“We’re here to try to do something different,” said Continuum’s Ed Milano, kicking off a panel discussion at the company’s Boston-area offices last Thursday to address a growing crisis within the field of microfinance. Milano, Vice President of Program Development at Continuum, set the stage with an apt quote from the de facto “father” of microfinance, Muhammad Yunus: “My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people. We see things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to see…Poverty in the world is an artificial creation…Poverty is unnecessary.”

A proven tool for fighting poverty on a large scale, microfinance provides very small loans to people, mostly women, to start or expand small, self-sufficient businesses. In fact, 155 million of the world’s poorest people have received a microfinance loan—giving them the opportunity to transform their lives. But as these organizations face meteoric growth, managerial operations needed to effectively scale these institutions are suffering. Industry leaders claim that finding a solution to this “talent gap” is critical to the future of the field.

Continuum, in collaboration with a remarkable team, has just begun work on a project to solve this social challenge. The project’s goal is to create an innovative leadership development solution for middle managers, and, in essence, groom the next generation of leaders in these crucial organizations. The team includes Continuum Social Innovation Principal Anna Muoio; Peg Ross, director of the Human Capital Center at The Grameen Foundation; Lynn Pikholz, President of the microfinance development company ShoreCap Exchange; and Lyndon Rego, Director of Innovation at The Center for Creative Leadership, an international leadership education and research firm. “This is a burly problem,” says Muoio, “and we need the power of all these different disciplines and expertise—from microfinance to leadership development to organizational effectiveness and innovation—to solve it.”

Over the last decade, microfinance has experienced explosive growth, with local banks expanding anywhere from 50 to 100 percent year-over-year to serve the needs of their clients. “But because of this enormous growth,” says Pikholz, “resources are stretched, staff isn’t adequately trained, and there’s no methodology in place for managing, grooming, and attracting talent.” For example, one microfinance bank in India has hired close to 1,000 loan officers and branch managers this year alone. The branch mangers, for instance, are largely in their mid-twenties with little experience in managing hundreds of employees, significant loan portfolios, and “non-textbook” situations, such as a local government officials urging people to default on their loan repayments or the death of a loan officer in the field. To put things in context: A comparable job in a city at a traditional bank would require seven to eight years of experience. “Microfinance institutions can’t reach their mission without help,” says Rego.

During the discussion, the team opened up the conversation to guests, who included individuals from the microfinance and financial service sector as well as graduate students from Harvard, Tufts, and Boston College. They helped to imagine what the solution would look like. All agreed that a trail-blazing mentality is needed to get the job done.

Although the project is still in its infancy, Grameen’s Peg Ross has already felt that working with Continuum has been eye opening. “This company has introduced me to a whole new way of finding a solution,” says Ross. “And with the work that the team will do on this project, they will effectively train the next generation of leaders.”

Click here to read “No Footsteps to Follow: The talent gap in the development finance sector in India,” field notes from the team’s initial trip to India in the fall of 2009.

On February 19th, students from the Otis College of Art and Design visited our Los Angeles studio. The students are part of a multi-disciplinary class called “Design for Social Impact.” In the class, the students work with local non-profits to focus their designs on specific and relevant needs.

With this in mind, we tailored our presentations to give the students a feel for Continuum’s social innovation process. The morning started out with a tour of the space and its project-specific installations, led by the studio principal Alex Hennen. Then, design strategist Brian Wen led a presentation and discussion on design strategy and ethnography in emerging markets.

