Description
In this episode, co-founding directors David Stern and Danny Parsons discuss the organization’s approach to tackling grand challenges. They consider three core principles guiding their decision-making: sustainability through capacity building, scalability via community development, and systemic change by collaborating with institutions. Would it be a failure if IDEMS was no longer valuable?
[00:00:00] David: Hi, and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. I’m David Stern, and I’m here with my co founding director, Danny Parsons. It’s great to be doing another episode together.
[00:00:17] Danny: Yeah, good to be doing another one. You said to come and do more, so here I am.
[00:00:21] David: And you have a specific thing you’re thinking of discussing this time.
[00:00:25] Danny: Yeah, this was a sort of idea that me and you discussed a couple of times and I discussed it with one or two other colleagues. And you said, yeah, that’s interesting about our approach and how we do things. And so you said we should try to document this and then see if it resonates with people. So, I eventually managed to do that, get it down in a little diagram.
[00:00:46] David: This is not a diagram we’re yet sharing.
[00:00:48] Danny: No.
[00:00:48] David: But it is a diagram which exists.
[00:00:50] Danny: Yeah. And the title was Impacting Grand Challenges, and what I was trying to do was maybe explain our approach to wanting to impact Grand Challenges. And I think it came from wanting to explain our decision making, I guess, in projects, or in general as IDEMS, which I felt sometimes can look contradictory or sort of not the obvious logical decision, given the size of us as an organisation, given the size of the projects. But I think hopefully does have some logic behind it when you consider our overall aim of impacting grand challenges.
And so in the diagram, I picked out sort of three approaches, or I don’t know if that’s the right word, we’re aiming to have an approach which aims to be sustainable, scalable, and systemic.
[00:01:49] David: Let me pick you up on this slightly because I think the insight of your diagram, and from our discussions as well, is that what we recognise is that if we’re going to impact grand challenges, then sustainability, scalability, and being systemic are all important components. But we don’t necessarily need to be all of them at the same time. We always need to be thinking about all of them.
[00:02:19] Danny: Yeah, so where I felt that our decision making looked contradictory is that we’re sort of making things harder for ourselves in some ways because the projects are not on this larger scale at the moment, but we’re making decisions as if they are or they might be.
[00:02:36] David: Or they might become.
[00:02:37] Danny: They might become, yeah. And these are the sort of three areas that I think we always have in mind with our work. And that informs our decision making, even when we’re not actively doing them right now, but we’re trying to create them in such a ways that this can be done in future.
[00:02:53] David: Absolutely. And I really like the way that you’ve singled out these three. But it’s not just about singling out these three, lots of people are thinking about sustainability, lots of people are thinking about scalability, and lots of people are thinking about systemic change rather than just isolated change.
So there’s nothing original about any one of these, or even the fact that we’re thinking about all of them. I don’t think that makes us different. But I think what you’ve then done, is taken this a step further. We’re sort of understanding how does this relate to actually things that we think deeply about in this?
And you’ve taken the sustainability and you’ve said that often for us, sustainability takes the form of capacity building and helping individuals. I like to think about this as actually things become sustainable if it’s not within an individual, but if there are many individuals who can take it on and do it.
[00:03:51] Danny: Yes, exactly. And I see that as sustaining something at its current level, that if there’s something that me or one of us is doing, if we’re sharing that with other people this thing can continue without us, but it’s not necessarily growing, but it could carry on or it’s, a project that can carry on, maybe. Yeah. And capacity building is often how we do that or try to achieve that.
[00:04:14] David: And this can take the form of us bringing other people in to teach in the courses we start teaching, or, always trying to hand over. With the maths camps, which we were both very heavily involved in for a long time, then bringing other people in to be able to take over and do it.
[00:04:30] Danny: Yeah, capacity building the local teams to then carry on these without us. And that means we can then move on to another case.
[00:04:37] David: I want to pick up on local teams, and I think there is an element of that, which we often try and do, but I think the capacity building in terms of sustainability, I feel isn’t just about local. It is also about the fact that even within our own team, within IDEMS, we’re almost always trying to, not only for ourselves, but get people to, once they can do something, don’t keep doing it, hand it over.
