Rafa Nadal Camps USA/Avanza Sports:: Sports in the Age of COVID

During COVID-19, one sport grew exponentially in popularity:: tennis.

It is an individual sport that can be played outside or in; one can play at a safe distance, even if playing doubles. And, not the least, it’s really, really fun.

According to an annual study commissioned by the Physical Activity Council (PAC), tennis boomed during the pandemic with an estimated 21.64 million Americans hitting the court in 2020, up a staggering 22.4 % after. literally, “years of stagnation.” (Source USA TODAY.)

As we continue to adjust to life in the age of the novel virus, it’s becoming increasingly clear that we must continue to find ways to connect as human beings, both socially and emotionally, and not just through mediated experiences.

Tennis is one of those ways; perhaps one of the best ways, from a fitness perspective:: Not only does it encourage us to work on our fitness—which promotes a healthy immune system—it brings us together, safely, through the magic of the sport.

Informed by our work with Greentarget and LAB/Amsterdam on Immediate Frontier:: Work, Wellness + Space, GreenHouse is developing a tennis and fitness pilot program in partnership with Delcorpo Bespoke Fitness and Avanza Sports Barcelona to make the game—and the basic tenets of fitness— more accessible than ever, while creating a natural on-ramp and off-ramp to the Rafa Nadal Camps USA.

“This is an opportunity for juniors and adults to learn how to optimize their fitness and reduce the chances of injury, whether they’re participating in the Rafa Nadal Camps USA or merely interested in more ways to maintain their fitness and good health at any age, which we know is the best defense against against COVID,” says Cheryl Delio, founder of DelCorpo Bespoke Fitness.

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Immediate Frontier:: Work, Wellness + Space

Immediate Frontier is a GreenHouse/Greentarget research and innovation initiative. Launched in partnership with LAB/Amsterdam, our international team of researchers is identifying and exploring the emerging and changing dynamics of wellness, work and space in the 21st century.

With improving health and wellness in the corridors of corporate America as a primary motivator, our aim is to deepen the collective understanding of how best to create and optimize what is commonly referred to as a work/life balance for a preventive world.

Ultimately, we delivered insights, guidelines and additional considerations to accelerate the collective move toward a preventive work/life balance in America through Holistic Preventive Design—developed with special consideration of COVID-19.

We also provide resources and counseling so our learnings can be adopted and applied in intentional, measurable ways. To access our insights and findings, visit immediatefrontier.com.

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Chicago Literacy Alliance:: Developing a Shared Language of Change

There’s no dearth of nicknames for Chicago: The Windy City, The Second City, The City of Big Shoulders. One of its lesser known sobriquets can be seen in the city’s seal: Urbs in Horto. City in a Garden.

Our very own Urban Eden.

It is, however, anything but Edenic when it comes to the issue of literacy. At present:

-30% of adults have basic low literacy skills

-39% of Chicago’s public school students do not meet or exceed reading standards

– 61% of low-income households do not own any children’s books.*

And while Chicago has accomplished a great deal since its founding in 1833, the goal of being 100% literate remains an elusive, not to say an impossible, one.

What does it take, then, to make the third largest city in the United States 100% literate? A vision, certainly; as well as an unstinting commitment to provide the tools and resources for large-scale collaboration.

It also takes a common language.

“As we’re a literacy catalyst,” said Ken Bigger, executive director of the Chicago Literacy Alliance, “it’s difficult to overstate the value of developing shared language about social innovation among our members.”

GreenHouse partnered with the CLA to provide a group of its members with a crash course in Innovation Dynamics™, our systematic approach to rapid social innovation. It was the first in a series of proposed engagements to identify the social norms of illiteracy; and, with them, a host of unmet needs within the communities the CLA serves to help its members complete the grander project: a 100% literate Chicago.

“Our first workshop with GreenHouse provided that language and helped our members put it to use. The participant reviews were glowing. We’re quite literally looking to spread the word, and eager to empower more leaders in our sector with tools of change.”

In this respect, the CLA is playing an important part in the City of Chicago’s mission to “Build a New Chicago”; and it ensures that, along with the range of new works projects — everything from “transport to energy, from water mains to logistics” — there will be even more groves of freshly planted trees of knowledge growing throughout the City in a Garden.

If all goes well, it won’t be long before Chicago has another nickname: Urbem in Silva— City in a Forest.

Monuments to Movements (M2M)

A pandemic can be a great magnifier. During the various lockdowns of the last few years, people began to see their lives, and the values, by which they were living, close up and in a new light.

It wasn’t what we were seeing so much as what so many of us weren’t seeing as we considered closely the world in which we find ourselves during a prolonged period of introspection, and that was a shared, communal story of human accomplishments.

