Why don’t we start off with you telling us a little bit more about your specific role and some of the responsibilities that you have in your day to day work with Ashoka?

I love this distinction you make between the systems level thinkers who want to change the system. And then I hear what you’re saying on the other hand about the startups that are operating within the system but still innovating in the way they go about doing business. Do you have any favourite or go to examples of such social entrepreneurs that you think are a great example of running a social enterprise, changing systems, consumerism or behaviour?

Well let me just add one thing that I find very helpful when talking about the different approaches and levels and what is social entrepreneurship. Obviously the lines are blurry to some extent, but, at Ashoka we often talk about the different levels or targets of impact, right? Obviously, you can innovate by doing direct service, you can directly help someone and that might be good, and much of our social action and need is on that level and obviously you can move beyond and scale direct service, right? So that’s also helpful. Our hypothesis would be, and is underlined also by many findings from very successful social entrepreneurs;

if we actually want to tackle issues – social issues and where they come from – we need to look beyond the symptoms.

And looking beyond the symptoms, what do we say when we talk about the systems perspective? Changing systemic root causes and changing mindsets, and changing how people act and believe addressing symptoms might be a good thing and it could also lead to people thinking differently, but it needs a good combination. We would always call for social entrepreneurs to look at which level they want to address and if there is a systemic thing. That being said, there’s a couple of people that I actually am in love with. One of those is Nicole Rycroft. She’s the founder of Canopy. You should definitely check it out. There’s a nice little anecdote to it too, because she is known for greening Harry Potter. Because after being an activist standing in front of those big machineries, taking forests down, she said, “I need to find a way that’s more impactful!”

With Canopy she worked with the key players. She said, “Let’s use market logic to change systems. She worked with the most-consuming paper producers in the U.S. and in Canada I believe, to actually unite them in an Alliance, creating new standards for at first recycled paper. Then they developed paper from straw, and they had patents on it and so forth. And then she said, well, let’s look at who else needs fibres from trees. And it’s the fashion industry. So [she said], ‘hey Zara, hey H&M, let’s build an alliance on that level.’ And that, to me, is a perfect example of pulling the right levers and playing on a systemic level.

I think this gives us a fantastic first taste. Between your work for Ashoka, Germany and the Social Entrepreneurship Network, Germany, what is one thing in Germany particularly that you think could be better that we still need to work on and improve?

Well Germany is very organised and that’s a very good thing, for many things. But, routines are not very helpful for innovative processes. The further we move towards trying to create a culture that allows innovation, experimentation, failing, learning and all of that quickly and in quick iterations in partnerships on eye-level, the more I see it’s really a cultural thing we need to work on.

The most successful social entrepreneurs tell stories of having funders that see themselves as partners, as long-term partners with an open mind to co-impact and alliance building.

It’s just a handful of people and many with good will. But we have too much output orientation. It’s a culture of people being slapped on the shoulder for saying “I spent 50 billion on a school program!”, but no one goes beyond that, asking “And what did that change? We do have a cultural issue still if we want to go about things. And this is a big piece of, I want it to say a bad word, but it’s a big piece of work.

I think there’s certainly a trend that we see in the U.S. as well, of getting really fixated on numbers and outputs without really questioning whether they’re meaningful in any way.

It’s interesting that you also say that, but those are hard questions, right? And I see that and I don’t have the answer to all of them, but it’s too easy to say “I can measure how many people we reached and I’m happy with that.” It’s just not enough.

I think it ties back to what you said earlier about “You can address symptoms and if that’s all you want to do, maybe the reach of people tells you whether you’re not successful or not. But once we peel back these layers of this really thick onion of what is the actual root cause, I think our answer to impact needs to be related to those root causes. And that will probably, I would assume, never be completely quantitative and never be completely qualitative, but probably a fine walk between those two.

Right, and I love this book. Have you read this book [called] System’s Thinking by Donella Meadows? It’s a wonderful book, and one of her first sentences is The universe is messy, deal with it. I love her for saying that!

So simple and so true. As the last question, what resources or books do you recommend to emerging social entrepreneurs or even ecosystem builders like yourself to learn more about social entrepreneurship, social impact, and all of this system thinking that you’ve been talking about?

Well the one I named, A System’s Thinking by Donella Meadows, is a fun to read book. It actually is fun. If I may self-promote the work of a couple of colleagues of mine, look at www.changemaking.net, in which we tried to create an easy guide to systems-thinking and to check your idea: which level are you working on, have you figured out which system you’re working on? Do you actually know what you want to change in the world? And so forth. It has worksheets and videos, and it’s also fun.

Then there is a German book that I read recently, and I don’t know if there’s an English translation, but it would be lovely. It is called The Art of Societal Change by Uwe Schneidewind. It is very known in Germany. It’s so cool because it lays out six or seven basic transformations that we need to master as humankind. It also lays out which role, each stakeholder group in society can and should play in these transformations. I found it was just a very good contextual thing of finding motivation to work towards transformation and finding your role as a social innovator or maybe also a different role. We need many people on board for the kind of challenges we have.

Fantastic. Laura, thank you so much for your time and sharing. It was so wonderful to talk to you.