By Laura Weiss on
February 1, 2010 4:01 PM
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Innovation is a very large ten-letter word. It usually conjures
images of vast sums of money invested over lengthy periods of time
resulting in significant change in products, services, processes or
entire organizations. Anything small or incremental runs contrary to
achieving success.
Or does it?
I've recently encountered two works that promote
seemingly contrarian approaches to solving the types of problems that
can lead to lasting change. These same techniques can help offset the
"analysis paralysis" that often blocks the innovation process.
In their new book
Switch,
Chip and Dan Heath suggest that the key to solving big problems can be
found by looking at similar situations where things are actually
working well - in other words, by focusing on the bright spots. Instead
of tackling an entire system at once, the idea is to investigate
easy-to-observe elements of the system; instead of trying to fix what's
broken, try to emulate what's working instead. The authors illustrate
this point with an exploration of malnutrition in rural Vietnam.
Instead of relying on heaps of socioeconomic data about poverty and
education, for example, a research team went out into the field to
understand what was actually going on in the villages, and even made
villagers part of the investigative team. Taking this approach had
remarkable results in the discovery of dietary habits with surprising
nutritional value.
Robert Maurer's 2004 book
One Small Step Can Change Your Life discusses the concept of
kaizen,
the Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement. Similar to the Heath
brothers, Maurer promotes a focus on breaking a systemic issue down
into smaller pieces (specifically, "small problems") as a more
manageable way to deal with an overwhelming crisis. He suggests that
asking small questions and taking small steps can dispel fear of
failure, inspire greater creativity, and generally stave off inertia.
Maurer, a clinical psychologist at UCLA, illustrates this concept
through the successful efforts of individuals seeking to improve their
health, financial stability, or personal productivity. As with the
stories told in
Switch, these too have positive outcomes.
The
guidance offered by these two books is characteristic of design
thinking - itself a contrarian concept that showcases inspiration,
intuition, and experience as key elements of the innovation process.
The Heaths' "seeking the bright spot" is a human-centered approach to
insight gathering that is based on observing how people actually behave
in a specific context in order to design solutions with broad impact.
Maurer's "taking small steps" is suggestive of rapid prototyping where
pursuing a series of low investment experiments can increase the pace
of learning towards reaching more significant outcomes. Both of these
techniques have application to innovating in the nonprofit sector, a
sector that passionately tackles society's biggest challenges utilizing
minimal resources. Contrary to the complexity of these efforts, a focus
on small steps and bright spots can actually help lay the groundwork
for transforming our world.
Laura Weiss is the Vice
President of Service Innovation at the Taproot Foundation. The newest
member of the Taproot team, Laura comes to the Taproot Foundation after
nine years as Associate Partner and Practice Director with the
world-renowned design consultancy IDEO, where she was an advocate for
bringing a business perspective to the design process. A former
licensed architect and educator, Laura holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan
School of Management, an MArch from Yale University and a BArch with
honors from Cornell University.
By Aaron Hurst on
January 29, 2010 9:30 AM
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Josh Rai, our fearless web developer, is already the third casualty of
jury duty on our team this year. (We're not even a month into 2010!) In
the hope that it would get him out of jury duty, Josh developed a
program that could reliably return verdicts that would replicate actual
human jury verdicts.
Here it is-
if (trial.getDistrict().getUntrustedRaces().includes(defendant.getRace()) and
defendant.getAnnualIncome() < LocationService.lookup("90210").getAverageIncome() and
MagazineService.lookup("Us").countOccurrencesInPastYear(defendant.getName()) < 10) {
return "Guilty";
}
else {
return "Not Guilty";
}
We
think he did a great job. Imagine how many hours of wasted time and
government costs Josh just saved the country. Nobel Prize? He has my
vote.
By Aaron Hurst on
January 20, 2010 2:38 PM
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With an upcoming Taproot board meeting, the recent release of our
Board Recruitment Service Grant,
and our participation in the San Francisco board matching event
referenced in my last post, this week we have been thinking a lot about
board service.
As a result, an article that referenced a
board made up mainly of lawyers caught my attention. My experience is
largely in working with social entrepreneurs. To most social
entrepreneurs, a board of lawyers feels like an innovation death
warrant.
Instead, social entrepreneurs tend to design boards
they believe will support their own entrepreneurial drive. These boards
tend to come in one of five flavors-
1)
The Passive Board- The goal is to have a board that doesn't get in your way. It is small and populated by friends.
