Educating Changemakers - A Conversation with Alex Budak

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

I have to say, I don't like the concept of being given agency because I think that has a weird power dynamic. But I think our job as educators is to help our students find that agency within themselves. That's a fundamental belief I have, is that it's latent in each of us. And I think we as educators can help identify, support, and nurture that.

Hi everyone, happy New Year and welcome back to the Future Learning Design Podcast for 2023. My name is Tim Logan and I'm very happy to be bringing you this conversation this week with Alex Buda. Alex is a Berkeley Haas professional faculty member, a social entrepreneur, and the author of the very popular book Becoming a Changemaker. Alex believes that everyone has the potential to lead positive change and he's dedicated his life to helping people from all walks of life become changemakers. He co-founded startsomegood.com, a platform that breaks to break down the barriers that prevent people from enacting change. The platform has now helped over 1,000 changemakers in 50 countries raise over $12 million to catalyze new initiatives. Previously, Alex ran Sweden's leading social innovation incubator, Reach for Change, and worked at change.org. At Berkeley Haas, Alex puts his heart and soul into teaching students and executives from around the globe the mindset, leadership skills, and action steps required to become changemakers. He also serves as Executive Director of the Berkeley Haas Global Access Program and Faculty Director of the Berkeley Changemaker Gateway.

Hey, Tim.

Hey, how you doing?

Good, thank you.

Amazing. Well, thank you, Alex. It's such a pleasure to be able to talk to you on the podcast. I've been really fascinated by your work and reading your book, Becoming a Changemaker, and talking to many people in my network and in education about the work of changemaking. And clearly, you know, you're somebody who's out there building the ideas around the concept as well as educating people about what that means at UC Berkeley. So I'm just, yeah, really happy to be able to talk to you.

Oh, thank you, Tim. It's my pleasure to be with you. Looking forward to our conversation.

Amazing. So obviously changemaking, being a changemaker, it's a kind of a, you know, Ashoka has language around that from Bill Drayton's work and more and more people I see using that kind of term. And maybe just before we kind of get into some of the detail, I thought it would be really interesting and important just to clarify a little bit of shared understandings around what does that mean specifically in the way that you use it in the book and in your work. And then we'll obviously, we can go off from there, but I think it's important just to clarify some of those things at the beginning.

Yeah, you're right. And so it's been wonderful to see that the concept, the phrase, the word has been taking off. As I think about it, the way that I try to sort of position it is moving it a little bit from just the realm of the social impact, social change world to be a little bit broader and a little bit more inclusive. So the way I define changemaker is simply someone who leads positive change from wherever they are. So you'll see in that definition that there's no mention of roles or of titles. And a fundamental belief is that a Nobel Prize winner has just as much claim to that title as an entry-level product manager or a teacher in a classroom. And so it's an identity we can each layer on top of our existing identities.

Yeah. Yeah. There is some language that's similar with Ashoka there. I mean, they, one of their definitions is a person that sees themselves as capable of creating large-scale positive change. So there's definitely a kind of the value in there around this is not changemaking in more dubious ways or potentially, you know, there, there is a, a definite value around positive change. And to some extent we're all changemakers in our own lives to a degree. And you know, what's the, do you have to be Creating large-scale change. I mean, that's a big phrase itself, but I don't know, how do you feel about that?

That's where I really diverge with Ashoka. So I think that in our, the social change world, social impact world, even in the business world, we tend to overglorify the large scale of change. And so a lot of what I'm trying to do with this book is to make it much more applicable to each of us and take that pressure off that, you know, maybe your change will scale and that's great, but maybe it's just the impact you have on a neighbor or, you know, as a manager on your direct report. And I think that's just as valuable.

Yeah, this is another term that I've been exploring a lot in education is agency and, you know, young people particularly taking and or being given or supported to develop in their own agency and being an active agent in their own lives or in their own learning. There's a certain sense of, of that perhaps in what you're saying.

Absolutely. And I have to say, I don't like the concept of being given agency because I think that has a weird power dynamic, but I think our job as educators is to help our students find that agency within themselves. That's a fundamental belief I have, is that it's latent in each of us. And yeah, I think we as educators can help identify, support, and nurture that.

Amazing. And so just, I think also for context, I was really interested to read about your own personal journey into this work. And so perhaps you could just give a little bit of a background around you with Start Some Good and what you've learned along the way about your own agency and beginning to try and scale some of that change really successfully in your work as you have done.

Well, so I come to this from the position of a social entrepreneur, and my interest in social entrepreneurship came when I was living and working in Ahmedabad, India. I was doing graduate school at the time, studying public policy, but I realized like on my first couple of days that while my colleagues were amazing, they're incredible people, they all thought about change in a much more traditional sense. They thought about change coming from the big institutions. Like to this day, a lot of my friends work for the World Bank or IMF or Department of State, like big institutions. And that was never quite me. So I spent a little time between my first and second year of graduate school in Ahmedabad. And while I was there, I was studying, but also I wanted to volunteer. So I did some work with a local social enterprise. And in telling the story, it's not a white savior thing. Like, I hardly did anything important. It was just a chance to contribute a little bit. But what really inspired me was seeing this grassroots organization. So they were working with girls from the local community using sport as a tool for teaching healthy habits and leadership. And that's where that idea to me of that, like, look, each of us can lead positive change from where we are. And like, this grassroots group just sprung up. They don't know the word social entrepreneurship, but they just took action for their community.