[00:05:03] Danny: Yeah, and that’s why we’re not just a consultancy company where we have things that we can do over and over and do this kind of similar things without using our skills. We’re trying to always push to achieve that bigger impact.
[00:05:15] David: And it’s not that we don’t want the same sort of things, but if we get the same things again, we’re looking to who do we hand these over to? And quite often that the partners like INNODEMS and…
[00:05:26] Danny: Yeah, it doesn’t have to just be within our organisation.
[00:05:28] David: Exactly.
[00:05:29] Danny: You know, this work, okay, other people can do this work. If they can, that’s great. We can be doing other things.
[00:05:34] David: Exactly. And that idea that sustainability isn’t achieved by us continuing to doing things, but us recognising how to do things and then trying to hand them over to capacity building. And of course, that’s not the whole of sustainability, but that is an insight about why in some of our decision making, we rarely take on the same work more than once. We’re not looking for repeat work in that same way.
[00:06:01] Danny: Yeah.
[00:06:01] David: Which is counterintuitive sort of organisation.
[00:06:04] Danny: Yes, it’s based on consultancy.
[00:06:06] David: Exactly.
[00:06:06] Danny: Originally. Yeah.
[00:06:07] David: Whereas many organisations like that would be looking for that repeat business.
[00:06:11] Danny: Yeah. What’s your kind of niche area and so on.
[00:06:13] David: Exactly.
Scalability, and this is an interesting one. I really like the way that you’ve associated this with working with communities and actually developing the underlying systems in some sense.
[00:06:28] Danny: Yeah, then you’re going beyond just the sustained, the capacity building, which is like one to one, or people sort of capacity builds one or two other people who can do one or two other people. For that scalability in what we’re doing, we’re trying to then reach communities more broadly. And that’s generally requiring sort of building underlying systems, or building tools for that. So maybe the Maths Camp example again is thinking about the Virtual Maths Camp, which is then a sort of digital form which can be going out much more broadly, not just one person to one person to another person or one country to another country.
Similarly with that sort of work on improving statistics skills and statistics training, we’ve been developing a whole statistics software, because we feel that’s part of what’s really needed to get those skills out more widely. It can’t just be us going around training or even training the trainers.
[00:07:26] David: And I think part of it is understanding and seeing that if this software or this tool existed, it would change how people could do it and there could be a community then of people who come around and do it. And I would argue that this is the one which we found extremely hard.
I coined a phrase over 10 years ago related to the stats education that you’re talking about, that what I was looking for was viral scaling. And I don’t believe we’ve yet achieved it, but we’re still working towards it. We’re still actually making progress at building those underlying structures, which could achieve scaling in certain ways.
So we see scaling in this context really as being bottom up. It’s bubbling up. It’s viral.
[00:08:15] Danny: Yeah. And I also feel the kind of common thing for our work is we’re also always trying to lower the barrier of people taking up, accessing the skills, being able to access the skills, so the tools should be lowering the barrier, whether it’s the sort of R-Instat software or whatever, similarly with some of the app development stuff and things like that.
[00:08:36] David: We’re trying to make it so that it could be reached by more people. And often the things that we’re trying to recognise is that it could be reached by more people without losing necessarily some of the complexity, which is part of I think the challenge we’re facing.
[00:08:50] Danny: Yeah.
[00:08:50] David: But I think this idea of sort of scalability, and you know there’s all sorts of different scalability but what we’ve honed in on here, and in your diagram you’ve honed in on, is this idea, which really is building those underlying structures that can enable, that don’t exist yet, identifying them, creating them so that communities of people can evolve which use them, which then can access and do things that they couldn’t do before.
[00:09:14] Danny: Yeah. And then of course, they all link together, but then, with the capacity building as well, that then just helps it because then you’ve got more people who are able to support the communities and so on, they build on each other and link together.
[00:09:26] David: And then your systemic, this is actually what a lot of people would think of in some senses as scaling, what I’d see as more being part of top down scaling, because you’re working within systems, within the structures. But what’s really interesting in the way that I think you’ve framed this is you’ve not framed this in terms of scaling, you frame this as working with institutions and working within existing systems.
And I really like that, that I think that in some sense this doesn’t need to be at scale because part of what you’re doing is you’re understanding through working with institutions, changing institutions in different ways. Not changing institutions, enabling institutions to grow. It doesn’t matter whether they’re small or big, it is this idea that institutional change actually sticks.