2)
The Succession Board-
The goal is to ensure the organization will continue after you leave.
This board tries to help the organization 'grow up' as fast as possible
and put systems in place.
3)
The Capital Board- The goal here is to raise $500k+ per year in unrestricted funds to pay for innovation and growth.
4)
The Mentor Board-
The goal is to support you as an inexperienced entrepreneur by
partnering with veterans who can play a very active role in the
leadership of the organization.
5)
The Credibility Board- The goal is to show foundations and others that you are legit by populating the board with experts in the field.
Are these the best five models? How can social entrepreneurs create better boards?
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As mentioned last week- for my thoughts on the future of nonprofit board service, check out my keynote address from the recent BoardSource Leadership Forum. You can also check out BoardSource for additional tools and events.
By Katelyn Wilson on
January 15, 2010 1:56 PM
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On January 12, the
Volunteer Center Serving San Francisco and San Mateo Counties presented their annual Board Match Event at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
The event is essentially a job fair for potential board members. More than 120 nonprofits set up booths and wooed potential board members from all walks of life - there were young professionals that would likely be carded at rated R movies mingling with folks who could have ordered off the back of the Denny's menu while Clinton was President.
One woman attended because after a 20-year "stint" on the board at a local hospital, she had reached her term limit and was looking for a new organization to serve. Some younger professionals were attracted no doubt by the sassy, "come one, come all" attitude conveyed by the tattooed, orange legwarmer-wearing board member portrayed on the event's collateral.
In the first hour - when most of us were still at work - more than 700 potential board candidates arrived. That's how many attended in total last year. As co-host, Taproot Foundation would love to take credit for this amazing turnout (we did
tweet about it ...), but it would seem that the booming interest in board service might surpass even our reach.
The volunteering and service movement seems to have found another growth opportunity, and people are clamoring for a way to engage on a deeper level with the nonprofits serving our communities. Events like the Board Match provide nonprofits with an opportunity to meet a diverse pool of talent, and therefore be positioned to be strategic in their selection processes. By capitalizing on the vast and growing interest, nonprofits are able to build their leadership and management capacity. And isn't that what it's all about?
On a side note, Taproot Foundation's network showed up in droves - several nonprofit clients busily recruited, dozens of pro bono consultants attended, and a few of our friends from Service Grant Tokyo stopped by our host's table to say hello.
---
For even more about the future of nonprofit board governance, about check out Aaron Hurst's recent keynote address from the BoardSource Leadership Forum.
By Marilyn Chen & Jaime Hiraishi on
January 14, 2010 7:34 AM
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To start the conversation on this emerging field, this week, The Taproot Foundation, the Net Impact Chicago Booth chapter, and American Bar Association Standing Committee on Pro Bono and Public Service and the Center for pro bono gathered twenty-five leaders from Chicago business, law, design, and architecture schools at the first-ever Chicago Summit on Pro Bono Service in Professional Schools.
With deans, professors, program directors, and students, we had a unique cross-university discussion focusing on the current State of the Pro Bono Union, how professional schools can collaborate to make an even bigger impact on the challenges facing Chicago today, and building a framework to ensure success and continuity of pro bono programs from year to year.
Some key points and outcomes from the Summit's conversation include:
- Pro bono programs are currently student driven and primarily student run
- There is great value in collaboration across schools to take on multi-disciplinary projects
- There is great potential for university pro bono to have a positive impact in the city of Chicago
- In order to change the culture of the institution, infrastructure is needed - as one participant commented, "We have people ready, give me the resources!"
- The group envisioned experiential learning as a part of every professional school's education by 2013
- A representative from the Civic Consulting Alliance committed to creating a list of 100 key issues for students to solve through pro bono
With great enthusiasm on campuses, we need to bring training, infrastructure, and resources to schools to move the needle on the pro bono movement. It's clear the time is now! How do you suggest we make this happen?
By Aaron Hurst on
January 7, 2010 11:36 AM
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These days there are so many incredible models for delivering pro bono service. Over the coming months I would like to spotlight some of the people and organizations who are leading the pro bono movement. To kick this off, this week I interviewed Kunal Modi. Here's the interview-
Kunal Modi is the Board Chairman of campusCATALYST, a Chicago-based organization he co-founded with Molly Day. campusCATALYST partners with leading universities to engage undergraduates in pro bono work for nonprofits. Working in engagement teams, and supported by both academic and business mentors, participating students enroll in a for-credit university course which complements in-class learning with pro bono service placements in the local community. You're working at Teach for America now through McKinsey- how does that work?McKinsey has a program called the McKinsey nonprofit corps. Having had on-the-ground nonprofit experience working with AmeriCorps, I wanted to understand how my management consulting training could be applied to the social sector to support a cause and a nonprofit that I believed in. I've always been interested in education. Teach for America is a really interesting case study of how to bring a lot of different skill sets together around a cause in the social sector.