Yeah.

And so that's where we became obsessed with that idea of supporting and encouraging changemakers, supporting social entrepreneurs. So led me back to the States. I met my co-founder Tom, and this was in the sort of heady days of tech utopia where tech could like solve all our social challenges. And so we set out to build a crowdfunding site called Start Some Good, which changed the dynamic of how we fund early-stage social ventures. And one of the greatest privileges is it gave me this bird's-eye view into what was happening in the social enterprise space. We were global from day one, which, you know, we can talk about scale, and that was maybe a mistake that we made going a little bit too broad. But I did get this vantage point to see like, what are the trends going on? We had so many people using our site to raise money for all types of different causes that we could see. Well, oh, we saw like mobile health tech was really big before a lot of people saw that, just because we saw a lot of people that were like, yeah, we're going to do something about this. And so that gave me this wonderful privileged view into what people cared about and how they were taking action.

Yeah, that's fascinating. A really interesting window. Yeah, absolutely. And, and just again, for context, that's still going, right? Start Some Good is still going as a venture?

Yeah, still going. So my co-founder Tom took over as CEO and he's done an amazing job continuing to lead it. I'm still on the board, but not so active day to day now.

Yeah. Brilliant. And as you said, I mean, there are people all around the world seeing need and taking action in, in relation to that. But one of the things I have in, you know, in my work with young people and with schools is sometimes there is a sense that young people might be too young to be doing that work. 'Cause you know, there are, as you said, as a social entrepreneur, you're essentially startup phase. You know, you're thinking about how do I leverage different resources and plan and self-manage and bring people together around core purpose and all these things which you could be doing in a profit., you know, with a profit motive, right, as an entrepreneur. So I suppose the question there is, how young is too young to be a changemaker? Is that— that's the kind of headline. But I'm just— I, I find that really an interesting question because when we're working with 7-year-olds, 8-year-olds who identify that, you know, they care about things that they see in the world that they don't like, and they, you know, whether it's just bullying in their own context or it's something about— they see about the world that they don't like and they want to change. I'd be really interested to explore with you. Yeah, 'cause you are working with graduate students and undergraduate students and then you take it down to the level of, yeah, primary school students. Is that a space they can begin their changemaker journey?

100%. You ask like what the age is, I don't know what the age is, but I guarantee it's younger than we're thinking that it is. I think there's like a wonderful naivete as I think about my own changemaker journey, you know, jumping into being a co-founder of a social enterprise. One of the best things is I didn't know how hard it was going to be. I didn't know all the things that I didn't know. And I think we can often get paralyzed with fear because we're like, well, I've never managed a team before, I've never done payroll before, I've never built a spreadsheet. And you realize all these things you haven't done and you go, well, I can't do it. But I think kids have this wonderful naivete, which is like, no, this is something that should be done and let's do it. And I think we should be careful to not take that away and say like, oh, well, you can't be a changemaker until you have your business plan set up and whatever. No, I think that we have that sort of latent change-making inside each of us. And so I think as educators, as parents, we can nurture that.

Yeah, there's a lot there I'd love to explore. But I mean, part of it is, I mean, as you were saying earlier, that it doesn't have to be an elaborate venture idea with a business plan, etc. As you said, it could literally just be, how do I be a better friend? How do I be a better person in my life in this particular role? And so I suppose there's that piece that I'd love to explore with you about how do we develop some of those competencies around that. But there's also, I think, a dynamic, particularly in K-12 education, that you don't know enough yet in order to tackle that problem, right? Whether you are 7, 8, or even 14, 15, you're still in school, you're still learning. You, you, you just don't know enough about the problem to, to take a really meaningful stab at acting and doing something about that, tackling it. So I don't know, where do you feel that the kind of knowledge piece, or I've thought about this in relation to kind of sensemaking, you know, you need to understand the problem space at the same time as doing the changemaking or before, you know, there's something there around understanding the problem, right?

Yeah, well, there's one of the chapters in the book, which is called Students Always, which I think is the way that I approach this, which is that you are never an expert on any of these things. Even if you've been running a venture for 20 years, you should still be learning every single day. And so this notion that you reach this magical point where it's like, Okay, now I know enough to get started. Well, that doesn't exist to me. It's more about the continuum and more about this mindset to say, like, I'm going to constantly grow and learn and challenge myself each day. And so while, of course, a child may not have, you know, the fundamentals of basic economics to understand supply and demand at, you know, age 5, fine. But there are strengths that they do bring in. So in the book, I talk about, you know, the wonderful childlike curiosity and how even as adults, we should be capturing that same sense of curiosity. So while they may lack for some specific skills that you learn in high school or college, university, there's also some real strengths, that ability to ask why, to see connections, to just be curious about the world. And let's lean into that. So I think it's more of a mindset of being students always rather than some magical point that you get to.

