When our Women Barefoot Solar Engineers return to their isolated rural villages in the poorest countries, finish setting up their workshops and solar electrifying their communities, then what? How do we build capacity once their training time with us is over? How do we allow them to keep communicating and reinforcing the strong bonds built during their courses?

These are just a few of the questions we needed a solution to. We found the answer in the Skoll Foundation and Sundance workshop, Stories of Change Impact Lab, earlier this year. We were asked to craft a solution to a “pain point” in our organization, Barefoot College, which among other programing, trains women to become solar engineers. It was an uncomfortable process.

In guiding an organization that has, for 40 years, been defined by its human approach, it’s been a defining year. We need to collaborate with technology to support a very fast scale-up within several of our Barefoot Solution areas, but it’s not our comfort zone.

Social media, for example, presents an inner conflict for organizations like ours. We are constantly challenging ourselves. What can we live without? Rather than what more do we need to have?

In the Lab, we were asked, “What were the bottlenecks to our growth and sustainability”? It was daunting, largely because introspection for any organization can be an uncomfortable process. With programming in more than 38 countries, self criticism is an intricate and time consuming exercise. We focus so much of our energy on our programming. We had definitely never approached the solving of an operational challenge through a design centric process.

We sat down with experts from Google, Tomorrow Partners, Frog Design, Firebelly U. and others, who listened and learned, then quietly opened the doors to possibilities we never imagined.

How can our illiterate and semi-literate grandmothers use technology to tell the stories of their ongoing transformation once they return home? How can we help them communicate, measure and evaluate their success? A challenge, indeed, but one crucial to our ensuring sustainability and full-scaling the “Barefoot Approach.”

I’m sharing this story because simply participating in the Lab was “potentially disruptive.” What we learned through the four-month process, which ended in a week of identifying and pitching a solution, went far beyond our expectations. It did not disrupt our focus, as we thought it might. It taught us a new thought process for analysis of challenges. I went into the process thinking we had no limits to our creativity and resourcefulness, but realizing our information deficit in and of itself, was a limitation.

What came out of the Lab, you might ask? The Barefoot Tablet. It’s a solution beyond our imagination. It’s a device designed for the 850 million illiterate in the world who are excluded from most of what is designed in Silicon Valley. It is purely visual and intuitive, can withstand tough conditions and lets the women Barefoot Solar engineers communicate in different languages based on audio input.

Now, we can break down the transformation of our students and understand where we can support them. We know how to use a narrative approach to trace their experiences.

We faced a challenge we had not clearly defined, with a group of people we did not know, in a place far away from those we are dedicated to working beside. We could not have placed ourselves in a more uncomfortable position—nor have come away with a richer learning experience because of it.

One risk taker always recognizes another. They are both repelled and attracted to the other. This is what connects us. It’s more likely the self-introspection and critique that forms the discipline of how we apply each other’s principles and innovations.

It is not so much what Silicon Valley can teach social entrepreneurs, or what we can teach Silicon Valley, but the opportunity to teach and learn outside our comfort zones. That’s what drives maximum impact, great innovation and the best solutions.

I’d like to leave you with a quote: “The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable…For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.” – M. Scott Peck