Isn’t it curious how the same idea, raised in two different times and contexts, can have completely different responses? We even have phrases for this, like ‘an idea whose time has come’, a ‘moment in time’, or the opposite: ‘now’s not the right time, ‘ahead of its time’ and so on. The Greeks expressed this idea of time being right as kairos, not the lineaer, sequential time of chronos, but the notion of time as an opportune moment, an opening into a new possibility. 

Over the years I’ve come across a number of factors that seem to play a part in the ripening of the conditions that contribute to an idea being accepted and taken forward. Here are seven reasons this context matters. Not just for curiosity value, but because I believe that if we attend to them we stand a better change of our ideas being adopted and taken forward.  

People 

Right idea, wrong people. Change in complex scenarios is a team effort, yet we are still operating within a hierarchical society. In our organisations if we can’t get senior level sign-off to ideas for change we have four options – let it go and move on to the next idea; do it anyway and live with the consequences (this is the ‘better to ask for forgiveness than permission’ option); influence and persuade others of the value of the idea; pause it and wait for different leaders or a more conducive time. 

Teams

Sometimes it’s a case of the right people coming together at the right time. My last two projects at RSA were the perfect combination of team members, experience working together, projects to work on. We could do so much more than a newer group of people not used to working together. Similarly I’ve been in teams or run community groups where the simple addition of one person can be enough to turn relative harmony into turmoil. 

Systems change is about collaboration and seeking to shift things for the better, and we need a range of skills and experiences in any such team. When each team member adds a valuable perspective and challenge to the system it is more likely magic can happen. If any one individual dominates, if there is conflict for supremacy, any attempts at change will grind to a halt. We need to hold a delicate balance between those working to preserve aspects of the status quo, which provides much-needed stability, and those working to bring to life new ways of doing things, which provides much needed dynamism in the system. 

Culture

I define this as the emergent properties of the collective norms and behaviours of people in any given community or group and as such is vitally important to the adoption of new ideas. An intervention that does not have account of culture is likely to die on impact. We see this in the humanitarian sector as many westernised solutions from the Global North are imposed on communities suffering crisis and disaster. By not taking account of culture and tradition the solutions fail and money is wasted. All too often the blame, of course, is on the recipients’ failure to implement and then adapt to the solution, not the other way around. Let’s face it, we don’t like to be told what to do and how to do it – research tells us the human condition is to want automony, mastery and purpose in our work and in our lives.

Place

Every place is a unique, emergent result of the interplay in which people shape, and are shaped by, their environment and climate over time. There is a reason why dishes and culinary traditions differ between cultures, why some cultures are relaxed about time and others are prompt, why some have a siesta and others saunas and cold plunges, and so on. To assume that a given solution or intervention will work without having account of place is another core reason why attempts at change – and scaling ‘solutions’ across multiple areas and communties – so often fail. 

Identity

At the deepest level we each have our own sense of identity, whether we explicity recognise it or not. It’s why we might do things that are seemingly foolhardy or against our best interests but they align with our identity and fundamental human needs. The same is true of communities and cultures. Any interventions and ideas for change have to either be in line with these deepest beliefs and norms, or they need to accept that a given intervention may only work with a proportion of the intended population. Otherwise attempts at change are doomed before they start. 

Incentives

We do largely what we are incentivised to do, whether overt or implicit, so long as this is not in conflict with identity. Particularly in an organisational context, we do what we have to do to get by, whether positively framed, such as winning (exceeding targets, gaining promotion, getting bonuses), or negatively where we are seen to be losing (avoiding the pain of missed targets, unhappy staff or getting fired). I’ve written before about negative institutional incentives such as media, procurement, risk, and so on. Any attempt at change needs an account of how incentives can be aligned to maximise the likelihood of its success and how negative incentives can be mitigated. 

So it seems to me that to ask the question ‘how do we account for context when we are trying to create change’ is to ask the wrong question. For it is not simply that context matters. Context is everything. To ask ‘ how can I get this idea to work in this different context’ may be useful within the current socio-economic paradigm but it is not going to help us shift to a different one. A different paradigm may not be one founded on economic and industrial concepts of economies of scale and efficiency. When we seek to optimise and economise we find ourselves having to do more of the same at scale. We take our initial investment in an idea and realise that to reduce the upfront costs we need to achieve more units of production – or adoption in a social setting. That’s what gives us a greater return on our initial investment. We can quantify that in terms of people served, and the more that demoninator rises the better the equation. 

That equation is a false prophet for those seeking to change the paradigm, perhaps one that centres efficacy and outcomes over a drive for economies of scale. In this new paradigm we would be more interested in ideas that work rather than then trying to scale them into any context. The true currency we should be seeking to optimise in a new paradigm is one comprising insights from the process, the learning, the failures, the collaboration. These can be scaled, particularly across a network of innovators, system-designers and social entrepreneurs. They are people who don’t seek to scale the intervention itself; they recognise that is a folly in complex environments. They are not headed towards a clearly specified and quantifyable end state (aka goal), but instead are actively engaged in the change journey itself. It’s the emergence of opportunity on such a journey that is the crucial, unquantifyable value of such an approach.