The social sector right now is being defined, and I want to be a part of that discussion. I believe the best social enterprises seek to inform rather than supplant government institutions. Today, we can really start to identify and aggregate the most interesting, effective ideas in the social sector and work to translate them into government policy. For example- if Teach for America has cracked the code on the teacher recruitment model, how do we work with the Department of Education and translate those findings to affect education more broadly in this country?
So, tell us about the founding of campusCATALYST. What was the catalyst?When I worked with a nonprofit called LIFT, we had a mixed range of experiences with both nonprofit and student-driven consultants. Later, as I recruited for McKinsey, I got further introduced to the consulting framework and model. At the same time, my co-founder Molly Day was in Malawi doing research with a nonprofit. We looked at our experiences in tandem and recognized that there was an opportunity to use a lot of the management consulting frameworks to tap into the talent pool of energetic,talented, passionate students. Our program promotes cross-sector careers and leadership and shows students that no matter what profession
you go on to, your skill sets have a useful application to the
organizations serving your community.
Where is the organization now?
We're two years old and proud of all the work the organization has done in the broader Chicagoland community; we run for-credit institutionalized classes at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago; we're working also with Kellogg School of Management and Booth School of Business. We've engaged over 250 students and worked with 50 nonprofit organizations. We've contributed about $600,000 in pro bono services to the Evanston, Hyde Park, and Chicago community, and we're excited to keep growing.
Who is the typical student and client?
The typical student in campusCATALYST is someone who is strong academically and has also taken a leadership position at an organization on campus. Typically the organizations we work with are small-medium sized nonprofits that are very invested in the local community. campusCATALYST works to scope out projects that ensure the engagements are valuable learning experiences for our students but are also a very concrete successes for our clients.
We've seen many MBAs struggle to serve nonprofits given their lack of experience. What skills do you find undergrads can reliably provide?Undergraduates are tenacious researchers; they're incredibly tech savvy; they're very resourceful. The trick is to create a pro bono opportunity for students that capitalizes on their strengths while providing adequate training, resources, and advisory support. I think the for-credit classes we offer through our university partners is unique model to tap into the all the talent and energy of students on campus.
So, what's next for campusCATALYST?We have a lot of exciting growth prospects going forward. We're looking to expand our impact to more students and more campuses. This past year we launched an Advanced Analyst program for students to come together for a repeat engagement at a faster pace. We'd like to start an externship program or partner with a study abroad program. We're also really ramping up our alumni efforts. As we graduate students, we'll see a unique set of leaders who have been through this transformative experience and can work together as alumni to drive social change.
By Aaron Hurst on
January 5, 2010 8:03 PM
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There is an American sense of progress based, in part, on the manifest destiny proclaimed by the settlers of the West. For these settlers, new territory was not only desirable, it was a patriotic mandate. They gobbled up the West like Pacman on speed.
The era of manifest destiny coincided with the growth of the first real corporate boom as companies built railroads and delivered goods around the nation. These companies were built with the manifest destiny culture and mandate. Grow. Scale. Consume.
This core philosophy has continued through the corporate eras fueled by the military-industrial complex and booms in real estate, globalization, energy, finance and technology. Today, MBA programs teach that success is defined with the same goals. Grow. Scale. Consume.
Unlike the private sector, the nonprofit sector has focused on impact (value creation) rather than scale. At its best, this mentality has still sought organizational progress, but rather than a progress rooted in manifest destiny, it has been a progress more akin to that of a craftsman.
A craftsman's progress is defined by the quality of his craft and not solely by volume of production. The craftsman's success is measured by his ability to create increasingly high-quality goods of increasing value and by the satisfaction he derives from this process of creation.
Manifest destiny is a land grab. Craftsmanship is the art and science of value creation.
Given that the modern pacman company has been around for our entire lifetimes, we tend to think that it will and must always exist. It is such a core part of our lives and economy that to imagine scenarios where it is radically altered seems naive.