We certainly in education fall into this gap of putting glass ceilings above students saying, you don't, you don't know enough yet. And you know, because as educators, often we see it as we're going to teach them and therefore we'll prepare them for that thing. But actually As you say, they're bringing so much richness of their own attributes to that space, and they can already begin way more than we give them credit for, I think. So I suppose in relation to that, then I'd love to explore with you about, because you've obviously built this out in, in really interesting ways, very practically in the course at UC Berkeley, but also obviously in the book, structuring somebody's journey to becoming more skilled and competent and confident about being a changemaker. So first off, where do you see are the, the particularly key and important dispositions or competencies that, that you were choosing to build that structure around? And then I'd love to get into some of the specifics on how you might go about developing those as an educator, right? But what, what are those things first?

Yeah, so at a high level, it's grounded in both lived experience. Mm-hmm. And also data-driven insights. And I think that's really important. 'Cause of course it's a class I teach at UC Berkeley, so we're not just making things up. It's based on social science and other fields. But as I thought about the, the structure, you know, And it's also informed by my own changemaker journey, by the changemaker journeys I've been honored to be part of with thousands of changemakers around the world and starting to pull out some of those trends. And so really, I break it down into 3 big pieces. The first is changemaker mindset. That's the way that you see the world and your role in shaping it. And we can identify some common traits that all changemakers have across roles and sectors. The second part is changemaker leadership.

Yeah.

And that's your ability to do your best work through and with others. How do you inspire others to be part of change with you? How do you influence without authority? How do you use vision as a way to inspire change? And then the third part is changemaker action. So I am not at all qualified to be teaching math. And so in my class, in the book, there's only one single equation that I put forward. And so I call the changemaker impact equation. And it's simply your impact as a changemaker is the sum of your mindset and your leadership. So imagine that in parentheses, mindset plus leadership multiplied by the action that you take. And so what does that tell us? It reminds us that when you multiply a number by zero, the result is zero. Yeah. It's the same idea. You can have amazing mindset, amazing leadership, but if you never take action, well, you'll never have any impact. Yeah. And so that action section, we can start talking about, well, how do we break down those crucial and challenging first steps of action? What can we learn from different fields about what it takes to start and how can we make change feel a little less scary and a little bit more approachable for each of us?

Yeah, no, that's interesting. So the mindset piece, and, you know, mindset again is another quite fashionable term with Carol Dweck's work, and, but it's often seen as something you have or you don't have. And I think, you know, trying to kind of break that down into the things that are more clear and tangible actions or developable things we can do is often helpful for people. Because it's like sometimes, you know, it's like, Do you have a growth or, you know, fixed mindset? It's like you either have it or you don't. But there's, I think there's an important piece there around what are the specific developable traits or competencies that when brought together begin to kind of form your mindset, right? You're developing it as you work, not necessarily arriving in a place with a particular changemaker mindset, right?

That's exactly right. And I think we run the risk of thinking of things in binaries, and that's really dangerous. And actually even Dweck, she's often thought of as teaching either that it's fixed or growth, but she actually says it's much more of a spectrum. But I think same thing with the changemaker mindset. I also talk about, you know, it's like the analogy of fitness. It's not like you go to the gym once and you're like, okay, done, I'm fit. No, it's a continual process that you work on. And so for me, what I try to do in the class is meet people where they are and then push them forward. So an example here is we talk about smart risk-taking, and we recognize that it's both nature and nurture. So on the nature side, you know, you can look at the Big Five personality test, and a lot of personality tests are like not so scientifically rigorous. The Big Five is one that a lot of social scientists actually like for its robustness. And among that, there's 5 different traits. One is called openness, which you could kind of think of as like your kind of openness to risks. And there's 4 subtraits and you go deeper, but broadly that's sort of like, you know, nature, like, are you built to be a little bit more of what we call a preserver, kind of keep things the way they are? Or more of an explorer, kind of shake things up. And when I teach in the class, there's no judgment. I just try to help people understand, well, where are you naturally? Yeah. And then also identify, you know, for those that are in the working world, for example, executives that I teach, you know, is your organization more of a preserver culture or more of an explorer culture? You can kind of see potential conflicts there. Yeah. So say, okay, great. So this is sort of where you are based on nature. Now let's talk about nurture. And that's where you can start bringing in some themes, some research, some ideas, some frameworks, some exercises to help push them along. And the goal isn't to get everyone to be a 100 out of 100 on this. No, it's to say like, this is where you are. Let's see if we can nudge you a little bit forward. Because the goal is being a changemaker isn't just to take a ton of risks. No, it's to take more smart risks, whatever that means for you.

