Design Influence Podcast / Season III Episode 5
We are witnessing a number of insistent reminders that the problems that we face as a society, we cannot solve as lone geniuses.
We have to learn how to get better at collaborating, listening to each other, and creating space for exchange. As a result, we’re seeing a lot of communities pop up, and networks. And that has triggered a desire to better understand the impact that the nature, composition, and functioning of those networks can have on complex systems.
We’re reimagining social and financial frameworks, and grappling with climate change at the same time, and it’s become increasingly evident that resilience, and yes, Our survival is largely dependent on understanding and harnessing our human behaviors. From our resistance to change, to our instinctual gregariousness, to our ability to learn and to adapt.
Meaghan Kennedy is founder of Orange Sparkle Ball. I’m always keen to hear what she’s working on because she has the uncanny ability to connect dots that other folks can’t. I caught up with her as she was gearing up to co-host an inaugural summit on tech-enabled community resilience. To ask her about what networks can do, their structures, the emergent behaviors they facilitate to alleviate some of the various crises we are facing.
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Meaghan—
The thing that I’m really thinking about a lot, both, uh, in projects we’re doing, but also in the summit we’re putting on is, um, how you really characterize and understand a community. Um, and as a side note, I’m going to use language interchangeably. I’ll use. Community, network, and ecosystem interchangeably.
Ecosystem is typically used by economic development people, startup people, tech people. Network is typically used by researchers, so social network analysis researchers. And community is typically used by community development folks, um, the public sector. Uh, but I’m talking about, and we work across all of those areas. So I’m really talking about the same thing. I’m just sort of weaving the different language in to hopefully appeal to people across sectors. So work-wise, I’m thinking a whole lot about characterizing community ecosystem networks.
Isabelle—
What do you think of, so folks, in recent time, and again, that’s a recent discipline, talk about systems change. And now it’s about system innovation. And so there are so many terms coming into play. Are you finding those characterizations useful, or, to your point about language, is it important to, for there to be convergence?
Meaghan —
That’s a great question. It’s always helpful that when we speak to each other we know what we’re saying and what the other people are hearing.
Yes. I don’t think there will be convergence though because even as I’m speaking to different people, people in, you know, disaster response, for instance. assume that I’m talking about community so that we can respond more efficiently to disaster, which of course I am. People who are college administrators are assuming I’m talking about community so they can be more effective in their, you know, the strength of their college community.
And, you know, that means responding to students, but it also means getting, you know, the right students in the right students out, all of that. So everyone sort of puts their own, I, I’m going to call it use case, uh, overlays it on the language that I use. So I always at this point, it’s probably a broken record because you know me really well.
I always am translating throughout what I’m saying so that I can try to pull in those very different use cases. You started out your career in public health. Can you talk us through a little bit how you got here? Yes, for sure. So I did, I started in public health. I was working at CDC, so the Centers for Disease Control, um, in the 90s doing HIV research, uh, and I, you know, obviously it was fraught, um, and I learned a whole lot at that point about community, um, And also about networks, because networks from a transmission perspective, um, and community from an engagement perspective, uh, and we were spending, we, CDC was spending a lot of money on, um, interventions in communities.
So the community might be injection drug users. It might be: men who have sex with men, however they define community, there were a lot of interventions that were spreading information about how to protect yourself, that kind of thing. Very non-specific, broad interventions in communities.
And again and again, those would be like, you know, three-year projects or five-year projects and they weren’t successful. So they weren’t really having the impact that anyone was hoping for. And then I went to this talk—there were a lot of talks at CDC, which was one of the benefits of working there.
I went to this talk that wasn’t really well attended or anything. And it was this guy — and I wish I could remember his name because this is the recesses of my brain. But it was this researcher who had mapped an injection drug-using community and then used social network analysis to understand who were the nodes — or a synonym is key influencer.
So who had influence in this community of injection-drug users, and then he used precision techniques to intervene with those key influencers, and he found over time that fewer and fewer injection-drug users that were coming into that community were getting infected because those key influencers were teaching people how to clean their worksm, they were giving out clean syringes.
So to me, that was like a giant light bulb.
Like we’re going to throw information to everyone, um, interventions that were not working and were very costly. And this guy had gone in and done basically a kind of anthropological slash epidemiological study using social network analysis and had really amazing results.
