Learn to Lead Social Enterprises
Strategic Intelligence for Education Innovation
Are current learning pathways for social enterprise leaders still relevant for emerging global conditions? To explore this question, Association Ventures designed a strategic intelligence map using the World Economic Forum Strategic Intelligence platform to inform the design and delivery of social entrepreneurship education at the University level and within peer-to-peer digital learning platforms.
A related WEF transformation map, Accelerate Impact Leadership AIM, explores content elements that shape how to discover, build, and grow social enterprise services, programs, and operating units. Building on the AIM map, The Learn-to-Lead WEF Map describes factors and conditions that shape opportunities and methods for social entrepreneurs to learn how to lead successful social enterprises.
The Learn-to-Lead analysis provides insights for designing instructional goals and methods across the learning spectrum, from early didactic learning to experiential learning during formal education and, lastly, with continuing professional development education. Six content themes shape the transformation map:
- Systems Leadership: The contemporary world’s intense interconnectedness demands a new approach to leadership.
- Achieving Diversity and Inclusion: Identity is multifaceted, and so is discrimination.
- Inclusive Education Design: Assistive technologies and online courses make instruction more available and effective.
- Adaptive Leadership: “Analyse, Plan and Implement” has given way to more adaptive leadership that relies on experimentation.
- Entrepreneurial Leadership: Leadership during the Fourth Industrial Revolution requires an entrepreneurial state of mind.
- Education Innovation: COVID-19 has highlighted the need to be able to deliver instruction in new and more compelling ways.
Here is a sample of those insights based on the Transformational Map output from February 6, 2022. The World Economic Forum, Strategic Intelligence Platform, prepared the extracted content noted in italics below. For the most up-to-date, visit the real-time updates here.
Systems Leadership
The contemporary world’s intense interconnectedness demands a new approach to leadership.
Systems leadership is about leading in a situation where power is diffused and where the consequences of decisions are magnified and less predictable as their impact progressively ripples across domains. It requires cultivating a shared vision for change and empowering innovation and collaborative action. According to a report published by Harvard Kennedy School’s Corporate Social Responsibility Initiative in 2016, systems leadership is needed to address complex problems related to food security, climate change, and gender equality — which cannot be solved with a top-down, pre-planned approach that focuses on one area to the exclusion of others. Instead, these problems call for the engagement of diverse stakeholders from multiple sectors. Systems leadership done right also means balancing short- and long-term goals to optimize value for everyone, not only for the loudest, wealthiest, or most influential. By cultivating a shared vision, nimble systems leadership can galvanize a diverse array of interested parties and help ensure that their efforts align, potentially producing better results in a faster way than would otherwise be possible.
Achieving Diversity and Inclusion
Identity is multifaceted, and so is discrimination.
The many factors that can make up a person’s identity — race, gender, age, physical ability, or cultural background, for example — shape their experiences throughout life. When confronting discrimination based on identity, there is a growing movement within and beyond the human rights community to draw wider attention to these multiple dimensions and to the social, economic, and historical contexts in which discrimination occurs. This method of holistically examining the multiple forms of discrimination that different individuals may face is known as “intersectionality”; fundamentally, it is a recognition that discrimination is experienced in complex ways, which can often have compounding impacts on one another. Merely focusing on only one form of discrimination, such as racial identity, without considering other factors like a person’s gender or economic status means that other, simultaneous rights violations can easily be overlooked or ignored. This can lead to a failure to address the totality of problems and structural disadvantages experienced by groups such as minority women, older people with disabilities, or LGBTI minorities.
Unemployment, poverty, and homelessness are all contributors to disadvantages for vulnerable populations, so including them in any contextual analysis enriches our ability to understand these populations. Intersectional approaches focus on society’s response to an individual’s multifaceted identity rather than slotting that person into rigid categories. It also acknowledges that discrimination may be less overt now than in the past and more multi-layered, systemic, and institutionalized. responses must therefore be more sophisticated, and greater effort is necessary to elevate sensitivity to the connections between race, gender, and social class.
