BackIn 2016, we started wondering: “Social problems grow exponentially, some of them affect population scale, how do we solve them with speed, at scale and sustainably?” We started connecting the dots – several organisations were working on similar problems, point solutions were doing wonders at a local level but were unable to scale. The complexity of issues made fissures creep up on one side as the other side was fixed.
We started looking at examples that created impact at scale. How did large social movements like the Indian independence movement, the American civil rights movement, Black Lives Matter etc. as well as technology-led innovations such as Aadhaar (India’s Unique ID Program) and UPI (India’s Unified Payments Interface) restore the agency of millions of citizens? How did large commercial platforms like Amazon and Uber reach unprecedented scale so fast?
An idea emerged, what if as solvers of today, we married the idea of platforms with societal impact. This idea was incubated inside Ekstep Foundation and our team started working alongside EkStep Foundation on an audacious endeavour – to improve literacy and numeracy for 200 million children across India. Eventually we started working with other change leaders across diverse thematic areas to reimagine how to solve society’s challenges at scale with technology platforms. We called these audacious endeavours, Societal Platforms.
At the same time, we also started extracting patterns, developing values, principles and frameworks combining platform know-how with our society’s needs. This do-learn-think-do cycle evolved into a systemic approach to think about building platforms in the service of the society.
As the contours of our thinking got sharper and we got exposed to diverse problems around the globe, we realised that this way of reimagining and realising change could come alive in many ways, not just as a Societal Platform. Some manifestations of this way of thinking we could see were actors across civil society, governments and markets coming together to reframe policies (Societal Frame) such as National Digital Education Architecture (NDEAR), a building-block approach to design that would enable anyone to use and build beyond (Open Exponents) such as India’s COVID vaccination management platform running on DIVOC. Recently, we have witnessed Open Networks being catalysed to increase value-creation opportunities for platforms as well, such as Open Network for Education and Skilling Transformation (ONEST).
This led us to pause and assess what we do and who we are. We started out trying to figure out what it takes to design platforms in service of society and landed up with a way to think about inducing exponential change, a set of values and design principles to put this thinking into practice and a diverse variety of assets to leverage and build upon. Thus we became Societal Thinking.
Now, in our journey to enable exponential change, together, we have found a home in C4EC as its way of thinking about exponential change.
Why Societal?
The word ‘Societal’ refers to groups or networks within societies that are connected, or could interact, exchange value and work together for a common mission.
Societal Thinking brings together diverse actors and infuses in them a sense of agency, co-creation and hope in order to induce exponential change.
Who is part of our ecosystem?
Our journey has been co-created by a diverse team of collaborators – people from academia, research, field-workers, government bodies, system orchestrators, design thinkers, technologists and more. It has been energised by system orchestrators who have embraced a new way of seeing and doing, and by philanthropists who have the patience and faith to invest in these audacious endeavours. Meet some of the people in our ecosystem here.
Roles we play
- We reimagine what an equitable world could look like when the agency of diverse actors has been restored and they come together to solve at scale.
- We create and curate knowledge to shape the understanding of societal issues and to redesign the way they are solved. All our work (knowledge, data, process, technology) is open and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, so anyone can share and adapt it with proper attribution.
- We co-travel with system orchestrators to learn, reimagine and design for exponential change.
We invite you to join our journey:
- Read our books Think Scale, Think Speed and Think Sustain – an invitation to reflect on and reimagine the journey to solving pressing social problems at scale, fast and irreversibly.
- Use the shared, open resources for your work: Every journey leads to the creation of open, reusable assets – knowledge, software, data, codes, tools.
- Join us as co-creators of the idea: We recognise the power of collective thinking, so we look forward to working with others who are working on enabling or inducing exponential change. Write to us at info@societalthinking.org.
Learn more about Societal Thinking here.
