The Social Labs Revolution

These innovations can be understood as a form of systemic spread betting.

Instead of seeing social interventions as always needing to take scaling up into account, the social realm is scale-free by nature.12

“Instead of starting with the dichotomy between global force and local response, these methods show the importance of contingent and botched encounters in shaping both business-as-usual and its radical refusals.”

Strategy is not sitting in a room coming up with a detailed plan and then instructing other people to implement that plan. That’s planning.

Instead of supporting talented and committed teams to seek permanent solutions to our most serious challenges as we do in the sciences or in the technology sector, we fund tightly controlled five-year plans.

The hotel had been a folk school, a key education movement in the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries that provided a practical education for the children of farmers.

The decision not to screen blood resulted in many unnecessary deaths through contaminated blood. The lack of scientific consensus on the nature of AIDS allowed the blood banks to operate in BAU modes, even as the gay community and activists generated political pressure by pointing out that dying people

Innovation is always a numbers game: the more of it you do, the better your chances of reaping a fat payoff. — Gary Hamel, The Future of Management

The Community Resilience Lab was born out of this approach.