Changemaking, which is always undertaken for others and with others, profoundly shapes not just society at large, but the individual person. It’s true for the social entrepreneur, true for the anonymous citizen working for a better world, true for anyone touched by the vision, values, and outcomes of this quite specific, distinctly human activity.
People from all walks of life are drawn to changemaking because it aligns with their own lifelong quest for meaning, purpose, and goodness—however they define it, or even if they never give it a moment’s thought. Working for the good of all shapes experience, informs one’s moral universe, and creates a sense of identity. Moreover, within the social environment of changemaking, all these individual quests intersect, overlap, and influence one another. We set examples and follow examples. We model attitudes, speech, skills, and we pick them up from others. Sometimes we do so intentionally, sometimes subconsciously, but these basic human processes are always taking place.
The principles that make up the social environment of changemaking are remarkably consistent, and seem to pop up naturally: Changemaking is voluntary, it’s for others, with others, focused on lived experience of contemporary people, it demands agency, directly engages values, requires openness. More or less the same parameters recur in place after place, culture after culture, situation after situation.
Changemaking is therefore a whole with two indivisible halves, a Solution side and a Self side. The Solution side is tangible— here are our explicit, organized, stated, formal efforts to fix broken systems, right wrongs, improve the human condition, measure and report on work accomplished and impact achieved. Meanwhile, the Self side holds all the intangibles—big cognitive categories like values, worldview, attitudes; “personal qualities” such as courage, openness, perseverance; habits of altruism, empathy, trust; identity and self-definition; and all the cognitive, neurological and social behaviors and conditions that shape any one person’s unique experience.
If problems and solutions are endlessly diverse and particular, the patterns on the Self side are remarkably common and consistent. Take the example of two forest communities facing loss of biodiversity. For one, restoring mangroves is the solution; for the other it’s bringing poachers to justice. Yet on the Self side, the processes are largely the same: attention to the lived reality of others, openness to working together, cultivating social courage, people inspiring each other by example, sharing identity and purpose, exchanging wisdom and trust.
While social impact is one of the organizing principles of changemaking, the nature and function of individual impact is still largely a mystery. How exactly are human values defined, expressed, and disseminated in the context of changemaking? How does one person “inspire” another’s quest? What is inspiration and how does it work? What roles do intangibles from the Self side like empathy, worldview, attitude, openness, and courage play in making impact on the Solution side?
Why do these questions matter? Sunbird believes that the Self side of changemaking, like the Solution side, can serve humanity in several ways. First, it can help changemakers, their communities, organizations, and supporters make more impact. It can also open up entire areas of investment and scaling for philanthropists and investors. To researchers, it offers an ever-renewing, multilanguage, largely autochthonous human mode of generating, updating, and disseminating social values substantively different from more static or traditional sources, with implications for machine learning and the modeling of human emotional intelligence.
But harnessing the power of the Self side requires much more than imagination. It calls for a multidisciplinary neurosocial framework that includes both a scientific understanding of the human brain and a sociological understanding of changemaking.
It only sounds strange because it’s new. Neuroscience has already enlivened our understanding of other complex human phenomena, neuroeconomics, neurolinguistics, neurotheology are three examples. Likewise, science is delving into the neurobiology of altruism, charisma, character, social values.
Some areas of brain research are particularly relevant to changemaking. Cross-cultural studies of how social values appear in brain scans ask whether there is a sub-linguistic, physical and biological basis to values that can be identified not by culturally-determined speech, but by neurological function. Inquiries into the neurology of religious experience have identified a particular brain pattern that ties together cultural experience, the intake of new information, and a dynamic sense of self. Behavioral economists, neuroeducators, and neuromarketers ask more pragmatic questions: How does the brain process choices and decisions in particular situations? What mental habits help students succeed? What colors will be most popular for automobiles next year? Whether in both pure research and applied research, the tools and methods are essentially the same.
A neurosocial approach to the Self side of changemaking would pose its own questions. How does the human brain respond when stimulated to think or act for the good of all? What social factors influence brain function? How does the brain process empathy and altruism in a changemaking situation? What is person-to-person inspiration and how does it work? What does it mean in neurological terms, to have a social “vision”? What strategies are most effective for unlocking empathy, agency, creativity, and courage in others?
What would it take to equip the world with a neurosocial framework for changemaking? First, the participation of as many changemakers as possible. Next, it would take time—an ongoing, long term effort. It would require an open-source platform treated as a internationally shared public resource, like the internet, the human genome, or outer space. It would require advanced semantic mapping in as many languages as possible. It would require the participation of universities and research laboratories worldwide, as well as philanthropists and foundations working in concert.
And of course it takes someone, somewhere to ask what could be.
Sunbird emerges from the global community of changemakers and is taking the first steps towards realizing this vision.
