Social Impact Entrepreneurship: A warning from a well-weathered friend
Written by Aryanisha Lawes
Great entrepreneurs are like great lovers: They get themselves “out the way” and master three essential skills that leave their customers wanting more. These skills are the ability to:
Shift their full attention onto the person they are trying to serve
Make their moves considerately, without assuming how they will be received
Adapt their strategy based on the messages they get back
If you're ambitious in business, you’ll be forced to acquire these skills. Good marketing and packaging - like good chat and clothing on a first date - will only get you so far. Yes, you'll get some customers, but when you don't deliver, they won't come back and word will spread. So, if you truly want to succeed and scale, you'll need to take a humble look at what's turning off your clients and improve your technique accordingly. Although the brutally honest feedback from performance data might bruise your ego, it will help you grow if you let it. This is a well-known reality for entrepreneurs of all kinds.
But for those entering the mercurial realm of "social impact": be warned. If you only have an indirect relationship with the end user of your product or service, you could get away with being average, or even mediocre, for much longer. The problem comes from an ambiguous link, usually quite clearly defined in traditional producer-consumer relationships, between who pays for your service and who your real ‘consumer’ is. When working with a company to reduce the risk of employee burnout, or funding opportunities for young people, for example, there's a strong chance that the person signing your paycheck isn’t the person you are trying to help. This means you'll find it harder to know what's working and what's not; and may get caught up trying to please a decision maker with different priorities or views than your beneficiaries. Essentially, you could find yourself blindfolded in a thruple with weird power dynamics that give you the ick (and perhaps we'll leave the analogy there).
Yet you also face a second challenge that may be uncomfortable to admit. Without realising it, those of us looking to solve a social problem can easily fall into a dynamic I call "The Helper and The Helped". We create, or collude with, a hierarchy in which we unconsciously place ourselves above those we want to help: we stand up here with the knowledge, the expertise and resources that "The Helped" apparently need. I've seen this play out, in both myself and other people, across my 15 year career in different sectors focused on improving social outcomes.
This inversion of the hierarchy that is so essential to successful entrepreneurship makes it much harder to be of genuine service. Instead of shifting our attention out, moving slowly and seeing how the people we want to help respond; we push ahead with our own ideas and assumptions about how we're going to ‘save’ the world. Our beneficiaries may be nice to us and say the right thing when asked. Yet if it were down to them to pay us, they probably wouldn’t.
There's plenty of people out there who can point to unconscious biases that can fuel this dynamic. Classism, racism and all the other -isms can certainly play their part. Having said that, I don't think prejudice is always the primary cause. Often we can simply forget or fail to realise that other people are different to us. If you get paid irrespective of whether “The Helped” really value what you give them, you aren’t forced to confront this lack of understanding, skill or empathy.
Smart meter rollout in the UK is a great example of this. I used to run fuel poverty services in South London and many people I spoke to didn't want a smart meter. Some were concerned about the health risks of 5G and being spied on. When I spoke to a well meaning technical expert, who was partly funded through grants, they simply replied that we should say that neither of these risks are real. Yes, unconscious bias may have contributed. But they were also shielded from the consequences of their views by the funding structures of their projects: either local or national government; donors; or other clients subsidised the more “altruistic” side of their work. I doubt they would last long in a tech company selling a new gadget directly to consumers.
So what can you do, if you want to create meaningful impact? You’ll find many experienced organisations who can help you integrate participatory and power-sharing processes into design and delivery. But if you aren’t willing to empty yourself of your ideas and assumptions - as the true social entrepreneur must - you will simply find a way to side step the results. You must be willing to ask yourself every single day: do I truly want to help; how do I know I really am; and am I ready to set another course when it becomes evident I’m not?
Aryanisha Lawes
Aryanisha (Ah-ree-ah-neesha) Lawes has dedicated her life and career to social and environmental causes, since graduating from Pembroke College in 2011. She has helped global brands reduce labour rights risks in their supply chains; advocated for people in poverty and other vulnerable circumstances in London; and tackled the climate conundrum from multiple sectors. She has recently embarked on her own entrepreneurship journey and now spends most of her time helping leaders inspire action and impact through confidence coaching and public speaking training. Aryanisha is an Ordained Buddhist. Her name means “She whose dream is of the Noble Ones.”