Tag: Change

10 (percent)

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

I’ve been finding a lot of power lately in 10% shifts in how I spend my time.  It’s an increment big enough to matter – an experiment big enough that you can learn something – but small enough that there’s no excuse but to start.

So, if you’re feeling stuck you could:

  • Work 10% more, or less
  • Sleep 10% more, or less
  • Turn your email off for 10% of your workday
  • Delete 10% of your emails, or reply to them with 10 words or less
  • Eat differently (veg, vegan, cro-magnon, all liquids, whatever) 10% of the time (aka one day a week…which I know is more like 15% but you get the idea)
  • Make 10% of your decisions in 10% of the time you normally take (and figure out if it makes a difference)
  • Etc.

Or if 10% doesn’t work you can try 10 days, e.g.:

  • 10 days of eating differently
  • Exercise for 10 days in a row
  • Sleep 8 hours a night for 10 straight days
  • Work 16 hour days 10 days in a row to ship a product
  • Write (and publish) a blog post for 10 days straight
  • Each day for 10 days, write down one thing you’re grateful for
  • Conduct a 10 day generosity experiment
  • For 10 days, apologize first
  • Etc.

Increasingly I’m feeling like long-term happiness results from our ability to evolve.  If that’s true, then discovering how to change is even more important than discovering what to change.

At least for me, all the big changes start small.   They start with an experiment that’s big enough to mean something but small enough that I can’t pretend it’s impossible.

What about you: do massive leaps work, or do you do better when you start small?

Your job, and leverage

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

If your life is one of service, then the one question to ask yourself when figuring out where you are and where you’re going is:

What role, what organization, what situation allows me to maximize the impact I’m having on others?

Most organizations find good people and ask little of them them.  Some organizations, sadly, even find great people and ask them to do mediocre work.

The best organizations take great people and help them be extraordinary.

It’s possible.

And the best part is that extraordinary feeds on itself.  Extraordinary creates more extraordinary.

Most of the time

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

You can’t make people care.

You can make people act.

How does knowing this change what you say and do?

The thing they don’t tell you

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

…when you set out to change the world is that the bottom right part of the table is actually MORE frustrating than the bottom left.

If you’re stuck there, I hope you choose to keep looking for the top right (succeeding), rather than retreating to the bottom left (not trying).

The DO Lectures and Tim Smit’s nine principles of management

~ Sasha ~ 8 Comments

I had a great few days last week in cold, rainy west Wales, speaking at the DO Lectures about Acumen Fund, generosity, and how we need to reinvent fundraising (talk to be posted soon).

The DO Lectures are described by founder David Heiatt as “a cross between TED, Burning Man and Where the Wild Things Are.”  30 speakers over the course of four days giving lectures in a small, unassuming tent (hay bales and all) and just 80 total attendees creates an incredible egalitarian spirit and a shared sense of community.  You don’t just have the chance to ask one of the great speakers a question; you’ll probably have dinner together at a communal table, then make your way over to the pub for a few beers, and finally listen to some Welsh poetry together over an open fire pit.

(if it was this year, you’d also spend a good deal of your time talking about how incredibly cold, wet and muddy it was…but I’m told that was an exception.)

I’m still processing most of the great, eclectic talks, but the one unifying theme I took away was “the time is now to do things in radically different ways if you want radically different outcomes.”  From Joel Bukiewicz talking about how he created Cut Brooklyn, the only handmade knife store in Brooklyn, to Michael Acton Smith, who’s on the cover of Wired this month thanks to the incredible success of moshi monsters, there was a lot to take in served up in gobbing heaps of inspiration.

Probably the most energetic and fun talk was by Tim Smit, the founder and creator of the Eden Project in Cornwall.  The biodome project, which cost £141m to build, has attracted more than 13 million visitors and generated more than £1.1bn in revenues for the local economy – all on a rehabilitated manufacturing site.

