John Marks On Applying The Principles Of Social Entrepreneurship To Amplify Peacebuilding Globally
John Marks is the author of From Vision to Action: Remaking the World Through Social Entrepreneurship.
Until 2014, he was President of Search for Common Ground, a non-profit organisation he founded in 1982 and built with his wife Susan Collin Marks into the world’s largest peacebuilding NGO with 600 staff members and offices in 36 countries. He also founded Common Ground Productions.
In 2018, his work was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. He is a best-selling, award-winning author, a former US Foreign Service Officer, a Skoll Awardee in Social Entrepreneurship, and an Ashoka Senior Fellow.
He was a Fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School. The UN’s University of Peace awarded him an honorary PhD.
John discusses why in a polarised world we need to lean into the process of peacebuilding and how the ideals and core principles of social entrepreneurship are a powerful catalyser of conflict resolution.
Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)
[Indio Myles] - To start off, could you please just share a bit about your background and what led to your work in peace building and social entrepreneurship?
[John Marks] - I started my work in the American foreign service. I was originally a diplomat, but I resigned in protest during the Vietnam War. I was against the war, so I wound up writing a couple of books about American intelligence agencies (one of which was a bestseller).
After a while, I concluded the work I was doing was defined by what I was against. I saw that I wanted to build a new system rather than tear down the old one, and it was out of that reasoning I founded Search for Common Ground in 1982.
My vision was to change the way the world deals with conflict, to help us move away from adversarial win-lose methods of conflict resolutions towards non adversarial win-win problem solving.
As the founder and managing director of Confluence International, can you share how this organisation is helping resolve conflicts by inspiring collaboration and coexistence globally?
When I stepped down as President from Search for Common Ground, it was operating in 35 countries.
We had many different methodologies globally, but they were all based on the idea of understanding differences and acting on commonalities. In other words, by identifying projects and ideas people had in common, you could bring them together across religious, ethnic, or national lines.
That was our primary way of operating, and there were lots of ways to apply that. We even produced a lot of television series’ we used to call 'soap operas for social change'. This was because we found dramatic television was a better way of getting our ideas across to millions of people, much better than hosting workshops with only 25 or 50 people.
As author of From Vision to Action: Remaking the World Through Social Entrepreneurship, can you share more about the book and its key messages?
It was published on September the 3rd, and I got advanced copies which I can use to pry open a window for example! What the book does is it shows you how I used the methodology of social entrepreneurship to create the world's largest peace building organisation.
In other words, my vision was in peace building, in making the world a more equitable problem-solving oriented place, but the methodology to enact was social entrepreneurship. Social entrepreneurship can be used in virtually any cause, and it is quite similar methodologically to what business entrepreneurs do.
In the book is I list 11 principles of social entrepreneurship I've identified. Most of them are common sense, the first principle is you need to start with your vision. What is your vision? My vision was to change the world from an adversarial to a non-adversarial place. The second principle is:
You need to be an applied visionary. In other words, just being a pure visionary is useful if you're going to start a new religion or write a philosophy textbook, but you must be an applied visionary to make things happen in the world.
You must be willing to go ahead, one step at a time. I use my own experiences in places like the Soviet Union, Iran, Burundi, and the Congo to show how these principles are applied.
Would you be able to share an example of previous work you reference in the book?
The first big project in peacebuilding we pulled off was at the end of the Cold War. We put together a U.S. Soviet task force to prevent terrorism across the world.
We saw that stopping terrorism was something both the Soviets and Americans could agree upon no matter what. The idea of blowing up airplanes or taking hostages was not something either country shared as an acceptable methodology. While they both might have done this at some points, they were willing to work together to prevent it at the same time.
While doing this, they wound up bringing together high-level retired members of the CIA and KGB. These individuals worked in intelligence agencies on counterterrorism, and we had the former director of the CIA, William Colby, sit down with a few KGB generals and work out ways that they could cooperate.