So fast forward, I left CDC in, at the end of the nineties and then, uh, went to industrial design school because that methodology really is design thinking. So that’s like quick, iterative, moving toward a goal, sort of directional change rather than the scientific method, which is very structured and trying to hypothesize a specific outcome and then test it, which is a slower process.
And from the design thinking methodology kind of opened a huge door in my mind. And from that, I started Orange Sparkle Ball, and that was a long time ago, over 20 years ago, which is hard to believe. And we’ve really been working on how do you understand how to make change. So not just characterize things, but actually make them actionable.
And we typically frame things as, who are your stakeholders? So what is your network community ecosystem? So what’s that top level? Then how do you design a program that, that supports the actionable change that you’re instituting? Then how do you design pilots to test iteratively in low-risk scenarios iteratively? Things that might create that change and then what are the characteristics of the people you need on board and how do you help them lean into those characteristics. So basically how do you support change makers? That, I believe, based on a lot of thinking, and a lot of work, and a lot of testing things, is a structure that actually facilitates change.
Isabelle—
That brings me to a topic that I’ve been thinking about a lot, which is how do you harness the acquisition of knowledge using that same framework? Is there a work of mirroring this work that you’re doing with pilots with disseminating information, or essentially walking people through the tree of thinking, that allows them to be, to your point about the the HIV work, giving those influencers the tools to do the work?
Easy question.
Meaghan—
Yeah, I’m processing a whole lot.
I’m going to answer in two different ways. My initial thought when you asked that question is I think what I’m talking about and what you’re talking about are exactly the same. So when you have a network, people are connecting in that network, but what they’re connecting on is they’re sharing insights. So, if you could map the information flow in those networks, I think the map that you’re talking about would look exactly like the map that I’m talking about, the connection map. Cause we know like you and I are, I think we’re both expanding our thinking on it. So I think a knowledge map and a network are the same thing. That was my first answer.I think that knowledge connection creates energy as well.
There’s a study that just came out and I’m going to paraphrase it, but it was, and this also was a big light bulb moment. Researchers had studied people with brain tumors. But they found that the more, so they were looking at neural connections to the brain tumors and they found that the more connections, so the more thinking that was going on between the brain and the tumor, the larger the tumor grew.
So basically the thought, so the knowledge, what you’re talking about was. feeding the tumor. That’s my very layman’s version of it. But to me, that’s the indication of what you’re saying and what I’m saying are the same thing. So I think when you actually get that network going, I think the knowledge share that’s happening grows everyone’s resilience, understanding, knowledge, energy, that all, it becomes its own organism. Now I’ve really gotten out there.
Isabelle—
Well, no, I mean, I think that makes a lot of sense. And also that it’s very helpful for us to have those kinds of analogies, to your point about living organisms and all of those things around energy and also being able to visualize things that are complex.
Meaghan —
There’s another study and I’m going to not do great with this one because I haven’t read it recently, but to your point about how information moves, there’s a study that I think is from the University of Pennsylvania. It’s probably about five years old now and it was, I think, economists who looked at how you define rural innovation.
So typically, innovation has been defined often as the number of patents that come out of an area. So that’s not really a measure that is applicable to rural areas. It’s a measure that’s applicable to like college towns or, you know, New York City. They were working on what is, how do you understand innovation in rural areas. And one of the things they found is that when there were several main companies supporting a rural town, and those companies exchanged workers. So people didn’t just stay at one company for their whole career, but they moved between the companies. That actually created more innovation in the town and they were measuring that by things like, you know, new small businesses created and other economic growth and well-being measures for the community, and to me, you know, their theory was that information was exchanged. So there wasn’t this siloed thing that often happens.
It was truly like information was happening in the network of knowledge. in this town was growing. So I think that also supports. what you’re talking about as the same thing I’m talking about.
Isabelle—
For sure.
So you live in Detroit currently, and we know that Detroit has a long history of self-organising. Of course, we also know that Detroit, the city of Detroit declared bankruptcy in 2013.
From that, even more self organizing occurred, and you’re a Michigander, and you’ve sort of witnessed a decline and what we’re seeing as a rebirth, specifically in Detroit, but more broadly of the Rust Belt. Can you say more about why you think — because I know you think that — there’s a differentiator there? What are you observing that is exciting you around what’s going on in Detroit right now?