The Eden Project

One would imagine that a project of this size and scope would require a massively buttoned-up approach to doing just about everything (the financing, team structure, ways of doing business, you name it).  With that in mind, imagine my surprise upon jotting down Tim’s Nine Principles of Management for the 700 staff at the Eden Project:

  1. You cannot start your workday before saying “hello” to 20 other people
  2. Intentionally read books (I can’t remember how many) that will spark new ideas that you normally would not read
  3. ..and plays
  4. …and movies
  5. …and concerts (for rules 2-5 I lost track of how many…the point was intentionally seeking out new ideas and inspiration)
  6. Once a year, stand up and “explain why you love to work for Eden” (said tongue-in-cheek, and explained as “if you have to do this, I believe that you’ll deal with all the reasons you don’t love Eden before giving your talk”)
  7. Eden’s top 80 team members must all do something unspeakably nice (a “guerilla act of generosity”) for other people at Eden at least once a year
  8. At least once a year, each employee must prepare a meal for the 40 people who make it better for him/her to come to work (apparently modified slightly in recent years given a distribution of cooking capabilities)
  9. All 700 employees of Eden must learn to play Samba drums together.  Seriously.  And they perform.   (70 drum captains, teams of 10)

The Samba drumming was what really got me – Tim said that it was not only unspeakably fun to have a team of Brits shaking their hips to samba, but it was impossible not to have a sense of optimism and hope (and, I bet, joy) result from this crazy undertaking.

Who knows what these feel like in practice – they’re pretty nuts to be sure.  I mostly love them, and must admit that doing things differently feels comfortable to me at a startup or at Google, but I’d never seriously considered that an undertaking of this size and success could go about their business in such a different way.

The words I was left with upon hearing Tim were “trust” and “discovery” and “respect” and “pride” (also his fundraising approach is apparently is to shake people by the lapels and ask them “do you want to be the guy who turned down the Beatles?!” along with other references to their tombstones).

My big takeaway is that we really can do things differently – not a little differently, not just at the beginning, and not only at a small scale – but we don’t because we’re dogged by the notion that there’s a “right” way, a buttoned-up, grown up way to do business.  The huge problem is that this “right” way has done a great job at creating mostly disengaged employees who check out the moment they show up to work.

Why have we so quickly and easily abandoned the notion that work can be joyful?

The Lean Nonprofit

~ Sasha ~ 13 Comments

I think of Eric Reis’ book, The Lean Startup, as an innovation handbook.  Eric, a software engineer turned successful entrepreneur, sets out to dispel myths around innovation and entrepreneurship.  He unpacks what it actually takes to innovate in the real world.

What the book really does is recast the old entrepreneur-in-a-garage yarn we’ve heard so many times.  Eric reminds us (video link to his Google talk) that every entrepreneurship story we’ve ever been told (think The Social Network) has the same basic structure:

Part 1: entrepreneur (and a couple of friends) have a revolutionary idea.  They pull all-nighters in the proverbial garage, write a bunch of code, and the idea comes to life.

Part 2: “photo montage” that lasts about two minutes long while they actually build the company.

Part 3: entrepreneurs fight over how to distribute the spoils.

The Lean Startup is all about Part 2, the actual work of figuring out if the thing you’re building is of any value to your customers.

Eric’s main premise, based on his own experience as a serial entrepreneur, is that most innovators and their teams waste huge amounts of time because they prioritize getting work done over figuring out what their customers want.  In Eric’s case, as the CTO of a software company called IMVU (which lets you make cool online avatars), he spent six months killing himself writing 25,000 lines of code.  The catch was that when IMVU put the software in front of 16 year old kids (their customers) they discovered that a core functionality of the software that had taken six months to develop – that it worked with every major instant messaging  platform – was absolutely useless to the 16-year-olds.  Six months of work totally wasted because the team wasn’t willing to test their assumptions at the beginning.  Six months building functionality when they could have built a webpage in one day and gotten the same answer.

