‘Yesable propositions’: how to negotiate for social change

Social entrepreneurs are people who launch ventures aimed at promoting positive change in their community and the world. I am such a person. In 1982, I founded a non-profit organisation called Search for Common Ground, which we refer to as Search. My bottom line was not financial gain, but making the world a better place.

My credentials as a social entrepreneur grew out of my hands-on experience in building Search into the world’s largest NGO engaged in peacebuilding. Over the years, I developed a set of 11 principles that underlaid my work. Now, these principles provide the basic framework for my new book, From Vision to Action: Remaking the World Through Social Entrepreneurship (Columbia University Press: 2024) from which this article is adapted. While I made use of these principles in the non-profit sector, they are also applicable to social enterprises.

One of the key principles of social entrepreneurship is to make “yesable propositions” – a term coined by Roger Fisher, co-author of Getting to Yes. The concept is so simple that many people brush it off as childish. A yesable proposition is a proposal that is in the interest of both the person who makes it and the person to whom it is addressed. The goal is to have the addressee respond “yes”. 

When people internalise the idea and make it a regular part of their interaction with others, the results can be life-changing. When I first heard of the concept, I had to ask myself if a proposition were yesable. Gradually, making such propositions became second nature to me.

For a proposition to be yesable, it should encompass the needs and interests, not only of the proposer, but of the recipient. If it is only acceptable to the proposer, it will undoubtedly be turned down. If it is only OK with the recipient, it will probably reflect pandering.

In the early years of Search, my wife Susan Collin Marks and I tended to be the people who made yesable propositions. But as Search grew, we realised that we needed more people to do this. One person who particularly stood out was Lena Slachmuijlder, our country director in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In 2011, I travelled to the DRC for the first time to see what Lena had accomplished during her six years in the country.

Working with instead of against abusers

I was taken to the Congolese army’s regional headquarters in Bukavu where I watched as a whole battalion was being retrained in the need not to abuse women. Deplorably, the DRC was known as the rape capital of the world, and the military were prime perpetrators. Many soldiers acted from the mistaken belief that females were a rightful part of war plunder. Lena had established a partnership with the army’s leadership for training to change the behaviour of the entire force – more than 100,000 soldiers. The curriculum of the programme, called Tomorrow is a New Day, included sensitisation sessions, radio and video programmes, participatory theatre and instructional comic books. Whenever possible, the wives of the soldiers were present. Virtually no wives supported their husbands being rapists, and the husbands proved to be more amenable to change when their wives were involved. 

When I asked Lena how she got buy-in from the DRC military for Tomorrow is a New Day, she replied that Congolese soldiers had been regularly condemned because of their atrocious behaviour, and the army had usually reacted with defensiveness and denial. 

She decided to work with the army – not to accuse it. As she put it: “Yesable propositions were a critical part of making change. It was essential to understand people’s needs and not just to try to get them to do what your project proposal said they should do. When you did this, you realised that not everything was about material needs, and that there were also other needs like reputation, appreciation, connection, and trust.”

Because Tomorrow Is a New Day contained incentives for key players, it was yesable to both the Congolese military and the international community.  For the military leader, the programme provided sufficient resources to make him relevant and to prevent conduct of soldiers that he found repugnant.

For the army’s general staff, which needed to give its approval, the programme deflected international criticism and increased the professionalism of the troops. For Western governments that provided funding and needed to show their parliaments that they were not wasting taxpayers’ money, the programme produced quantifiable results that were verified by independent evaluators. 

For the soldiers who became the trainers and facilitators of the sensitisation sessions, the programme allowed them to do the right thing and to gain a certain degree of status. In addition, they earned pocket money, occasional fuel for motorcycles, and a modest amount of office supplies. For the soldiers in the field, in addition to being instructed in international standards of conduct, the programme furnished small but tangible inducements, such as time off from normal duties and large quantities of Fanta orange soda – a delicacy in Congolese terms that was regularly served at sensitisation sessions.

Television for social change

Later, Lena and I met with Search’s TV production team. Although our media activities in the DRC had begun with radio, we had expanded into television, which had a wide viewership in major cities. In Kinshasa alone, our programming reached about 2m viewers. 

With justifiable pride, the team showed us samples of their output, including the DRC’s first-ever reality series, Tosalel’ango (Let’s Do It in Lingala). This series showcased young people tackling real problems in their community. One episode featured two students named Jenny and Filston. Like most Congolese young women, they had grown up in an environment where gender-based violence was endemic, and schoolgirls like them were frequent targets. Unscrupulous male teachers often pressured girls to trade sexual favours for good marks. (The practice was informally known as sexually transmitted grades.) Jenny and Filston wanted to take action, but they understood that directly approaching the authorities at their school or in their locality was probably not going to work. 

They reasoned that a more effective way to make a yesable proposition to the powers-that-be was to appear on television and have their problems graphically displayed before a mass audience. So, they contacted Tosalel’ango’s producers who agreed to create an episode about the abuses the girls had suffered. 

The strategy was hugely successful. After the episode was aired, the local police commander met with the girls, and criminal charges were brought against four of their teachers. The outcome put Congolese teachers on notice that they could not continue to escape punishment when they committed crimes. 

For the next year or two, I dined out on these examples and others that I had seen in the DRC. I was proud to explain that Lena had confirmed an idea I had believed to be true but had never before been able to verify: namely, that a societal approach to conflict prevention could work well in a geographically large country, and that skillfully crafted, yesable propositions could result in positive social change.