Meaghan —
I would love to. I am a Michigander. I have the big Michigan love. I would argue that there’s a rebirth in Michigan across the state, it’s gotten very vital, but as I was thinking about needing to get back to Michigan, kind of to be closer to parents, you know, my personal reasons for coming back, I was trying to figure out where did I want to go in Chicago is like a, a very easy, um, choice.
Detroit was another one, and I was trying to figure out. Should I go? Where should I go? And I started looking at spending some time in Detroit and I’ve spent time in Chicago as well. It was much easier to feel the grassroots movement in Detroit than it was in Chicago. That might be related to size, I don’t know, or it might just be related to me being a Michigander and I had a propensity to feel it.
Anyhow, I started paying a lot of attention to what was happening and, in Detroit, there are a lot of public-private partnerships that have sprung up, probably out of the bankruptcy. So I was really paying attention to that, and I think Detroit was, was a benchmark for public-private partnerships long before other places thought that that was something that they could do to increase vitality in their areas.
So that was really interesting to me. And the other thing that was really interesting was when I heard the kind of business community talking, um, and talking about creating new businesses, that’s a very standard conversation that most cities are having. And it almost always is accelerators and tech people talking about creating high-growth startups.
So their goal is to get these high-growth startups going, get as much investment in as possible to kind of supercharge them and create a unicorn. The conversation on the other hand, I was hearing in Detroit was we’re supporting all these businesses and in economic development language that’s often called small and medium enterprises.
So we’re supporting all of these enterprises that are going to help support our community. And they were doing profiles of, for instance, there’s a restaurant that’s amazing and has won a ton of awards in Detroit that was created by a husband and wife Burundian couple who came to Detroit and went through one of the big accelerators in Detroit.
And out of that came Baobab Fair, which is this restaurant. And that’s one of the things that’s talked a lot about as opposed to this unicorn that was created. Well, StockX, for instance, is a unicorn that came out of Detroit. I hear a whole lot more about Baobab Fair than I do about StockX — even though I really like sneakers.
And me personally, I believe for a community it’s more important to be creating a lot of Baobab fairs than it is to be creating a lot of StockXs. I may have not made some friends with that either but . . .
Isabelle—
Say more about that though in terms of why you’ve observed that that is a game changer.
Meaghan —
Well, so there’s a theory and I talk about this all the time and people have a hard time thinking about it, but there’s a theory in economic development that, um, those unicorns are because they’re high growth. They get a lot of influx of money. Um, they pull. workers to them. So they are the job creation force, new businesses.
And there’s data to show that new businesses are job creation forces. My personal feeling, and I haven’t seen a good study to show this, is my personal feeling is that they pull a very specific type of worker. They create kind of siloed growth. So they pull tech workers. They, you know, it’s, it’s all we kind of are when we think about unicorns.
So startups that are, are worth a lot of money. Um, we think about technology, highly skilled workers who have a lot of education, who make a lot of money, um, you know, Bring that money into very specific parts of the community when you think about a lot of small and medium enterprises They are not siloed like that.
They’re reaching out, you know, I’m using my hands are they’re reaching out horizontally instead of this real silo of Concentrated money and if I had the same amount of investment, I would invest in 200 small and medium enterprises every day rather than invest in one unicorn because I think it’s actually better for the community for everyone and it’s a more the the money is dispersed into the community much more broadly and I would I’m gathering more equitably.
Isabelle—
So that is a nice loop back to what you’re working on right now around networks and resilient communities. Can you tell us more about that?
Meaghan —
We have been partnering with Teri Garska at the University of Kansas, Center for Public Partnerships and Research on thinking about how you characterize communities.
So, community / ecosystem / network. And she’s been thinking about that for a long time because they’ve developed and work on — I think 30 now — social care communities and they’ve been using social network analysis to understand what sectors are really supporting that social safety net and what organizations are nodes so that they can then give that data back to communities and communities can make it actionable by creating more connectivity between organizations or providing resources to organizations that are underfunded or bringing other organizations in to fill gaps, so she had already been thinking about that a lot. And as I mentioned earlier, I had an awareness of social network analysis and how important that was. And so we started talking about all of these different use cases that people might have around understanding their community ecosystem network.
