Steve Davis On Sustaining Practical Activism Through Revitalising Social Innovation

Steve Davis Author, Interim Advisor and CEO.jpg

Steve Davis is the author of Undercurrents: Channeling Outrage To Spark Practical Activism, a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Senior Strategy Advisor and Interim China Country Office Director at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

He also serves as co-chair of the World Health Organization’s Digital Health Technical Advisory Group, is a Distinguished Fellow with the World Economic Forum, and is a member of numerous boards and advisory committees.

He is the former president & CEO of PATH, a leading global health innovation organization; former Director of Social Innovation at McKinsey & Company, a global consultancy; and former CEO of Corbis, a digital media pioneer. With degrees from Princeton University, University of Washington and Columbia Law School, he speaks and writes regularly about the intersection of innovation, technology and social impact. He lives with his family in Seattle, Washington.

Steve discusses the re-emergence of activism seeking to address social injustices globally and the importance of entrepreneurs to seek involvement through innovation.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Indio Myles] - Steve, thank you so much for joining us. It's fantastic to be speaking to you.

[Steve Davis] - Thank you, Indio. It's my pleasure.

To start off Steve, could you please share a bit about your background and what led you to working in social innovation and activism?

Thank you again for having me today, it's always great to share some time with such an enthusiastic communicator, particularly around innovation in the world today. I came to it like so many people did, not by accident, but my career looks more like a pinball machine than maybe a nicely aligned bowling alley. It's because I've done a lot of different things. I started out as a human rights and gay activist in the eighties getting a law degree, but also focused a lot interestingly on China, where I spent some time, learnt the language and really fell in love with the place.

I had a dual path that was giving me both exposure to a lot of global issues and I particularly got involved in refugee work as well as in a lot of human rights and legal work as an activist.

I continued for quite a while doing that work in global settings around refugees and a lot of writing. Then I by accident found myself back in Seattle, at the early days of what became known as the internet. I ended up taking a job as a lawyer to help an early start-up that it turns out a guy named Bill Gates was starting, who I really didn't know much about, but ended up working for him and building a company with him for 15 years in the digital media space.

But I always kept my hand in social activism because at my core I wanted to make sure that the technology, innovation and the ideas that we were developing had an impact on a number of people.

I've now spent the last 15 years dedicating even more of my life and time to that work, teaching social innovation and helping build the global practice at McKinsey in this area. More recently I've been running for about eight years one of the largest NGOs in the world PATH, which focuses on digital health and innovation. Now of course I'm doing a variety of things as you mentioned, including helping the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Wow, those are some very eclectic interests there. You can very clearly see your journey into the social innovation and activism space you're positioned in now.

What role do you believe social innovation plays in reducing societal inequalities globally, and how vital is this role to you?

I mean, it's a bit circular because I think social innovation is in fact about better processes, products, services, financing and policies that can change the way we do things in a more systemic way and for social good.

In many of those areas, the social good is about an equity agenda, so I think that social innovation addressing inequity is interlinked in very fundamental ways. I mean, that's also true I would say because a lot of social innovation addresses environmental challenges, which also disproportionately are going to affect the poor. The reason I think it's so important is because I think we are seeing new ways in private sector enterprises, public sector organisations, social sector organisations like NGOs, foundations and academic research institutes are rethinking the way we are building models, creating tools and putting things like access at the front of their agenda.

Also, we are making the opportunity for someone in the digital era to get access not only in an effluent community, but in a poor community. Not only for people that have a lot of advantages already, but maybe for people that don't have those advantages.

Now this is not inevitable, I do want to underscore that one could argue that some of this innovation seems to be widening the divide because of access and equity. But, I'm a strong believer that over time we will see the flattening of that divide because we are going to see the way technology particularly can reach so many people so much more effectively and efficiently and disrupt the way we're doing our business in profound ways, which I think will help with social inequality.

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Very interesting perspective there Steve, that's great to hear that from you. If we're looking at some key advice that you would give to a social entrepreneur or an impact-driven individual seeking to adopt socially innovative practices, what would that advice be?

I write about this in a book that I just recently published, Undercurrents [which you mentioned], about a couple of things. One is taking what I call a practical activist approach, and in the book, I speak about practical activism. This is to say we sometimes have celebrated social activism as really just breakthrough innovation, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and big-name philanthropists.

In fact, that actually mischaracterises the way most social activism gets done, by normal everyday people who have maybe not the most glamorous jobs or live in the most interesting places. But they just take one step at a time to improve their neighbourhood, school or to change the way they're thinking about a problem.

My first piece of advice is don't overdo it in your mind or your approach. I mean, you can take small and incremental steps, and in fact that's the way most activism happens. It can still be disruptive and terribly important, people set up themselves to the point that they're nervous or paralysed, and my goal is to try to turn people's outrage to practical activism.

The second thing I would say, and I've seen this emphatically and underscore it in the book over and over is really to not just listen to, but to include the communities that you are hoping to impact in your approach at every stage and at every level.

We still have way too much social entrepreneurism and social activism that is us doing it for them, as opposed to helping them do it for themselves, actually just giving folks in other communities, other parts of the world or people that are suffering through risk that help to help themselves.

We're still doing too much of going in to save people rather than helping them build their own destiny with their own agency.

I really encourage younger entrepreneurs and activists to spend more time with the communities they're working with, listening, and actually taking their agenda to heart.

Great pieces of advice there, Steve. As you covered at the beginning, all of these pieces of advice are highlighted in your most recent book Undercurrents, but also you look a bit more at the history of activism, and I think you and I could both agree that 2020 was a significant year in recent history for the re-emergence of activism. I just wanted to ask you to look into the future, looking at 2021, where do you see opportunities for people to improve approaches to activism and do social enterprises and impact led individuals need to be at the forefront of these movements?

