The past year has painfully revealed just how broken so many things are in our communities. As we grapple with how to help our communities and our nation heal, recover, and ultimately thrive, it’s clear that many of the old ways of doing things - from creating jobs and building businesses to engaging in our communities - may not be working for us.
It’s time to find new ways, embrace new ideas, and try new things we might not have imagined before.
We need many, many more people who say “let’s fix this” and “I can play a role in solving this” rather than lamenting “somebody should do something about this.” We need more people trying things and taking action instead of rage tweeting or lashing out on social media. We need more people who think entrepreneurially and who are willing to try creative ideas rather than leaning on old and tired approaches.
We need to rediscover our own agency to solve problems and then we need to unleash the floodgates of ideas and experimentation aimed at tackling our greatest challenges.
To create this reality, entrepreneurship should be celebrated and stories of those thinking differently and acting innovatively should be shared. But we must be careful to foster the right approaches and leave behind ones that damage, rather than build-up, our communities.
It’s time to jettison the now-infamous Facebook mantra: “Move fast and break things.” This week, we saw why...
A self-described “group of college kids” saw the need to quickly vaccinate large numbers of people across Philadelphia against COVID-19. Having previously set up pop-up testing sites under the name Philly Fighting COVID, the group decided they could also tackle this massive challenge. The fact that they lacked medical expertise or experience in the medical field was seen as a positive, allowing them to “think a little differently.” The team took to social and mainstream media to tell the world as much, even appearing on NBC’s Today. They shared their vision of scaling to create a vaccination franchise model, making getting shots like going through the McDonald’s drive-thru. The City apparently bought into the team’s abilities and allowed Philly Fighting COVID to create an online portal and mass vaccination site, handing over thousands of doses of the life-saving vaccine to these young men to administer.
As is now being widely reported, the result was a disaster. Appointments were not able to be kept. Seniors who made the trip to get their shots were turned away in tears. Nurses’ credentials were not checked. Reports emerged of one of the founders pocketing doses of the vaccines and bragging about the money to be made from charging insurance companies for the vaccines. Community advocates raised alarms about the all-white team being in charge of vaccinations in a heavily Black city. In the end, the City ended up parting ways with the organization, further delaying vaccinations for its most vulnerable citizens and Philadelphia’s District Attorney is seeking information about possible criminal activity.
The story shows four ways “Move fast and break things” often brings more damage than good to our communities.
- Moving fast does not mean skipping the early experimentation phase. Doing more right away is not always better. An eye toward scaling is great, but low-fidelity tests still are a crucial step to achieving success and ultimately solving the identified problem.
- Moving fast does not mean moving past those with knowledge, expertise, and a stake in the outcome of the problem being tackled. While outside perspectives and innovative approaches are welcome and needed, they shouldn’t exist in a vacuum. The problems communities are facing are complex and they exist within a system of brokenness. To try to tackle those problems without understanding that complexity and learning from others who live, breath and experience them is a recipe for failure.
- Breaking things is not without consequences. Entrepreneurial activity should not be a steamroller plowing ahead without regard to what’s in its path or the destruction it leaves behind in the name of innovation. The problem being solved is a real one, impacting real people - sometimes in life-threatening ways. The proposed solution therefore will have real ramifications that must be thought through. To scale at any cost is not a sustainable approach to building a business or solving problems in community.
- This mantra and approach to entrepreneurship is cloaked in privilege and those without such privilege can see it immediately. It’s privilege that lets one propose a big, bold idea and be taken seriously, celebrated and encouraged rather than told to sit down, move on or laughed at. It’s privilege that opens doors where you have limited or no expertise and ignore those more knowledgeable and experienced. And it’s privilege that frees you from worrying about the consequences of making mistakes, failing others, or causing harm.
Because of this, it’s privilege (and a trail of brokenness that is accepted and rewarded) that people have come to associate with entrepreneurial activity. And that has unnecessarily closed off a lifeline to communities that are hurting. In the many communities I visited over the past three years, people shrug off the idea of being an entrepreneur. It’s neither seen as a pathway available to them nor an avenue they would want to pursue.
Given the magnitude of the challenges in front of us, we must now open this critical lifeline. To do so, we can start with a new mantra and stories that exemplify it.