System Change is the Only Way

Futures of Social Innovation in 2040 (1/3)

In this post, I am sharing considerations for the development of social innovation as a field of practice in Canada. These considerations are expressed inside of foresight scenarios that speculate on the characteristics of assumed, brighter, and desired futures for social innovation. If you’re looking for guidance on preparing and writing your own scenarios, check out my instructions here.

Drivers of Change

• Extreme weather is putting pressure on urbanization

• Innovation stereotypes

• Rapid digitalization and pace of change

Direction of current trends

• Move away from social innovation in favour of system innovation

• Industrialization and commodification of social innovation

• Imposition of one way of doing social innovation (Only One Right Way)

• Worsening rural/urban divides

• Worsening quality of life for First Nations (boil water advisories, suicide contagion)

• Continued financialization of housing

• Lack of social impact measures and increased social washing

Speculative Scenario 1
System Change is the Only Way: An assumed future for social innovation in 2040

A negative image of a city with environmental degradation in the year 2040 generated in CoPilot by the author.

The year is 2040, and as expected, meaningful social change and societal progress are limited. Progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals is largely made by technicality or statistical anomalies. Coca-Cola and Nestle have taken credit for creating and maintaining 0% world hunger (more accurately, 0.9% of the global population is food insecure). These rounding errors provide the backbones of some political commitments, but structural and environmental racism persist.

In Canada, the water is polluted and poisonous to humans and boil water advisories plague even urban populations. Adverse weather events are common, creating pressure to mitigate risk and address short-term harms instead of implementing adaptive and regenerative efforts. Seasons of major flooding and landslides are followed by periods of drought. Built environments and cities, composed brittle concrete, crumble as they swing between these extremes.

Despite the vulnerability of urban infrastructure, real estate remains a major asset class. Housing affordability is treated as an individual and material challenge rather than a systemic failure. Homelessness is common and hypothermia is becoming the leading cause of death in urban areas.

Innovation stereotypes have entrenched into social innovation practices, proliferating “bro-culture” and the harmful lessons learned during the Silicon Valley Boom of 2010 to 2020. We’re looking for a man in social innovation, trust fund, 6’5” echoes on social media. Harmful racial ideologies have also entrenched in this future, reinforcing the White Saviour complex inside of social innovation cliques. Racially habituated behaviours mar any potential for meaningful liberation and justice for racialized people and the Global South. The social innovation space is conformist and homogenous.

In this version of 2040, there is a high need for social services to reduce, mitigate, and treat harm to human life. Harm reduction strategies are no longer enough; more people need to be involved in service and care. Niche social innovation experiments exist but tend to reproduce existing capitalist market structures and economic inequality. Digital tools are not proving to be helpful for mitigating inequities as surveillance and power imbalances increase.

More practitioners are getting involved with mutual aid networks and community development to address complex issues. However, community-based models are still considered risky, without government or corporate backing.

Traditional knowledge and social movements are co-opted and washed of their meaning. Even so far as to create phenomena like the ‘green-hushing’ that occurred due to fear of prosecution under Canada’s Anti-Greenwashing Act, 2027. No similar legislation has been introduced since.

Competency and skill recognition are acknowledged in theory (and among progressive educators) but mainstream hiring still favours traditional credentials. This future values centralization and conformity; there is Only One Right Way. Social change is not measured by its process and only by key performance indicators and quantified impact measurements.

Reflection

This is the next in a series of foresight scenarios, across which I hope to demonstrate the breadth of speculative scenario generation and use. This series shows the how foresight scenarios and speculative fiction can support critical thinking, problem solving, and strategy development. The assumptions for “Systems Change is the Only Way,” are rooted in an initial infrastructure for a set of scenarios. The infrastructure is evidence-based.

Although this scenario may be less narratively rich than my previously shared 2035 scenario involving Translation Language Models, I think the evidence base provides useful handholds for speculation. A meticulous and step-by-step approach thereby provides a tool for strategic planning. Creating foresight scenarios within an infrastructure or framework provides a systematic means to plot the outcomes of expected changes, generating potentially unexpected circumstances. Such a systematic approach puts assumptions at the centre as variables for exploration.

Scenario Infrastructure & Methods