In 2007, I spontaneously left for a week in New York City to meet my cousin, who was flying into NYC from the UK. A miscommunication left me arriving into the city about five hours early with no access to our housing. With nothing better to do, I wandered around Greenwich until I came upon one of those charming, slightly over priced New York bookstores with patrons leafing through political non-fiction.

Out of boredom, I picked up Power and Idealists by Paul Berman, a book about the 1968 student revolutionaries in Europe. The first few pages captivated me. I spent much of that week reading Berman’s book, finding spots on the parks and sidewalks of New York.

Power and the Idealists traced the development of personalities like Bernard Kouchner, a young, leftist radical revolutionary of the sixties, who later became a prominent member of Sarkozy’s right-leaning government. Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Joschka Fischer were also examined as student politicians who’s ideas transformed as adults.

What stood out to me was Berman’s treatment of how these ideas developed to create a movement of the New Left. He framed the growth of politicians like Kouchner as a process that happened in concert and conflict with colleagues and friends of the same generation, yet was also grounded in a rich historical context that was passed on through parents and grandparents.

What started out as a rebellious, idealistic movement of young people morphed into a policy of humanitarian interventionism that affected Kosovo and Rwanda. I was fascinated by the notion that an idea could ripple through society, not only affecting the people who came into contact with it, but having the idea itself change and evolve through this movement.

In Kouchner’s case, it was the people that he engaged with who affected his ideas, and these ideas affected his actions. His actions set him apart a major change agent (although we may not always agree with the direction of that change), first manifested through his days as a resistant in the student revolution, and then as founder of Doctors Without Borders, and most recently through his post as Foreign Minister in Nicholas Sarkozy’s government.

Boiled down, Berman’s ideas might be synthesized as follows: ideas spread through networks, changing both the idea and the network through this movement. It turns out this has a lot of applications to social value metrics, but we seem to have missed these connections because of the focus on appeasing the needs of investors. If we approach social value metrics as a tool for helping social ventures optimize their impact, then it becomes important to understand how this impact is created and spread.

Power and the Idealists provides clues to this puzzle: social impact creation is about changing behaviours, and behaviours are learnt through the people we know, much as Kouchner learnt about resisting totalitarianism through his grandparents’ experiences in World War II. In another light, social impact (a complex mixture of ideas and action) is created and spread through networks of people. By creating connections, we are opening the door to learning about more sustainable ways of living. As we take on these practices, we also adapt them to our own situation.

We can go one step further:

If we can deepen our understanding of how and why social impact is spreading, then we can start making ‘impact optimization’ decisions: placing resources in areas of networks that are conducive to achieving the mission of different social ventures. If we invest more resources into understanding the mechanics of social value creation, then we have the opportunity to scale up social impact to unprecedented heights. These ideas are the kinds of ideas explored and developed by myself and a few others at Social Asset Measurements (SAM), a social value metrics firm.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/iisg/4699675776/sizes/o/in/photostream/

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