Yeah. There's sometimes, I think, is a tendency to view the kind of, you know, the Silicon Valley kind of move fast and break things. That's the way to do it. But actually there are, very different people coming into these spaces that care about change. You know, they care about an idea that they want to move on, but you know, they're not— that's not authentically who they might be. And humility— I've heard you talk about humility as well, and I think that's a really also an important and interesting piece, is like understanding who you are in relation to the care and the work that you want to do, but also how do you remain humble in relation to all of the dynamics at play, given that you are just, I mean, yes, you are an agent, but you are also just one piece in a very, very large and complex, beautiful picture, right?

Oh, humility is so key. And it's one of the things I think Silicon Valley, where I'm joining you from, really gets wrong, which is that we tend to put the single innovator up on this pedestal, hero-preneurship, it's sometimes called. But no, I think humility is such, such an important value to leading change, to be able to bring people in the change with you. We even see the way that it's overlaid with so many other crucial aspects of being a changemaker. You know, for instance, I teach Amy Edmondson's work on psychological safety to make sure that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. And I see humility as the key that unlocks your ability to create psychological safety. Um, you know, we so often think as leaders we have to have all the answers, but Edmondson shows us that if we can model failability, which I think is only possible if you are humble, that it makes people feel more psychologically safe. Also fascinating research done by Deloitte looking at inclusive leadership. And they found that there's 6 key traits of being an inclusive leader. One of them is awareness of bias. One of them is humility. But they found there's this like magical intersection, which is when, when you have both awareness of bias and humility, that's when your ability to be inclusive leader just skyrockets. And so why is that? It's recognizing that each of us have our own biases. But is the question that you sort of say, well, I've got it, whatever. Or do you say, no, I'm humble enough to say like, I'm going to work on it. I'm going to be cognizant of it. I'm going to do something about it. And when you have both of those together, humility really unlocks your ability in this case to be a more inclusive leader. But I think I think that's a way to think about humility as a catalyst for so much change.

Yeah. No, that's really interesting. So then let's maybe think about how have you decided to kind of spend time with these students in leading them, as you said, from where they are to more into the, the kind of dispositions of being a changemaker. 'Cause there's a, there's an interesting pedagogy piece for, and you know, the audience to this podcast is, you know, largely educators around the world. You know, there is a lot of conversation within, well, all levels of education, but particularly K-12 where I am, because there has been a bias towards the didactic. And as you said, if you never take any action, you know, you're multiplying by zero, right? I mean, there's a sense that's the same. You live in theory and a lot of education has kind of lived in this didactic theoretical transmissive space. So if I'm gonna teach you a bunch of content and we turn skills into content and then we just teach it and then we expect that to magically somehow transmogrify into this, into this amazing outcome that we want to happen, right? So I think there's this really important pedagogy piece in there, which is like the experience of learning these things has to be just as important, and perhaps more important, than almost the ideas themselves, right? Because you have to feel it, you have to, you have to experience it in order to develop some of these attributes. So sorry, that's my little piece on it, but I just want— I wonder how you you have approached that problem when you're actually, you know, faced with the very tangible task of establishing a course, which I understand is now one of the most popular courses at UC Berkeley. And, you know, clearly you're doing something really magic. So I'd love to hear a bit about, yeah, how have you structured that in terms of teaching and learning?

Well, you're right. So I mean, my lens here is higher education, but I think similar to K through 12, a lot of faculty will sort of teach in a way which is like, Well, look at it. Do you see the p-value on that? You see it's statistically significant. Like, obviously that's right. Like, people should just know. But it's not enough to just be right. You've got to sort of create the environment in which people can learn. And so the sort of mental framework I like going into it is that it's very experiential. But I think there's this magic point. There's this magic point between feeling too safe and too scared. So if you're too safe, you kind of never have that growth edge. You never put yourself out there. But you also feel too scared. Like, if it's too much of a leap, people will just be kind of frozen and never take that action. So a lot of the work that I do in the classroom is to try to create that magic cultural point, that point where students feel safe but uncomfortable, safe that they're held. It's a place that's psychologically safe where they can take risks. Yeah. They can push themselves where they know that I'm there to support them, but also they're willing to go just a little bit beyond their comfort zone. Like we talked about, people will come in with different levels of comfort, but my goal is not to have one singular goal for everyone. It's to push them further than they were before. And I think that's only possible when you feel safe but willing to be uncomfortable. So that's the kind of macro culture I try to set in the classroom. But then in terms of how we actually do it, experiential learning is so key. So to give an example, you know, we spend a lecture in class talking all about smart risk-taking and failure, learning from failure. And that's one where you could just easily live in the empirical world, just in the data world. And so, you know, we do a couple of case studies, we look at some frameworks, look at some research. And then a lot of people would probably stop there and go, okay, look, we made the case. This is why failure matters. But towards the end of class, I just put up a slide which has two words on it and it says, go fail. My students kind of start looking around like, what's going on? And I put up the next slide. I go, okay, you have 15 minutes. You have to go leave the classroom and you have to go purposely get rejected. You cannot come back to the classroom until you've asked for something and gotten a no. And so at this point, my students start feeling really uncomfortable. They tell me afterwards that their hearts start beating faster. I can see them like respond somatically. Yeah. But it's for a class. And so, you know, they nervously shuffle outside of the classroom. I tell them, look, I'll be at the front of the classroom. If you need a little coaching, a little mentoring, I'll be here to help you come up with what you want to ask. But perhaps like many of your listeners, my students tend to be really high achievers.