By dint of that and many other equally powerful insights, Monuments to Movements (M2M) was born in 2020.

Working with co-founders Jane Saks and Neysa Page-Leiberman, GreenHouse developed a launch strategy for Monuments to Movements (M2M), which included a unique articulation of purpose, plans, tactics, and measurable goals.

The founders had this to say about the GreenHouse experience::

“One of the most unique and powerful elements of the GreenHouse process is their ability to hear what you're not saying. Guiding the launch of our new international public art organization, GreenHouse strategically honed in on our foundational mission to give voice to our goals and aspirations. By helping us get to the core of our mission, we were better positioned to amplify our message, reach the intended audience and authentically impact in our field.”

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Emerald Cities Collaborative

There’s less traffic on the high road; but getting there takes time.

Working in tandem with SRW, GreenHouse facilitated a series of discussions which culminated with a roundtable in Washington, D.C. to help Emerald Cities Collaborative (ECC) understand how—and what—must be communicated to various groups of actors to breathe new life into its “high-road approach” to designing sustainable and verdant cities and building regional economies in ways that serve to support and strengthen American democracy.

Our work informed the development of a new brand and communications strategy for ECC to support its efforts related to system reform, program development, and community impact.

“GreenHouse helped us get to where we needed to go—systematically, efficiently…[GreenHouse] also took us to places we didn’t know existed until we got there, and showed us all sorts of hidden values within ECC that could be leveraged through strategic messaging.”

—Brian Rolling, Co-Founder, SRW; Founder, Let’s Roll

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The Ovarian Cancer Project

When people are diagnosed with an acute disease, they enter a new world, one with unwritten rules they do not understand. At the same time as they are trying to heal, they suffer physical and psychological harm because of their inability to navigate the hidden social conflicts of being a patient.

GreenHouse took on this issue through a year-long study of a disease where these conflicts are particularly severe: ovarian cancer. Working with the Susan Poorman Blackie Foundation and the Clarity Foundation, we determined that ovarian cancer patients face eight fundamental social conflicts, including everything from learning and decision-making styles to how to handle their changing roles in their families.

Finally, at a symposium with patient advocates and other health care leaders, we envisioned a way to foreground the conflicts patients will experience, designing a new model to give them the social support they will need from day one.

Our work informed the development and launch of Steps Through OC, a six-month program of The Clearity Foundation consisting of free professional counseling in tandem with education, referrals and other resources for any woman facing ovarian cancer, her family and active caregivers—the first such program of its kind.

“The GreenHouse experience is extraordinary in form, process and outcome. Strategic imagination, thoughtful design, and practical execution converge mysteriously through the team’s boardroom meets sacred space approach, and the result is nothing short of transformation. It’s a process that calls organizations and actors to go deep, be willing and courageous, and get un-endingly curious in order to manifest necessary and revolutionary change.”

—Buck Dodson, President, Susan Poorman Blackie Ovarian Cancer Foundation

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“GreenHouse’s expertise is that of the most unusual sort and lies in their ability to engage people at the highest possible level in analysis of their concerns and their dreams for the improvement in the human condition.”

— Fmr Dean, USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work

USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work

Increasingly, organizations tackling society’s most pressing problems are run by executives trained in business schools, where they receive no education related to social challenges, social dynamics or the social sector, generally.

In response, GreenHouse helped design, develop and launch the nation’s first doctorate in management, leadership and social innovation – at USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work.

The professional doctorate requires students to complete coursework in social and public sector leadership, social sector finance, public discourse, program design and evaluation and social innovation – predicated on GreenHouse’s ordinal work in this area. Students are required to substantively address one of 12 grand challenges facing society, ranging from the human cost of climate change to the impact of stigma.

In his capacity as the first innovator in residence at USC, GreenHouse founder Howell J. Malham and his colleagues also developed curricula and content, including casebooks and videos, which are used by faculty and students throughout the program.

As part of our efforts, GreenHouse developed the first-ever casebook for social innovation practitioners – leveraging the pedagogy currently used by universities to train professionals in law, medicine and business. We’re drawing on the best aspects of this tradition but making a crucial change: the problems we’re tackling will not be closed cases, but open questions facing society.

The casebook is predicated on the social norms approach to social innovation, and will include in-depth exploration of innovation related to 15 social challenges, including mental health, childhood obesity, sexual assault, animal maltreatment, decarceration, foster care, refugees, disaster preparedness, homelessness, social isolation, and access to the legal system.

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The SDGs in Order

United Nations/OECD/New America

It has been estimated it will cost upwards of $45 trillion over the next 15 years to fulfill the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, the centerpiece of a global effort to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all.

