The world has many ‘wicked’ problems that defy easy solutions. These problems are systemic, interrelated and intractable. We need collective wisdom to engage with the wickedness. This wisdom exists amongst us. However, it needs to be surfaced.
We bring together the 'right' people to carefully designed spaces. Over time we prototype some ideas emerging from these spaces. We also produce and distribute tools to imagine, think and solve.
We want to understand
- How will India flourish in the era of Climate Change?
- Can we provide nutritious food to all?
- How will our cities become hospitable for migrant families?
- How can our farmers live lives of dignity?
- How will our youth respond to an uncertain future?
In Summary
“What’s Socratus you ask? We take systems to task combining Socrates the Greek with a designer and a geek and collect their wisdom in a cask”
Why did we set up Socratus?
India faces a unique challenge!
We have a large population that is young and mostly poor. Many Indians await prosperity. This India of the future is yet to be built. However, the engines of India’s growth are deeply embedded in the carbon economy. Neither India nor the world has the luxury of following that path.
India’s quest for dignity and prosperity will largely coincide with humanity’s response to climate change.
- Farming that produces nutritious food for all without destroying the soil, and while providing decent returns to farmers.
- Cities with living spaces and transport for all residents while curbing pollution while welcoming migrant workers.
- Millions of decent jobs that channel the creative energy of our young people, especially women.
Such challenges fit the definition of Wicked Problems
- They are complex in scale and scope
- They have competing and seemingly incompatible objectives
- Addressing one of them can lead to another that will require its own solutions
- Interventions also have unintended and unexpected consequences
There will be roadblocks to any idea that challenge the existing economic, political or social interests.
We need Political Solutions
Enter Greenup.
"Greenup" is our name for the cluster of range of ideas and actions that are necessary for such a deep reimagination and transformation of Indian society including measures for innovation, adaptation and resilience.
Greenup will help India become a climate leader by building a flourishing nation that has leapfrogged the carbon economy.
Our goal is to change the climate discourse from a peripheral, elite policy debate to one that is visceral and central to addressing India’s future.
We will do so by convening Greenup spaces - online and physical convenings with supporting tools and research- bringing together:
- People with power in the system such as political figures - especially young politicians
- People with knowledge such as academics and thinkers
- Creators and problem solvers such as innovators, system thinkers and entrepreneurs
- People with capital - representatives of business and philanthropy
- People with moral authority, especially traditionally marginalized groups.
The collective wisdom distilled from these spaces will be the basis for a roadmap for Greenup with buy-in from the above key stakeholders that will be shared with the public.
Socratus is the midwife of collective wisdom, which we believe is the core of a “wicked mind.” We believe that complex, “wicked” problems can only be solved by minds as wicked as the problems they seek to solve.
Towards this, Socratus is creating a distributed academy for training wicked minds through deep engagement with problems such as the agrarian crisis and climate change. We do so by Unlocking the collective wisdom of the community of experts and various citizen groups, using design and data to drive alignment amongst stakeholders, using visceral experiences to embody wisdom and prototyping interventions in the field in collaboration with our field partners and then scaling them
In short, we are a modern take on the classic Socratic method of arriving at the truth, with data, design and viscerality playing a key role in the acquisition of collective wisdom.
Who are we
We see ourselves as a node in a larger ecosystem of partners with whom we work on creating implementable actions and streams of knowledge that serve as training grounds for the next generation of wicked minds.
Not only do we need to understand the methods of system’s thinking, we need to cultivate the mental habits that go with them. We tend to think in siloes and imagine the effects to be linear. We need to move away from specialization and recognize the interconnections.
We need solutions that combine data and technologies with culture and politics.
We have been fortunate to be able to work with a large extended community of advisors, partner organisations and individual volunteers. They not only bring in their experiences but actively shape the organisation.
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How do we go about it?
One could say Socrates pioneered window shifting in the way he used reason. His arguments were built on a series of “obvious” steps that no one would disagree with but whose conclusions were dramatically counter to accepted belief.
Our goal is similar, we want to shift the way we approach wicked problems in a series of “obvious” moves - units of reasoning, of moral clarity, universal compassion, background design, visceral experiences and solid data - that in combination organically change the way we think and feel about wicked problems.
Our theory of change is based on unlocking wisdom at the individual and the collective level. We start with individuals who bring a quality of presence to wicked problems; simultaneously, we also bring design and data to unlock the wisdom in others.
We are committed to cultivating individual wisdom while also bringing data, design and viscerality for the development of collective wisdom - our approach to wicked problems depends on fully autonomous “wise” Individuals who work collaboratively with others in the larger ecology of development. Ultimately, we want ecosystems where wisdom is maintained across generations.
We believe we don’t have to ‘solve’ climate change. Instead, we have to build a new society. In India much of that remains to be built, which is both good news and bad news. The question we want to solve for is - How can we ‘write a new India in a climate and citizenship grammar’? Climate Centric Design becomes the grammar of our human and planetary systems, which is to say:
- When building a road, you have to incorporate climate change into its lifecycle just as today you have to take the safety of motorists into account.
- When passing a law, you have to take climate change into account just as today you take the interests of underprivileged communities into account.
- And so on, you get the point - climate change is baked into all the activities of our society just as making a profit is today.
