Societal Thinking

The Think Collective by Societal Thinking hosted an exclusive event with Don Norman, author of 'Design for a Better World' and young change leaders to discuss designing for a better tomorrow. Don Norman, a writer and researcher, was the founding Director of The Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego), is the co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, former Vice President of Apple and Member Board of Directors at the Don Norman Design Award DNDA. The hour-long conversation featured insights from Don Norman as well as Sanjay Purohit, Chief Curator of Societal Thinking, across sustainability, artificial intelligence, policy-making, and the importance of designing alongside communities. 50+ young enthusiastic change makers gathered at the Bangalore International Centre and brought with them their curious questions making this session highly interactive. We would like to thank Don Norman and everyone who attended the event for making it a success. Stay tuned to this space for more interesting updates and bytes from the event. Also, if you've attended the event, do share your biggest takeaway in the comments! Hitha Maureen | Anjali Hans | Devina S. | Siddhartha Menon | Priya Mantri Ajmera | Ashcharya Prabhu | Rishika Gopinath | Sreekar Gangisetty #designthinking #societalthinking #socialimpact #changemakers

We're thrilled to welcome Health Care Without Harm into the C4EC family as a Journey Partner. Health Care Without Harm works to transform healthcare worldwide, reducing its environmental footprint, becoming a community anchor for sustainability and leading the global movement for environmental health and justice. Talking about their aspiration for the Centre for Exponential Change, they highlight: "Our aspiration for our co-creative partnership with Centre for Exponential Change is to navigate together a paradigm shift of embracing technology and innovation to more effectively deploy climate and health solutions across our health systems, hospitals, health professionals, and other stakeholder networks. We want to scale our impact, not our organization. We believe technological innovation is key to this aspiration and that C4EC is best positioned to help us arrive at the strongest solution for our needs." We look forward to working with the wonderful team at Health Care Without Harm in this journey of exponential change 🧡 Erin Ricci, PhD | Jolie Patterson, CAE | Ana Belluscio | Nick Thorp | Shanda Demorest | Carolina Gil Posse | Mariano DeDonatis | Gary Cohen | Sanjay Purohit | Priya Mantri Ajmera | Varsha Verma #collaboration #socialchange #exponentialchange #healthcare

With the growth and adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) globally, working towards reimagining equity within and through transformative systems becomes crucial. Aapti Institute's recent research highlights how the ecosystem can help strengthen the design and deployment of AI systems to reduce the potential impact on historically marginalised communities. This blog piece by Kunal Raj Barua, Senior Manager, Aapti Institute, summarises these findings and hopes to draw attention to the various ways in which ecosystem actors can contribute to strengthening equitable and inclusive practices of such systems. Here's a glimpse of the blog below. Read the entire blog here: https://bit.ly/aptlnkd Sarayu Natarajan | Anjali Hans #ai #equity #inclusion #socialimpact

Last Friday, our office buzzed like a beehive as we hosted an exclusive ILSS x Think Collective session for the ILSS - India Leaders for Social Sector alumni group. Think Collective champions exponential change thinking in the social sector and offers a collaborative space to nurture reflection and reimagination through engagement with the Think books. In this session with ILSS, Vyjayanthi Mala (VJ) and Polina Nezdiikovska guided a diverse group of social sector professionals through an engaging exploration of what scale can mean for them, their teams, and their ecosystems. The room was alive with the energy of shared ideas. Discussions revolved around the meaning of scale, the importance of activating agency within communities, and how to ensure change sustains. Here are some key takeaways from the session: - What works, may not work at scale. Achieving scale depends on many factors, like ownership, agility, robust design, and simplicity of the solution. - Small changes create a ripple effect leading to sustainable impact. Simple solutions are more likely to scale as they reduce complexity for end users, making adoption easier. - To scale, solutions need to move from context-specific to context-free to ensure wide adoption. - Agency drives scale, and vice versa Empowering individuals with choices and decision-making power fuels change at scale. - Collaborative efforts and shared innovations rather than a top-down approach lead to impact at scale. We hope the ideas planted during the session will grow and flourish further! You can download the Creative Commons version of Think Scale here: https://bit.ly/tslnkd Sanjay Dhawan | Shashwat P Shukla | Meghana Ratna Pydi | Mahi Titus | Vishwajeet Lohakarey | Soumya Suresh | Arti Yadav | Rajika Seth | Geetha Skaria Philip | Arun NS | Devaki . | Abijeet W. | Vidyasagar Bedida | Rajesh Ramamoorthy | Subhash Panicker | Nagraj Prabhu Mudradi | Priyank Hirani | Rashmi Rajdev #thinkcollective #socialchange #thinkscale #exponentialchange