That’s a long lead-in to say where we have put a summit together called the Tech Enabled Community Resilience Summit. Our goal was to gather people from across sectors who were all trying to understand that, you know, kind of what’s happening in their community, and help us as all see this is a cross-sector issue that people are trying to tackle. It’s not just specifically with social care communities or for disaster preparedness response. So we’re putting a summit together. We have an agenda that is some economic development folks, some tech folks, some social care folks, some university folks, and we have speakers who have developed different technology tools to try to help understand their community.
So it’s really just kind of an awareness and a gathering to hopefully help people understand this is a cross-sector challenge and push all of our thinking forward.
Isabelle—
There’s a lot of emphasis on data and there’s a lot of data available. There’s a lot of folks measuring and often again, where there’s a bit of a challenge is how do you better understand your community through that data in ways that are actionable?
Meaghan —
Having actionable data is one of the things that I am very focused on. There’s a whole lot of data in the world that’s not being used for anything, so one of the reasons that we so we heavily curated the folks who are presenting at the summit.
And we have in the summit is organized by: 1. what is community—so that kind of community ecosystem network conversation we had earlier, then 2. how do you create shared value in your community? Because everyone in your community or the players who you’ve engaged have to believe that the network is stronger than a singular approach to buy-in.
So, the second section is about that shared value piece. The third section is about technology tools. So, we’re highlighting three of them. The first one is a social care referral platform tool called IRIS that The folks that we’re partnering with developed— and Teri Garska is going to talk about her understanding of the need for that and then them developing it and what they’re doing now.
The second one is Danielle Varda at Visible Network Labs talking about a network mapping tool that she’s created. And I think her talk is going to kind of be more about, um, Thinking like a network scientist. So how do you go in and think about the network rather than kind of individual? Um, individual actions you might take, uh, and then the third one is a group in Puerto Rico that’s putting, I almost, I asked them this, it seems to me it’s an, uh, supply chain for information at the hyper local community level.
So it is a social network where people can define what they need, what they can bring. Um, and kind of who’s around them if there’s a disaster. So it’s this very interesting, super hyper-local use of technology. So, our goal was to show there are lots of different ways to think about technology-enabled community resilience.
That then allows you to understand or make actionable more in your community. Once you understand your network, it might look a little bit like Swiss cheese and then you can precision intervene to fill those holes. So that directs you kind of like that example I used earlier, knowing the key influencers you could direct information that then allows you to fill your Swiss cheese holes. And I know that like the Iris team takes the data, does social network analysis, and then gives that back to the community. So the community really understands what sectors are the nodes supporting the community and can make decisions about how to continue to strengthen the network.
They’re also working on network health measures and they’re doing a lot of research around how they understand. a community more effectively with data. So that’s kind of actionable research and actionable at the community level. And then, you know, contrast that with the super hyper-local one that I talked about, where that is basically, in and of itself is actionable because you’re saying what your needs are and what you are able to bring.
So everyone is kind of set up to respond to whatever is needed.
Isabelle—
My mind keeps going to climate change and this replication of hyperlocalized behaviors to this global crisis. How do you see the understanding of these hyperlocal movements as helping to create seeds that can, like fractals, replicate?
Meaghan —
I think there are a lot of things, and as with any kind of growing body of knowledge, some people who are community organizers probably are going to think that this is not a growing body of knowledge, this is obvious, but, which I totally agree with. However, I don’t think we have taken it out of community organizing into: how do we actually make change more broadly.
So I hope the summit has a tiny little piece of that. I have seen as we’ve been organizing it and we, you know, we get on calls with. potential speakers, um, as we’re talking about the lineup being so cross sector. I think a little bit of a light bulb goes off with different people, which makes me very happy.
So I think there’s some of that. I think there’s some of the research, for instance, that, um, Teri and her colleagues are going to talk about where they’re trying to look at network health measures so that you can potentially correlate the network health measures with community-level outcomes, so like Census outcome data or economic development outcome data.
