Albert Einstein is credited with saying, “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend fifty-five minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.” If we want to be successful when we innovate, act, or try to ‘change the system,’ we need to get serious about understanding the problem. Unfortunately, the world that most of us inhabit is focused on that last 5 minutes – rushing headlong toward a “solution” without having spent enough time getting to know the problem. This happens in virtually every industry, organization, and sector of society.
It’s one of the reasons most new businesses fail, most public policies are reactive, and “innovation” (whether commercial or social) spends far too much time in the unicorn-seeking land of hackathons, design sprints, and slick pitches, where confident answers make poor substitutes for authentic understanding.
In this session, social innovation and systems change educator James Stauch will discuss his new book The 55 Minutes: An atlas to navigate problems, reveal systems, and ask beautiful questions in a radically shifting world. The 55 Minutes is a compendium of mapping tools, frameworks, and concepts for those pursuing innovation or transformation, whether of the commercial or social variety. The book helps aspiring changemakers understand the broader context: the nature, depth, origins, and potential trajectories of the problem that your innovation is trying to address and the systems that produced that problem in the first place (and that still hold it in place).
Speakers
James Stauch, Social Innovation and Systems Change Educator
James Stauch has authored or coauthored many guides, scans, and trend analyses on a range of contemporary social issues. A social innovation and systems change educator and consultant based in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, Canada, he serves as Co-chair of the Banff Systems Summit and as Complex Systems Strategist with ATCO’s SpaceLab. James is a Visiting Fellow at the Skoll Centre at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, and was the founding Executive Director of the Institute for Community Prosperity at Mount Royal University, where he developed social innovation, leadership, and systems-focused learning programs for undergraduate students and the broader community. James has also been a foundation executive and philanthropy consultant, which included designing and managing Arctic and Northern programming with the Gordon Foundation. Having chaired several national and international grantmaking networks and consortia, James is currently a board member of Alberta Ecotrust Foundation and a member of the editorial advisory board of The Philanthropist journal.
Sylvia Cheuy, Consulting Director, Collaboration
Sylvia has spent over 20 years as a changemaker and champion of multi-sector, citizen-led change efforts. She is inspired by the capacity of communities to innovate and advance creative solutions to their most pressing issues. Sylvia is a skilled and seasoned community change facilitator whose work has included designing and delivering capacity-building sessions, both in person and virtually, to clients across North America as well as in Singapore, New Zealand, the UK, and Singapore. She has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Toronto and completed her Graduate Diploma in Social Innovation at the University of Waterloo in 2013, where she explored opportunities to create change within regional food systems.
Learn more
- Visit the55minutes.ca for more information, to discover what others have said about the book, or for a free PDF download.
- Order a hardcover, paperback, or e-book.
- The 55 Minutes is produced by ATCO’s SpaceLab in partnership with Mount Royal University’s Institute for Community Prosperity.