A conversation about diversity, inclusion, and design with Lean Startup Conference 2018 speaker Liz Jackson

Ragen Chastain, our Inclusion and Accessibility Manager for this year's Lean Startup Conference, spoke recently with Liz Jackson, an advocate and consultant and founder of The Disabled List, who will be presenting at the conference on Designing with Disability.

We created Ragen’s role to further our long-standing efforts to make sure the conference is open to all. A lot of important initiatives fall under her purview, including creating a diverse group of people at every level; creating ticket levels, scholarships, volunteer, and livestream opportunities so that money isn’t a barrier to participation in the conference; and creating a comprehensive Accessibility and Inclusion Guide and enforced Code of Conduct that make our values and expectations clear. In addition, Ragen is in charge of outreach to affinity groups and organizations for people who are typically underrepresented in order to find speakers, sponsors, and volunteers. We want a conference that welcomes and centers the voices of those who have been traditionally marginalized and excluded, including People of Color, disabled people/people with disabilities, LGBTQI people, and women. Diversity makes events and organizations better because amazing ideas and innovations lie outside of our own experiences, and people from different backgrounds can teach one another new approaches to problem-solving. We want to be a part of building a future where diversity, inclusion, and accessibility are expected, celebrated, and affirmed.

We're on the path and moving forward with purpose, but we know we have plenty of work to do. That's why we have an open door policy, as well as specific opportunities, to provide feedback on how we can improve our efforts. If you have thoughts or suggestions, please e-mail Ragen at: ragen@leanstartup.co


The conference is sold out, but you can still register for our free livestream:

Meanwhile, here’s Ragen and Liz’s conversation about Liz’s work on disability design, how she came to it, and more--including some thoughts on Stephen Hawking.


Would you start by telling us a bit about yourself, and how you got started working with disability and design?

On March 30th of 2012, I woke up to a new body. That was when I began to understand my lifelong relationship with disability. I never knew it, but I had always had a relationship with disability, and it wasn't until I had the clarity of a drastic change in my body that I realized what it meant, for me, to be disabled. To everyone around me, that meant that I had lost the ability to choose my body. But it wasn’t the change in my body that pained me--it was that I could no longer choose products and narratives that reflected my identity. For example, why do I have so much choice with eyeglass frames but absolutely none with canes? I first set out to resolve this frustration by creating an organization that would provide more choice in the marketplace; I was going to design more canes. But what the last six years have taught me was that this is not a simple problem requiring a simple solution; it’s a profound lack of infrastructure that keeps oppressive models of disability in place.


How are you tackling that problem?

Even though I have no formal design training, I am now the founder of The Disabled List, which is a disability-led, self-advocacy organization that is creating opportunities in design; be it through product, branding, marketing or other creative fields. I fundamentally believe it’s my lack of formal education, and the ways I’ve hacked my knowledge that have put me in this unique position to reassess the status quo. The life of a disabled person is spent cultivating an intuitive creativity — allowing us to re-form a world not shaped for our bodies. Disability ingenuity is responsible for omnipresent designs such as the bicycle, touchscreen technology, and cruise control. Through integrating specific, disability-led ways of knowing into design pedagogy and practice, The Disabled List advocates for a future as yet unimagined.


Why is it important to design with and invest in disabled people rather than simply creating solutions for disability?

The presumption that disabled people simply want to be fixed or that only we want things fixed is wholly inaccurate. Sure, sometimes we want those things. What we really want though, is to participate and to be truly seen--meaning accurately represented--in society.

Your question makes me think of an ad that made the rounds on social media when Nike signed their first disabled athlete. It wasn’t even 4 seconds into the video, when Nike described marathon runner Justin Gallegos as someone who suffers from Cerebral Palsy. On World Cerebral Palsy Day! Their word choice of ‘suffers’ demonstrates how charities or brand initiatives tend to position our bodies as a tragedy so that they can either raise money or bolster their bottom line.