Inclusive Education Design
Assistive technologies and online courses are making instruction more available and effective.
Truly inclusive learning involves curricula and experiences designed for diverse abilities, learning styles, cultural backgrounds, and gender identities. Universal Design for Learning has also been instrumental for inclusive learning; this framework, promoted by the Center for Applied Special Technology, includes three basic principles: multiple means of presenting information, multiple means of motivating students, and multiple means for students to demonstrate that they are learning — ranging from a traditional essay to green screens and podcasts. Both of these models can foster skills necessary not only for school but also for post-graduation life.
Inclusion in education involves the broader process of changing social norms, values, and attitudes addressing unconscious biases and stigma, and adopting policies and practices in schools and training centers accordingly. In a world where change is occurring more rapidly, driven by science and innovation, inclusive education must leverage technology to bolster the cause of universal access and increasingly personalized learning; video conferencing, virtual reality, and digital courses are redefining when and where learning takes place and paving the way for greater flexibility and access.
Adaptive Leadership
“Analyse, Plan, and Implement” has given way to more adaptive leadership that relies on experimentation.
An ability to experiment with and pilot new ideas and designs is essential for adaptive leadership. According to a study published in 2017 by Deloitte, one way of developing this ability is to cultivate diverse and inclusive teams where people feel empowered to speak up. The study found that this generates more and better ideas and innovative ways of working. Piloting new ideas works most effectively when followed by a rigorous assessment of results. A “systems mindset,” which involves looking beyond the immediate impact of decisions to consider all concerned stakeholders, can help refine and sharpen initial ideas. In the face of this unknown, organizations must be adaptable, with the ability to embrace change and rapidly respond to internal and external forces.
Before, an organization’s desire to become more agile and innovative was an indicator of success; now, it is imperative for survival. So how exactly do you design for adaptability? First, recognize that an organization is both a technical construct that needs to be engineered for efficiency and a social construct that needs to be nurtured to empower its workforce, customers, and communities. Specifically, four key ingredients drive enterprise adaptability: Built on purpose and meaning: Rally your employees through a united vision to overcome challenges. Organized for effectiveness and efficiency: Drive focus and agility unraveling your organization’s complexity. Optimized for the future workforce: Build resilience by harnessing alternative talent models. Designed for human-centered realities: Treat employees as the“customer” of your organizational design.
Entrepreneurial Leadership
Leadership requires an entrepreneurial state of mind.
Successful startups and innovative enterprises have demonstrated how to transcend existing leadership methods to create new ways of functioning as an organization. Startups, for example, often go through multiple iterations of ideation (the process of generating ideas) as they approach a problem, followed by relentless prototyping. The vast majority of these prototypes fail. However, the limited time and resources spent on developing them, including the handful that succeeds, make the process sustainable but often highly effective. This ability to move quickly from design to implementation is characteristic of entrepreneurial leadership — which emphasizes mobilizing external resources, pushing through previously-assumed boundaries, and building new business models. These new models, whether they involve crunching big data to pursue criminal probes, or distributing electric scooters throughout a city center, are a defining feature of the Fourth Industrial Revolution; they have captured public attention through the ways that they disrupt and the ways that they transmit the influence and impact of individual entrepreneurs.
Education Innovation
COVID-19 has highlighted the need to be able to deliver instruction in new and more compelling ways.
Pedagogy is a field ripe for innovation, especially when it comes to personalized learning. However, research has also highlighted that new learning tools do not always enable engagement with hard-to-reach groups — and it is critical that the drive for related innovation is matched by the monitoring of its effectiveness. Funding should be strategically allocated to trials, and any successes can be scaled up in the future. Greater public-private collaboration aimed at expanding this opportunity could also be beneficial — since governments cannot necessarily directly influence every classroom, they should instead focus on setting the right conditions for future-proof curricula and more innovative formats. As the education sector is both highly sensitive to change and a central pillar in the economy, better data collection could help ensure effectiveness.