Yeah.

They tend to be people who get where they are because they do things, quote, the right way. So whether that's taking the right standardized tests, taking the right classes, doing the right volunteer work, they sort of had the script. But a theme running throughout the class is that there's no script to changemaking. There's no real grade when it comes to changemaking. And so we try to make it so that they start feeling a bit of that discomfort which comes from being on the edge of leading change. So they go out, they're nervous, they're silent, they're shuffling out, and then they come back, the energy is just off the charts. So much so that I once had a professor next door come over and ask us to keep the noise down because students are just so lit up from this experience.

I bet.

And when they come back, we see that one of two things happens. So about 30% of students, they go out there, they ask for something ridiculous, they're sure that they'll get a no, and they get a yes.

Interesting. Yeah.

I think about a woman who went to the cafe downstairs and she said, "Hi, could I have a free orange juice?" And she started kind of walking away, assuming she'd get a no. But the barista said, "Yeah, okay." And she went, "Oh, okay, can I have two?" They said, "Yeah, okay." 3? No, he cut her off there, thankfully. But she came back to the classroom with 2 orange juices. And that's a reminder that sometimes our first failure is that we don't even ask for something in the first place when maybe we would have gotten it. So about, you know, 30% or so of students have that experience. Then for the other 70%, they do get the rejection. But instead of coming back dejected, they actually come back really empowered. They come back feeling kind of proud of themselves for putting themselves out there, for taking a chance. And they realize, well, no one laughed at me, you know, failure wasn't fatal. And then on top of that, so sort of have the experiential exercise, and then the paper that's due the next week is a self-reflection on the exercise. So using some of the frameworks we talked about in class, some of the data, you know, some of the case studies, what can you personally learn about failures to sort of bring together the lived experience plus the data to get them to think about their own unique situation. We're talking a lot now about like ChatGPT and AI and these sort of automated papers, and a lot of faculty are worried. For me, I'm not worried, at least yet, as I say with caution, because the papers I want my students to write can only be written by them. They have to be intertwined with their own personal experience and the concepts from class. And so no two papers are ever the same. It's not this analytical sort of standing out on the balcony looking at yourself paper, just saying, look, this is what Edmondson says. But no, it's about like you being intertwined with the material and you bringing in these ideas to How have you led change? How will you lead change? How will this affect you? What would you have done differently? And so really getting students to go experience things, especially slightly uncomfortable things, and then to apply that to their own life and work.

Yeah, that's great. That's so interesting about the kind of boundary— they're almost boundary testing, right? They're kind of— if they're specifically asked to test for failure, you therefore have to push the boundaries of what you might normally ask or social convention or, you know, whatever it is, economic, you know, asking for free stuff. I mean, it's that you wouldn't normally do that when you get given permission to test the boundaries a bit more. I think that's the experiential element. Yeah. Cool.

Yeah. And we meet people where they are. So, you know, I had one guy who was like all about this and so he went out and he tried to convince a bulldozer driver to let him ride the bulldozer. And thankfully he said no, but you know, he was all about it.

Yeah.

We also had one student who was so uncomfortable with this idea that she had 15 minutes and she probably spent 12 minutes just talking with me to try to get up her courage to do it. And then finally I sort of advised her and she decided she would ask a woman if she could try on her shoes, which we sort of figured out was like a sure no, cuz this one would never say yes to that. And you know, it took her of the 15-minute experiment, probably 12 minutes to come up with it, probably 2 minutes pacing the hallways, and then she finally made the ask. And so, you know, you meet people where, where they are.

Yeah.

It's all about going just a little bit outside of your comfort zone.

Sure. Exactly. No, interesting. But as you said, in a safe space, because you've already established the safe culture first. And just one other thing that struck me, how much of a kind of an ongoing experiential element is there alongside the course? Because obviously you have decided that there are certain kind of experiences and concepts and things that you're supporting them to go through. But is there a larger kind of more, I suppose, meta perspective of like they're actually doing their own change-making work alongside the course and therefore kind of reflecting on that, or is it like a capstone project towards the end? You know, is there— how do they actually put these things into practice?

Yeah, so like pedagogically, as I was thinking about the class, I was like, well, there can't be a final exam for this. We gotta think about that. So I applied for special sort of permission from Berkeley Haas to say we don't have a final exam, and they, they agreed. And so instead we have students work on a changemaker project.

Yeah.

