5 minute read
Industry Change by Jeff Shinabarger
DAY 22 INDUSTRY CHANGE
By Jeff Shinabarger
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Founder of Plywood People and author of More or Less: Choosing a Lifestyle of Excessive Generosity.
@shinabarger
We started Plywood People because of the quantity of people who started having coffee with me, that had an idea they wanted to share. After hundreds of conversations, I realized I was encouraging people in the same ways and asking the same questions. Don’t just have an idea, create a significant change around something that really matters, create a social innovation.
Social innovators are leaders who are working to address the world’s greatest problems in new ways. These creative solutions take the form of many different shapes and social concerns. They can be for profit, not-for-profit, or a hybrid of solutions. The spectrum of social issues are broad, like bringing clean water to the world, attracting customers to restaurants in a down economy, creating micro-loans for the working poor, making fresh food available to all people, creating jobs for unemployed, ending homelessness, restoring workers caught in modern-day slavery, and on and on and on.
These leading thinkers see what is unseen and reveal it to others. They do what others find unthinkable. Sometimes the solutions start hyper local but even at a small scale, creative solutions have the opportunity to influence an industry. True social innovation is the combination of addressing a great need and changing how an industry operates forever.
If you and I had coffee today, I would ask you three questions to challenge your creation. 1) What is so unique about your social innovation that it will change the industry in the next 5 years?
Making something that is relevant for today’s culture will not last. It is essential to reframe a conversation for the future. As an innovator, you must look far enough into the future that you are meeting culture where it is headed, but not so extreme that everyday people can’t comprehend your creation in the mean time. Innovators play the valuable role of creating progress because society wants to see it. Not everyone likes change, but they know change is needed. As you create, dream for the future. Imagine a solution that will shift industry. Consider making something that changes how people engage the issue in a new way. Change the conversation, disrupt the industry.
2) How can you create a low-cost experiment to determine the viability of your creation and get feedback from a test market?
Before you quit your job and put your family security in jeopardy, please do an experiment first. Choose a time period and dollar investment that you are willing to evaluate the market potential. At the end of the experiment determine if you can sustain the idea and if the problem actually has the potential to be solved in a new way. Don’t pursue an idea that you think is an idea, you need affirmation
to continue. Involve others and get critical response from people you trust and people influenced by the problem. Social innovations ought to be revolutionary, but equally need to be understandable and possible, while most importantly solving the problem at hand.
3) Creating a unique story is a must in our society, how will the idea be shared with others?
Creating a website and registering profiles in social media is not an adequate answer to this question. Storytelling is an art form and creative expression. What are you doing that is so unique that others will share what you are doing with friends? How do others easily share your story? Make a plan. Write your story on paper. Put your passion onto paper and see how others respond. If you are not good at this, find people to help you. Great design and a killer story are an expectation in a digital culture that values design and authenticity.
Problem solving will never happen alone. There is an art to finding collaborative doers. We are hit with thousands of headlines every day. The challenge of every problem solver is to find a way to tell the story of what is broken in our society and gain interest in a media-centric age. We paint a picture of what is wrong and cast vision of how it could be different. Problem solvers are winsome in their approach. A picture is still worth a thousand words; the problem is we see thousands of pictures every day. Casting a unique, memorable, and inspiring vision of a solution is one of the problem solver’s critical roles in order to attract others to join in his or her passion.
Compare your story with the best, and challenge yourself to tell the most compelling story possible. Learn from the best because you are competing with the best. Tell the story better than good. We don’t realize it, but we are all becoming instant curators of what is good in story creation. We experience such a magnitude of content that if something will stand on its own, it must be special.
4) Why are you the person to make this?
Making something from nothing is hard. Giving your life to solving a problem takes deep commitment. If you don’t have a clear reason why you are the person to address the need, don’t try to do it. Have a clear answer for anyone who would ask you why? Problems that you don’t have a deep connection with will result in losing interest quickly. Problem solving must become personal for a long-term commitment to the cause. Choose to say yes to the things that only you can say yes to or freely give your ideas to the right person to lead and step away at the right time.
I hope that the writing in this book leads you to radical shifts of all different industries that I have never even thought previously. I hope you join in a community making things a little bit better together.