Still, the craftsman has actually been a part of civilization for much longer and represents a a more sustainable and more satisfying model. This model is healthier, because it is based on a resource constrained reality that affords more satisfying work for more people.
What if rather than teaching MBA students how to be pacmen, we taught them to be professionals? What if we taught them to value their trade as art or craft? What if we taught them to measure value creation and not just market share?
By Aaron Hurst on
December 29, 2009 2:29 PM
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(Click Above to See Our New Video and Youtube Channel!)
It's that time of year again when many of us reflect on the past year of our lives, look ahead at the potential of the coming year, and resolve to better ourselves in any number of ways.
While New Year's resolutions are made with great intentions, in practice, many of them end up being somewhat insignificant or self-centered. Though positive changes, will it really make a difference if you lose 5 pounds or brush up on your French this year? When February rolls around, will your resolution be something you care about enough to stick with it?
All this talk about new year's resolutions got me thinking--imagine the impact if all business professionals made a resolution that really mattered-- "I will make a positive impact in my community by doing pro bono work."
Reflecting on the past year, I've been realizing the impact pro bono service can have on the nonprofit sector and have been inspired by all of the amazing individuals and corporations currently engaging in pro bono service. As we've said many times, pro bono work is not just for lawyers. There are hundreds of thousands of nonprofits that could desperately use the skills business professionals like human resources managers, graphic designers, management analysts, and marketers have to offer.
According to the 2010-2011 Occupational Outlook Calendar of the Department of Labor Statistics, in 2008 there were 904,900 people working as human resources, training, and labor relations managers, 286,100 working as graphic designers or graphic artists, 746,900 people working as management analysts, and 623,800 people working as advertising, marketing, promotions, public relations, and sales managers.
That represents over 2.5 million people with professional skills that are currently put to use in the for-profit arena which could also be used to strengthen nonprofit organizations improving our communities. And those numbers don't even include people working in IT, copywriting, journalism, architecture and many other professions whose skills would also benefit the nonprofit sector.
Imagine the impact on our communities if all of those individuals spent a few hours in 2010 contributing their services to a local nonprofit and did so in a structured, well-managed engagement, which ensured its success. Recognizing that you have talents that can be shared to really make a difference is a first step. Pro bono work can be the gift that keeps giving. Many participants say the work they do for nonprofits in their communities renews their pride in their profession and gives them an opportunity to do work for causes they care passionately about. This is a resolution worthy of kicking off the New Year--and new decade.
An amazing video production team got as excited as we are about this vision and contributed their services pro bono to help us make the
video above, and we've posted it on our brand new
youtube channel.We hope you'll kick off the new year by watching our video and considering the exciting potential in our vision for a society where the business and social sectors truly partner to address today's toughest challenges. This year, we hope you'll help us spread the word about the positive impact pro bono service can have. We hope you'll share this video and vision with business professionals you most respect, engage in the national dialogue about meaningful service in our communities, and consider ways your employer could partner more substantially with the community organizations they most care about. We hope that this year you'll share your passion and talents with the nonprofit sector!
Make your 2010 resolution matter.
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All of us at the Taproot Foundation would like to thank all of the people who have inspired and energized us in 2009 and wish you a happy and healthy 2010!
By Aaron Hurst on
December 18, 2009 7:26 AM
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Design thinking has become one of the hot topics in the consulting world and is now making its way into the nonprofit sector. The most recent edition of the Stanford Social Innovation Review even did a cover story on the topic that was co-written by CEO Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt, both of the design innovation and consulting firm IDEO.
Wikipedia describes design thinking as "the essential ability to combine empathy, creativity and rationality to meet user needs and drive business success." This design process emphasizes creativity and the needs of those whom the design is being created for. In their article, Tim and Jocelyn outline how the nonprofit sector is starting apply design thinking in to account in solving societal problems.
I also just finished reading
"The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage" by Roger Martin. In this book, Roger describes a model for the process of design thinking which he calls a knowledge funnel. This model descries the way most social entrepreneurs think and
creates a model that makes this thinking more accessible and deliberate.
The knowledge funnel starts at the top with a mystery.
For example, the mystery when I founded the Taproot Foundation was -
how do you make capacity building services like marketing and
technology widely accessible to nonprofit organizations who can't
afford to pay for them?
Going down the funnel, you next examine the mystery and develop a heuristic or
a hypothesis that you feel
could unlock the mystery. For Taproot, we observed that given cost
constraints of nonprofits, to provide them with capacity building services, our solution would need to use pro bono service. We also observed that to be scalable and reliable, this service would need to done using a
production line model. Thus, the heuristic was to use a pro bono service production
line.
