Dark side innovators: We don’t have to like them to learn from them
This essay is an adaptation of a short talk I gave at a conference a few years ago, and it includes a pretty terrible pirate joke.
The talk’s three key points start with “R,” so the pirate joke was hard to avoid. Below is a synthesized version of the talk, with minor edits to remove some “uhs” and “ahs,” but keeping the “RRR!”
Setting: Social and Behavior Change Summit, Nusa Dua Indonesia, April 2018. Title: Dark Side Innovators: We don’t have to like them to learn from them.
“ I got some advice yesterday about these short “lightning talks” which was to ‘get straight to the point,’ so here it goes: The main point that I want to make is that dark side innovators are successful because they believe in the capacity of community members, to a degree that often far exceeds the belief that many of us have in what we call “the humanitarian sector.”
And you might want to say to me, “but wait — we believe in community members too! Don’t tell me that in the humanitarian sector we don’t respect communities, because we do.” And while this may be true, there are some ways that dark side innovators are outperforming us.
The dark side is seducing where we are trying to inform and persuade.
They are seeing the power of communities, the power that they have to decide and to act, or to not act, in ways that we often don’t. Those working in the humanitarian or international development sectors often see deficiencies and things that are broken and things that need to be fixed.
And while we don’t always do this, I think we do it often enough that we can spend 7 to 10 minutes this morning talking about it, and you can tell me later if you disagree.
I was thinking I would introduce my talk with a slide of Darth Vader and some Star Wars theme music, but then I thought that it’s probably too culturally specific so I will skip that. I will also skip reference to politics and politicians. There are many “dark side rhetoricians” but I would rather not go down that road. I have in mind a different line up.
First we’ll cover the violent extremists. Second we’ll talk about corporations and I’m not critiquing capitalism — please don’t tweet that I’m saying that corporations are bad because they’re not — but sometimes they do things that are a little bit dark and often I do things that we should be learning from. Thirdly, I’ll be talking about the entertainment sector, with reference to video games in particular. Of course not all video games are bad, but many are criticized for being ultra-violent or for simply making us waste a lot of time.
If you’ll indulge me I will say that video games can sometimes be just a little bit “on the dark side.” I’m using these three examples to make three concrete points. That was the other advice I got yesterday about these short talks: “Make two or three points and make them clear.”
Here are my three key points: 1) Violent extremists understand the powers of community to act or not act; 2) Corporations understand that communities have the power to buy or to not buy; and 3) Video game designers understand that without people participating and playing, the video game companies will go out of business — so the power is with the people. It’s not we who “empower” the other, we don’t “give voice,” because community members already have voice. I think that those on the “dark side” understand this more than we do, on the humanitarian side. Each of the examples I’ll talk about it’s going to illustrate one key lesson I believe we can learn.
Violent extremists having something to teach us about respect. Corporations can show us the power of research and through video games we can better understand recognition and giving visible rewards for action. Before going further I want to give a short definition of innovation, which I am borrowing from a book called “Eat, Sleep, Innovate,” from Anthony, et al. They don’t equate innovation with technology. Instead, they define innovation as “something different that adds value.”
Let’s look at what violent extremists are doing differently from the humanitarian sector, how are they “innovating,” so to speak. I had slides it would be a big word it would be RESPECT. We are going to talk about respect for the next 1–2 minutes. What violent extremists understand about young people in particular is their desire to contribute. They see young people as agents of change in waiting, not “beneficiaries.” They don’t treat young people as recipients but rather as actors. And they know how to motivate them and to motive them to act. They do it by offering a vision.
Saint-Exupéry once said that if you want to build ships you don’t tell people to go out and collect wood, you have them dream of the endless sea. Violent extremists are really good at selling the vision and they’re really good at getting people to contribute and to act. Of course the actions are often in horrible — if they’re blowing themselves up- this is not something I’m recommending. But this idea that young people are actors and not broken beneficiaries is really powerful and I think we can learn from them.
For the next two examples, I’m going to go a little bit faster, not by speaking faster, but by keeping the examples shorter because I think these next lessons are easy to grasp.
From the corporate sector we have borrowed for many years. In the 1990s, for HIV prevention for instance, we used “social marketing” — are there any social marketers here today? Population Services International has been using social marketing for more than 20 years and they do it really well. So the marketing aspect is not new within humanitarian and international development sectors. But one major lesson we can still learn from corporations is how much they invest in research. Again, if I were using slides today the big word on the screen would be RESEARCH. Corporations invest more in research than we do. The do more of it, they do it earlier, and faster and they spend more money doing it. What corporations spend a lot of time doing is understanding what people want. What people desire.
There was a so-called “innovation” that came out more than 40 years ago, which was powdered milk for infants. In many countries it did a lot of harm. It was perceived as new and beneficial, and corporations managed to sell something to women and families in low-income communities that ended up having a harmful effect of children because some families used unclean water with the powdered milk, and many children got sick — and continue to get sick. Here is an innovation that came in, and in some instances it had bad effects.
But what the corporation’s selling powdered milk understood is that women appreciated convenience. And they understood that there was a certain status and the prestige to having this commercial product. It was about desire, convenience and status. While the humanitarian sector is thinking about what people need and what is good for them, corporations are thinking about what people want.
There was a great essay from a few years ago that talked about the need to flip “Maslow’s hierarchy,” on its head — and to think less about needs and more about desires. I think the corporation’s succeed because of they have the research superpower. And they spend time and money understanding what people desire. Yesterday, the issue of data mining and the “Cambridge Analytica” scandal came up, and I think this is another place that we could make reference to the dark side’s use of the power of research. There is a ton of data available and we, in the humanitarian sector, often don’t invest in using available data.
Now I’m learning I have only minutes left for this talk, and I’ve got to fit in my joke, so I will try to wrap things up now.
The last example I want to share is from video games. What video game designers do extremely well is they make progress and action visible, and they reward progress through points and prizes. They scaffold the game, and it starts easy and gets progressively harder. And players are happy because the are in the game, gaining points, getting rewarded and recognized.
If any of you are out there who have ever written a report and sent it to your boss, or to your team, and nobody read it nor responded — then you know what I mean when I say that in the “social sector” I believe we could be focusing more on recognition as a form of motivation. We could do more to publicly recognize community member’s actions and contributions. Recently, with some colleagues working with me in community radio began experimenting with WhatsApp to publicly recognize the radio stations that turn in their reports on time. We called it “WhatsAppreciation.” We were trying to use something positive to motivate action. We borrowed this directly from video games, using a light form “gamification,” a tactic that many of you have heard about and may already be using.
Okay, it seems I am at the one minute mark until the end of this talk, so I will recap my three points, which were: respect for communities, the importance of research and the power of recognition.
And because those make three “R’s” and because I said I was going to tell you a terrible joke, I’m going to pull out the dark side pirate who’s gonna tell you to remember the three “RRRs!” Respect, research and recognition — and arrrren’t you glad that you came this morning to hear that terrible joke?
And because I don’t want to be remembered only as “the lady who made the pirate joke,” I’m going to end on a semi-serious note with a quote that from a writer who I admire, who is Audrey Lorde, who said that the “Master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” And I think the reason she says this is because she fears that we will become like the “Master,” we will become dark, or join “the dark side” if we use their tools. And that is a perfectly valid point.
What I want to suggest is that we CAN use the Master’s tools, and we don’t have to dismantle the Master’s house, we can instead build another house just next door — a better house — and we can make that house so interesting and exciting and so full of respect for community members and so built on insights and empathy from research and so full of recognition for the creativity and contributions of community members that people will come over to the light side. We will compete with the dark side by using their tools.
Thank you very much