As the ad progresses, the viewer grows aware that Nike is going to surprise Justin at the finish line with a contract. The entire narrative struck me as preposterous because I had never before seen a sports apparel company or team ‘surprise’ an athlete with a professional contract as a gift. If you Google ‘signing day’ you will see image after image of athletes seated at tables in front of contracts, pen in hand, treated as professionals. The mere fact that Nike felt they needed to market the signing of this particular athlete as a ‘surprise’ or ‘gift’ rather than a transaction tells me that they don’t see him as valuable. They view their charitable gesture as a brand enhancer.


How does your work specifically address that kind of problem?

I’m trying to shed light on the ways disabled people are prevented from participating in design, marketing and investment decisions that presumably should impact us. Had Nike hired a disabled person as a decision maker in the process, I assure you that Justin Gallegos would have been sitting at a table with a pen and a contract, and treated as a valuable signee. Justin should serve as a reminder that this emerging disability market, which is larger than the size of China, cannot be tapped until disabled people are valued at the helm of culture globally.


What about events? How can event planners do a better job of incorporating disability into cultural practices?

Events must prioritize access. This can play out in a myriad of ways, but I’ll use my experiences thus far with the upcoming Lean Startup Conference. In my initial correspondences with Lean Startup, I hedged my participation on whether accommodations such as captioning and transcripts of video and audio content would be made. Lean Startup made this easy on me. Thank you Lean Startup!

I was glad to see how Lean Startup has already incorporated access into its ethos. When an attendee registers for the Lean Startup Conference, they’re asked to complete a registration form which has a box that can be checked if they require accommodations. A representative from Lean Startup then follows up with that person directly to ensure they will have full access to all of the events. I’m increasingly seeing this as common practice for events and hope it becomes the status quo in coming years.

Beyond accommodations, my work is focused on finding ways for disability to influence the culture of these events. How do I ensure that I’m not the only disabled speaker? If I’m the first disabled person invited to speak, how do I ensure that I’m not tokenized and that the door remains open for my disabled peers, either on that same stage or at future events? I now serve on advisory panels for such conferences as SXSW, ensuring both access and opportunities are incorporated.


What other projects do you currently have underway?

The Disabled List started out as a list of creative disabled people who have a background in disability studies and are available to consult. It has been a massive success; people on The Disabled List have been brought on to consult with such brands as Wells Fargo, Google Creative Lab, Volkswagen and more.

Over the course of the last year, I started The WITH Fellowship, which facilitates a process of designing with, rather than for, disability by partnering disabled creatives with top design studios and creative spaces. The first cohort, which started in September 2018, partnered four creative disabled New Yorkers WITH SYPartners, Frog Design, Pollack Textiles and Gibney Dance. Our second cohort runs from February 4 to April 29, 2019 — applications for prospective fellows and organizations in New York City and San Francisco are now open.

I recently came across a quote by the late Stephen Hawking, where he said time and space are finite in extent, but they don't have any boundary or edge. As I read it, I recalled wondering if he was talking about the universe, or if he was in fact, talking about his disability. At the very least, I felt that his disability must have informed his perceptions of the universe profoundly. As I read it and read it and read it, I began to think about the inherent conflict of Universal Design in disability. There’s this presumption that you can make an object or a system that works, as intended, for every human being on the planet. But disabled people will be the first to tell you that there is always going to be an exception, this is our foundational experience of the world. Nothing is universal. But what Stephen Hawking taught me was that the work we do in disability, while not universal, is expansive. It expands our understanding of humanity. It expands what we have the access to do. And it expands what we have the freedom to pursue. I have found this miniscule pocket in the universe, a black hole if you will, and by letting it consume me, I have discovered the world.

An Interview with Author and Lean Startup Conference 2018 Speaker Giff Constable

One of the speakers at this year’s Lean Startup Conference, which kicks off on November 14th in Las Vegas, is Giff Constable. Giff is a repeat entrepreneur whose companies include Neo, a product innovation consulting firm where he worked with organizations like the Mayo Clinic and Time, Inc. before it was acquired by Pivotal. He was most recently VP of product at Axial, a fintech startup that connected medium-sized businesses with capital providers and buyers, where he oversaw product management, engineering and design.