But until now, there has been no logical path to meeting the 17 goals. GreenHouse released the first-ever sequencing of the SDGs, the result of a survey of economists, political scientists and social scientists around the world, working in public institutions, think tanks, universities, foundations, and civil society organizations.

The sequencing was done in partnership with OECD and New America. For more, visit sdgsinorder.org.

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“The approach by GreenHouse in creating positive social change is unique and has greater impact than anything else I have seen. They are able to break down an issue or problem to its component parts; analyze, explore, and improve each part then rebuild it as a coherent and comprehensive whole that significantly enhances the social benefit of the project. They deliver positive action and effective change in some of the most challenging environments.”

—John Petrie, MBE, Chambers Director at 1 Crown Office Row in London and a trustee of the National Holocaust Museum in the U.K.

Kigali Genocide Museum:: Activation Through Physical Spaces

Genocide museums – like those in Rwanda, Germany and Washington, DC – are extraordinarily important institutions, ensuring that the atrocities they chronicle are never forgotten.

But the museums are not terribly effective at enlisting volunteers in preventing future atrocities.

That’s because the institutions follow a proven, predictable path: introduce visitors to horrific events through facts, artifacts and stories, which leave them smarter but shaken. We discovered a new path: by re-introducing hope and humanity within the museum experience, the institution allows visitors to recover their emotional balance and imagine themselves joining the fight.

The research was part of our UX for Good initiative, in which GreenHouse co-invited a dozen top user experience designers from around the world to join us in resolving a complex social challenge. The initiative produced the Inzovu Curve, a model that has guided modifications in Rwanda and helped designers map the emotional impact of institutions around the world.

Our groundbreaking work with the Kigali Genocide Memorial continues to influence the design of other memorials and museums founded to educate successive generations about past human atrocities, including the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.

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TED:: The Elements of Global Collaboration

The single most essential element of collaboration – of cooperative efforts at any scale – is an inadequately understood idea called transcendent interest.

This is what GreenHouse unearthed at the request of the world-renown TED Conferences, which was looking to boost participation in and impact of its annual, global TED Prize.

It’s not a win-win, where interests overlap. It’s something that lives above our interests, a grander concern. Here’s what it is not: a homeowners’ association; the EU; or cooperation, in which one helps another move a couch upstairs and the latter gives the former a beer. That’s a win-win. It’s not simply a sublimation of interests. It’s beyond those interests, in a future state.

GreenHouse has successfully isolated a few of transcendent interest’s key features. For example, transcendent interest requires suspension of individual identities; it renders original interests hollow and it utilizes an untapped element that wasn’t being accessed in previous interactions between the parties.

NASA:: The Future of Manned Spaceflight

Institutional leadership requires the assertion – not simply the development – of a vision. GreenHouse principals worked with top officials at NASA’s Langley Research Center, the space agency’s longtime home of R&D, to develop a framework for asserting the agency’s vision to Congress, the private sector and the public.

There is no shortage of vision at NASA. But the agency had become overly reliant on passive strategies, such as waiting for a U.S. president to set the space exploration agenda just like John F. Kennedy did in 1962.

But the social norms around “the vision thing” have changed. Adam Frankel, a presidential speechwriter we tapped for the project, explained:

“When JFK challenged us to go to the Moon, he was essentially challenging NASA,” Frankel said. “Now that would be different. It would be the president calling on NASA and all of the American people who are interested in this work. The ‘we’ would be different. That’s the opportunity.”

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Exelon:: Cultures of Innovation

Large corporations know they must innovative to survive. But they approach the process with much less structure and discipline than they do more routine functions like sales or IT.

With Exelon, the country’s largest energy company, GreenHouse raised the standard for corporate innovation, helping develop a repeatable process for group ideation – which we tested together around the country with groups of corporate executives. The experiment produced new, actionable insights into the role Exelon and other utilities could play in building a better electric grid.

From our final report: “Many experts claim that they can guide companies toward new ideas and ways of implementing them. But such interventions often wither and die after the consultant’s contract ends or the organization’s leadership changes. To truly thrive in today’s world, organizations need sustainable means of innovating that are woven into the culture of the organization itself.”

Our findings informed applications of our original methodology for social innovation in similar tests with executives from at Coca-Cola, entrepreneurs at 10.10.10, and doctoral students at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work.

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The Future of Law

The Future of Law::

Industries are almost impossible to disrupt from the inside. Winners in the current system have way too much to lose, so it’s hard for them to imagine a vastly different environment or to abandon the strategies that made them successful in the first place. But radical disruption is inevitable –  even in the relatively staid, predictable business of practicing law.

