop an extraordinary array of tools (legal, economic, cultural, organizational, measurement, etc.) into an easily and readily used system. I believe that, within four or five years, this will be a very important part of law school and business school curricula.

Question 3: As AI seems poised to reshape the workforce and perform tasks that once required human intelligence, what are the implications for young people considering a career in social entrepreneurship?

You’re right that AI, another step in the path to a world defined by omnipresent and very fast-moving change and interconnection, will eliminate repetitive, thoughtless work. Thank heavens!

However, I doubt there is any risk that this will reduce the ever-increasing demand for people to help other people master how to be a great changemaker and giver. And what does a changemaker most want to do? The greatest gift is helping others be great changemakers. This is exactly what’s necessary for human consciousness to gradually evolve toward a unified “brain” that includes billions of people and countless “teams of teams of teams,” all interconnected with each other and all changing.

Helping others is what brings health, happiness and longevity. A world where everyone has the power to help everyone else grow their changemaking power is a united world. It’s a world that actively encourages equality. It’s a world where problems don’t outrun solutions. It’s a world where everyone has what all the great prophets wanted: a life of expressing love and respect in action.

Every young person absolutely must have the changemaker realization as early as possible. This is when they experience being a changemaker — because they had a dream, they built a team and they changed their world (perhaps starting in their school, religious community or neighborhood, and growing from there).

Once a person has had this experience and knows that they are a changemaker, they also know that the world will always need them. The demand for changemakers is growing exponentially, even more so for changemakers with high levels of changemaking skills. One of those skills is a very strong ethical fiber. Indeed, the first foundational changemaker ability is something that the youngest child must learn and all of us must grow every year: conscious, empathy-based living for the good of all.

Question 4: Has social entrepreneurship — and the new approach to business it represents — gained as much mainstream traction as you expected this past decade? What do you see as the main obstacles to its growth in the coming decade?

As the rates of change and interconnection continue to accelerate, the need for social entrepreneurs will increase at least as quickly. And we will all have to continue to become ever-more effective entrepreneurs individually and collectively. Ashoka’s development of networks of mega partners and our development of new methodologies, such as self-correcting decision-making architectures, are examples of how the world’s cutting edge has to learn and develop at cutting-edge speed.

The chief obstacle we and everyone else now face is the danger that our ability to work together to collaboratively create a brain-like united humanity will be disrupted by the reaction and divisions coming from large numbers of our neighbors, who we are allowing to remain unable to contribute. We must all recognize this terrible injustice and cruelty as the profound risk it represents to everything we are building.

Question 5: With the key role media, particularly social media, is playing in polarization, disinformation and conflict, both in the U.S. and around the world, do you believe this needs to be a bigger focus of social innovation? If so, does Ashoka have any plans to ramp up its work in that area?

When a need is ripe for action, a wave of social entrepreneurs from across the planet comes up. Since we are now building the connective tissue of the global “brain,” much of which involves media and online communication, there’s an urgent need to have that connective tissue work as efficiently and beneficially as possible. And indeed, Ashoka has seen a wave of social entrepreneurs in this area.

For example, a collaboration of Fellows in Ashoka’s “Tech for Humanity” Purpose Group is currently collaborating with Ashoka Fellow Helena Puig Larrauri to test how best to measure the levels of artificial polarization in different social media sites used by a sample of 35,000 people in Kenya. Once one can measure what the algorithms are doing, a whole array of possible actions becomes possible. A good many Fellows are working on truthfulness and other “connective tissue” interventions, ranging from fighting cyberbullying to making it easy for citizens and groups to undertake independent investigations online.

Question 6: What is one thing you wish you had known when you founded Ashoka, that would’ve helped you advance your efforts to build the organization?

When we launched Ashoka, we knew we had a major experimenting and learning curve ahead. Indeed, we kept Ashoka very small for the first five years because it’s so difficult to correct mistakes once an organization is big.

The key to our learning — and our increasing ability to change the world — has been our efforts to build a network of the world’s leading social entrepreneurs, and now a network of networks comprised of a number of closely linked partners in the “everyone a changemaker” movement. This network of networks includes the Ashoka Fellows; the Ashoka Young Changemakers; the Ashoka staff; our Entrepreneur-to-Entrepreneur community; next-generation leaders who come together to lead their mega organizations in alignment with our core strategies; and other partners. Everyone in this network of networks is chosen very carefully, with the same core criteria, including entrepreneurial quality and exceptional ethical fiber. Together, we’ve been able to, year after year, develop new and ever-more-powerful approaches.

Question 7: What’s one thing you’d like today’s young people to understand about social entrepreneurship, and about their own ability to make a difference in the world?

We have one very simple recommendation for everyone, very much including young people: Give yourself permission! It is so easy for you to find a problem in the world that’s important to you and then to go and fix it! Yes, a lot of people will tell you that you cannot. What that typically means is that they didn’t do things like this in their lives. Your going ahead and changing the world makes them feel uncomfortable. Please be sympathetic and polite. But please don’t listen to them! You can change the world.

James Militzer is the managing editor of NextBillion.

Photo credit: United Way of Massachusetts Bay & Merrimack Valley