At the conference, he’ll be talking about transforming your organization’s culture to support innovation and running two workshops: one on Mastering Experiment Design, and one on Customer Discovery. He’s also written books on both of those topics: Talking to Humans, published in 2014, and now, a follow-up volume called Testing with Humans, just out this week. Frank Rimalovski of NYU collaborated on both. We recently spoke about customer discovery, experiments, and his writing habits and process.

Testing with Humans uses a fictional story of two entrepreneurs building a soccer ball sensor company. How did you come up with that example and what makes it useful for discussing experiments?

The story is really a composite of multiple real situations. I just blended them into a unified arc. Business fiction can be tricky to get right, but it did allow me to get a lot of ideas across with one coherent example rather than twenty fragmented ones.

As for why a soccer ball? That's easy — I'm a huge English Premier League fan (go Bournemouth!), so how could I resist? In all seriousness, in both this book and its prequel, I wanted the entrepreneurs to have a product idea that many people could relate to. I chose physical products both times so that the concepts didn't feel specific to tech or software. Experiments and customer discovery are powerful across all types of business.


What was the most surprising thing you discovered while gathering the research for the book?

I guess the most shocking thing came from talking to my former colleague David Bland. I was surprised to hear him say how many people, across his coaching, are still struggling with the basic concept of landing pages. I would like to think that we're further along than that. I always have to remind myself how long it takes for things to seep into widespread practice, especially things that fight against our cognitive biases.


What step do people most often try to skip in the experimentation process?

I'm going to give you a three-part answer. The first is experiments themselves. Everyone knows that they should run experiments, just like they know they should talk to customers, but that doesn't mean they do it. People chase a perception of speed, when in actuality they go slower because of mistaken decisions, big and small, that could have been avoided.

Within experiments, however, it really depends on one's psychological profile. "Do-ers" jump right into experimenting without prioritizing what they really need to learn. "Seat of the pants" types ignore structure and change too many variables in parallel, making it really hard to interpret results. The high-charisma founder usually has a huge problem resisting confirmation bias. The introverts hide behind the experiment, putting data on a pedestal while missing out on the huge insights that come from talking to participants. To do lean startup well, you need to understand your own makeup and challenge your weaknesses.

Lastly, I've learned that for any big, important experiment, it's worth running an experiment about the experiment. In other words, test the design first, before scaling (just like a startup!). This small investment pays dividends with speed and better decisions.


If you had to pick one element that every single experiment needs to have, what would it be?

A very specific quantitative goal, even if it is a guess! I've always seen that if you don't go into an experiment with a clear goal, everything becomes mushy from that point on.


What's the most challenging audience question you've ever had to answer?

That has to be: "How do I know when to kill an idea?" I share a lot of tactics in the book, but there's one area where I absolutely refuse to be prescriptive: decision-making. Everyone has their own context. I certainly do not believe that one experiment should make or break someone's vision. However, I firmly do believe that good experiments will arm you with far better information to make those big, heavy decisions. Unfortunately, they don't let you off the hook of having to make them.


What's one of the best experiments you've seen and why?

The non-profit Taproot Foundation ran an excellent Wizard-of-Oz experiment as they sought to scale, by way of an online application, their historical service of connecting non-profits with pro-bono experts.

Because they had been manually providing this service for years, they could have been cocky about their expertise. Instead, they challenged themselves to ask hard questions. They ran a Wizard-of-Oz experiment that was sharp from top to bottom. They had tight hypotheses statements and quantitative goals. They ran it at an intense pace. They tracked and openly shared their metrics. They talked to participants of the experiment, rather than relying solely on metrics to tell the story. The team also brought their entire organization along for the ride with excellent internal communication. In the process, they ran into unexpected challenges, learned a ton, and ultimately informed a much better final product (found at https://www.taprootplus.org).

It was particularly impressive to see a non-profit, which as a field can be pretty hidebound at times, attempting to work in such an agile and forward-thinking way.


Do you have a daily writing routine when you're working on a book?

This book took years to get out, because I was busy selling a company and then helping to build another startup. I was finally able to build momentum by getting up regularly at 5am. I could get an hour or two of good writing in while fresh, before startup pressures invaded my brain. And I'll admit, my family has been very patient as I've disappeared for weekends at a time.

