Purposeful Stories
The Power of the Collaborative
When people and purpose come together to solve social challenges at scale
The world’s societal challenges are moving faster than ever before.
This calls for coordinated and agile solutions that can connect stakeholders—solutions that reflect the complex symbiotic dynamics of problems, which require working towards a shared goal.
Just a little introspection would make us realise that we are responsible for creating many of the pain points in existence in society today. On the bright side, we are also a major part of the solution. The need for improved collaboration at multiple levels among stakeholders, governments, philanthropists, and citizens has never been greater.
We know that we are in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution, which is changing the way people interact with technology. Parallelly, it is also drastically changing the way people interact. The need of the hour is to find new models to facilitate better interaction, understand the role of humans as we move forward and place them at the centre of collaborative efforts, and design ways to facilitate meaningful and fruitful partnerships at scale.
In India, for decades, the social sector remained focused on the isolated interventions of individual organisations. But today, we have individuals such as Harish Hande, the founder of Selco, who is working towards providing sustainable energy sources to rural areas, or Sumita Ghose, Founder Director, Rangsutra Crafts India, who aims to revive the talent and craftsmanship of rural India.
Today, it's great to see that social entrepreneurs and philanthropists are realizing that large-scale social change needs a lot of coordination across different fields. They are shaping innovative collaborative models of collaboration that take advantage of the unique power of collaboration.
One strong example of human collaboration we can see today is that of the Migrants Resilience Collaborative, which is a multi-stakeholder collaborative that includes participants such as nonprofit, philanthropic, and private sector actors across India. The collaborative is focused on security and mobility for vulnerable migrant families across India. In the next three years, the collaborative wants to help 10 million workers and their families in 100 districts and cities get back on their feet in a fair and partial way.
Another prominent example of the power of collaboration is the journey embarked on by the Bharat EdTech Initiative, which aims to enhance learning outcomes for 1 million students by 2025. The company’s stakeholders include the likes of the British Asian Trust, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation India, Sattva Consulting, and Give. The initiative has been able to reach out to marginalised groups that are in the remote regions of India and also looks to address the top pain points in edtech: linguistic barriers, infrastructure, and affordability constraints.
Solving for all these at scale required a core group of edtech entrepreneurs, educators, teachers, and community leaders to come together with a collective approach to improving education outcomes for students from low-income households, with their parents as active participants in the process.
“By bringing technology and people together, we understood the need before we built the solutions." "Today, a conversational AI chatbot engine has simplified learning and encouraged students to explore new boundaries when it comes to learning,” says Jairaj Bhattacharya, co-founder of a conversational AI platform for children called Convegenius.
The role of citizens
The concept of citizens coming together to solve societal problems is not a new one. While the critical issues that need to be addressed keep changing, the current pressing pain point for society is enhancing the economic freedom of individuals. In a book called "Samaaj Sarkaar Bazaar," author Rohini Nilekani argues that the power of the people to take action, along with the government and enterprise, to bring about impact at scale, is underestimated.
Following a pandemic-fueled economic crisis, we are now seeing a backlash against global financiers and opaque financial markets. But unless Indians can show strong examples of how collaboratives can work for the better, there won’t be much change emerging from the financial structures.
“Often, business models by philanthropists are built by carefully listening to what their potential clients actually want, but what they lack is financial support that will not hold them to a model of maximum profit extraction at any cost,” writes Nilekani. The current model does not allow for much experimentation owing to budget constraints; this is why the idea that what we need to build on is a model where “the role of the bazaar is an enabler and not a master of the samaaj”
“Often, business models by philanthropists are built by carefully listening to what their potential clients actually want, but what they lack is financial support that will not hold them to a model of maximum profit extraction at any cost. ”
Is there a model from which we could draw inspiration to bring people, government, and businesses on a level playing field? We could take a look at Indus Action, a policy implementation organisation bridging the gap between law and action. They call themselves a "do tank" more than a "think tank," enabling vulnerable families to sustainably access their legislated rights.
Their model is threefold: Action Organising; Action Consulting; Action Research. Action is thus a critical part of their approach. Samaaj 3.5 is a project where they are seeking the 3.5% changemakers of the whole population to make change happen because they firmly believe that small efforts can make a huge difference.
At the end of the day, a successful collaborative is one where the purpose of working together is understood. Is the goal to grow awareness or to build capacity? Or to address specific societal issues? The bottom line is trust between the different parties, for which the crucial element is clear communication and transparency with roles, responsibilities, and outcomes of the partnership.
So, what constitutes a well-functioning collaborative? A 2018 study in Poland showed that there were three factors that drove collaboration between NGOs and businesses: alignment, commitment, and trust. Alignment is the organisational fit in values, respect, and objectives. Commitment is the amount of effort and resources that the participants are willing to invest in order to improve the relationship. Third, trust is confidence in the credibility of the other participants; each collaborative member must have complete faith in the other's competency, dependability, and ability to keep promises and support each other in times of need.
And this is where the future of CSR and related activities lies: in bringing together communities, companies, NGOs, and individuals through alignment, commitment, and trust for the greater good of society.
Artificial Intelligence
The Human-AI collab: Pros and Cons
It was 26 years ago when IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue famously defeated the reigning chess world champion, Garry Kasparov. Two wins for IBM, one for Kasparov, and three draws in six matches that lasted several days For the first time, the world took notice of the power of AI, not as an entity that was smarter than humans but as one that humans could program to do tasks faster and smarter than our organic brains could process.
