Christian Seelos is the co-director of the Global Innovation for Impact Lab, part of Stanford University's Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, which develops insights to help organizations make better strategic and operational decisions about innovation, scaling, and systems change. He is co-author of several influential articles in social innovation research, such as “Innovation is not the Holy Grail” and “Mastering Systems Change”, as well as the award-winning book “Innovation and Scaling for Impact” (all co-authored with Johanna Mair). In the latter, the pair reassess how organizations in the social sector create value. Drawing on ten years of research, they show that success depends on balancing innovation and scaling in ways that make sense for any social enterprise. They provide conceptual models and tools to navigate these strategic imperatives, using four rich case studies to illuminate the path. 

Christian Seelos was named “2019 Outstanding Social Innovation Thought Leader” by the World Economic Forum and the Schwab Foundation and is part of our Public Entrepreneurship Academy. We had the pleasure to meet Christian during these days and asked him a few questions.

Hello Christian, thank you very much for letting us talk to you. In your research work, you deal with the topics of social innovation and systems change. To create a better understanding for our readers, what do you understand by these terms? And how do they relate to each other?

Both terms are misleading because they are vague and ambiguous and therefore people associate various characteristics and meanings with the terms. Finding the “right” definition is not the goal. What is important, is to develop a perspective on these terms that is shared in your organization so that people share an understanding of why and how to use these terms. This shared understanding enables consistent decisions and cumulative learnings. In my use, the term innovation refers to a process of replacing uncertainties with knowledge, sufficient to generate desired outcomes. The goal of innovation is therefore not success, but to create important learnings about whether problems are sufficiently understood, whether adequate resources can be accessed and configured into an effective solution, or whether anyone would like to use the output from the innovation process. Systems change is also an ambiguous term for two reasons: Firstly, in the social world, there are no non-systems, every person is always related to numerous people, to various physical, cultural, and political contexts, or to the natural environment. The term system only means – complex social reality - and there is no social reality that is not complex! Secondly, systems or social realities are changing all the time anyway, even without our intervention. Ideally, the adoption of the language of system change helps us to prevent some of the pathologies in the philanthropic and development sectors – assuming that problems are well defined, that we can fix other people’s “systems”, and the enactment of predefined theories of change or solution templates by those who are not deeply embedded in social realities or systems.   

You’ve been critical of systems change jargon in some of your work. Why?

See above and also the adoption of “system” language signals a naïve and artificial inflation in our ambitions as development professionals – but how do we make sure that we have the competencies and the legitimacy to enact these ambitions? Growing ambitions is easy – getting really good at something and building trust with those whose “systems” we intent to change, takes much longer. An essential challenge of this perspective is that we need to learn to be patient and we need to learn to be humble – hard to do for professionals. 

Photo credit: Tobias Fehr-Bosshard