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You can buy Talking to Humans here. You can buy Testing with Humans here. Both books are available to schools and non-profits for free, via a form you can fill out either here or here. Follow Giff on Twitter at: @giffco.

A closer look at Lean Startup Conference 2018

As we put the final touches on Lean Startup Conference 2018, I wanted to take a moment to share more about some of the panels, workshops, and events. For the whole program, please take a look here. We’re looking forward to channeling the energy and excitement attendees bring with them, and to providing opportunities to learn about not just things that have been successful, but missteps and major obstacles that have been overcome--all part of the Lean Startup process.

Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn and Greylock Partners will be talking about “blitzscaling” with his co-author Chris Yeh, and Stanford Professor Bob Sutton. That’s the growth management strategy that prioritizes speed over efficiency in an environment of uncertainty as an organization scales. It’s the engine that has powered companies including Amazon, Alibaba, and Google. As Hoffman has put it, if starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and assembling a plane on the way down, scaling is like “assembling that plane faster then strapping on and igniting a set of jet engines, while still building the wings.” You need the right tools.

Joel Spolsky, CEO of Trello, will be sharing his experiences building Stack Overflow (after 10 years, the 65th most popular website in the world with 12 billion views), Glitch, and Trello. His understanding of the value of building community has informed all of his work, and he views it as an integral part of creating a company. He’ll also talk about what coding can, and should, look like in years to come, a responsibility he takes seriously as he believes that “being a developer gives you an unparalleled opportunity to write the script for the future.”

Kabam, the mobile gaming company, hit a major stumbling block in its early days when its financing was lost due to the 2008 financial collapse. It not only survived but was sold nine years later for $1Billion. Co-founder Holly Liu will walk us through the the decisions that led to that outcome. Among other things, it’s a story about the inestimable value of the pivot, which in this case made the difference--several times--between folding and huge success. Along the way, the company faced challenges while scaling and going global, and she’ll touch on those, too.

In a fireside chat, Kathryn Minshew of The Muse and Brit Morin of Brit + Co will discuss their strategies for acquiring customers and how they continuously innovate to stay ahead of the shifting demands of the millennial generation. Both women started their companies as platforms for sharing information that helps people tap into their natural strengths--professional for Minshew and creative for Morin--and both companies are directly linked to their founder’s own experiences.

Hands-on learning will also a big part of this year’s conference, providing real experience with critical techniques. In the Mastering Experiment Design workshop, participants will come prepared with a risky assumption of their own to build an experiment on, which they can then use to begin testing right away. The essential elements of effective experiments, which are the best tool for making better decisions and assessing risk, will be outlined. The presenters will discuss how to avoid common mistakes as well as provide tools for unlocking the creativity of teams.

The Mastering Customer Discovery workshop will be a forum for practicing and refining customer interview techniques, finding good candidates, and turning what you learn into action. Talking with customers can be a surprisingly tricky thing to get right, so a great customer discovery process is important.

As is the right business model, which is the focus of the Don’t Bet on Your First Business Model workshop. It tackles how to validate a business model in the early stages, using the Lean Canvas tool to look at assumptions about problems, solutions, and sales channels followed by creating hypotheses and experiments to either validate or disprove those assumptions. Every experiment, regardless of its outcome, should be built on a solid foundation, and this workshop shows how to do that.

We’ve also put together a number of case study presentations on fundamentals that will speed and shape your building process in the early days. There’s one on A/B Testing that draws on growth management lessons from KISSmetrics and I Will Teach You To Be Rich to help answer questions like: “What happens when your testing program is set up incorrectly?” It also lays out the 8 tried and true rules of testing that can help you avoid worrying about what you’re testing instead of how you’ll execute the test. This kind of testing, done right, is definitive for creating growth. Another case study takes up Amazon’s practice of “Working Backwards” that’s been so critical to the company’s innovative culture and growth. It will cover how the company is organized to follow this practice, and how its mechanisms actually work on a practical level.

Finally, we know building a business is more than just work. That’s why we’ve put together a panel that looks at the human side of being a founder. Taking Care of Business AND You brings together experts from numerous fields to talk about founder self-care on every front.

