What is impact?
Impact is the sum of the effects of an organization’s actions on top of and next to what would have happened anyway. It concerns the social and environmental changes that would not be taking place without your actions.
The Center for Social Impact (Michigan) describes impact as “a significant, positive change that addresses a pressing social challenge, as a result of a deliberate set of activities with a goal around generating social impact and social change”. Often, the word “impact” is associated with collisions. However, when we use the word “impact” in this book, we mean the beneficial change we can make to society, the environment, culture, education, the economy, our wellbeing and our quality of life.
Activities that have an impact can be direct or indirect, small or far-reaching, immediate or long-term, close or far away. Impact can be positive or negative, direct or indirect, and even unintentional.
Before we embark on a journey to make an impact, we need to reflect on which benefits we are bringing and to whom. We also need to reflect on any potential, unintended, negative consequences. In our opinion, impact needs to be sustainable.
Organizations working consciously towards creating an impact often follow a sequence in terms of their inputs activities outputs outcomes impact. This sequence is called the “logic model approach”. This approach underpins the Theory of Change of an organization, whereby you believe that your efforts are converted into desired societal results. “We believe that by doing x, the result y will be reached.”
THE LOGIC MODEL
RISING YOU
Rising You is a Belgian social enterprise that facilitates the integration of refugees through programs that provide training in climbing techniques, technical skills (e.g. industrial painting) and soft skills. This innovative solution has a remarkable impact: 93 % of the young refugees who participate in the program get a long-term job. The number of companies that ask for training sessions for their future technically-trained employees is growing fast. Rising You also enriches the refugees’ quality of life.
YOUR LOGIC MODEL
Be the change you want to see in the world
Mahatma Gandhi
Why do we want to have impact?
Steve Jobs stated that “death is the destination we all share” in his commencement address at Stanford University. “No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent.” Death is indeed the only certainty we have as humans. As a result, death reminds us that our time is limited. Once we realize this simple, plain and undeniable fact (usually when something dramatic happens in our lives), we do not want to waste something that is so valuable.
Humans care; it is our nature. Humans want to have an impact. Our time on earth is finite and we need purpose. Our minds cannot live without thoughts, reflection and meaning just as our bodies cannot live without food. We need to connect and share with others, which is how we give meaning to our lives. We want to have purpose but finding purpose is a journey in itself. If we embark on this journey properly, we will create change, as Steve Jobs pointed out.
Our time and dedication to make a difference are precious. In the words of Anika Horn from Social Venturers: “Do something to fan your flame each day. Each interaction is another spark of impact, however small and insignificant it may feel in the moment. We each guard that little flame of passion to save the world and we work daily to create sparks in others. We connect and introduce. Some of us invest. We help define national policy. We create space and we listen. We can instigate and amplify social impact in our communities and beyond.”
The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it
William James
To be driven by positive impact is part of human nature. How do you want to be remembered when you have passed away? As the person with the cleanest house? As the person with the most expensive car? Would you not rather be remembered for what you contributed to the world and what you did for other people? In addition to our biological drive to procreate, we all have the desire to belong, to be loved, to make sense of the world and to contribute to it. Human beings cannot help it: we need to contribute.
Why should everyone make an impact in his or her own way?
The world is suffering. Many are calling for action to stop the exploitation and misuse of our planet. The number of people living in poverty remains high, our ageing society presents challenges that urgently need solutions and so on. Last months confronted the world with major challenges: big parts of the world are burning, one virus disrupts societies worldwide, refugees are dying at sea every day… It is impossible to say that “everything is fine”.
Luckily, we, people, have the power to create change. Often, we are led to believe that we cannot alter our circumstances, as if they were out of our control. But the world changes because people make it change. We have the power to create solutions for societal challenges.
There is a Native American proverb that states that we do not inherit the world from our parents; rather we borrow it from our children. This proverb changes our perspective and makes us realize that we do not have the right to use the world; rather, we have a duty to care for the world for the sake of others.
This new perspective encapsulates the essence of this book. How can you create a better world for future generations? How can you leave a legacy?
More than ever, there is an urgent need to create an impact. Given the challenges we are currently facing, we have to be aware of the cost of inaction. The P2P Foundation (peer-to-peer foundation) draws attention to the fact that our current political economy of capitalism uses artificial scarcity and pseudo abundance in a way that social injustice and inequality increase. “The idea of pseudo abundance is based on the mistaken premise of infinite material growth on a finite planet, where natural resources are actually fundamentally limited. Artificial scarcity refers to the strategies that prevent the sharing of technological and scientific progress because of excessively restrictive intellectual property rights. A sensible alternative is, of course, to recognize the limits of what we can use from the world of nature, of which we are an intrinsic part, and to allow for the sharing of all knowledge that can contribute to living within the limits of this ‘biocapacity’. Right now we have a production system where competitiveness is achieved by externalizing human costs to nature and society as a whole. Capitalism has become a scarcity-engineering machine that prohibits the occurrence of natural abundance. From this beginning, our theory of change was based on the idea that the seed forms of a new system grow within the old one, usually embedding an alternative logic to systemic crises.”1
This urgent call from the P2P Foundation brings us to the Three Horizons framework2, which helps to facilitate change and explore innovation in the face of uncertainty. This framework has been applied in a variety of contexts, including smart infrastructure, the IT industry, rural community development and executive leadership programs. It explores the potential of the present moment through a number of perspectives, which all need to be considered if we are to steer our course wisely into an unpredictable future.
This model draws attention to three possible futures we face, and how our future will evolve depending on our behavior. Take the three futures (horizons) into consideration when you think about ways that you can create a better world.
Within this framework, prevalence (x-axis) over time (y-axis) depicts:
•Horizon 1 (the red line): this line represents the dominant systems that are becoming less fit for purpose. Ultimately, these systems are destructive. They are beginning to decline and they go through increasingly short cycles of crisis and temporary, but never fundamental, recovery.
•Horizon 2 (the blue line): this line represents the transformative, capacity-building journey towards Horizon 3. This is the entrepreneurial and creative space for technologically, economically and culturally feasible innovations. These innovations can alter H1 to varying degrees and can have regenerative, neutral or degenerative socio-ecological effects.
•Horizon 3 (the black line): this line represents a viable future where people and the planet are under threat. We may not be able to define this future in every detail, but we can gauge which fundamental transformations lie ahead, and we can pay attention to existing social, ecological, economic, cultural and technological experiments that may hint at this future.
The source of change lies in the detail of interactive movement in the living present
In which way, or in which context, could you make an impact? Organizations nowadays can never be simply categorized. They are all located at a certain point on a spectrum. One well-known spectrum defines organizations by the extent to which they are profit-driven or impact-driven. Organizations that strike a balance between profit and non-profit fall in the central part of the spectrum. There we find social entrepreneurs who put their social mission first, but who also generate the economic profit that is essential to a solid business model. The spectrum also covers socially-aware companies that begin with an economic motivation but focus on broader social value and sustainability (shared value) through their supply chain, services, products or partnerships.
Source: Peattie, K. and Morley, A. (2009), Social Enterprises: Diversity and Dynamics, Contexts and Contributions
Our responsibility to change the world for the better can be overwhelming, but there are many ways in which we can have an impact, for example as part of a movement or as a citizen, researcher, entrepreneur or employee. Every step forward is a step towards creating a positive impact.