If innovation is all about operating within conditions of extreme uncertainty, and if we are first and foremost in search of answers and only THEN building our products, then we have to get a lot better at getting answers quickly (and yes, I do believe that social change work nearly always operates under conditions of “extreme uncertainty.”)  To do this, we have to get better at what Eric calls “validated learning” – getting clear data around our core assumptions – by iterating through a BUILD – MEASURE – LEARN cycle:

By embracing a Lean Startup mindset, you build products in a completely different way.  Your early products’ only job is to allow you to test your assumptions; you do this by MEASURING results that validate or reject these assumptions; and you LEARN from these results, and either pivot your company strategy to a new direction or continue on course.

The big point of the giant chart (the whole point of the book really) is: the main determinant of whether / how quickly we innovate is how quickly we can go through the BUILD – MEASURE – LEARN cycle.  The faster we go, the more quickly we learn, the more often we pivot, the less time we waste.  We optimize for learning and build organizations that are made to adapt quickly.

Makes sense, but it’s not how we (any of us) act most of the time.

And this is where the lightbulb went off for me about the social sector.  It’s never felt to me like we are, by and large, built for innovation, yet that always felt like it had to do with willingness to take risk – especially on the part of the big institutional players.  And while there’s some truth to this critique, it also partially misses the mark.

Imagine if you had to write Eric’s chart for the nonprofit sector.  My best attempt at this looks like this:

The lightbulb moment for me is that we are structured as a sector to have a BUILD – MEASURE – LEARN cycle that lasts three years (sometimes longer)…the time it takes to get a grant, execute against that grant, write the grant report during and after the grant, and potentially renew.   So the underlying problem isn’t about willingness to take risk, the underlying problem is the false premise that long cycle times make sense – when in fact as a sector we need new and better solutions nearly everywhere and need to create engines of innovation to get us there.

Our sector conducts itself with an academic approach to learning – with all of the rigor and the long, slow cycle times that always entails.

Of course there’s amazing work going on nearly everywhere, people bucking the system, working around the barriers, making incredible things happen despite the structure being all wrong.

But what would a world look like in which we acknowledged that we don’t have all the answers?  What would it look like if we asked ourselves NOT to be right from the get-go but instead to create approaches and systems that are designed from the outset to incorporate learning quickly?

I think it would look pretty different from what we’ve got today.  I think that business approaches would be a bigger part of the answer not because it’s inherently better when people pay for things but because businesses are designed with built-in feedback loops from customers.  I think that providers of capital would feel more like long-term partners and no one would survive who didn’t learn quickly and adapt often.  I think we’d listen to end customers a lot more and treat experts less like experts and more like people with accumulated experience from which we can all learn.

What else would a Lean Nonprofit sector look like to you?

Scarcity

~ Sasha ~ 7 Comments

A student at a nonprofit school of management told me that they are learning a lot about how to operate under conditions of scarcity – because that’s what the nonprofit sector is like.

The catch is that if you start with the notion of scarcity and how to cope with it, that’s your mindset.  Money is scarce, it’s a zero sum game, you see constraints all around you.   You’re being taught to operate within a broken system.

Let’s break this system (that includes the schools with this mindset).  Let’s reinforce in our students a mindset of abundance, of possibility, of agency.  And then let’s rip out all the classes and lectures about scarcity and replace them with lectures from the best fundraisers and executive directors and philanthropists we can find – so we can give students the tools to create these conditions of abundance.

Friction

~ Sasha ~ 7 Comments

Reflecting on the last two days’ posts – one on the long, hard, stupid way and one on mobile gift giving, I’m left with the notion that if we’re going to bring on serious partners to solve serious problems, then we actually need some friction.

That is: Kony2012 is essentially frictionless.  It spreads like wildfire.  But the disconnect between the apparent ease of “doing something” about Kony (“buy your Kony action kit”) and what it will take to address all the complexities in Northern Uganda and beyond is….stark, to say the least.

It seems like we have three options:

  1. Confine high-velocity, frictionless stories to ideas that are pretty simple
  2. Use high-velocity, frictionless stories as the hook to get people’s attention, and then start a longer, more engaged dialogue
  3. Decide that real solutions will require embracing complexity from the get-go – so a big push to engage with an audience that craves simplicity is actually not time and money well spent.