Having hundreds of Lean Startup practitioners in the same place is also an ideal time to draw on that other critical resource--the knowledge and experiences of peers. We have no doubt that the conversations and connections will be boundless, in settings that include all of the above and also range from small, conversational Meetups to more structured Lunch and Learns.

We’re looking forward to seeing you in Las Vegas. If you haven’t registered yet, you can do it here.

Join me in Downtown Las Vegas on November 14th

In just over a month, I’ll be heading to the Zappos campus in Downtown Las Vegas to meet up with a global community of entrepreneurs at the Lean Startup Conference.

I’m really excited about this year’s program. Whether you’re brand new to Lean Startup, a seasoned practitioner, a founder, or an innovation leader within a global enterprise, you’ll have a chance to learn from and meet some of the most truly innovative thinkers I know. We hope you’ll leave inspired to go back to your organization and take action.

I’ll be taking to the main stage with Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, to talk about how his company has overcome critical business challenges and answer your questions. Also featured on the main stage will be Kabam Co-Founder Holly Liu, LinkedIn Co-Founder and CEO Reid Hoffman, Brit + Co Founder and CEO Brit Morin, and Stack Overflow Co-Founder and CEO Joel Spolsky.

There will also be workshops focused around case studies that dive deep into real-world applications of Lean Startup principles across industries and company sizes, including non-profits. Each of you will get to choose an example that applies to your own circumstances, so these hands-on sessions will be not only interactive but super relevant. Some of them cover Lean Startup basics like assessing risk and making assumptions, how to build a great team, how to use A/B testing effectively, and the value of learning from failure. Others explore the ways you can effect real change once Lean Startup has become your standard way of operating, whether in your own company by using innovation accounting--VC-like metered funding and growth boards to assess and either kill or continue projects--or, in a whole different, equally critical realm, by using lean principles to propel social change through programs and education.

A number of panel presentations have been put together as well, to create space for discussion and diverse perspectives. These tackle big issues like how to lead culture transformation inside a large organization, how to use Lean for fundraising in the non-profit world, the huge changes that the Internet of Things is bringing to business, and a conversation about the human side of being a founder.

Each of these workshops and panels is meant to give you a chance to engage with entrepreneurs who’ve experienced--or are experiencing--the same challenges you do, so everyone can learn from each other.

This chance to make lasting connections continues to be thing people most often talk to me about after conferences, and it’s the reason so many of you come back more than once. This year, we’re expanding that network to include entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, and innovators from across the world so we can all benefit from even more perspectives. I hope that the evening dinners and receptions we’ve planned, including a special event at the world-famous Mob Museum next to Zappos Campus, will provide yet another way for everyone to connect on a more casual, but equally important, level.

I hope you’ll come to Las Vegas to lend your voice, share your ideas, renew your energy, and explore ideas that will inspire and challenge you.

Lessons Learned: Hugh Molotsi

Innovation within large corporations has more in common with startups than you’d think, but also comes with its own set of challenges. In The Intrapraneur’s Journey, Hugh Molotsi and Jeff Zias share their experiences at Intuit and lay out the guidelines for fostering innovation projects and also an innovative culture within enterprise companies. Here, Hugh Molotsi takes us from skunkworks to large-scale success.

I’ve been very blessed to have had a 22-year career at Intuit where I held various product roles from software developer on QuickBooks for DOS to offering leader on QuickBooks Connected Services. When I left Intuit in 2015, I was VP of Innovation and led Intuit Labs, Intuit’s internal incubator.

One of the highlights of my time at Intuit was being part of a skunkworks team in 1999 that developed Intuit’s first payment service, the QuickBooks Merchant Account Service. After months of advocating for the idea of allowing QuickBooks users to process credit card payments from their customers inside the product, we were finally given the green light to proceed but only had 12 weeks to make it happen.

We were severely under-resourced (initially the team was just a Product Manager, Scott Baird and me) and had to overcome significant organizational pushback from people who thought the whole idea was terrible and that what we were doing was dangerous. Somehow, with hard work and the help of a few key colleagues, we were able to deliver a functioning service to customers on time. Through the great work of many other Intuit employees, Intuit Payments would eventually become a roughly $1B business for Intuit and a key enabling feature for over half of Intuit’s small business revenue. I was generously rewarded the Intuit Founders Award in 2011 for helping get it started.

