Don’t Give Up. Innovate. Try Something! Private Innovation in the Public Interest Podcast
Anita starts off by asking Sarah about what kinds of transformation are possible through deep stakeholder engagement by companies. Sarah responds by talking about win-win opportunities (she recommends that you should take them when you can find them!). However, what almost immediately comes up in most situations is that you hit tradeoffs: between stakeholders; over time; between different types of goals. Stakeholder transformation is about breaking through these tradeoffs. She gives the example of a mining company entering into a community to mine for cobalt in the Canadian north. This mine might initially be welcome in the community for the jobs that it creates. Over time, though, there may be consequences for Indigenous culture and educational systems and the environment.
Sarah then turned to the challenge of moving beyond only consultation with stakeholders. The goal is to move the corporation away from the center of consideration, and to truly understand what stakeholders in a community may value in ways that haven’t been considered. Building on a quick summary by Anita, she talked about how not everything is known up front, which makes consultation most productivity into a process rather than something on a checklist.
Anita asks Sarah about what she was referring to in her descriptions of good governance as critical to these processes. Sarah cites work by Elinor Ostrom, who wrote about how members of a fishing community would get together in the evenings in a local village café to work out problems on the water. These working-out sessions reflected the ambient background of the legal system that would be an ultimate arbiter. So legal frameworks and principles sat in the background and shaped mutual understanding, but it was the conversations about who would fish where and when that led to breakthrough solutions to shared problems.
Sarah also talks about the missed opportunity in ESG reporting. She describes how the view of ESG reports as the work of corporate communication departments can lead to big problems (Anita thought of the connection to Olga Hawn’s comments about the ESG backlash). If you do this right, according to Sarah’s experience, you can learn a lot about your company. Sarah describes the soul-searching that Nike did through its ESG reports, which is the real purpose of disclosure: Learning. The same is true of Community Benefit Agreements in the Canadian North. If you view these agreements as a place where shared understandings can develop, you can unlock great value.
Principles of user-based design are also valuable in efforts like this. Sarah describes how one hospital redesigned a pediatric MRI machine to overcome the trauma that it imposed on the children who were strapped down and sedated to get their tests. By consulting with children about the experience, they learned that they could make MRIs so appealing that the children wanted to get an MRI everyday. They did this by renovating the look of the MRI machine so that it replicated a space rocket, and by changing the preparatory process for children to get them excited about space travel. She offers another example of a Condo development in Toronto that was designed in consultation with women who favored innovations such as a window in the gym into a childcare center and no blind corners and stroller parking, for example.
We talk about the relevance of user-based design for organizational processes themselves. Sarah laments that we’re so locked in by our legal systems. We need to think differently about organization structure itself; and whether profit has to be highlighted in our legal systems as a duty of directors. Like Dovev Lavie, she mentions Bhutan’s happiness index. In the end, Sarah sees this as an untapped opportunity for more thinking and development.
Our conversation lands on what Sarah wants you to be most aware of in your work with stakeholders. Here it is: Don’t give up. When the business case fails, don’t give up. The temptation will be to give up, but don’t do it. Experiment. Co-create. Look for inspiration. Find something small that you can accomplish. Immerse yourself in the problem. But don’t give up.
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🎥 View the interview here. Don’t Give Up. Innovate. Try Something!