That was our challenge in Law 2023, a year-long project in which we worked with a national team of top attorneys and legal-industry vendors to imagine the impact of sweeping economic, sociological and technological changes on their field. We guided the group as they reckoned with corporate and academic trend-watchers as well as authors, reporters, and designers who embrace disruption.

What emerged were seven rules we believe the winning law firms will follow in the next decade. For example, the winners will develop offerings that transcend jurisdiction.

“As the pace of globalization quickens, the nature of jurisdiction will change,” our report reads. “It’s not just that corporations and other institutions will need to navigate dozens or hundreds of sets of rules and regulations — they’ll also have a significantly greater need to choose among them. These clients will expect their counsel to keep up.”

“The opportunity: Firms will employ technologies to help them rapidly understand how a transaction might play out across all possible jurisdictions. Then, crucially, they’ll use their human ingenuity to craft offerings that transcend jurisdiction, maximizing clients’ freedom to act across the globe in real time. Top legal minds will help regulatory bodies and intergovernmental organizations figure out how to make sure everyone plays fair in this new arena.”

After releasing the report, we continued the work with two of our collaborators, who launched the industry’s first legal R&D effort. Key leaders of Akerman had been part of Law 2023. Shortly after the project concluded, the firm launched the industry’s first R&D Council, with whom GreenHouse worked to develop new norms and practices.

“This effort will help us better anticipate and react to the rapid changes happening in the market while also serving as a catalyst for breakthrough thinking,” Akerman CEO Andrew Smulian said at the launch.

“While the formation of Akerman’s R&D council may be pioneering today, we foresee a time in which research and development departments will be commonplace at law firms in order to adapt to an increasingly complex world.”

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Dalai Lama Center for Peace + Education:: Teaching The Heart

Virtually everyone agrees that children would benefit from mindfulness training – learning how to be calm, attentive and aware of their thoughts and feelings. But virtually nobody knows how to squeeze mindfulness training into already jam-packed school curricula.

That was at the center of a challenge posed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who in 2004 told a crowd in Vancouver, Canada that the time had come to “educate the hearts and not just the minds of children.” A year later, followers launched the Dalai Lama Center for Peace + Education, which has been trying ever since to integrate mindfulness and public education.

We took up the challenge through our initiative UX for Good, which GreenHouse developed with Jason Ulaszek to enlist top user experience designers from around the world in solving social challenges. Interestingly, the answer we found was unrelated to school curricula and related instead to classroom management. Teachers had independently discovered that they could use mindfulness techniques to more effectively manage disruption and disciplinary issues, leading to quieter, happier classrooms. They were more than happy to share these insights with their colleagues.

This insight led to the Center’s development of Heart-Mind Online, a resource launched to facilitate the sharing of mindfulness resources among teachers and parents.

We have also deployed UX for Good to tackle challenges facing genocide memorials, and the livelihood of professional musicians in New Orleans, for which the initiative won the user experience design industry’s top award.

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The Family Van/Harvard Medical School:: The Hidden Value of Mobile Healthcare

Mobile clinics could play a transformative role in the health care system — and not just as roving emissaries for hospitals.

That was the conclusion we reached in our work with Harvard Medical School and its own mobile clinic, Family Van. We concluded that the real value of mobile clinics is the way they literally meet patients where they live, upending the social norms of medicine. This helps mobile clinics improve patients’ adherence to treatment and sense of agency in their own care – precious knowledge in a shifting health care system.

Further, we imagined the upshot of assigning  “very attentive” graduate students to every mobile clinic, and concluded that, with enough data from a variety of settings, researchers could hypothetically identify the crucial ways in which these health workers help patients feel safe, empowered, and open to medical advice.

The insights – also captured in an article in Harvard Medical School News – informed our work in the social determinants of health, including development of the graduate nursing program at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work.

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 “GreenHouse runs a large hadron supercollider of ideas. They curate one of the world’s most remarkable collections of talent, tee up research questions designed to take you to new dimensions, and generate intellectual collisions with the power to change our understanding of the world.”

—Dr. Tomicah Tillemann, Senior Fellow at New America and co-founder of the Blockchain Trust Accelerator; former senior advisor to U.S. Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry for civil society and emerging democracies;

United States Department of State:: Venture Democracy

Strengthening democratic governance around the world requires shaking up the social norms of international diplomacy. That was our conclusion from work with the U.S. State Department, which enlisted us to develop a new model for international organizations.

For example, democracy governance is messy. But diplomats, the polished representatives of their various countries, are polite, measured and disinclined to reveal the underbelly of how their countries’ democratic institutions actually work.

