[MUSIC]
When a social entrepreneur goes out into the world and tries to solve a problem,
they actually have to do some homework before they can actually come
up with a solution that's powerful.
In our stories, Carlos actually starts by going out into a rural village in
the Philippines, collecting a group of villagers, sitting around a campfire,
and talking to them about their struggles and needs when it comes to energy.
He's not coming in there with ideas about what they should want, or
what they really do want.
He's listening to them and asking them to talk to him about how energy could
be powerful, how it could be useful to them, and
how they'd like to have it in their homes and in their businesses.
So an important part of good social enterprise involves listening and sitting
down with the end user and understanding the world from their perspective.
Now, in Africa, Coco actually went out into the village, where she was
planning to launch her venture, and she followed a family with a video camera,
tracking them for an entire week, and to understand deeply, how this family
wrestled with the challenge of moving and mobilizing water to grow their crops.
She tracked them as they carried water,
as they poured it over the fields, as they struggled to irrigate.
And she did this because she really wanted to understand
the challenge of effective irrigation, not from an outsider perspective, but
from the perspective of the farmer.
Listening to the local community is important, but Carlos and
Coco went one step further.
They tried to understand the field in which they were operating, and
understand what best practice might actually already be out there.
So Carlos made a trip to the annual conference of alternative energy.
There he met dozens and dozens of people who are working the field that he
wanted to enter, to try to understand what else is going on in this field.
This is a critical part of being a social entrepreneur,
is listening not just to the local community, which is absolutely critical,
but also to the experts and the people who have done the work before.
Coco went and did in depth research online to understand all of the many existing
irrigation systems.
She built an enormous catalog database of solutions that are already out there so
that she would understand, before she started her own venture, what was already
in existence and what she could learn from the best practices in the field.
So taken together, these are critical moments for social understanding.
When they listen to the community,
when they hear from the authentic voices of end users what they really want.
And then, when you go into the field of research and
talk to the experts and understand best practice in the field.
Those are two critical steps, I think,
putting yourself in a position where you are actually now well informed and
ready to come forward with new ideas for solving a problem.
In our discussion of design thinking,
we mentioned the concept of empathy maps and mind maps.
What I want to do now is show you Carlos and
Coco's use of these tools in their own work.
First, take a look at Coco's empathy map.
Here's the result of her talking to, listening to the local farmers.
What has she done?
She's asked four big questions.
What does she see?
What are the people feeling?
What is she hearing?
And what are the locals thinking?
And as she did her fieldwork, she started to write down on small post its,
her observations and her notes on what she observed.
And then, in this empathy map, she's organized it into the four quadrants.
I think that's a powerful tool for a social entrepreneur.
It makes the fieldwork real.
It takes it and sorts it into these four big categories, and
gives you a real clear sense of what it is that the local customer and
user is feeling when it comes to the problem you're working on.