And there's a couple of pedagogical things I like about this. The first is that I force them to work in teams.

Mm-hmm.

And I prefer them to work in teams where it's an even number of students, either 2, 4, or 6. And the reason is that I want them to practice all the things we've been talking about in the class. It's a little bit easier if you can say, you know, which direction should we take? Well, 3 to 2, that's the vote.

Yeah.

When it's 2 to 2, you have to use a lot of the things we talk about in class, like influence and negotiation and painting a picture and inspiring people to be, right? So they have to work together in teams, which already makes some students feel uncomfortable because if you're sort of used to being the, you know, solo achiever, then you'd like to just kind of control things yourself. But it gets complicated and messy when you bring other people in. Yeah. But then also I want them to spend a good amount of time identifying a change they want to lead. Again, this idea of being safe but uncomfortable. I think there's no replacement for having actually led change. Yeah. And so I want every single student to leave the class with the confidence and the courage that only comes from having led change. So we spend a good amount of time really in that, you know, you might call it problem discovery phase, but like really trying to get them to understand the core problem. And I find that so often students just want to jump into the solutions, right? So they want to say, okay, I don't know what problem to solve, but we're going to do TikTok videos. No, no, no, slow down a little bit. Like, let's figure out like what's the actual problem you're solving? What are the root causes you want to address? So we spend probably 3 or 4 weeks just trying to find the right problem, find the right people to work with. And then from there, I'm delighted that through the support of UC Berkeley Haas, we have some seed funding. So each group gets $100, which is the money they need to launch— we call it minimum viable project. So basically to put something out there to actually learn learn by doing. And then the third part is I've created a tool which is called the Changemaker Canvas. Uh, if any of your listeners want to check it out, you can see it at changemakerbook.com/canvas. And it's a tool I built having worked with thousands of changemakers around the world that tries to take change from something that feels overwhelming and unachievable to break it down into small, actionable, achievable steps, shifted from being a strategy question to an execution question. And they'll fill out that Changemaker Canvas together, which really breaks down all the aspects of change down into this this canvas, which then allows them to start taking action.

That's great. And you're practicing what you're preaching in the sense that, you know, as you were saying about action, if you don't take action, it's for naught, right? And I can imagine they learn a significant portion of what they thought they'd already learned, but they really learn it when they actually try and put it into practice by taking action, actually putting it in that project.

That's exactly right. I think about students of mine who are terrific, and they decided they were going to come up with a better safe walk system. So the university has this sort of existing safe walk system. So if you're, you know, studying late in the libraries at night, you can call a university representative and they'll walk you back to your dorm, your apartment. And they found it to be kind of clunky and awkward and official and kind of cringy. So they said, let's come up with a different version of it, which is more kind of peer-to-peer. And so they went to the library late at night, they posted flyers, QR codes, and they used social graphs of Facebook and LinkedIn so you could sort of match like, well, I don't actually know you, Tim Logan, but we have 3 friends in common, so maybe you're legit and like you need to go this place, you're leaving at 1 AM, we could walk together. So it kind of came up with like creative, like peer-to-peer safe walk system. So they tested it out and they found that it was not popular at all. Students hated the idea. And so they came to me and they're sort of feeling distraught because they were like, look, you know, we tried to lead this change and it just didn't work. Like, what do we do? We only have a couple of weeks before, you know, the finals due. What should we do? And they kind of thought they had failed. I was like, no, that's the best possible thing or second best thing you could have achieved, which is that you learned in 2 evenings of work. So, you know, 6 hours of work, you learned that no, that even though the idea is great, I think it's a good idea that students actually prefer the existing setup, the kind of awkward, clunky but safe setup. And so now instead of investing, you know, months of your time and tons of engineering resources, you've learned in 6 hours that this isn't a change worth pursuing. And now you can pivot. And they took a different path. To thinking about campus safety. Yeah. And you can learn that intellectually. You could sort of learn like, oh, it's important to pivot, it's important to change direction. But until it actually happens to yourself and you feel that feeling of like that dread where you like, you know, go meet with your professor and think that you failed. Yeah. You know, you can't replace that until you actually do it yourself. And that's what I think is so important about getting students out into the real world leading change.

Absolutely. Yeah. The power of lived experience, eh? Yeah.

Yeah.

And one, one of the things that I mean, you've mentioned it a couple of times in different ways already, but what did you say, hero-preneur and the solo student, whatever. But this idea of, this is one of the things that I have as a kind of an interesting tensional question myself around the whole idea of changemaking is that quite often it's seen as an individualistic kind of focus of you taking your agency, you know, finding problems that you care about, that you are gonna do things about. And your competencies and skills around that. And I wonder, because obviously, you know, many of the challenges, you know, even the one you were just talking about there is a complex interplay of many different dynamics and it's a social problem. It's not an individual problem, but you are acting as an individual. So the fact that you're, you know, grouping them up in teams is an interesting one. But I just wondered what your thoughts were there on even just the concept and the idea of being a changemaker. What's the kind of individual versus kind of more social or collective dimension to that concept?