Another example: the most mature democracies, like the United States, are always cast as the teachers and the younger democracies – no matter how effective – are always cast as the students. That must change, we concluded in our report: “All participants must be given the opportunity to act as teachers and as learners. Sometimes the United States should report to Estonia.”

The project was part of our portfolio of work critically assessing norms of international relations, which includes our work with the U.S. State Department on the concept of venture democracy and with New America on supporting long-term, large-scale impact investing.

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Illinois Humanities:: Humanities Without Walls Doctoral Workshops

Society is vastly underestimating the potential of the humanities to help solve its most difficult problems. Worse still, the social norms of universities persuade the best-trained humanists that they can only work on problems that perfectly match the narrowest version of their expertise.

We did our best to blow up this myth at the Humanities Without Walls pre-doctoral workshops in 2015 and 2016, working with humanists from 15 research universities to tackle society’s wicked problems, including electoral reform, the social impact of driverless cars and the American way of dying.

After our work together, a participant captured our perspective beautifully, writing that the humanities “give us access to how we think about things. Humanities are adept at giving us insight into the unknown, allowing us to make decisions in the face of the unknown. Having an advanced degree in the Humanities also means that you have dived deeper – in short, the deeper you go, the better you are at navigating the unknown.”

The workshops emerged in part from work we did with the state humanities councils of Illinois and Indiana. The content is based on our original framework for social innovation, which we integrated into a range of professional education – most notably the nation’s first doctorate in social innovation at USC.

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“Conversation between the maximizers and the reinventors is be made possible by a common understanding of the organization’s place in the natural cycle.”

—GreenHouse Report on Design + Creativity in Corporate America

Starbucks, Herman Miller + Johnson + Johnson:: The [creative] center can hold

Creativity in big corporations will die without the right social norms to sustain it. With design executives from Starbucks, Herman Miller, Johnson & Johnson, and the BBC, we isolated those norms and the structures that keep them healthy and alive.

Together, we identified four models by which corporations successfully nurture and protect creativity. One, for example, requires the corporation to leverage the natural cycle of reinvention and maximization.

From our report: “There are times when the people who are itching to develop a new product or plan must sit back and come up with tactics to harvest the benefits of what has already been built. Similarly, the folks responsible for the next earnings statement or report to the board need to remember that creative types always need some level of stimulus if they are to exercise their brilliance and bring about the next spring.

“Conversation between the maximizers and the reinventors is be made possible by a common understanding of the organization’s place in the natural cycle.”

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Clinton Global Initiative /The GRAMMY Foundation:: A New Music Economy for NOLA

The Clinton Global Initiative broke important, new ground in social impact: holding corporations and social sector organizations accountable for their commitments to do good. As members of CGI, we made and fulfilled our own commitment to improve economic conditions for professional musicians in New Orleans in partnership with The GRAMMY FOundation and The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival

“We commit to take action to improve the standard of living and bolster the social safety net for musicians working in New Orleans,” our CGI pledge read. “Through this commitment, we will develop new, more effective models for directing financial resources and providing social services to musicians.”

Working with the designers, we went on to detail several solutions, from re-tooling tipping to building new technologies for music career management. Our findings related to tipping spawned several new companies, through which musicians can automate tips from their fans.

Our final report read: “To maintain the culture of music, musicians need access to different resource sets than other participants in the economy and social safety net. If we want musicians to keep doing the things musicians do, we need to design solutions that are compatible with the way musicians must live.”

UX for Good, which won the user experience design industry’s top award for our work in New Orleans, has also tackled challenges related to schools and genocide museums.

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United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:: A New Metric For Humanity

The world’s genocide museums successfully ensure that we never forget history’s most horrific events. But these institutions can do so much more, we concluded in our work with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

Specifically, genocide museums can build a movement from visitors who are sufficiently touched by their experiences to incorporate lessons into their own lives. If enough visitors are transformed, the resulting movement would be an unprecedented force for good and a breakwall against future atrocities.

“The experience of the Holocaust could ultimately help people to make sense of what is going on in other conflict situations,” said former U.S. congressman Toby Moffett, who collaborated with us on the project. “To be a fountain of know-how and information and technical assistance, while at the same time not relinquishing the main idea of the Holocaust as history’s greatest case study – I think it’s very exciting.”

This work informed our later work in Rwanda, in which we explored alterations of the museum experience that transform visitors into active agents in humanitarian efforts.

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Walter Reed Military Medical Center:: Bringing Art To Heal

At first glance, it appears as if the social norms of the military and the arts are incompatible. That perception is so pervasive, in fact, that it threatens art therapy programs at military hospitals.

That was the challenge we were asked to address at Walter Reed Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, where an art therapy program was showing very good early results. We worked with medical staff, military leadership and arts professionals to look for some way to reconcile values of the two fields.

