We designed the Platform for Change to honor human, social, produced, and natural capital—in addition to financial capital—and put them all to good use in aligning humanity’s aspirations and actions to advance wellbeing for all. Along with using a layered strategy to incorporate memberships, investments, grants, contracts, and fee-for-service projects, the RCI Ecosystem employs Donor Advised Funds (DAFs) to transform philanthropic dollars—and the insights, expertise, assets, and commitments of donors, members, thought-leaders, volunteers, and investors—into positive social and environmental impact.
We developed the Wellbeing Innovation Acceleration (WIA) Process to support a novel place-based, living-learning design-venture studio and capital formation entity, the Rock Creek Design Studio (RCDS), whose chief purposes are to foster and expedite innovation to advance sustainable wellbeing for all.
Wellbeing Innovation Acceleration Process
The WIA process generates value by applying “social acupuncture” to address conflicts skillfully and boost the effectiveness of group processes. Our small, diverse Communities of Passion, Purpose, and Practice work through the WIA Process, to explore and re-frame problems and investigate their interrelationships; crystalize our most informed understanding of daunting problems into Opportunity Statements (Clear Challenges), which guide subsequent innovation and action; grow exceptionally creative, collaborative teams; and rapidly reduce the cycle from identifying a potential problem to creating a meaningful, scaled response.
Two-Stage Model of the Innovation Process
Our model of how significant innovation happens doesn’t begin with a “lightbulb” event. It’s a two-stage process that starts with a Clear Challenge, a “Beginner’s Mind,” and an open and free exploration of a diverse range of options. We refer to this “idea generation” component of the innovation process as “divergent” because its purpose is to illuminate the broadest range of different directions we might go, while still adhering to the original challenge. The second phase uses “pattern cultivation,” a strategy to refine, modify, and cull the various options based on their perceived potential to respond to the original challenge, while limiting foreseeable negative tradeoffs. This allows us to converge on a single innovation to advance.
RCI offers an environment conducive to contemplation, reviving the sacred, meaningful innovation, and group work; provides seed capital and vital support; and disseminates the stories of our initiatives to amplify their impact. RCI is ultimately indifferent to whether the entities it spawns are for-profit, non-profit, or hybrid as long as the overall RCI Ecosystem is, like nature, self-sustaining.
At Rock Creek Institute, we believe in changing the operating instructions to navigate a middle path between naive optimism and analysis paralysis. To elevate the potency of our group dynamics, we draw on ideas from Robin Dunbar, Donella Meadows, Stafford Beer, Yvonne Chouinard, Frederic Laloux, Roman Krznaric, and others to create our organizational structure. To guide the all the actions of our community, we created a set of pithy and memorable Design Principles for Wellbeing Acceleration.
Design Principles for Wellbeing Acceleration
These Principles acknowledge that the path to Wise Ancestry is, perhaps the biggest challenge our species has ever faced. To create the transformative change in habits, practices, organizations, and institutions that will get us from here to there, we must acknowledge the koan nature of the quandary, “we can’t incrementally change what is fundamentally broken.” Most decisions are inescapably incremental, but they are rarely skillful, strategic, or guided by a bold vision. And while our WIA Process is depicted as linear, it is anything but. We can begin anywhere in the “cycle” and iterate or repeat as necessary. Like the most successful corporate research labs, from SRI’s PARC to Nokia Bell Labs, we aspire to do full-cycle, soup-to-nuts innovation in-house. Unlike these corporate research labs, however, our raison d’être is nothing short of cultivating Wise Ancestors.