How do we channel our outrage?

This article and excerpt was originally published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review on January 12, 2021.

When each week brings new injustices or preventable catastrophes, it’s easy to feel outraged to the point of paralysis. So how do citizens intent on making a better world keep going? In a word, perspective. Consider our progress as a planet over the past few decades with the enormous strides we’ve made in lessening poverty, hunger, and disease, and it becomes easier to shift daily outrage toward long-term optimism. And the way to channel this outrage—to influence the positive trendlines rather than be immobilized by negative headlines—is through social activism.

Activism doesn’t necessarily translate into street demonstrations, celebrity philanthropy, or breakthrough social innovations, although those are important. Based on my four decades as a business executive, teacher, activist, and social sector leader, I advocate that we pay more attention to what I call “practical activism.” It is about those actions, big and small, that all of us can do every day to support social change. It’s focused on building bridges and happens mostly behind the scenes. Often, practical activism engages players that might surprise people who think we’re all starry-eyed idealists.

And the good news is there are a number of powerful social forces and macrotrends—which I call undercurrents—that are accelerating practical activism and providing opportunity and hope to practical activists. In Undercurrents, I explore the following trends that will have lasting influence on social activism and innovation:

• Global economies are moving away from the old model of a pyramid with mainly low-income people and countries at the bottom and a few wealthy ones at the top, toward a fat diamond with vastly more people joining the middle class and living better, realizing powerful new possibilities to link entrepreneurialism with improved well-being.
• Communities are increasingly becoming customers with agency and voice, rather than passive recipients of aid and social change, increasingly playing more of a role in shaping their own futures with community- and human-centered activism.
• Equity concerns—whether based around gender, ethnicity, or sexuality—are radically reshaping the field of social activism.
• Data and digital tools will continue to bring valuable new capabilities to our world, revolutionizing everything from health care to education—even as they present daunting new challenges for activists to navigate.
• Adapting and scaling innovations for widespread impact, often ignored as one of the less glamorous aspects of social change, is becoming more important and, surprisingly, more sexy.

The excerpt from my book below touches upon this last trend, from the chapter entitled “The Surprisingly Sexy Middle: Crossing the Valleys of Death to Scale Innovation.”

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Every day, inventors are conceiving extraordinary solutions to address the problems of our world. They are creating new drugs and vaccines for patients in need; digital devices that allow students in remote settings access to the same information as those in major cities; tools that help farmers reap larger crops; and innovative financial services that offer the poor a ladder out of poverty. Every week, I see fresh evidence of this dazzling pipeline of innovation through the scores of email pitches that come my way from activists, students, and entrepreneurs seeking support for their frequently brilliant ideas.

Yet when I take a step back, my excitement wanes. There are already hundreds of effective solutions sitting on laboratory shelves or floundering in pilot programs—ingenious ideas for saving or improving the lives of millions of people that never get beyond the proof-of-concept phase. In global health alone, there are thousands of medical products—tested, safe, and ready to shield people from disease—that are not reaching those who need them most.

Why? Because they are stymied by what social entrepreneurs refer to as the twin “valleys of death,” a gauntlet of complicated tasks that all innovators must navigate to take ideas to scale. The first of these valleys involves getting a product or service from the drawing board to launch pad; the second, and often more harrowing, is moving from launch to widespread uptake. No matter how promising, innovations repeatedly fail to achieve significant social impact because of the treacherous demands for testing, adapting, funding, validating, regulating, licensing, launching, and marketing that comprise the valleys of death.

This undercurrent in social activism—scaling solutions—is persistently underrecognized and underfunded, to the peril of us all.

There are many reasons for the lag in knowledge around scaling. For one thing, it is messy and unglamorous. Scholars often describe it as the journey between two critical points on the “value chain” of getting great ideas to communities. At one end of the chain is the invention. Everyone loves this part. It’s creative and exciting. It generates words like “breakthrough,” “genius,” and “founder.” It’s also the part that creates celebrities who win Nobel Prizes and MacArthur Genius awards. The last-mile delivery at the other end of the chain—bringing products and services to people who need them—is also immensely gratifying for anyone who wants to see change happen “on the ground.”

These two points, the moment of discovery inside an inventor’s garage and the sounds, many years later, of clean water arriving in a rural household for the first time, are the stuff of movies, books, and splashy news stories. The distance between them is the part we never see, the slog through the middle, where brilliant ideas are swallowed whole.

Not surprisingly, many activists prefer to concentrate on first- or last-mile heroics. But from my perspective, the middle is really the sexy part. It’s all about working collaboratively, solving problems, and getting stuff done. And it is absolutely critical to scaling any innovation.

Urgency around getting solutions to scale is now palpable. That is, in part, a result of the ticking clock we all sense around the need to do something—fast—about climate change and growing economic inequity. COVID-19 dramatically underscored the need for more know-how, and the challenges of scaling quickly.

What allows some ideas to scale while others fail? Many well-intentioned ideas stall due to a failure in listening to users on the ground; trouble with government approvals; or lack of infrastructure to build out the innovation, among other reasons. Of course, some ideas are just plain bad.

Consider the PlayPump, a playground-sized toy built for children and attached to a water pump. It looked something like a whirlybird. The idea was that kids would leap onto this contraption, spin round, and simultaneously pump water for an entire village—or so went the pitch. The World Bank loved it. A US$60 million global campaign launched in 2006 promised that harnessing children’s energy at play could bring clean drinking water to ten million people in sub-Saharan Africa within four years.

But no one seemed to have spent much time considering the value proposition. The $14,000 cost per PlayPump would have paid for three conventional hand pumps that produced similar output. Nor did anyone note that generating enough water for a village meant that its children would need to “play” on the pump for more than 24 hours a day. Four years after its emergence to great fanfare on the world stage, PlayPump International was shuttered.

On the other hand, Zipline, a California company that uses drones to delivery medical supplies to hard-to-reach locations, is rapidly scaling across the globe. Its founder, engineer Keller Rinaudo, initially wondered if robotics could somehow be usd to improve national health systems. A researcher in Tanzania told Keller that he’d tried to tackle the same problem by devising a method for texting emergency medical supply orders into a database. The problem was, Tanzania had no capability to transport those supplies to the remote locations where they were needed. That’s when the lightbulb turned on in Keller’s mind. Drones could solve this issue.

Six years later, Zipline is bringing medicine, blood and supplies to all of Rwanda, much of Ghana and parts of the U.S. Scaling the original concept has put Keller in front of civil aviation authorities who control national airspaces; ministers of health who oversee health systems; hospital staff who need to know what to do when robots start dropping medication at their doors; and, of course, the communities where all this is taking place. “The easy part was building the technology,” Keller says. “Integrating it with a national health system—that’s much harder. In some ways, we’re building the plane as we fly it.”

I consider his work a classic example of scaling because it adapts existing technologies to create new answers. This is how we move forward, one step building on the next, fitting technology to new ends, disrupting and innovating again.

Excerpted with permission of the publisher, Wiley, from Undercurrents by Steve Davis. Copyright (c) 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. This book is available wherever books and ebooks are sold.