Surprisingly, it turned out we didn’t need to. By digging into the military budget and the realities of the military experience, we discovered that the arts are already a critical element of what the Pentagon does. At the time, the budget for military bands alone was bigger than the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts, the federal agency that supports arts institutions and arts programs in all 50 states.

The key was simply the arts speaking the military’s language. “Walter Reed’s leaders could evaluate all of their arts programs using the same metrics the Pentagon uses to assess its own efforts to reintegrate soldiers into civilian life,” our report read. “This data could not only bolster the role of art at Walter Reed, but serve as the basis for new military arts programs.”

We were enlisted in this effort by Mike Orlove, director at the National Endowment for the Arts. It is one of several projects of our projects related to the social norms of health care, including our work with Harvard on mobile health, with a start up on the role of patients, and our publication on the social determinants of health and professional education.

“Working with GreenHouse is an exhilarating, 360-degree whirlwind experience. Their work in educational, business, not-for-profit, and corporate communities around the world is driven by an utterly original approach to problem solving, requiring highly accomplished and creative people to leave their egos at the door and dive in. They approach the work with integrity, respect, and incredible wisdom.”

—Mike Orlove, Director of the National Endowment for the Arts

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The West Collection:: What Comes After Museums

The social norms of a museum don’t align particularly well with the rebellious spirit of contemporary art. But we found the right social norms – in all places – at the corporate campus of a financial services company.

The West Collection – one of the nation’s most important collections of work by emerging artists – is housed at SEI, in the Philadelphia suburbs. The campus’s employees, who originally had no particular fondness for contemporary art, now cherish the art in ways few museum visitors ever have.

That is due in large part to revolutionary curatorial practices, such as letting employees choose pieces from the Collection for their workspaces and even allowing employees to “steal” pieces from their colleagues.

We worked alongside the collection’s curators for two years to isolate lessons that could be shared with the rest of the art world. Among our findings: “We need a happy medium between the ‘wild’ of the artist’s studio and the ‘zoo’ of a traditional museum. In this ‘nature preserve’ for art, viewers’ reactions would inform the experience, but the integrity of collections could still be preserved.”

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Ashoka:: The Fourth R

Ashoka, the organization famous for empowering changemakers throughout the world, sought to infuse empathy into the next generation of schoolchildren. But they found schools to be wary and teachers to be resistant.

We discovered that the key was uncoupling empathy from the curriculum and coupling it instead with what teachers do naturally: tracking and encouraging relationships among children. As one of our collaborators, Nina Rappaport, said: “We just need a fourth R. Reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic and relationships.”

This critical piece of context informed the Start Empathy toolkit Ashoka released the following year.

“Cultivating empathy and building up change-making skills in children and the adults modeling their behavior isn’t the result of a single exercise,” Ashoka’s Lennon Flowers told us about the toolkit. “We do have an extraordinary of concrete exercises that help you start today. But in the end, it’s not about that. It’s about being intentional in every conversation you have with every child, as well as your peers and administrators.”

The insights we developed with Ashoka greatly informed our later work on mindfulness education with the Dalai Lama Center for Peace + Education. We also took up the theme of scaling social impact with Ashoka the following year.

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Echoing Green:: Start Something

There has been an explosion in programs to support social entrepreneurship. From business schools to design academies to digital collectives, everyone is trying to equip a new generation with the tools and competencies they need to “start something.”

But how do these prospective entrepreneurs know what’s really worth starting?

That was at the center of our project with Echoing Green, a pioneer in the field of social entrepreneurship. We concluded that while startup skills are nice, social entrepreneurs really need a way to discern a clear calling or to develop a coherent theory of change – long before they apply for 501(c)3 or B Corp status.

“Early proponents of the idea of social entrepreneurialism noticed the similarities between the way these folks pursue their dreams and the spirit that animates young companies,” we noted in GOOD Magazine. “As a result, nonprofits and universities launched programs that seek to equip young people with similar skills.

“But without a persistent desire to do good, a social entrepreneur is little more than a glorified grant writer. There are plenty of people with strong callings who will never found a nonprofit, but instead realize their desire to do good in some other arena. We need to maximize the number of individuals actively pursuing their callings to do good, no matter what form their careers might take.”

This was a foundation of our work at USC, where we helped launch the nation’s first doctorate in social innovation.

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Alfred P. Sloan Foundation:: Stealth Management

Over the past generation, changing social norms have made the white-collar workplace a much more flexible environment. From the introduction of new technologies to the embrace of enlightened HR practices, many corporations realize they will do better if they empower employees to find work-life balance.