In the final step in the funnel model, an algorithm is developed and constantly refined
that is the design for how to execute the heuristic to address the
mystery. For us, the algorithm was the Service Grant program and all the
countless details that went into optimizing it over the last 1,000
projects we have completed.
The article and book really show the power of design thinking and the knowledge funnel model. At the same time, they also showed me that the conversation around design thinking and service is missing the larger opportunity by continuing to focus on individual products instead of larger social missions.
The current design thinking conversation as it relates to service is all about product design and largely about bottom-of-the-pyramid products. The cliché being - how do we develop low cost water pumps for Africa? This is critical and breakthrough work, but the same design thinking can be also be applied to the primary product of the domestic nonprofit sector- services.
Some of the most impressive work of firms like IDEO is their accomplishments helping to drive innovative designs for services, not products. IDEO, for example, helped design Bank of America's wildly successful "Keep the Change" innovation, a service which helps promote savings by rounding up the cost of each purchase made with a check card to the nearest dollar and transferring that change to the user's savings account. Designing a service or program that helps address domestic societal issue may be less attractive to designers as it is less visual and tactile, but it is no less transforming.
Using design thinking and the knowledge funnel model, one can see a great opportunity for taking one of the hundreds of social, environmental, or economic challenges facing our nation, working to find solutions, and then doing the hard work of implementing the plan. We need to look at how we can train the nonprofit sector on this methodology to find increasingly better solutions to our country's challenges. By applying design thinking not only to product development but also to service improvement, we can fundamentally advance our solutions and ultimately address our country's challenges on a more sophisticated level.
As a last aside- It would also be interesting to design a conference around design thinking and service. Each year you could bring one challenge to the event and work to leave a few days later with a heuristic that is widely believed by the group to have a strong possibility of solving the mystery.
By Aaron Hurst on
December 10, 2009 8:16 PM
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Bobbi Silten, the Chief Foundation Officer at Gap, Inc. made an interesting observation about the segmentation posted in this blog
last week. It is not only nonprofits that fall into a segmentation of Ad Hoc Users, Centers of Excellence, and Service Enterprises.
Not only, did she observe, do other entities like companies and city governments fall into these buckets, but they are all inter-connected and enable each other for the good or bad.
Take, for example, corporations-
The company in the Ad Hoc Service User segment encourages a wide range of one-time volunteer activities. They fundamentally see the volunteer function as one of coordination. They measure success based on hours served and the percent of employees engaged (inputs). They often engage in 'days of service' and other tactics to achieve volume goals. Their lack of strategy around volunteerism leads to chronic under-investment which prevents maturation.
Corporations of Centers of Service Excellence are similar to corporations that are Ad Hoc Users, but they have identified a key strategic area or two where they have built a program to engage their employees. This typically involves partnerships with large nonprofits like Habitat for Humanity or Junior Achievement. They hold up these partnerships as core to their measurement of impact. They are well run programs, but they rarely use the true commercial competencies of a company, and their effectiveness doesn't influence the broader employee engagement strategy significantly.
The Holy Grail for companies is the Service Enterprise. This is what I understand Rosabeth Moss Kanter has championed. It is the company that sees leveraging core competencies as the core of their strategy. Their service programs are co-lead by business executives, measure success via impact, and integrate service with talent management.
The majority of large companies are likely in the second segment - Centers of Service Excellence. The corporate Service Enterprise is still pretty rare although a few companies like Gap, Inc. are on the right track and may be there very soon.
On the city government level you see the same pattern emerge-
Service cities in the Ad Hoc Users segment support volunteer centers and the general goal of serving their residents. They likely celebrate volunteers and may even set goals for increasing volunteerism.
The cities that are Centers of Service Excellence are those like San Francisco where the mayor has picked one or two issues and begun to build infrastructure to support service to address a specific need like homelessness.
New York is an example of a city on the path to becoming a Service Enterprise. It is trying to look at the role service can play in every agency and integrate volunteer human capital into the possible solutions to every city challenge. This is just starting, but it appears Bloomberg gets it and is charting the right course.
Bobbi is right that this pattern exists across institutions and also that they all reinforce and support the same behavior. If companies and cities measure service in volume of service hours, nonprofits are pushed to work the same way. If outcomes are the driver, nonprofits can be supported to design strategic engagement models.
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