2The Strategic vacuum

We are losing the skills of cooperation needed to make a complex society work.

— Richard Sennett, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation

Social labs as a new approach to solving complex social challenges compete with existing business-as-usual (BAU) approaches. The relative efficiency of one strategy over another can be evaluated only by considering the nature and cost of BAU approaches as a response to our challenges.

BUSINESS AS USUAL

Randy Shilts, a journalist who documented the spread of AIDS in the United States provides a sobering example of business as usual.1 During the early years of the AIDS epidemic, the blood bank industry in the United States found doctors who questioned the evidence that ...

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