by Pamela Scott Crace

How do we make real progress? This question governs my thinking a lot. Usually it's all in a day's work. Sometimes it's more existential.

Turns out, I'm not alone. In HBR's annual Breakthrough Ideas for 2010, topping the list is a simple prescription for making progress: Enable your people to see or feel momentum every day, even if it's incremental or personal, and you can move any agenda forward.

How can political and institutional leaders heed that advice in a constructive and responsible manner?

A confluence of ideas and events I've encountered lately suggests a growing disillusionment with the sclerosis of many of our systems and institutions. And there is a growing bias for change and action. As my friend Marty Janowitz would say, "There's getting it. And there's getting it done." Clearly, we need to start doing more of the latter. But how?

This Ideas Issue of Progress lays out just a handful of vexing challenges: a shrinking workforce; escalating health care costs; pricing carbon; business values; personal authenticity; food security; immigration; poverty; and education.

While preparing this magazine, I attended a morning-long dialogue on social innovation and how to mobilize more resilient responses to complex problems. Coincidentally, the impetus for the event was many of the same challenges (and opportunities) I listed above.

The gathering was convened by the Authentic Leadership In Action Institute, which serves a local and global clientele who seek to strengthen their ability to lead and manage change within business, government, and community-based organizations. The idea was that the realm of social innovation—approaches that are often grassroots, on the edge, hybrid, risky, or unproven—is perhaps where we need to be looking for new toolkits.

We learned about efforts in play to formalize and scale up social innovations to replace time-worn problem-solving frameworks that no longer serve our needs. According to the experts, social innovation, like business innovation, needs to be institutionalized, taught, invested in, incubated, piloted, marketed, and embraced. This is a noble pursuit that will hopefully result in widespread culture change. Indeed, many social innovations are already entrenched, such as micro-finance and social entrepreneurship.

But let's not forget one thing. To be sustainable, social innovation's influence must unfold naturally, like evolution. And it has to exist in the cultural DNA.

Social innovation, like any kind of progress, starts with you.