The Core Values
Exponential change becomes possible when actors across society have the ability to be active participants in changemaking. Catalysing positive exponential change needs to be anchored in Core Values. These values are essential to clarify our beliefs, resolve existing and emerging conflicts and align with other actors who share our beliefs.
Core Values help us ensure the change we create is positive and restores agency, nurtures dignity and enables choice for all participants (individuals and institutions) of society. Exponential change may inherently carry the risk of unintended consequences. These consequences may affect historically marginalised communities adversely and disproportionately.
While structuring Societal Thinking, we walked alongside and spoke to a variety of actors, such as change leaders, thinkers and funders, to understand the values that guided their journeys, especially at a crossroads. We analysed the consequences of global transformations to figure out what ensures or takes away from inclusive change at scale, with a special focus on historically marginalised communities. These insights informed the Core Values of Societal Thinking.
The Core Values are:
Restore agency – Every individual is born with the will and desire to fulfil their potential. Under unfavourable external circumstances, their ability to do so may get hampered. Agency gets restored when these individuals have the power and resources to fulfil their potential.
Nurture dignity – An individual’s social and economic location may be taken to be a marker of their worth. Dignity is believing that all individuals have inherent worth, treating them with respect and shaping systems in ways that ensure everyone is treated fairly.
Enable choice – An individual’s choices could be limited or predetermined, not because of lack of aspiration but due to socio-economic and cultural factors. Choice is the ability to explore multiple pathways. To enable choice, barriers to decide between varied pathways need to be lowered.
Catalyse interactions – One actor of society alone can’t solve a large problem. It needs civil society, government and markets to come together and solve. Change leaders need to facilitate proactive participation, value exchange and co-creation between these actors.
Resolve for diversity – A large and complex problem may look very different context to context. It cannot be addressed by one solution or type of solver. Change leaders need to engage with the problem from multiple perspectives and invite key actors to co-create inclusive solutions.
Inspire co-creation – A unilateral and / or top-down solution may not be inclusive or easy to adopt for participants. Change leaders need to design a shared space for people to come together, learn, build upon one another’s work and create new relevant solutions.
Open value creation – If each ecosystem actor has to find and build what they need (information, technology, data and more), it will be time- and resource-intensive. Change leaders need to empower every actor to freely develop solutions that create value in response to their needs.
Empower with data – Many solvers hesitate to share data with others, especially participants. To see and solve better, Change leaders need to empower actors across the ecosystem with information and insights. These help strengthen existing solutions and explore new ideas.
Build public goods – Changemaking efforts require many resources, such as tools, knowledge, technology, processes and data. These are often scarce and unevenly distributed. Change leaders need to make these resources openly available to use and build upon for all.
Seek rapid evolution – It can be tempting to make the most complete, most perfect solution. However, while dealing with a complex system, change leaders need to start with simple imperfect solutions and leverage feedback to drive continuous improvements and innovation.
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