That was our first major successful project. It was in the news and thought to be something making a real difference, particularly when the Gulf War started. This cooperation became the norm between the CIA and the KGB, and I didn't like the excesses of either organisation, but on the other hand, having them cooperate was certainly better than not cooperating.
Do you believe that businesses and corporations can be more proactive in addressing or resolve conflicts external to their organisation? If so, do you have any advice for them to do so?
There are two kinds of corporations.
First, there are those who are purely for profit, where making money is the only priority. Then there are also what we call social enterprises, which need to make a profit, but they’re trying to do things that are socially valuable.
When I think of a social enterprise, I think of organisations like KickStart working in Africa to bring water to dry areas. What they do is sell pumps, and they make a modest profit. It's not a charity; they sustain themselves through what the farmers pay for irrigation equipment.
Now you can do this on a global scale, or you can do that on a local scale, but that work is important. Business is important to running the world, much of the economy is based on successful businesses. But businesses can also have a social purpose mixed with generating profit.
What are your secrets for inspiring peacebuilding and collaboration between groups often polarised by their beliefs, goals or ideologies?
First you must listen. You must listen profoundly and find out what the conflict is all about. You also can't take sides. Even if one were an impartial observer saying that one side is wrong and the other is right or one side is more correct than the other, it doesn't work.
In this case you're just a partisan of one side, so instead you must find ways to bring the groups together.
You must be able to identify commonalities, areas where these groups can work together or transcend their arguments. Then as a peacemaker, you must be able to make what we would call 'yes-able' propositions, propositions to which both sides are willing to say yes.
You can't be too directive, it's much better if they make them themselves or it comes out of an exchange, but you certainly can push along the process.
I'm not so much a mediator myself, but I'm a person who had some entrepreneurial skill as an impresario, to bring people together and to identify areas where they might be able to work together.
What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across creating a positive change?
I put together an organisation that when I stepped down had 600 employees. One difference between starting out with only a couple of employees and having 600 employees is you no longer know everything that's going on inside your organisation… and I like to know everything even though I couldn't!
I had to depend on sub-entrepreneurs or what we call ‘intrapreneurs’ to be entrepreneurial. Sometimes I could start a project, but my staff could also start a project. We had a marvelous person in Congo, a woman named Lena Slack Mulder.
Pretty much without my supervision she wound up retraining the entire Congolese army (over a hundred thousand people) in preventing sexual violence. The Congo was known as a place that was at one point the rape capital of the world, and she found ways to get the army to cooperate with her and participate in training programs.
They were retraining people by the battalion or regiment. I was proud to have started an organisation in which something like this could happen, particularly when my hand wasn’t in it.
I set up the space and provided the context and administrative capacity to back it up, but my country director Lena in the Congo was the one who was able to do it.
As social entrepreneurs commonly feel the need to take on all the responsibilities of changing the world, do you have any advice for how changemakers can empower intrapreneurs in their organisations?
The phenomenon you describe I call the Atlas phenomenon.
Atlas had the world on his shoulders in Greek mythology, and if he had dropped it for one second the world would have ended! Many social entrepreneurs and business entrepreneurs for that matter feel that's true, but what you need to do is delegate. You must have good people to whom you can delegate tasks, and you need to be able to take care of yourself.
Too many people in this field (and I was guilty of this in my prime) spend all their time working, and they neglect family and their personal health. That doesn't work well either, so you need to find the right balance. Many social entrepreneurs don't like to listen, they think they have all the answers. That is probably not the best way to move ahead, but somebody like Elon Musk would probably dispute what I just said!
To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?
I'm not a scholar or theoretician, but the book I’ve written lays out how to operate successfully as a social entrepreneur. With an overload of modesty, I recommend my own book, because that's exactly what the book is about. It's not the only answer, but it certainly is a good one. I haven't read much in the field, but it comes all from my own experiences. The 11 principles of social entrepreneurship I developed were totally a function of what I saw and did over 40 years of peacebuilding work.
