Design Principles and Leadership

On Thursday we had our second “community service” team meeting. For those of you who aren’t aware, every SAWIP team has to conceptualize and implement a community service project of their own upon returning from Washington. As far as I understand, the reasoning behind this is that we a) get to implement and apply the knowledge and skills that we acquired during the program, and b) that we continue in the SAWIP mantra of service in leadership.

As we were sitting around a boardroom table throwing ideas back and forth, I found myself wondering what some of the most creative and innovative community service (or general social assistance) programs that were “out there” looked like. I thought back to this article that I shared with the team a few weeks ago. In it Carole Cadwalladr of The Gaurdian writes about her experience at a Silicon Valley based for-profit learning institution in Silicon Valley whose stated aim is to "assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity’s grand challenges."

From Cadwallars first paragraph it is obvious that Singularity University is for real, and serious:

"It’s day one at the Singularity University: the opening address has just been delivered by

a hologram. Craig Venter, who was one of the first scientists to sequence the human

genomeand created the first synthetic life form, is up next.”

Re-reading through the article I can’t help but compare the projects that I have been involved in to some of the things the “students” at Singularity University get have done. Father of the internet, inventor of Google’s self driving car, founder of Pay-Pal and Ashton Kutcher - they’re all there. I will concede that these people are to a large extent the exceptions of society, but I can’t help asking myself: what am I currently doing or learning that will increase my odds of being someone (perhaps a leader) who can do things (good things) at the scale that these guys do?

I forgot about Singularity University for a bit, and did what any searching youth would do: I turned to Google. I soon came across familiar names like Kahn Academ, the project of a lone actuary that is now providing free online education to hundreds of millions of kids around the world, and TED.com who recently launched their own online education initiative, TED-ED. Another popular form of online philanthropy is found in crown funding websites that pool resources for different charity projects. Changemakers is one of the leaders in the field, and similarly JustGiving, a UK based non-profit, has raised over £450 million for good causes since it launched in 2000. (This infographic shows how online crowd funding was in 2010, already, accounting for billions of dollars in donations.)

To backtrack a little; when I checked into the TED website I remembered a girl that I met last year at the TEDxStellenbosch conference (another form of social service if you ask me). She was an architecture student and spoke about how she helped design and build an innovative new hospital for a remote location in Rwanda. I remember her telling me about her involvement with IDEO.org, the non-profit arm of the world famous design company with the same name. Apart from their beautifully designed website, I really like their mission:

“Through Human-Centred Design projects, we're bringing stability, hope, and dignity to communities around

the world that are wrestling with poverty. Along the way, we’re sharing what we learn and accomplish

with everyone—so we’re all learning together. And through the IDEO.org Fellowship Program, we’re

fostering a community of future leaders with expertise in design thinking, then letting them

loose on the world.”

And they’re doing exactly this. These are some of the brightest young designers, entrepreneurs, leaders and all round cool kids who are implementing some really, Really awesome projects.

I remember speaking to a mentor of mine, Stafford Massie, who was the first CEO of Google Africa. He was in a rush as usual, and said kind of in passing: “you know what, we should load Kahn Academy onto 150 000 HTC smart phones and just hand them out in the Eastern Cape”. I recall him saying that he could probably get the phones form someone he knew, and something else about a small logistical hiccup that would need to be bridged, but that he just did not have the time to execute the project right now. Whether this was feasible or would actually work is besides the point to me. Stafford thinks in a in a way that the people of South Africa desperately need. Outside of the box, and with a keen disregard for impossibility. I ask myself, what are we doing to equip our leaders to think more like him, or the people at IDEO or TED? We load on knowledge about different leadership styles and we have in depth discussion about public health and BBBEE (all of which, I agree, are crucially important in their own right), but I feel that there is something that the “next generation of young leaders” are out on missing.

I will concede that many of the examples I mention above are closely related to the internet in some way, and this in itself reflects the kind of “early adopter, risk taking” demographic at the forefront of this industry attracts. But my question is, what are the principles these individuals live by that drive them to do these extraordinary things? And what can we do to instil these same values (or attitudes, perhaps) in our young leaders, so that they too can excel in their own fields - whatever they may be. Imagine the next generation of South African politicians with a feel for design thinking, or policymakers that pride themselves on innovative solutions. I want to emphasise that I by no means wish to imply that our current approach to “training” young leaders is wrong or even inadequate, but merely that we have a lot to learn not only from Ghandi and Nelson Mandela, but also from Steve Jobs, Larry Page and even, perhaps, Ashton Kutcher.