On reflection, I’ve half-jokingly said that the only reason our skunkworks service saw the light of day was because our group wasn’t well managed at the time. Perhaps if the big-wigs had realized the significance of what we were developing, they would have demanded more detailed plans or assigned the project to a much more senior leader. Flying just enough below the radar and plain luck seemed to be as important to our success as anything else.

Many years later, a group of Intuit employees were asked to develop a program that would give employees autonomous time as a way of increasing employee engagement. For personal inspiration, I thought back to my time on the Merchant Account Service. Imagine if we could create an environment were breakthrough innovations didn’t require luck or flying below the radar? What if the company was supportive of skunkworks projects, ensuring that small passionate teams of employees didn’t have to expend so much energy fighting against organizational pushback?

With this in mind, we started Intuit’s Unstructured Time program in 2005, where employees could spend 10% working on their own projects. The genesis of Unstructured Time was how I met my co-author Jeff Zias, who proved to be an instrumental thought leader and the key driver to getting employees excited about the new program. Jeff and I would go on to spend a decade working together helping cultivate Intuit’s innovation programs.

Unstructured Time has been an unqualified success for Intuit, yielding new offerings like mobile tax and small business applications, the move from desktop software to online “cloud” products, and numerous product improvements and internal process improvements.

Along the way, we had the privilege of spending time with innovation leaders at companies like Google, Atlassian, and LinkedIn who generously shared what has worked for them and what mistakes to avoid.

Jeff and I have shared all of these lessons in our new book The Intrapreneur’s Journey. We’ve seen the rewards of developing a culture of innovation where employees are empowered to work on their own ideas. The road to creating such a culture is riddled with challenges and pitfalls, and our book will help you avoid these pitfalls while creating an environment that empowers your employees. And empowered, energized employees innovate greatly improved experiences for your customers, ultimately driving growth.

The Intrapraneur’s Journey is available to order for a limited time (only until September 22, 2018) on Kickstarter.

You can also follow the authors on Twitter: @hughmolotsi and @jeffzias

Lessons Learned: Ann Mei Chang

We say we want to make the world a better place, so why does it seem like we’re working so hard just to stay in place? With Lean Impact, Ann Mei Chang takes us on her journey of trying to bring innovation and social good together.

ANN MEI CHANG:

I thought that my decades working at some of the most innovative Silicon Valley companies would prepare me to tackle the big problems that really matter. Now I realize all the ways the tech industry has it easy.

16 years ago, I met Eric Ries when we were both working at an up-and-coming startup that held the promise to change the way we communicate and socialize. We poured our hearts, souls, and virtually every waking hour into what we thought was the perfect vision that would captivate the world. Then we launched, and our presumptions were plunged into cold reality. Sure, we had some passionate users. But, not surprisingly for a revolutionary product, we got as much wrong as we got right. Soon, I was unemployed, lying on a beach licking my wounds and wondering what happened.

While Eric went on co-found another company and write The Lean Startup, I went on to Google. There, we didn’t assume we knew all the answers. Rather, we believed in data. Whether it was a new product, new feature, or even a simple tweak to an algorithm or color choice, we ran experiments to see how users reacted. We lived and breathed the user experience under real world conditions with real world customers. Google didn’t always have the best ideas, but what it had was the ability to learn, iterate, and improve faster than its competitors. Seven years ago, when I left to dedicate the rest of my career to social good, I thought I could take these lessons with me and use them to make a difference.

Alas, it wasn’t so simple.

As I immersed myself in my new mission, I found myself continually propelled back into the poor practices of my failed startup. In this case, it wasn’t hubris but rather a web of  perverse incentives that in combination induce organizations to draw up incredibly detailed plans in advance, then implement them faithfully without necessarily knowing what’s working. Only rarely are they able to gather feedback and data, let alone incorporate improvements. The biggest challenge was the nature of funding, which tends to emphasize predictability and discourage iteration. On top of that, it’s far harder to measure social impact than e-commerce transactions or experiment responsibly when people’s lives hang in the balance.