Yeah, so my theory of change here is that I think we need kind of in the Shoka terms, you know, everyone to be a changemaker. Each and every one of us can be a changemaker. And once we get to that point, then it's less about us as individuals and what, you know, Tim does, what Alex does.

Yeah.

But it's more about do we have that mindset, those leadership skills, and then we work in collaboration. So, you know, you run the risk when you glorify each person becoming a changemaker. I, I recognize that you can overglorify the individual, but that's not how I'm thinking about this. I'm really thinking about this as each of us becoming agents of change, and that allows us to then go through life in ways that are complex and nuanced to work through and with others. And so if we see ourselves as a changemaker, we commit to being changemakers for 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 years of our life. You know, sometimes you'll be the leader of something, which is great. Sometimes you'll be a follower. Sometimes you'll be a collaborator. Sometimes you'll support on the outside. Sometimes you'll be right on the inside. And so to me, it's less about about sort of that lone individual ruggedness, right? That kind of like American construct.

Yeah.

And much more about the, the collective. You know, I love a paper that was written in Stanford's Social Innovation Review. It's called The Most Impactful Leaders You've Never Heard Of. And they talk about something called network-based leadership.

Okay.

Where the idea is that you're not doing everything yourself, you're kind of working through and within networks. And that's really how I think about change making. But I think you have to have the mindset, the leadership, and the action skills to really be a contributor to those types of networks. So you work on yourself, but then you do your best work through and with others.

Yeah, no, interesting. And how does that intersect as well with the kind of the other social dynamics of privilege and, and, you know, people who have more access? Because, you know, you're, you're working in a particular context, as I am, in many different ways of, of privilege. And, you know, you mentioned the kind of white savior idea earlier, and there, you know, that's, that's very prevalent in this kind of space, or it can be. Particularly I've seen it in the way schools work with kind of service projects and you end up kind of, there's a bit of a perpetuation of this kind of idea that you're going to save people, you're going to help people. And there's this kind of dynamic of almost even just the privilege of being able to kind of step into the agency of being a changemaker. There's, I think there's just, yeah, interesting dynamics going on there. I don't know, how, how do you respond to that in the way that you work with it?

Well, one of my favorite papers is one called Designing with the Beneficiaries by Joanna See and Jess Remington. And there they try to shift that notion on its head, that idea that like if people come in and we design for you, but instead it's the idea of designing with the beneficiary. So, you know, involving people in the change, making sure that you shift that power. And I think the best changemakers are ones that are cognizant of their power and their privilege, but also they work to shift that. So it may be the case that you start off with more, but can you find ways to change that in like the leadership structures, or not just be the one that leads something, but you find local leaders who— because who knows better than local leaders in the community themselves how to take on a project? And at the same time, am I teaching to really cognizant of that, that, you know, for instance, I teach at a business school and one of the things I love about Berkeley is about 40% of my students are first-gen students, so first-generation college students, and a number of them are students of color. But everyone comes with a different lived experience. And so to meet them where they are, to not come with this one set of cultural norms, just this is how you have to be, but to meet people where they are. So for instance, there's a lot of imposter syndrome in my class, and understandably so when you're at an elite university and a lot of students are questioning themselves like, you know, do I deserve to be here? Do a lot of work to, you know, give them that sense that yes, you absolutely do deserve to be here. We need to hear your voice. And, you know, it's true that sometimes that ability to find your voice will happen earlier for some folks rather than others. But just because it doesn't come quickly doesn't mean that it's not worth cultivating and working on. So try to bring that more inclusive lens to the teaching, meet people where they are.

Yeah. Yeah. No, that's brilliant. And then lastly, there was a question I had around unintended consequences and that's, you know, it's just something that I find again, also quite interesting about this work. Because we are most often talking about deeply complex, intractable challenges, right? And as you of course will know well, when, you know, you're trying to interact with a complex system, it's very difficult to predict what the consequences of your actions will be. And I just wondered what your, you know, how do you approach that kind of idea in the class, but also how do you feel about that in terms of the way that if you step into the agency of being a changemaker, is there a responsibility that you then also have for the ripples, the unintended consequences of the actions that you think at the time are the right ones to take? And of course there's the failure element of just, it just didn't work and you learn from that. But also from that failure, there might be, your action might have worked in some sense of the term, you know, it's successful in some sense of that term., but it may also, of course, some quite negative unintended consequences that you, you didn't even consider would arise from your actions. You know, that's just the reality of working in a complex system to some extent, right? So I just wondered what your thoughts were about that.

