Thank you for helping us select the best title for this new book by Zaid Hassan, managing partner of the Oxford office of Reos Partners.
Current responses to our most pressing societal challenges – from poverty to ethnic conflict to climate change – are not working. Dominant responses are rooted in a planning-based paradigm that is ill suited to the complex nature of current challenges.
Zaid Hassan builds on a decade of experience – as well as drawing from cutting-edge research in complexity science, networking theory, and sociology – to outline an exciting new approach to addressing complex social challenges. At the heart of this new approach is the idea of the social laboratory. Social labs have three key characteristics: first, their social character, where the primary work is conducted by teams of diverse stakeholders; second, their ongoing experimental nature, based on prototyping, not planning; and third, their systemic orientation, addressing challenges at a root cause level.
Hassan explains the core principles and daily functioning of social labs, using examples of pioneering labs from around the world. And he describes a fast-growing global movement around a new generation of ambitious social labs. These next-gen labs are tackling big challenges such as dramatically reducing global emissions, preventing the collapse of fragile states, and improving community resilience. Hassan offers a new generation of problem solvers an effective, practical, and exciting new vision and guide.