I spent a lot of time last night thinking through some stuff about the Stockholm Challenge that is keeping me pretty busy right now. I had help from my colleagues and friends Ulla Skiden, who is the Director of the programme and Toula Karayannis who is both a juror and a damned fine networker and community development person in her own right.
The problem we are trying to solve is how to fund the programme adequately and how to attract another couple of sponsors so that we can afford the time to do the work without constantly having to skimp so we can afford the resources to chase the sponsorship that keeps us going.
In other words, nothing new to most people running programmes like this, or, in fact, any business.
Inevitably we got down what exactly the sales pitch is; how do we even get the potential sponsor in the room to have the discussion about whether or not they want to think about investing in it? We got down to the elevator pitch.
And, for me, there isn't one. Not just because its a dynamic, constantly developing conversation, in the Internet sense, but because there is an irreducible complexity that is impossible to simplify without destroying the understanding of what it is. I've ranted abot this before.
In the process of talking this through I protested that the whole problem of KISS and elevator pitches is that it leads to a situation where only those things get done that can be summarised in an arresting way in 30 seconds. But we don' live in a world where here are simple inputs, simple processes and clear, simple outcomes expressed in dollars.
Toula made the point as clearly as can be when she talked about a Melbourne organisation called the Western Women's Domestic Violence Support Network. Unlike those organisations who provide elevator-pitch services such as women's refuges (a safe place for women and children under threat of violence) the network provides emotional and social support to women undergoing the whole process of dealing with domestic violence. Volunteers turn up at the court and government departments to help women deal with the bureaucracy and the effects of legal actions; they provide an experienced hand to help from someone who has been through it before and reassure that this is OK, that it can work out, that there are ways to survive the experience and so forth.
They cannot explain their programme in an elevator, let alone why it is important to a wide variety of women with, often, few emotional, financial and life experience resources.
So they are going broke and in danger of closing down.
At every level and on every scale we live in a world where the benefits comes from staggering levels of complexity, where understanding takes years and is then only approximate at best, where significant and thoroughgoing change is now inevitable as we confront the massive problems of Peak Oil, climate change and economic disconnection.
We live and will die in this world, yet our decision making systems revolve around whether or not the entire value of the discussion can be distilled into a 30 second statement because we don't actually want to pay the price of living in complex societies, we want our personal worlds to remain simple.
That, friends, is a vote for suicide.
Whether the Challenge lives or dies will make not much difference in the great scheme of things, but in the microcosm of my life it matters a lot. Its survival determines in the short term how well I eat and what I do when I get out of bed in the morning. But if that survival depends on simplifying an inherently complex thing that provides powerful benefits to its participants that solidify only in retrospect; we haven't a show.
And we are just the canary in that coal mine.
Yes.
And there's the same problem, imho, with the question for many start-ups or new businesses or areas of activity (esp. in the software area) with the question "What's the point of PAIN, the problem you are trying to solve ?"
More often than not, if not viewed holistically or integratively, solving a point of pain or a bottleneck problem creates other equally vexing problems, whether technical or sociological, elsewhere in a system.
Posted by: Jon Husband | May 03, 2006 at 04:18 AM