That’s what they’re working on. And they’ll present about that at the summit as well so I think that moves the research thinking forward, connecting across sectors, moves the applicability thinking forward. And then I’m going to come back to Detroit in a conversation I had after I was on a panel. I had a much more outsider perspective of Detroit than the other three panelists who had grown up in Detroit, had been through the bankruptcy, are all leaders in Detroit, you know, much, they’re leaders in Detroit. I’m an outsider looking in, I think, who lives there. We were having a conversation after the panel and I was talking about there being a distributed power structure in Detroit. And the guy who’d been on the panel I was talking with was like, well, you know, during the bankruptcy, there really was a void of official leadership so, we had to fill in the gaps and I was like, I actually think that distributed, you know, basically we have to, we have to do it, we have to fill in the gaps.
That’s the ethos in Detroit I love. That actually resulted in a stronger, more resilient community because there’s lots of data to show that. Decentralized networks are stronger than centralized networks and are more innovative. So ideas flow more freely. There’s shared power. And back to that thing I talked about with the summit, that shared value.
People then have to really think about, okay, is this just good for me or is this good for the bigger network? And maybe there’s going to be some conflict about who’s going to, you know, own things or be the leader on things and all of that is great for a strong, resilient network. So I think it is kind of a Midwestern ethos that we’re just going to fill the gaps but that what happened in Detroit, I think also is an example of what we were trying to kind of talk about in a more conceptual and academic way.
Isabelle—
I think that decentralized leadership is being echoed in a lot of leadership and decentralized structures are being tested. So I think it’s really interesting.
We haven’t talked much about the fact that at Orange Sparkle Ball, you run a lot of pilots that bring together either public-private partnerships or corporates with startups or with innovative organizations.
And one of the things we know is, often, for intrapreneurship or for innovation to work in a larger corporation, it needs to, to your point, have kind of a separate leadership. What are other things that you’ve noticed in your extensive experience with pilots that helped to bridge that gap between ‘we have this idea, we think this will work’ and ‘how do we test it? how do we roll it out?’
Meaghan —
Oh, this could be an entire podcast in and of itself.
Isabelle—
I know, but I only have you for a half hour.
Meaghan —
I’m going to go back to the information question you asked me earlier, and I said, I have two answers. My second answer is a very tactical one.
We have found, anytime you’re running a pilot, you’re testing some version of change inherently. People are resistant to change. It’s human nature. So we’ve found that if you run one very low-risk pilot, so if this crashes and burns, it’s fine. No one’s job is on the line. It doesn’t hurt anyone in the community.
And then you do wraparound communications. And I mean, a huge communication push. So a communication push that’s way, has way more weight than actually the weight of the pilot, because you’re trying to move people. It’s a little like the Overton window where you’re trying to pull people’s thoughts about what this could be out far enough into the future to give you space to actually do the testing.
We talk about things as we need to build a platform. People typically talk about one pilot, like they think they’re going to test something, they’re going to do one pilot, and it’s going to be great, and that fixes everything. So we change language to a platform or a program. And then we do that one pilot.
We do that huge wraparound communication push. We give a little space between the next, the start of the next pilots for that communication really to land and be pushed out. And then we really start what I would call the real pilots that are like. testing real aspects of technology, market fit price. You know, what is the pricing model here?
How do people interact with this? If, if it’s a technology they need to interact with, like all the things you need to solve, but you never try to start with those because you start with something that is so low risk. Uh, and, and then you talk about the success of it.
Isabelle—
So what does success look like right now for you?
Meaghan —
That’s such a good question. For me personally?
Isabelle—
Sure, whatever you want.
Meaghan —
I think when I see, uh, people get the idea of shared value, that gives me hope every time. From a professional standpoint, it manifests as one organization who thinks they’re just selling something to another organization realizes that if they can engage in a meaningful way with that other organization, something greater than, you know, their, their sale comes out of that.
So that’s always our goal. We, when we’re running pilots, we’re always trying to do something that sets up true shared value, not a transaction. So that’s the professional version. The personal version is when I see something happening that hits my value system in the wrong way and I see people sharing information and kind of self-organising around fixing it, that gives me a lot of hope.
And that’s basically I think what I described or what I was talking to that guy that was on the panel. That’s what we were talking about. I think that’s what happened in Detroit as a whole, but, you know, I also see it at a much more local level. It could be a co-op is doing that, or some other community group, something like that. When people realize that if they actually share information and work together that they can right some of the wrongs that we might see in our life.
That also gives me hope.
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Meaghan Kennedy is the founder of Orange Sparkle Ball, an innovation and impact consultancy that accelerates initiatives in the private and public sectors. She’s based in Detroit.
