A few weeks ago I attended Social Change Camp in NYC. I led a session discussing on the merits of iterative vs. revolutionary/holistic design approaches. I asked if there are any other approaches to creating change.

This topic came up for me while I was watching the President's health care speech to congress and noticed that one of the big applause lines had to do with the idea that they would not make radical change. I recognized at that moment that I think there needs to be significant change, not only in health care but a number of areas of society. The question is how do you get there.

As a citizen, it worries me that perhaps we don't have the communication/collaboration tools, the political process in place to achieve real change. David Brooks makes this argument to Gail Collins in the NYTimes:

...there is a broad consensus on what we need to do to solve many of our major problems, but no political way to get there. Most experts of left and right believe we need a gas tax in order to address our energy problems. No political way to get there. Most believe that we need a flatter, fairer tax code, probably based on a consumption tax. No political way to get there. Most agree that the fee-for-service system drives up health care costs and the employer based insurance system is unsustainable. There is apparently no political way to change these things. Most experts agree that teacher quality is crucial to the schools and that bad teachers need to be fired. Again, no political way to do this. - David Brooks

As we now approach the endgame of the health care reform debate I think there will be a lot of rewriting of the recent history. There was a lot of fear around the tenor of the public debate with people talking over each other and questions raised of President Obama's capacity to keep a hold on the debate.

I found the degree of public investment in this debate interesting and appropriate following the degree of interest there was in the presidential election. I found it refreshing that the debate wasn't managed from the top for the most efficient and politically tidy outcome.

This line stuck out to me in the book "Washington's Crossing", by David Hackett Fischer:

Our republics cannot exist long in prosperity. We require adversity and appear to possess most of the republican spirit when most depressed. -  Benjamin Rush

Rush is a lesser known Founding Father. He felt it was a national habit to avoid dealing with difficult problem until it was nearly impossible. It is interesting that this was apparent even at the founding of the nation.

I also remember the Winston Churchil line - America will always do the right thing, but only after exhausting all other options.

America seems to have a reputation. I assume it is at least in part due to our geographic location which insulates us from much of our conflicts and our short election cycle...but as a creative it seems like creating change is also a design challenge. 

You can witness this same debate on how to create change also being fought in the development of websites & software applications. It is a debate between iterative Open Source development and more holistic design driven approaches...with the design of user experience being a main point of contention. You can tap into one such debate here at the Mark Boulton blog.

Mark Boulton is an interesting designer with a modernist, top-down, holistic midset. Perhaps not unexpectedly, when he took on the challenge of working with the open source Drupal community he encountered some challenges getting buy-in from the community and figuring out how to communicate his process openly but also maintain ownership. There seem to be reactions to the tone of some of his communications. But in the end there is a fundamental struggle between worldviews going on here. Does change need an architect or can it effectively be crowdsourced. Sounds a lot like the old Modernism vs. Postmoderism debates to me.

Now-a-days, I typically explore these question in designing events and live interactions. In my work at Double Happiness and putting on participant-driven events like Goodmeets, I am very attracted to open, collaborative approaches. Fr one thing they are effective and for another they are more affordable.

On the other hand when I make performances, I appreciate the importance of owning your ideas. It allows for you to work towards a kind of perfection.

I think the clash of worldviews here is tough to resolve but I am wary of defaulting back to a Modernist, holistic planning scenario despite the pleasures of seeking perfection. I wonder if there is not another way.

In our discussion at Social Change Camp, we ended up discussing a kind of "incremental revolution" approach to change. Saying that building consensus in small steps is important but with an eye toward reaching tipping points were real change takes place.

Some kind of incremental revolution seems like a interesting notion to me and it makes me aware that the key is still transparency...transparency that is often politically and personally challenging. 

One reassuring argument I saw in the midst of the health care debate came from Michael Pollen. He argues in the NYTimes that even if a weak healthcare bill passes that it would change the power dynamic in the food industry. That by placing the incentives on preventive care you place the health care industry on the side of reform and create a powerful counter-lobby to the entrenched food biz lobby. It would be easier for me to swallow incremental change in things like the health care bill if there was a clearer path to these kinds of tipping points laid out for me as a stakeholder.