Reflections from the Canadian Forum for Social Innovation
How do we build the capacity to solve complex challenges together? Following this year's Canadian Forum for Social Innovation, Skills Society's Director of Development and Community Engagement, Annand Ollivierre, reflects on the conversations that challenged his thinking about talent, systems change, and the expertise that comes from lived experience.
In early June I spent a few days in Calgary at the Canadian Forum for Social Innovation. This year's theme was Talent Powered Prosperity, and the gathering pulled together people from higher education, government, and the social sector to think about what Canada needs from its talent strategy in complex times. I've been sitting with a few ideas that speak to each other in ways I didn't expect.
Gwen Joy, CEO of SI Canada, opened with a question: what if our critical national resource is the ability to solve complex problems together? She named three strategic capacities the country needs to build. Equitable participation, so that people with lived experience of problems are part of solving them. Innovation and learning together, a kind of social research and development. And alignment that includes people with genuinely different perspectives.
Ben Weinlick, SI Canada's Board Chair, added texture to that third capacity. He spoke about shared stories as the ground where different perspectives can meet, and about the discipline of holding tensions, where multiple truths and facts exist at once. He also touched on transition design and hospicing within systems: the recognition that some structures need to be helped to a good end so that something better can emerge.
Then Dianne Roussin of the Winnipeg Boldness Project shared the four questions the late Senator Murray Sinclair offered as the real work of education: Who am I? Where do I come from? What am I doing? Where am I going?
Those four questions gave me a new lens through which to view what Gwen and Ben had shared. Anyone who has moved through systems that were not built for them has been working through these questions their whole life. That is not just resilience. It is expertise.
There is deep wisdom about what it takes to shift systems already present in human experience. People carry embodied knowledge of complexity: how systems behave, where they bend, where they break, what it costs to move through them. The problem is that we rarely create room for that knowledge to be articulated, or treat it as capability.
In challenging times, this feels like a practical place to start. Raising individual and institutional capability to improve complex systems might begin with something as simple, and as demanding, as making room for people to answer Sinclair's four questions out loud, and treating what they say as the resource it is.
– This piece was authored by Annand Ollivierre, who serves as Director of Development and Community Engagement at Skills Society.