𝗪𝗲’𝗿𝗲 𝗲𝘅𝗰𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝘄𝗲𝗹𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗦𝗿𝗶𝗿𝗮𝗺 𝗕𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗮𝗺 𝘁𝗼 𝗜𝗻𝘃𝗼𝗸𝗘𝗱 𝟰.𝟬! A serial and social entrepreneur, Founder & Chief Mentor at Kuza One (Kuza Biashara), Sriram is committed to enable youth, women, and small businesses in low-middle-income countries to learn, connect, and grow on their own terms through digital technologies. By bringing together and mobilising public, private, and philanthropy sectors, Sriram has been instrumental in driving large-scale impact across health, agriculture, and WASH, empowering 6 million+ youth and creating 153,331 new jobs across Africa and South Asia. Join Sriram Bharatam, as he shares insights on leveraging digital platforms to accelerate problem-solving at scale! 📝𝗥𝗲𝗴𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗙𝗼𝗿𝗺: https://lnkd.in/gsT82e2V ℹ𝗚𝗲𝘁 𝗠𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗗𝗲𝘁𝗮𝗶𝗹𝘀: https://lnkd.in/e6SjNBZc #InvokED #SocialImpact #WomenEmpowerment #SocialChange #Health #Communities #Equity #InvokED #MissionToMovement #Education #Leadership #EducationEquity #LeadershipforChange #EducationEquity #Thisismyshikshagraha #EveryStepTowardsEducation #Global #Event #Dialogue #Bengaluru #India

While AI and GenAI could contribute nearly USD 2 trillion to the global GDP over the next decade (Boussour, L. (2024, March 22)), we need to ask an important question: How can we design AI to ensure it's equitable and inclusive? Kunal Raj Barua, Senior Manager, Aapti Institute, highlights the immense economic potential of AI but emphasises the crucial importance of mitigating risks like bias and exclusion, particularly for marginalised populations in this latest blog. The blog calls for policymakers, businesses, and other ecosystem actors like users, researchers, academia, and civil society to collaboratively create inclusive AI systems, advocating for proactive system design, robust safeguards, and meaningful user feedback. Read the entire blog, "Reimagining equity through AI systems" here: https://bit.ly/aptlnkd Aapti Institute is an organisation working at the intersection between technology and society to build solutions that enhance societal impact, justice and equity. Sarayu Natarajan | Anjali Hans | Vasudha Varadarajan #artificialintelligence #equity #socialimpact #inclusion

We had the pleasure of orchestrating a learning journey for the Collaboration for Impact Group and the executive leadership team of the Mastercard Foundation, led by Reeta Roy, President and CEO of the Foundation. Mastercard Foundation partners with visionary organisations to enable young people in Africa and Indigenous communities in Canada to access dignified and fulfilling work. The teams were in Bangalore to learn from India’s digitisation journey and how our digital rails power financial inclusion, education and livelihood pathways for communities that are traditionally excluded from participating in the economy. Our conversations explored strategies to unlock pathways to sustainable livelihood across countries in Africa through education, skilling and entrepreneurship. We thank our vibrant network for sharing their insights and lessons on designing to solve problems at scale, network effects, and models of exponential change. We would also like to thank the Mastercard Foundation for their time and energy. Chris Locke | Christina Levine | James Mwangi | Jeroo Billimoria | Patrick Awuah | Peer Stein | Tilman Ehrbeck | Tinotenda Chirinda | Doug Kasambala | Wole Onabolu | Sconaid McGeachin | Litsa Popowich | Tina Muparadzi | Adesola Sotande-Peters | Jeniffer Ramnath | Lakshmi Pattabi Raman | Sanjay Purohit #communities #livelihoods #socialchange #exponentialchange

"2025 is off to a power-packed start," recalls Priya Mantri Ajmera, reflecting on her role as a facilitator at a recently conducted workshop at Shikshagraha's Shiksha Samvaad. She further elaborates, "I recently did a workshop with these women community leaders from the state of Bihar in India along with the Shikshagraha team. They showed me the power of agency and when restored, how people find innovative ways to solve their problems. Each of these women is a part of a movement - to build a micro-community of support for girls and women around them. Together, they convince parents to keep girls in school, ensure early child marriages don't happen in their community, resolve gender-based violence issues in their communities and most importantly, give the women around them the confidence that "they matter". They shared with me many, many examples of empowerment - first their own and then enabling other women to feel empowered. Exponential change at its core. One of the most powerful examples for me was "Naari Adalat" or women's court for dispute resolution by the people, for the people. I am so intrigued to go back to their communities, see them in action and learn this magic of "coming together to solve." Preeti Sunderajan | Khushboo Awasthi | Neeraj Doddamane | Santosh More | | Mantra4Change | ShikshaLokam | The Shibulal Family Philanthropic Initiatives (SFPI) #socialchange #educationforall #movement #collectiveaction

Change begets change. Here are two approaches to enabling exponential change. While one focuses on replicating ideas, the other focuses on nurturing environments and ecosystems to create new ideas. What approach resonates with you, and why We're curious. ---- This quote is from the Think Book, Think Speed and the chapter: When change induces more change. Download the Creative Commons version of Think Speed here: https://bit.ly/tbslkd ---- Polina Nezdiikovska #ideas #socialchange #thinkspeed #exponentialchange

A Milestone to Celebrate: 1000 Jalshalas Completed! From Assam to across India, students are becoming changemakers through the Jal Doot Programme of the Jal Jeevan Mission, Assam. Together, we’re building a water-smart future. Ready to make a difference? Refer a school or connect students to this incredible journey! #JalShalas #WaterSmartCommunities #JalDootProgramme #INREMFoundation #SustainableWaterManagement Jal Jeevan Mission Reap Benefit Kailash Karthik N Manu Srivastava AVPN Ashoka Sarah Misra Kuldeep Dantewadia Maria Zapata Anuj Sharma ClimateRISE Alliance Ayan Biswas Sanjay Purohit Centre for Exponential Change Societal Thinking Glific Project Tech4Dev