Want to solve the world’s most complex problems? Simplify your solutions.
Since the dawn of time, human beings have been using creative thinking to address challenges and improve the quality of life for themselves and others. The characteristics that help facilitate effective creative thought align with the tenets of societal innovation at scale. And as our problems in the year 2020 and beyond seemingly become larger and more complicated to solve, the need to find creative, simplified solutions to them is even more necessary.
In India, entrepreneurs have championed the concept of “jugaad innovation” to find creative solutions to societal challenges. “Jugaad” is a Hindi word that loosely translates to…well, “winging it.” As Sudhanshu Kaushik, a graduate student in India said, “I think jugaad is a word that can’t really be defined in a word. It’s a concept.”
Jaideep Prabhu, a professor at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge in England, outlines the six principles of jugaad innovation:
1. Doing more with less: Particularly in regions that face a scarcity of resources, or in situations where solutions need to be scaled to a rather large population, this principle is extremely important to successful jugaad innovation.
2. Creating very simple solutions: Again, given the scope of the issues that social entrepreneurs are trying to address, practitioners must avoid the inclination to unnecessarily complicate solutions.
3. Using an agile approach: Prabhu emphasizes the idea of lateral thinking. Instead of focusing on how to create a traditional solution in a scalable way, how can you create a solution for the fundamental problem using what is readily available to you?
4. Getting inspiration from adversity: This is similar to the concept of “post-traumatic growth.” When faced with adversity, we can lament our bad fortune and poor decision-making; or, we can learn from and become inspired by these challenges.
5. Viewing marginalized people as not only beneficiaries, but part of the solution: Trusting that marginalized people are able to help improve their own condition if given the right tools and resources.
6. Following your passion: When attempting to tackle systemic, lofty challenges within a society, it’s important that your efforts align with your passion so that you’ll continue to be willing to invest your time and energy in the process.
Creative thinking has been used to advance our society since whenever Neanderthals evolved into homo sapiens (and probably even before that). But, let’s take a look at a few examples from modern society.
As technology evolves and more socially-conscious entrepreneurs build their fortunes earlier in their lives, they have been able to apply divergent thinking to solve larger societal issues.
Recently, I attended a talk by Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Group, who discussed his passion for social responsibility programs at each of his businesses, and through more direct efforts such as Virgin’s philanthropic arm, Unite. Branson is a gregarious speaker, so much of what he said was entertaining. But one of the more insightful comments focused on his role as a billionaire entrepreneur. His perspective was that earlier in his career, his job was to build businesses for profit so that he could focus on solving world issues in the future. He also mentioned that if every business aligned itself with a social issue, many of our world’s challenges — such as poverty, access to medical care and even global warming — would be significantly improved. One could argue that billionaires by definition in a modern world are contributing to systemic inequalities, but that is for a different article.
The career mentality he shared was very common in previous decades, where baby boomers often focused on their work as a means to provide for their families and to give back to their communities. Corporate social responsibility was always a talking point; however, it was not a focal point for brands.
Milton Friedman wrote in his 1970 essay “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Profits,” businesses only need to focus on increasing their profitability, so long as they remain “within the rules of the game, which is to say, engage in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”
Today, corporate social responsibility and sustainability programs are being reported in similar annual fashion as financial results, with brands like Dell, Northrup Grumman, Target, Allstate Insurance Company, and Cisco, regularly sharing their efforts with the marketplace. Entrepreneurs are taking it a step further and creating for-profit businesses that operate with a socially responsible purpose.
TOMS is a fantastic example of how creative thinking can be used to build a successful business while simultaneously solving real, global problems. Founder Blake Mycoskie was inspired while visiting Argentina, noticing that many children walked barefoot throughout the day while adults wore a very simple yet comfortable shoe. He built a business developing these shoes and promising customers that for every purchase, a pair of shoes would be donated to someone in need somewhere in the world. Since TOMS was founded in 2006, the company has expanded to offer a variety of products aligned with its world view, including sunglasses and coffee.
Let’s map the emergence of TOMS against a pattern of jugaad innovation, which involves improvised, divergent thinking to solve large-scale challenges. Think back to the six principles laid out by Jaideep Prabhu:
1. Doing more with less: Mycoskie aimed to use affordable, simple materials like what had been used to create the shoes he had seen during his time in Argentina.
2. Creating very simple solutions: Starting with one product and a socially conscious premise, he built comfortable, basic shoes for consumers.
3. Using an agile approach: Instead of overanalyzing a solution to help children solve the challenge of accessing reliable footwear, Mycoskie looked at what was readily available to him and to people living in these parts of the world. He developed a scalable solution to help build a business and provide for those in need.