The second question I can answer right away, absolutely yes.

We need now more than ever people who are willing to think through more innovative approaches, even disruptive approaches to the way we're getting things done. Look, 2021 is going to be a tough ride, even though I know everybody is so happy to just be done with 2020.

Of course, there are many good things on the horizon, we hope that a vaccine is more effective for COVID and eventually changes the course of this pandemic, a new U.S. Administration should hopefully be a better player on the world stage, and there are other signs of improvement. But it's still going to be a tough year.

We've got a pandemic that's still way out of control, we've seen this enormous amount of economic and humanitarian crises that have cascaded from the pandemic, and we still have a lot of the underlying structural and economic issues that we had going into the pandemic.

I think the time for strong social activism and innovation could not be riper than 2021. I think some of the things that 2021 will require, and hopefully some of your listeners and social activists and entrepreneurs will take heed, is more thinking about how we actually don't just go back to the way it was. I don't think there is going to be any going back to normal, and it's an overused phrase, but there will be a set of 'new normal'.

The ‘new normal' could be an opportunity to take the lessons from this enormously tragic experience and convert them into sustainable models, whether you're talking about what we've learned from online education as we've forced folks to use online tools, to the enormous innovation I've seen in the health area.

[This is] where people have really rethought the way telemedicine can work or the way that mental health counselling can be accessed remotely in very personalised ways. Even the way other kinds of financial services have been provided in communities which have been deeply affected by the pandemic. All of those things have gems in them of what we learnt.

Now, not everything was perfect and there was a lot of craziness and incoherency, but in those lessons, we need to come out of this stronger.

I think there's an opportunity for social activists to think, "okay, what did we learn about education? What did we learn about health? What did we learn about protecting the environment in this crazy tragic environment?" Then, they can apply those more effectively for sustainable change in the future.

Steve, that's a really refreshing perspective and I equally hope that our audience can take the silver linings from this experience and turn those into some success in the future.

Now, if we're going to look at some projects or initiatives that are inspiring you at the moment that you've come across recently, what would those be?

Well, that's a tough one, because there are a lot. I've written an article and I'm actually participating in a project at Stanford around what COVID has generated in terms of social innovation. One of the things it's generated is just a fire hose of extraordinary ideas.

Now not all of them have gone to scale, a lot of them didn't work and frankly we kind of learned that without a good ecosystem to manage these and more regulation, it's hard to get things to really have the impact we had hoped for.

But in that, for instance [I mentioned it already], but there have been some really cool apps which are working on addressing mental health challenges. This is somewhat to do with the increased mental health, stress, anxiety and challenges that we're seeing coming in the pandemic, but also have really long-term benefits of taking out stigma, giving access to more personalised approaches, counselling, and even diagnostics that use better AI and other kinds of tools to understand behavioural changes. HelloBetter is a really cool app in Germany. But there are many that are doing great things in that area.

I'm quite excited about the opportunity for us to have some sustainable and effective approaches to using digital health and mental health management going forward.

Another area that I see which might be more in the United States given the specifics, but I've been working with an organisation that is looking at the horrible situation I have in my country. But it has a similar phenomenon in others, which is mass incarceration of brown and black people.

But really what the issue is we call the school to prison pipeline, where people get off track and there's just a one-way ticket to incarceration. Yet, we also know that juvenile incarceration does not really do much to rehabilitate, et cetera.

One program is in Seattle called Choose180, but I'm very excited to see an alternative to juvenile incarceration as a functional and very viable model. It takes a much more personalised approach, but I think those are scalable. Whether we're talking about very cool apps that are coming out of Germany and India for COVID management or very local innovation models that are saying, "how do we tackle old problems in new ways?" I think it's a pretty exciting time for innovation.

A few very interesting projects and initiatives there. Steve, thank you very much for sharing those with our audience. To finish off Steve, what books or resources would you recommend for our listeners to check out?

I read a lot and so I could just go to my go-to list. I do think one of the books that I would encourage people to read is the newest Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now) or the Hans Rosling's books. Factfulness is the name of the Rosling book, but both underscore the premise that I build my book around, which is data driven analysis that the world is actually continuing to get better.

The punchline of my book, but also a lot of the work I do, and I don't say this as a naive pollyannaish optimist, I say it as a practical activist and a pretty savvy business guy, is that the data shows that there is a lot of positive momentum on many critical issues in the world.

These two books are written by brilliant authors and scholars who can show us how with actual data that more girls are being educated, people are living longer, more people are living in the middle class than ever before, and despite the setback from COVID, I think those are important. Then I'd also go back to some of the practical things you can find online. We talked about a lot of interesting innovation happening in COVID, but I've been working with a group at the World Economic Forum and putting together a clearing house if you will.

The World Economic Forum's website has created an action platform that is not only giving exposure to interesting innovations that entrepreneurs are creating, but also, it's becoming a broker for potential financial supporters or potential technical support for people who want to scale it up.

I think there are others doing the same thing, but I think those platforms that are online, linking people between the innovator community and the demand community, the communities that need them are really incredible. I think they're a very inspiring source for an entrepreneur.

A few excellent recommendations there, Steve, and I would also just want to mention you forgot to say your book Undercurrents: Channeling Outrage To Spark Practical Activism, which would be a fantastic read for our audience also.

Steve, thank you for coming on our podcast and having a chat to me about activism and the current space in social innovation, it was great to hear your insights and we really appreciate it, thank you.