AI as a collaborative tool to improve human lives appears more promising than ever today, with the advent of processing power and widespread adoption of the cloud and IoT on the verge of a 5G revolution. But many AI scientists and experts are wary that we are dealing with a double-edged sword, so how can we find balance?
But what exactly is collaborative AI? Many issues in private or public enterprises and among NGOs require coordination and collaboration from both humans and machines to derive decisions that improve the overall outcome while also looking into an individual’s goals. Collaborative AI includes taking into consideration operational, strategic, and tactical viewpoints, including those of non-human agents, to come up with a solution that is far more feasible and applicable owing to the superior collective intelligence of the system.
While many experts touted that AI would be a gamechanger, the real game changer is how AI is helping humans better their lives and processes. The question to address is should we trust them with lifesaving or even life changing decisions? Are they actually capable of creating solutions that humans are not capable of on their own without AI?
Before a myriad of questions and doubts flood our minds, probably the first question to ask is, why even involve humans in the equation? Why not just totally automate machines to do all the tasks necessary? It is because the complementary strengths of both humans and AI can be simultaneously developed. While humans can expect better leadership, creativity, and the overall functioning of their teams, AI can in turn become faster, increase the volume of data it can process and be deployed at scale, maybe at least for the near future until it can be automated to do these things on its own.
Are dystopian fears around AI legit?
There has always existed this dystopian fear of machines becoming autonomous and wiping out the human race, mostly stemming from sci-fi movies and novels. Just to see how far humankind has traversed in its thoughts, let us look into a few examples.
The book Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie talks about a fragment of the human consciousness that gets stranded in a human cyborg after its pilot vessel is destroyed in combat. In Crux by Ramez Naam, a transhuman AI device that is used for human-to-human communications turns people against each other. And who can say if all AI takeovers are going to be evil and dark? In City, by Clifford D Simak, there is no power madness in the machines, rather, they just want to live peacefully among their dogs who are capable of speech and are way more intelligent than our domesticated pets today.
In all of the above, the concept base is one, that of “technological singularity," which presents a hypothetical scenario where AI has reached a state of self-consciousness and is capable of making independent decisions. AI becomes self-improving and goes on a hyper-technological growth spree, eventually overtaking human intelligence.
However, on the basis of what AI experts and philosophers have to say, at least for today, such a situation is simply not possible in reality, for human values are too complex even for the greatest AI machines to comprehend. This will also require AI safety engineers to define goal systems that simultaneously captures the entirety of human values, which is impossible.
So, in what ways can AI and human collaboration benefit companies?
There are many examples of Collaborative AI helping humans better processes. In one example, it is being seen as a powerful tool to help combat the need for food for a growing human population, which has hit 8 billion currently. This is being done by AI’s ability to gather and interpret large amounts of data and predict where hunger is most likely to occur and distribute food effectively and efficiently. The gap it fills is bringing in crucial data, and making timely decision-making, because time is a crucial factor when feeding the hungry.
It is estimated that by 2050, this number is expected to hit 9.9 billion, as the food demand skyrockets by 35-56%, making the case for AI and humans to join hands even stronger.
Meanwhile, an online application called Quill.org, helps students in rural areas learn better grammar and English through its online AI platform. The non-profit organisation provides free literary activities that help build reading comprehension, writing and language skills for elementary middle and high school kids globally.
There are a few key principles that can help companies make the most out of AI-human collaboration. Companies need to actively reimagine business processes, make experimentation part of usual process with active participation of employees, actively engage in bettering AI strategies while redesigning work and building skills to incorporate AI into business.
While collaborative AI brings in new methods to old solutions, it is also fundamentally changing how we work. Work processes are now changing from a defined linear process with a start and end to ongoing and recurring cycles, while processes now have more people involved, including inputs from design, manufacturing and end users. Parts of process building can even be crowdsourced using AI tools, this is in sharp contrast to the project stakeholders making the big calls. Additionally, there is no need to have fixed office hours as there is 24/7 synchronized access to collaboration all across the globe.
We have only scratched the surface of what collaborative AI is capable of. We can delve a little deeper by looking at CSR initiatives within enterprises. There are a few questions always being posed about CSR: can it be measured and can it be measured with utmost honesty? Can we bring about a positive view towards CSR and change behaviour patterns about its perceived benefits? Can CSR be integrated into a business strategy in the most optimal manner?
When AI is used in CSR, the first thing it can ensure is to eliminate the possibilities of human bias. Secondly, the AI system can provide multi-dimensional performance measures - while putting them up and measuring against global standards. Thirdly, management bias, misalignment of funds, and even constantly measuring constant changes in trends, can be done with ease. But can it be made even more responsible? To answer this question McKinsey came up with the concept of Technological Social Responsibility, where at its core it talks about aligning short and long-term business goals with the long-term goals of society as a whole. This can ensure that there is holistic growth for individual companies and overall society.
In conclusion, collaborative AI is on the horizon, and there will be a steep growth of applications and use cases of AI in different domains and sectors. What we need to keep in mind is that there can’t be a generic approach to AI, and here is where the collaborative needs to work in-tandem to get inputs from industry specialists and all stakeholders, to build the right system of AI-human interactions.
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