4. Getting inspiration from adversity: During a trip to Argentina, Mycoskie saw firsthand how many children suffered from a lack of reliable footwear and how it affected their day-to-day lives. He then turned to local adults to gain inspiration from how they were already working to solve the challenge, and created a plan to help them scale it profitably.
5. Viewing marginalized people as not only beneficiaries, but part of the solution: Mycoskie gained inspiration for materials and the design of his product from the people he engaged with while in Argentina.
6. Following your passion: Mycoskie was passionate about helping less fortunate children, and picked a specific challenge to help them overcome. He understood that building a successful business was not only an ancillary goal, but would help him to more effectively address this global challenge. As he has scaled, the business has been able to tackle other issues facing the same population, including a lack of clean drinking water (each purchase of coffee provides clean water to those in need).
While TOMS has built a marketplace for socially responsible, for-profit businesses, it has also ignited the growth of brands tackling other societal issues, such as Warby Parker (which operates a similar buy-one-give-one system with eyeglasses), Out of Print (which donates books when it sells its clothing line featuring out of print book designs), Figs (which produces clothing for healthcare workers and donates “scrubs” to professionals in developing countries), and many others. If we were to map each of these businesses against the jugaad innovation framework, I would bet that they fit well into each characteristic.
As I learn more about the jugaad philosophy, I kind of love it. We spend so much time thinking of complex, expensive, inefficient solutions to problems that could be more readily addressed through an exercise called KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid. Perhaps the most profound principle of jugaad is this one:
“Viewing marginalized people as not only beneficiaries, but part of the solution.”
This principle is based on the fundamental idea that every single person has the capacity to contribute to their own well-being and to the well-being of humanity. Marginalized people are impeded by circumstance, and the need to focus on Abraham Maslow’s base-level, physiological motivations. However, if given the opportunity, the human spirit is overwhelmingly powerful.
Muhammed Yunus believed that the key to helping lift marginalized people out of dire poverty was to give them control over their circumstance. He founded the Grameen Bank and pioneered the concept of “micro-lending,” giving very small loans of usually just $20 to help people, often women, in his native country Bangladesh start their own businesses. Traditional lending institutions considered the recipients to be far too risky and the dollar values to be too minuscule and not worth the hassle.
But even with $20 someone could buy cloth to turn into clothing or a cow to begin selling milk. Micro-loans are a jumpstart for individuals to help them apply their own creative thinking to build wealth. Like TOMS and other purpose-driven companies, the Grameen Bank is a for-profit entity. Dr. Yunus believed that he could help people help themselves and build a sustainable business model at the same time. And, he was right.
Between the bank’s founding in 1983 and 2006, Grameen made $5.72 billion in small loans to 6.6 million individuals. During that span, the bank turned a profit in all but three years, including $15 million in 2005. Most noteworthy: 98.5% of loans have been paid back.
Aside from the financial impact to citizens of Bangladesh, Grameen Bank has helped its customers realize a sense of dignity and identity. It also has advanced the perception of women in a very traditional Muslim country. For this, Dr. Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. In the Nobel citation describing the award, the committee noted that the Grameen Bank was a “liberating force in societies where women in particular have to struggle against repressive social and economic conditions.” In an introduction Dr. Yunus wrote on the organization’s website, he challenged the notion that charity is an answer to poverty. “[Charity] only helps poverty to continue. It creates dependency and takes away individual’s initiative to break through the wall of poverty. Unleashing of energy and creativity in each human being is the answer to poverty.” Hell yeah!
In the example of micro-lending, creative thinking helps less fortunate individuals build financial security to improve their well-being. But as the Nobel organizers highlighted, this application of creativity also helped to shift perceptions of women and enhance a sense of dignity and belonging within the community. Creative expression has a way of improving our reality, both directly through financial or commercial recognition, as well as indirectly through deeper, more empathetic relationships with those around us.
Sources:
- Cachero, Paulina and Keira Edgett and Shani Tsur. “Jugaad: An untranslatable word for winging it.” BBC. 12/14/2017.
- Prabhu, Jaideep. “Solving Big Social Problems by Thinking Small.” Stanford Social Innovation Review. 4/21/2017
- Roston, Eric. “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Save the Planet.” Bloomberg. 6/20/2013.
- Fritz, Joanne. “Lessons in Corporate Social Responsibility from TOMS (Shoes).” The balance small business. 4/22/2018.
- Giridharadas, Anand and Keith Bradsher. “Microloan Pioneer and His Bank Win Nobel Peace Prize.” The New York Times. 10/13/2006.