Below are some impressions from the students:

“I began to realize all the types of people, methods, and practices that go into social design. It is a complex system.”
Alexandra Cantle

“[I got] a chance to see more ways that design can create social impact. It also was good to see the importance of video interviews and what they can reveal.”
Stephanie Treinen

 ”Being in product design, I’ve come to the realization (or more left the state of denial) that you really need to get out there and talk to people when doing research. Not just sit and google things on a computer.”
Ryan Robinson

“[I got] a better understanding of the effectiveness of systems thinking, the process involved, and the importance of beginning with people’s values, and how to work with and understand people in a ethnographic design context.”
Julian Rood

Does design have a role to play in the face of disaster? That’s the conversation the Cooper-Hewitt sparked through a panel they hosted the other week which I was invited to join. The conversation was moderated by Chris Hacker, CDO of J&J, and included panelists who have been on the frontlines of relief for some of the world’s most horrific disasters, Jean-Cedric Meeus, Emergency Coordinator of UNICEF Supply Division, Gerald Martone, Humanitarian Affairs Director for the International Rescue Committee, and Pierre Fouche, a Haitian earthquake engineer.

The conversation focused primarily on the disaster in Haiti. Frontline reports from Jean and Gerald underscored the extraordinary challenges the humanitarian community faces in delivering aid to a country hobbled by a threadbare infrastructure (including a lack of basic governance) and debilitating poverty. Taking a step back, we looked at a country that has been the recipient of over $4 billion in aid over the past 20 years. Pre-earthquake, there were over 10,000 private aid organizations working in Haiti, providing basic services in every arena of life. Depending on which source you choose to believe, the estimated cost of recovery hovers in the range of $7.2 to $13 billion. The main focus now is pure “rescue:” How to deliver and distribute it. This is the horse before the cart of reconstruction.

And it all reminded me of something I heard the founder of a social enterprise working in Haiti say, post-disaster: “Rescue is important, but doesn’t lead to anything more than rescue.” That’s not to say immediate relief isn’t a must have—but what’s the role design can play in the long-term recovery (and we’re talking decades) facing the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere? That’s the big question to ask—and some of what we touched on during the panel conversation.

You can view the video of the conversation here.

Yes, we all know: Change is here. It’s taken up residence in the White House (we hope). It’s having its way with every system—financial, housing, political—to which we faithfully subscribed and that kept our world running. And now change has come to Design Observer, one of the most authoritative blogs on design. Change Observer will be the new venue for Design Observer to highlight the activity, development, best and worse cases at the burgeoning intersection where design meets social impact. It’s a way for the contributors (specifically the new additions to the team, Julie Lasky of ID Magazine and Ernest Beck, a former Wall Street Journal reporter) to focus their keen editorial insight on important efforts underway in social innovation. It’s a way to begin to affect change through increased knowledge and understanding. And it’s much needed.

The need to drive awareness around the impact design can have when applied to some of the world’s most intractable problems is one of the insights that emerged this summer during a “Design for Social Impact” workshop Continuum led with support from The Rockefeller Foundation. The goal of the workshop was to think about how we could create the “infrastructure” to increase the design industry’s systematic contribution to the social sector. (The outcomes of this workshop can be read here)  Bill Drenttel from Design Observer was a key participant in these conversations—and took the lead in thinking about how a robust site—in his terms, an “uber site”—could most effectively report on the activities, knowledge and progress of the collaborations that emerge from this sector.  The belief is: If we can increase awareness about the efficacy of these collaborations, we’ll start to see an increase in involvement.
Read more

I have just finished a book that has provoked the most unusual vision: The Temple of Apollo. Intoxicating vapors rise from the earth’s deep chasms. The Oracle of Delphi unleashes an unbridled stream of murmurings. The holy priests wait below, open-mouthed, to reshape these cryptic invocations into enigmatic prophecies. Fire and brimstone kind of stuff.

No William Gibson book is this. No manga of ancient Greek mythology, but rather Michael Kinsley’s new book-birthed-by-blog, “Creative Capitalism, A Conversation with Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and other Economic Leaders.” So why the Delphic vision? Perhaps because this book is less a conversation (between the third richest man in the world and the richest man in the world) than a scramble by the modern day priests and priestesses of our economic system to make sense of the oracle-like proclamation by Bill Gates at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January of 2008.

It is in this 2,774 worded speech or that Gates, a self-proclaimed impatient optimist, launched his provocative, compelling and, to some, cryptic call for a world where “creative capitalism” takes its turn at addressing some of our most intractable and pressing global inequities.

Read more