Foreword

Are You Ready for The Big One?

THERE ARE SMALL AND BIG CHANGES. AND THEN, VERY RARELY, THERE comes a tectonic shift so profound that everything is transformed in a historical instant.

Such transformations are as powerful as they are because they change the structure of how humans work together. A big advance of this type indeed changes everything—including the skills everyone must master, how groups and society organize, and how we all see the world. Technological revolutions, for example those in electronics or chemistry, do not begin to compare. The closest historical analogue is the agricultural revolution.

Today, after three centuries of tectonic acceleration, we are, I believe, already in the transformation zone of as big a shift as we have ever seen. The rate of change is accelerating exponentially. So is the growth in the number and the skills of the people actively causing change, and the connections between them.

It is clear where we are headed.

In a world where everything changes, and where every change bumps many other elements, causing them to change, the old social system is fast failing. Organizations in which a few people direct everyone else may have worked when the group and its members learned a skill and performed repetitive tasks year after year. This world of invisible peasantry, the Henry Ford assembly line, and the law firm increasingly will not be able to cope.

What is needed to contribute value—and to be able to compete and survive—is instead a fluid, quick, and often changing team of teams. The growth of the Web reflects and serves this accelerating need for flexible, kaleidoscopic global collaboration. When a new opportunity to contribute to a valuable change arises, successful groups will pull together teams and alliances of teams, from wherever they are, to bring together the right contribution of vision and experience and skills. And those teams of teams will keep changing as the change they serve evolves.

But a team can only be a team if everyone on it is a player.

And, in a world increasingly defined by change, being a player increasingly means one must be able to imagine and contribute to change. There will still be repetitive tasks. We will still have to wash the dishes. But anyone who is not a changemaker will be able to contribute little.

We can get a glimpse of this new world by looking at the islands of collaborating changemakers that already exist, for example, in the fluid interchanges of Silicon Valley (consider the free movement of people, the increase in open-sourcing, and the Valley's rapidly evolving support structures) or the Ashoka community of leading social and allied business entrepreneurs (consider its breakthrough beyond solo entrepreneuring to “collaborative entrepreneurship” and www.changemakers.com). These early islands are learning and evolving fast and increasingly relying on alliances and teamwork.

We already see the old systems failing all around us. Threatened people reverting to backward-looking fundamentalism. Old institutions unable to deal with the new reality—both internally or in terms of their roles.

What is needed now more than anything else is for society to go through what Ashoka calls “the awareness tipping zone” very, very soon. In all major changes, awareness is the trigger that leads to action. Once many people see the change that is coming, and what it means for them, they begin to act. And when they see one another acting, it makes conversation and action safer and increasingly unavoidable.

The media then jumps in as the contagion spreads and more and more people want to know what is happening and, in fact, urgently need a map. For example, in the American press, mentions of civil rights increased 300 percent in the 1950s and 600 percent in the first half of the 1960s as everyone focused on, talked about, and then changed how they thought and acted. Once the country had done so, its need for daily stories, the vehicle through which most learning takes place, fell sharply—with the result that media coverage declined as quickly as it earlier had grown.

The “everyone a changemaker”™ age that is now upon us will change your life and those around you profoundly. Are you ready? Will you be able to help lead the transformation?

• If you love a six-year-old, will you help her master the complex, challenging, learned skill of empathy? To the degree she does not, she will be unable to go on to the other essential skills those involved in change must have—teamwork, leadership, and changemaking—and she risks being marginalized.
• Are you ready to help the teens in your life master the above four skills by helping them practice being changemakers now?
• Are you prepared to help the institutions about which you care see the challenge and become “everyone a changemaker” organizations able to survive and flourish?
• Will you help lead society through this historic moment?

As Darwin's work in the mid-1800s makes clear, it is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most adaptable when faced with change.

All these questions point to why this book should be valuable to you.

Social entrepreneurs are critical to this transformation. Changing the world's systems is what defines entrepreneurship. Doing so for the good of all, which is absolutely essential now, is what defines social entrepreneurs. That is why the field has grown so very rapidly over the last thirty years. (When Ashoka was formally launched in 1980, there was not even a word to describe the field.)

This volume will introduce you to a rich sampling of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. You will quickly intuit what defines them, which should help you sense if this is a path you might take as well.

You will also get a feel for where change is headed in each field and overall. This will help you map the directions you and those around you should be considering.

You have a great guide for this journey. Bev Schwartz has been a colleague at Ashoka for seven years now. Earlier she was one of the leaders of the emerging fields of social marketing, smoking prevention, and HIV/AIDS awareness. Perhaps most important, she has long been committed to the good of all.

January 2012

Bill Drayton

Ashoka