Episode 28: Howell Malham
“We have the answers. They are all around us. What we are seeking is the question. The right question at the right time.”
About Howell
Howell Malham is a cultural philosopher, theorist, innovation strategist and author.
How does one become all of these individually fascinating, disparate yet interrelated things?
To mix the Howell potion, we begin with the musings of Heraclitus, add in equal parts Vicktor Frankl, Marshall Berman, Robert Hughes, and Harold Bloom, sprinkle in the poetry of Rumi, and top it all off with The Rolling Stones. Then, put this potent mix into the crucible of life and let it bake, on high, for a few decades, and out shall emerge one Howell Malham, whose own subversionist approach has carried him from coffee to academia, utilities to government, and back.
In 2010, Howell co-founded Insight Labs, the world's first philanthropic think tank, and was a founding director of UX for Good, a non-profit venture leveraging the UX discipline to help solve pressing, complex social challenges.
In 2014, Howell founded GreenHouse, a consultancy that leverages the power of social innovation to unlock strategic insights, leading to never-before-seen opportunities for growth, impact, and social change, while deepening the collective understanding of the role of social sciences, ethics, and aesthetics in the private and public sectors.
Howell has also architected The GreenHouse Theory of Social Innovation, and Innovation Dynamics™, a systematic process to identify and dismantle social norms that resist meaningful, measurable change.
Howell’s work in the realm of social innovation — specifically, in the resolution of social predicaments — consistently overturns assumptions about what is and what can be.
And as such, he has worked with NASA, the US Department of State, United Nations, Harvard Medical School, US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Starbucks, the Walter Reed Military Medical Hospital, and The Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education, to name but a few.
And, as the first innovator-in-residence at the University of Southern California, Howell co-created the original practicing PhD in social innovation, leadership and advanced management at the Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work.
He has written for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Fast Company, and is the author of I Have A Strategy (No You Don’t): The Illustrated Guide To Strategy.