[00:10:18] Danny: Yeah, that’s what I had in mind. And I think it’s a big part of what we do because it comes into the collaborative aspect of our work, and I think, from kind of discussions before, not all organisations are interested in working with existing systems, they’re wanting to break through and do their own thing. And that’s slightly different approach. But yeah, we’re interested in both that kind of viral type scaling as well as the sort of, yeah, I like the sort of bottom up and top down together. And very much wanting to work and support within the system. Because we have the other things, we’re not then limited just by working through them.
[00:10:57] David: And what I think is really interesting about the way that you’ve got these three, which I feel is different to how others see it, is that the systems being separate from what we’re saying is scalable, where we’re thinking of the scalable being the viral scaling, often, if you think about the systems, you go to the top, whereas if you want to scale something, you start at the government. And that’s big, and we’re small.
Whereas, actually, if we want to change systems, if we want to be able to get it so that it could go to the top, it probably wouldn’t be us to take it there. We might work with a local institution that’s small, but a university or something, and they might be the ones to then take it to the top. And so, really changing systems, it doesn’t need to be us.
[00:11:48] Danny: Yeah, and I think in the sort of examples, the stats education one again, the R-Instat one, or stats education more generally, this would be then working with universities to help them adapt and embed courses or tools that we’ve developed into their systems, which are then being used. And then maybe it’s then many universities are then just doing this and then it’s obvious that this should go up to the government level.
[00:12:14] David: But it’s not necessarily us to take it there. And the example of this, which jumps to mind for me, is really with Mike, Mike Obiero, who’s a partner who we’ve been working with for a long time in different ways, who’s very active with STACK. We started off supporting him to be able to institutionalise STACK in his institution. He then took it beyond his institution into other institutions. And the thing which has happened really recently is he started working not just at the university level, but at the sort of TVET, the technical level, which is a sort of layer down from universities, in some sense, because it’s technical vocational training, but it’s also a layer where his position from within a university working with the TVETs, he’s more naturally starting to work, not just with individual institutions, but across sort of networks and at a different level.
If we’d gone in and done that as outsiders, it’s very different from him being the one taking it, which is much more about building that local capacity. So we’ve supported him to grow, this is the capacity building, we’ve developed it so that it’s easier to be able to get, we’ve brought it into some systems, which are more the universities, the local ones. But they’re now the ones taking it out into other systems.
And it’s really powerful the way that it doesn’t need to be us.
[00:13:47] Danny: Yeah. And this comes back to our kind of collaborative nature. I really liked the sort of quote that, it’s amazing what you can achieve if you don’t care who takes credit. And that’s you know, what you’re saying that it’s good that there’s other people doing this and they can achieve things in different ways. And we can be supporting and sometimes behind the scenes and sometimes pushing in other directions.
[00:14:08] David: And I think in your diagram, what you then do is having these three sort of roots, which have evolved, which sort of relate to how we relate to sustainability, scalability and being systemic. You then bring all of this back down into the fact that having that means that it frees us up to push boundaries further and in other areas. And that is what we try and do, so if we can make ourselves redundant somewhere, we have the skills to move to somewhere else.
[00:14:36] Danny: Yeah, and I think at each of these three components we’re trying to make ourselves redundant in some way, whether it’s as individuals, just through the capacity building, passing on to other people. Or in the other two as well, in much wider ways. And I think that that’s the aspect that I think helps to explain, our decision making. Why are we trying to make ourselves redundant? It’s much harder to make yourself redundant, or make your organisation redundant, or whatever, because it requires quite an investment of effort and time and resources as well. It’s just easier if I just keep doing it over and over again because I know how to do it.
[00:15:10] David: And it’s more cost effective, it increases our profit margin for big things and so on. I guess there’s two things about this that I think we need to hone in on. One is, we’re a social enterprise, and there’s two parts of that. It’s pretty easy to see how this approach is good for social impact. We need to also explain and get to how is this also good for us, for business.
[00:15:35] Danny: Yeah.
[00:15:36] David: And as a social enterprise, if we totally make ourselves redundant, then the organisation no longer exists, we’re all out of a job. Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing?
