Why you need an outsider’s perspective

If you want to change the world, it probably helps if you are rich, powerful, an expert, famous or called Donald Trump. But you do not need any of these attributes, and some of them may even stop you from achieving your mission. Expertise, in particular, can be a curse, not a blessing.

I have spent the past ten years researching social entrepreneurs who make a real impact, and I have even started some social enterprises myself. Reality is always a healthy antidote to theory, and the reality is consistent: successful social entrepreneurs often start out with nothing. No money, no power and certainly no expertise. 

How outsiders unlock breakthrough innovation

For instance, Muhammad Yunus famously set up Grameen Bank. That started the micro-finance revolution that is credited with lifting millions out of poverty. Yunus fell upon the idea by accident. He was a professor and lent some money to a local community, which was suffering after a famine. It snowballed from there. He tried to get traditional banks to take on his idea, but they kept on putting him off. They were experts in banking and understood that it is useless lending to the poor, especially poor women, because you will never get the money back and it is too expensive to serve them. Banks prefer lending to people who do not need to borrow.

Yunus was not constrained by the wisdom of experts. When the banks would not help, he just kept growing his idea. Grameen now has over ten million borrowers, with an average loan size of just $160. 

Similarly, when we started Teach First, none of the start-up team had any education experience. We did not realise that what we were doing was impossible. The experts knew that it would be impossible to get high-flying graduates to teach, let alone in areas of economic disadvantage. They knew that you could not let graduates loose on classrooms with just six weeks’ training. They also knew that the unions would hate the idea (elitism and/or teaching on the cheap). The government would never back it, and businesses would never support it. 

Yet Teach First became the largest graduate recruiter in the UK within seven years.

This is a story I heard time and again in researching my book How to Change the World. So what is going on, and how can outsiders succeed where experts falter?

Why experts struggle to change broken systems

Experts often struggle to innovate because of their expertise. They understand the intricacies and all the trade-offs that make the system work. They can maintain the system brilliantly and make the marginal gains that all good managers make. But they become prisoners of the system.