This will be one of many blog posts exploring the compelling ideas that came out of The Overlap which is an annual peer-to-peer gathering of designers, artists, educators, business people, etc. (well, that’s the short explanation)
I think it’s no coincidence that my “Question of the year” is about designing systems and that was clearly one of the themes that evolved out of this year’s gathering.
So what I’ve walked away with is a definition of a scaleable action as a way of effecting change on a system through a behavior or many behaviors. The action can be simple or it can be very complex.
Childhood obesity was introduced as a “wicked problem” and it is indeed gnarly. It is a problem in which there is no single cause and no single solution. Early in the process as groups illustrated the problem and some of the issues around the problem there was no single approach, but a series of compelling possibilities. At the end of the process as one of the groups explored the problem basically from the uncomfortable position of “a company in the beverage industry trying to take actions that would contribute to the reduction of childhood obesity and hopefully discourage possible government regulation”, they got very hung up.
After thinking about it for quite some time, I realized they got hung up because of a contradiction that exists between the desired solution (painting the right face on fast-food companies) and the solution that helps solve the problem of childhood obesity (feeding kids real food and getting them plenty of activity).
The problem is, everyone knows that companies in the business of marketing and selling these non-food foods, for the sake of society, should reduce the manufacture and sale of these products. Because the truth is a calorie from a carrot is not the same as a calorie from a carrot even though “Science” tells us they are. No one is getting obese from eating too many carrots.
But you could never tell that to Big Soda as an agency or employee in response to a brief and stay in business. You could inform parents with the facts and tell them to stop feeding this crap to their children, but no one wants to be told what to do (except when they do, hence the Diet Industry).
The issue is complex and taking the step to acknowledge the complexity is huge.