Are these Big Ideas helping you think about how to work and live differently? Get an easy guide to all the Big Ideas in this handy PDF: https://dellarucker.gumroad.com/l/Epkcd
The Big Idea
Making an impact, even on something relatively simple like getting healthy food to a neighborhood, requires system thinking, not just doing stuff.
Too often, well-intentioned people think that if we just do this One Thing (build a grocery store, recruit a Big Business, revitalize the riverfront, build an Innovation Hub, whatever they think that means), then Magic Will Happen.
But we have a lot of people doing those One Things in more or less isolation, and that has given us a disjointed landscape where a huge amount of energy is being expended for often unimpressive results.
Most of the time, the One Things don’t live up to their billing because we assumed that X would cause Y, without carefully defining and working on the intervening steps necessary to convert a new resource to desired outcome.
Instead of making the assumption that X will cause Y, we need to walk carefully through the steps that will be needed to get from X to Y. Preferably in full partnership with the people who are already living in the space between those letters. And preferably with a careful eye out for the potential unintended consequences that can develop from intervening in a human ecosystem.