[00:15:48] Danny: Yeah, good question. If we’re not needed, then is there any more social impact we can give?
[00:15:52] David: Exactly. If we get to the stage where the skills that we have are no longer needed in any area, then it might be very bad for IDEMS as a business. But I would claim that the world we live in has enough grand challenges, enough real problems.
[00:16:11] Danny: Yeah, I’m not too worried about that.
[00:16:13] David: That’s not a danger, this isn’t going to happen in, probably in my lifetime.
[00:16:17] Danny: And that’s where it, for me, also comes back to the impacting grand challenges being central and being our vision. And this is why, this is why these three things are important. This is why we’re trying to make ourselves redundant because this is what we, you know, believe is needed to be part of impacting grand challenges, and then need to bring in other things like how do we make this sustainable for us as an organisation in terms of the enterprise side as well.
[00:16:44] David: I want to challenge this in the sense that I believe the challenges the world is facing right now are sufficient that if we can do this multiple times making ourselves redundant, we will have plenty of space to push the boundaries further to go further. We’re not going to be running out of these opportunities in 10 to 15 years. We can be growing, you know exponentially and we’re still not going to have that.
But we won’t grow, I believe exponentially forever. And so I think this does come to this fact that as an organisation, there may be a point at which we get big enough that we’re not now needing to grow to be able to impact grand challenges. We’re at a stage where we can really contribute to the grand challenges, which at the moment, I still feel we’re a drop in the ocean.
[00:17:33] Danny: Yes, if we could do this even for one, you know, area, really to have this sustainable, scalable and systemic sort of thing, then we would be pushing the dial on a grand challenge, which would be a huge achievement. So doing this on one would be massive, so I think, yeah, we’re not going to run out of areas.
[00:17:48] David: But if we did get big enough that we were actually at that point, now we were getting to the stage where actually by making ourselves redundant, our team might need to slim down. This is exactly why we have the sort of business structure that we do, that the organisational growth should not be driving, it shouldn’t be a goal forever. There should be a point at which the organisation is at a stage where maybe in the future it does get smaller. And if those grand challenges are not stimulating anymore, well, I for one might want to go back to take an academic job!
This is the thing. I’d love to go back and teach and actually be within academia much more. And I’m sure many others in our team would want to do that. And so we could get to the stage where we’ve now really achieved something and then it might be that our team then slims down as people move into more maybe education roles or other roles and the need for these structures might be less. So if we think of a very long arc, that would be amazing. This is the dream.
[00:18:53] Danny: Yeah, and as you said before, seeing other organisations take up maybe components and really drive other aspects forward, sort of following in a social enterprise way, for example, would be great to see in a really big achievement as well.
[00:19:07] David: Absolutely, and this is one of the reasons that I think we need to be careful in who we employ and how we employ. So that it isn’t that we need to be continuing as an institution. We should be existing as an institution because we’re added value.
[00:19:23] Danny: Yeah, that, and that’s obviously where you can then get the dangers because your then aim is to grow because you want the organisation to grow. And then that could lead to decision making, which is not thinking on the impact because you’re thinking, how can we get work to get more people, which is not necessarily serving your social impact.
[00:19:44] David: And we don’t know how to do this, we’re still relatively young at actually thinking about the social entrepreneurship in this way. But this is the essence of what we hope to achieve. That we hope to continue growing because we know we cannot impact grand challenges as we want to at the scale we’re currently at. We would need to, at this point to really be able to build things which are scalable. Now that’s the thing where we know we can’t be scalable at this point, we just can’t have influence at scale at this point, but that’s what we’re working towards.
Whereas getting to that point and doing so in a way that the organisation doesn’t need to take precedence over the impact, that’s the dream. Whether we can continue to do that at the moment, it seems our decision making is aligned with this. And we’ve been able to keep this. And that’s the aim. That’s the goal.
[00:20:42] Danny: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:20:44] David: Thank you, this has been a, it’s been a nice discussion. And thank you for taking the effort creating this diagram. It might be that this diagram eventually becomes part of our description. It might be that as it gets challenged by our team and as other people input it, it evolves and becomes something else.
But it’s been fun to discuss it, and for this to be something which others can listen into.
Thank you.
[00:21:05] Danny: Thanks.