But lots of employees don’t work in offices, and many of them face grim realities as they try to balance the responsibilities of work and home. In work with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, we explored this new frontier of workplace flexibility. To find answers, we examined the social norms of jobs where flexibility would seem to be impossible – think forest rangers and psychiatric social workers.

We found that even in these places, some people were making it work – not just for themselves, but secretly for their peers. We dubbed them “stealth managers,” then suggested some ways Sloan might be able to mine their wisdom and bring work-life balance to everybody.

“We realized that the geniuses of flexible workplaces aren’t CEOs, management consultants, or even professors who have spent years studying the issue,” our report read. “Instead, they’re more likely to be front-line managers or shift supervisors.”

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The Creative Coalition:: Right to Bear Arts

There’s a movement today that argues the arts should occupy an equal place with math and science in school curricula. But in work we did on behalf of the Creative Coalition, we came away with a radically different perspective.

We concluded that enthusiasm for the STEM subjects — science, technology, engineering, and math — runs so high on the education scene not just because those subjects lead to high-profile jobs, but because student performance in STEM is easily measured in objective terms. If that’s the scorecard, art doesn’t stand a chance.

But what can be objectively shown is that humans need art to thrive, in the same way they need food, sunshine and love. Therefore, schools must absolutely fight for art’s place within their walls — just not in the same way they aim to raise SAT scores.

“In today’s schools, no curricular subject (even STEM) claims to increase quality of life metrics — there isn’t even a place to declare victory if they do,” our report read. “But social programs do, from school breakfast programs to mandatory vaccination plans. These programs ultimately succeeded when the benefits they provided were viewed as every child’s right — researchers track what happens when kids don’t get a measles shot or a hot breakfast. We should start talking about art’s impact with the same urgency.”

We were enlisted for this work by Tim Daly, president of the Creative Coalition. It is one of several projects in which we’ve untangled the social norms related to art, including those in hospitals and corporations.

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Chicago:: The Birthplace of Social Innovation

Chicago really, really wants you to believe it’s a world-class city.

Hence, the failed bid to host the Olympics in 2016 and the successful bid to host the NATO Summit in 2012. The strategy appears to be to show how important the city is by showing how important its guests are.

But Chicago is already legitimately world-class. It is arguably the hub of modernity in the United States: the birthplace of modern thinking in science, literature, architecture, and journalism. And Jane Addams gave us the modern meaning of the term “social innovation.”

So, again:: Why would NATO want to come to Chicago?

“Because NATO is re-thinking NATO,” Howell Malham Jr. said on one of our regular appearances on WBEZ, Chicago’s public radio station. “Because NATO needs to break through, to think beyond what NATO already knows. What better place (to do that) than a place like Chicago?”

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University of Illinois:: Making America Great The Old Fashioned Way—Relatively Free and Open Immigration

You might think the best way to supercharge American entrepreneurialism is tax incentives or business education. But in our work with the University of Illinois, we discovered the most efficient way to increase the number of start-ups: relax immigration restrictions.

After investigating the key traits of entrepreneurs, we concluded that no group ticks as many boxes as immigrants from countries that are less free to countries that are more free.

“If there were some other measure – if we knew that left-handed people were more entrepreneurial – then I would say that we should hire more left-handed people or let more left-handed people into the country,” said University of Chicago professor Pablo Montagnes, whom we consulted on the project. “But we don’t have a measure like that. The measure we do have is a desire to take a risk and move to the United States for a particular reason. …

“The U.S. is best at creating these kinds of opportunities for people. If people want these kinds of opportunities, we should be the ones who let them take advantage of them. Often the immigration debate is about ‘illegals’ stealing jobs from Americans.

But entrepreneurship is about creating new jobs and new things that would not exist otherwise.”

Bucking this norms isn’t as revolutionary as one would think; if anything, it’s reactionary, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website:: “Americans encouraged relatively free and open immigration during the 18th and early 19th centuries, and rarely questioned that policy until the late 1800s.”

It was the spirit and imagination of immigrants that helped shaped America 1.0, and it will be the spirit and imagination of successive generations of immigrants that will give shape and voice and even deeper meaning to America 2.0.

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University of Southern California:: Health + Social

There is now widespread agreement that social determinants – factors like race, class and zip code – have greater influence on our health than does our biology. But the health care system has been slow to evolve, leaving providers ill-equipped to help patients and others in need.

GreenHouse has jumped into the void, developing the publication Health Plus Social to explore social determinants and the implications for the training of health care professionals.

The publication was part of our efforts as Innovators in Residence to give shape to the new graduate nursing program at the University of Southern California, the first such program housed in a school of social work.