Which do you choose?

What’s sacred about you?

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Here’s the one thing I can’t stop thinking about after writing yesterday’s post: what’s sacred about me?

Meaning, Jonathan Haidt’s research tells us that to understand people and how they make decisions, you have to understand what they hold sacred.  Around these sacred beliefs, there’s a halo of willful ignorance, one that few facts can penetrate and, if they do, these facts fail to dislodge the core belief.

It must be the case that this applies to self-image, that there are things I fundamentally believe about myself (that you believe about yourself) that blind me (you) to the facts.

The capacity for change comes from the willingness to observe the things that are most dear in my self-image and expose them.  Most obviously, Jonathan challenges me to look at the notion that I’m an open-minded person by asking me how much I understand the perspective of people whose core beliefs differ fundamentally from my own.  More broadly, we all walk around with notions of who we are, namely…

I am:

[   ] good

[   ] bad

at public speaking; writing; analysis; closing a sale; inspiring others; leading a team; coming up with new ideas; getting things over the finish line; fundraising; meeting new people; taking risks.

For example if you’d asked me when I was 23 what job I would never, ever want to or be able to do successfully I would have said “any kind of sales job.”  Whoops.

There are only two ways to break this cycle.  The best way is to decide not to listen to the stories you tell yourself and to start doing things that contradict your most sacred beliefs about who you are and what you’re best and worst at.  Then supercharge your efforts by creating a culture of honest and open feedback (a la Open 360) – a work environment in which people who know you and who deeply care about your success and that of your organization actually sit down and tell you what we’re best at.

I promise, you’re your worst critic.   In the act of trying, buttressed by feedback from invested and caring colleagues, you’ll show this critic who’s boss.

The impact-to-scale ratio

~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

Every so often, I cannot help but comment from afar on corporate social responsibility (CSR).  I worked in this area for IBM and GE before coming to Acumen, and I greatly appreciate what it takes to get big companies to do things differently – to incorporate a broader set of stakeholders and to think in terms of longer time horizons when making decisions.  I also know how hard it is to move the needle on this stuff (e.g. Nike).

With this potential for impact, as a general rule I’m always amazed at what companies can get away with talking about and not talking about in public forums.

Simply put, should it be OK for a company to talk about a single program or initiative if that program / initiative is tiny relative to the scope of the entire organization?

I don’t think it should be, but time and again I’ve heard CEOs of companies with $50 billion to $100 billion in revenues give major speeches about $20 million programs (that’s 0.2% of revenues!).  Not once, but often.  And the programs are used as proof points for statements about how the company conducts its business globally.  It would be no less absurd for a CEO to talk about one call center or to talk about its smallest division in its smallest market – which of course would never happen.

There should be some minimum threshold of impact to scale before any CEO is allowed to talk about anything of this nature.

The reason we care about how corporations behave is because of their size and scope.  So: Apple’s supply chain matters a lot, what Apple does in and around Cupertino is good to know but essentially irrelevant.  Pepsi’s Refresh program is a wonderfully innovative form of corporate philanthropy coupled with crowdsourcing, but their opportunity for real global impact starts and ends with what they are and aren’t doing about obesity and  diabetes.  When Wal-Mart puts its weight behind fluorescent bulbs it matters.  If BP were to shift a major portion of its business away from fossil fuels the world would care, but Deepwater made it pretty clear that they are not “beyond petroleum.”

I’ve argued before that we can do much better than “more than nothing” when talking about the role of corporations in building a better world, and when you get Fortune 50 CEOs in a closed room to talk about the world and the future it’s clear that all of the top companies care deeply about these issues and see them as core to their long-term success.

But somehow we keep on falling into this trap of talking about nice, ancillary philanthropic endeavors as if the person on the stage is running a medium-sized nonprofit and not a multi-billion dollar, global institution.

We can do so much better.