I think you're exactly right. And I'm not an expert on systems thinking, but we do teach systems thinking in the class as well. You know, using that classic example of if people are all blindfolded and sitting next to different parts of an elephant.. And so one is holding onto its tail and going, oh, this is the brush. Another one's feeling its leg and going, oh, this is a, a wall, right? That no one has that, that full picture. So we teach systems and the lens I try to bring to it is really think about systems change as well. So I love the work of Donella Meadows. Uh, she talks about leverage points to intervene in a system. And so getting students to think about that sort of from day one. I think it's not realistic that most students will be affecting systems change, you know, in their minimum viable project or even in the first couple of years. But at least think about those systems, at least begin identifying that is kind of as a, healthy habit. And then, you know, going back to— you're exactly right, there's a lot of unintended consequences, and I can't predict all those things. But I think if we can equip people to go into their work with humility— I think so, so often in Silicon Valley, we tend to, like, find people that have success, we glorify them, they say, well, I'm a savior, look at what I'm doing, and they kind of turn off to, like, all the unintended consequences. So keep that sense of humility, and also keep iterative, that change-making is never done. It's a constant process. And so by definition, right, we can't predict all the unintended consequences, but can you at approach it with humility and a sense of iteration, being willing to change things. Yeah. You know, I tell the story about, oh, this is interesting. Um, in my class we have a, an assignment that students do, which is called the Changemaker of the Week. And so we ask each student to choose one changemaker alive or not, famous or not, and make the case using critical thinking, persuasive communication for why that person is a changemaker, how they embody concepts from the class.

Yeah.

And so it's great. I get introduced to all these amazing different changemakers from all walks of life, but there's only been one single changemaker who's been selected every single semester in my class. And it's not who I would've expected.

Okay.

The one person that's always been selected has been Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia.

Yeah. Okay. Okay.

And this was before he gave away his, his fortune. Yeah. So anyway, he's always been, been selected. And so based off of that insight, I said, well, in my book, I'm gonna make sure that I write about Yvon because clearly his story resonates with changemakers. But in researching, and I didn't know his whole story, I just knew about sort of Patagonia, we actually got it started by kind of building these revolutionary climbing pitons.

Yeah.

And By all external measures, he was having a lot of success, right? He kind of revolutionized the climbing industry. But then quickly he realized that these pitons were having a terrible environmental effect. It was actually degrading the environment.

That's right.

Yeah. Yeah. And at that point, he was willing to walk away from his whole company. Basically, he built the success, but he said, no, environmental impact is more important than the profits or revenue that I'm making. I'm going to pivot. That's where he pivoted into a clothing brand.

Yeah.

But I tell his story as an example of someone who is is, you know, having that humility, having that ability and willingness to iterate and to walk away from what was externally a success because it was not grounded in what the world actually needed.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's a fascinating story, isn't it? I was reading his book, Let My People Go Surfing. Yeah. Fascinating story. But I think there's something also there about being so strong on your values and your purpose, right? That you, you use that as a compass to help you make those decisions at those points because you, You know, for him, it could have been, had he not been so strongly rooted in those values, he, you know, he was successful in some definition of that term and he could have just kept doing that thing because success feels good and you wanna keep going. But if there's a rooting around value or purpose, then that might kind of reorient your decision as you iterate or, you know, in your humility.

Yeah, that's right. A concept I put forward in the book that I quite like is this idea of being clear on your why and flexible on your how. So you've got a sense of the change you wanna make or the impact you wanna have, but then recognize that there'll be many hows along the way. Things will shift, things won't go as planned. You'll find new ideas, you'll find that there are unintended consequences. It doesn't mean you have to give up on the why, but it does mean that you shift those hows.

Yeah. No, that's great stuff. I mean, it's, for me, it's such an important topic that I'm so happy to be able to speak to you about it because I think I love seeing what you've built there at, at UC Berkeley, but also I see how much opportunity and possibility there is for this, more of this kind of educational experience and particularly the focus on changemaking, whatever language a different context will choose to use around it. But it's those set of concepts around what we've just been talking about. There's so much opportunity in schools and the education systems generally that, that I fear to some extent when they come to you, there's a lot of damage has been done by the system to disempower them, right? You know, you say we don't give agency, but it may be that it's been taken away, right? In some senses by the, by the systems that, and you know, of course I don't want to kind of overplay the, the, the problem. You know, there's a lot of educators out there doing incredibly important work despite the system. But I think for me, often it's the perverse incentives within the system itself, not the individuals that actually ends up disempowering some of the young people. And then you, you end up, kind of trying to undo some of that work and re, you know, reignite them somehow when they come to you. I think there's an important piece of work that needs to happen there.

So I certainly hope so. And for your listeners, if you feel inspired to teach changemaking, you know, I hope that this book could be a guide for you. I'd love for you to take the book, adapt it to your classroom. I mean, that's what I'm so excited about is, you know, I have one version at Berkeley, but would love to see how you take these ideas and run with the book and run with your classroom and equip your students to become changemakers. So if you decide to run with that, let me know what you end up doing and how I can support you.

Amazing. Thank you. I'll put all the contacts and links in the show notes as well. But thank you so much, Alex. It's a real pleasure to be able to talk to you about this stuff.

What a fun conversation. Thank you for having me, Tim Logan. Brilliant.

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