“The basic reason for the neglect of social determinants in health care is that the system is primarily set up to treat acute, biomedical problems,” wrote the editor of our report. “Substantial work remains if we hope to translate our understanding of social determinants into practical, specific protocols for care on the individual or community level.”

Former Dean Marilyn Flynn wrote in the foreword: “Conditions of poverty, injustice, and broken human relationships provide the etiology for gunshot wounds, delayed development, late-stage diagnosis, and lack of access to care… Our experts here note that nursing may have more potential than other health professions in bringing power and authority to the idea of social determinants and incorporating this content into training and professional perspectives.”

As Innovators in Residence, we were part of the new graduate nursing program from its inception through the admission of the first cohort of students in August 2016.

Our work continued in exploring how these social factors can inform a new research agenda for nursing science and new forms of doctoral education.

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“Conditions of poverty, injustice, and broken human relationships provide the etiology for gunshot wounds, delayed development, late-stage diagnosis, and lack of access to care… Our experts here note that nursing may have more potential than other health professions in bringing power and authority to the idea of social determinants and incorporating this content into training and professional perspectives.”

—Fmr. Dean, USC Suzanne Dworek-Peck School of Social Work

COBI Fellows Program:: University of Southern California

Innovation is hard work, particularly inside organizations that aren’t equipped to have disruptive ideas or to bring them to life. But that work gets even harder when the instigator has no organizational authority.

That’s why we designed the COBI Fellows Program, a pilot at the University of Southern California Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work to prepare graduate students to lead innovation on day one of their careers.

In its first year, the program won the SAGE/CSWE Award for Innovative Teaching in Social Work Education. From the award announcement: The program “provides a framework for infusing innovative practices in organizations, and engages participants in an interactive experience designed to drive change in social service organizations.”

We developed the program in our capacity as Innovators in Residence, basing the curriculum on our original framework and methodology for social innovation.

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The Community Foundation for McHenry County

GreenHouse designed and facilitated a custom-designed program to help nonprofit executive leaders throughout McHenry County identify and leverage what we call "stealth strengths;" and provide a deeper understanding of how to question norms, optimize/reallocate resources, and fuel passion.

Ultimately, to free up much needed bandwidth, and to help these leaders remember to never, ever forget what their work — The Work — is all about.

The reason? 

When juggled individually, the daily challenges these and other nfp leaders face on a daily basis become daunting. When tackled comprehensively by unlocking the hidden value of leadership, leveraging organizational strengths, and embracing an iterative approach, we contend nonprofit executives can transcend these challenges and move further along the road to a healthy and sustainable organization. 

To learn more about our Hidden Value workshops for executive leadership, please email walker.post@ghouseinnovation.com.

“The program helped to surface some shared issues that I didn’t expect: affordable housing, hiring staff in a tight job market. It is important to make sure there is space for those conversations.”

—Participant, Hidden Value Workshop

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University of Detroit Mercy

What is the purpose of a brick and mortar university in the 21st century? How do we build them—rather, how should we build them? And for whom do they exist?

In 2024, GreenHouse set out to answer these—and other questions—in cooperation with University of Detroit Mercy which is leading the way to a new model for higher education; a model that meets the challenges and leverages the opportunities that are unique to the digital age…and in the era of the novel virus.

Our continuing partnership is uncovering a surfeit of insights, chief among them:: the growing importance of meaningful community engagement, and on a variety of levels.

The traditional paths to engagement have been a one-way street (i.e. a university imposes its ideas of service on the groups of actors within its orbit.) Working closely with its neighbors in Detroit—and in student communities around the world—UDM is committed to learning how to serve others not as it wishes to serve; and not to serve as it wishes to be served but as members of communities want and need to be served.

This simple yet profound design principle is informing the University’s numerous efforts—e.g. new programs, new courses, new community initiatives, and a new “living brand”—as it prepares for its upcoming 150-year anniversary.

And, in the process, it is setting a precedent for leadership at universities around the country that are pledging to rethink both purpose and mission. As UDM is demonstrating, it requires the courage and the humility to invite different voices, neighborhood voices to the table—neighbors from down the street or half a world away—to co-design meaningful and mutually beneficial engagement initiatives and experiences that express “purpose and mission” in ways that are far more aligned with conditions and concerns of the 21st century.

THe Hidden value of community

GreenHouse’s evolving partnership with University of Detroit Mercy kicked off with a series of roundtables with the Detroit community that led to a simple yet profound insight:: rather than serving others as it wishes to serve, or as it would like to be served, UDM is committed to serving as members of various communities want and need to be served. Adopted as design principle, this animated idea is informing numerous GreenHouse-led/GreenHouse-supported initiatives at UDM as it prepares for its 150th anniversary.

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