In terms of fostering innovation in education, ChatGPT can assist students in leveraging technology to bolster universal access and personalized learning. It can guide how to use video conferencing, virtual reality, and digital courses to redefine when and where learning takes place, thereby paving the way for greater flexibility and access.
ChatGPT can provide comprehensive support for project-based learning in social enterprise education. By assisting students in problem formulation, AI tool selection, interaction with AI tools, and reflection on their experiences, ChatGPT can help students develop key skills and knowledge required for leading successful social enterprises.
Learn-to-Lead WEF Transformation Map
Building on the Accelerate Impact AIM map, The Learn-to-Lead WEF Transformation Map describes factors and conditions that shape opportunities and methods for social entrepreneurs to learn how to lead successful social enterprises. The Learn to Lead analysis provide insights for designing instructional goals and strategies across the learning spectrum, from early didactic learning to experiential learning during formal education and, lastly, with continuing professional development education. Six content themes shape the transformation map. For the most up-to-date, visit the real-time updates here.
Supplemental content on Experiential Education Strategies
To supplement the WEF Map, two additional studies are highlighted to further inform entrepreneurial leadership learning. Future Accelerate Playbook articles will highlight additional publications to illuminate viable experiential models for social enterprise education.
Entrepreneurial Leadership
Thomsen, Bastian, Olav Muurlink, and Talitha Best. 2019. “Backpack Bootstrapping: Social Entrepreneurship Education through Experiential Learning.” Journal of Social Entrepreneurship, December (December), 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/19420676.2019.1689155.
Experiential learning is an optimal conduit to student maturity when coupled with self-reflection and class discussion. The term backpack bootstrapping is introduced to illustrate how students rapidly learn by taking on a real but manageable weight of responsibility they assign to themselves. this study proposes that taking students out of the classroom, rather than mimicking the real world within the class as in the more traditional entrepreneurship ‘training’ pedagogical approach, may have advantages both to the student and to host organizations. If partner non-profit organizations are to benefit from university SE student projects, then all parties must set clear objectives, maintain communication, identify the role of the organization (e.g. action vs. service-learning), and all parties must complete their commitment. This backpack-bootstrapping approach may also help create a new generation of social entrepreneurs hardened by exposure to the weight of responsibility and, ideally, create sustainable change.
Achieving Diversity and Inclusion
Otten, Rebecca, Máille Faughnan, Megan Flattley, and Samantha Fleurinor. 2021. “Integrating Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion into Social Innovation Education: A Case Study of Critical Service-Learning.” Social Enterprise Journal 18, no. 1 (July): 182–200. https://doi.org/10.1108/sej-11-2020-0101.
As social innovation education expands within HEIs, educators need to seriously consider where equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) is integrated into the curriculum. Addressing wicked problems requires co-creation to produce social innovations that empower marginalized communities and challenge the status quo. Social innovation programs need to prepare aspiring changemakers who can critically reflect on their positionality, work collaboratively across differences and systemically analyze forces of oppression and justice. Our student-driven data illustrates how critical service learning — operationalized in the service structure and combined with a specific EDI framework and an exemplary organization — can serve these efforts. Students demonstrated transformative learning around the pursuit of social justice, whether through responsible consumption, supporting broader movements, or seeking out inclusive workplace cultures. Our findings support CSL’s existing best practices (Mitchell, 2008; Stith et al., 2018). We also provide evidence-based support for a specific EDI framework that other educators can adopt and adapt (VISIONS, Inc, 2020). The insights from this study are relevant for faculty and staff at similar institutions aiming to integrate EDI outcomes into experiential social innovation education. The students we educate now will have enormous influence, wealth, and decision-making power in the future. Enabling them to explore and develop their commitments to change-making through critical, experiential learning prepares them to work toward a more just and pluralistic world.