Mission-driven organizations face immense hurdles in keeping up with, let alone getting ahead of the ever-accelerating pace of change in the world. But, given the pressing problems facing people and the planet, I wasn’t about to give up. My search led me to the Global Development Lab at USAID. In the heart of one of the largest and most established organizations working to end global poverty, the Lab nurtures groundbreaking social entrepreneurs and designs new ways of funding that can better support learning, risk-taking, and experimentation. In my years there, I encountered more and more trailblazers both at nimble startups and in pockets at larger institutions who were breaking the mold. Still, these were by and large early adopters.

As my appointment at USAID came to an end, I began to pursue a number of opportunities to lead nonprofits in the global development sphere. When I got my first offer, I knew I had a tough choice – would I do more good by working within a broken system to make what difference I could or by trying to change the way the system worked altogether? I decided to plunge head first into the latter. Given the perverse incentives, deeply ingrained culture, and difficulty of adopting widely used innovation techniques in the world of social good, I simply couldn’t convince myself that I’d be able to make a meaningful dent on the problems I cared about without first addressing some of the barriers to social innovation. Thus, Lean Impact was born.

To learn from those who had pioneered new models for designing solutions, accelerating learning, and financing social good, I asked the smartest people I knew to tell me about the best organizations they had heard of across the US and around the world. In the course of my research, I was lucky to interview over 200 of them.

They include Summit Public Schools, a nonprofit that was unwilling to wait potentially years to see full academic results and found ways to dramatically speed up its feedback loop so it could more quickly iterate and improve its transformative approach to personalized learning. Another great story came from One Acre Fund, a social enterprise that learned from a failed big bet and introduced staged experiments to test and improve new ideas with its smallholder farmers before investing in a large rollout. Still others, like Civilla, have worked hand-in-hand with government to drive change – in its case taking a human-centered approach to make access to social services in Michigan far simpler.

Companies like M-Kopa Solar, Off Grid Electric, and d.light are not only innovating on their home solar systems for low-income families, but also the business models that allow them to become profitable and expand. And, cutting edge funders like the Global Innovation Fund are deploying the increasingly flexible and blended financing that is needed to allow and encourage rapid learning.

It turns out that social good is no longer the exclusive purview of nonprofits and foundations. Increasingly, I’ve found that the most promising solutions are coming from hybrid organizations and funders – whether they be social enterprises, B corps, venture philanthropy, impact investing, or some combination. As individuals choose where to work, buy, and invest based on their values, businesses are taking notice. And, to achieve sustainable impact at scale, government and policy often must play a crucial role. I wrote Lean Impact for anyone pursuing a social mission, so that we can all work together in concert to drive much needed change.

What it comes down to is, how do we create a system so that the pursuit of social impact and scale becomes as relentless as the pursuit of profits in the corporate world?

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Lean Impact: How to Innovate for Radically Greater Social Good (Wiley, Oct 30) is available for pre-order at Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Indiebound | Books-A-Million | 800ceoread.
 
Visit the author’s site. Follow her on Twitter.

Lean Startup Conference 2018 is Coming to Las Vegas

After eight years in San Francisco, the Lean Startup Company's annual flagship conference is moving to downtown Las Vegas. From November 14 - 16, at the Zappos Campus, Lean Startup Conference 2018 will feature all-new workshops, speakers, and networking events covering all the latest Lean Startup insights and innovations. I'm excited to tell you more about it.

When Zappos approached Lean Startup Co. a little while back about hosting our conference in Downtown Las Vegas, we saw it as an opportunity to further expand our mission beyond Silicon Valley. South Bend, Indiana went from Rust Belt to Tech Belt with EdTech in the Bend. Detroit has Technology in Motion (TIM). Austin has SXSW. Revolutionary work can be done anywhere, and that's part of what this move is about. In addition to iconic hotels, casinos and restaurants, DTLV, just north of the strip, also has the Downtown Project: a thriving scene of tech startups, arts, culture, and education. Conference attendees will be staying at the Downtown Grand Hotel, one block from the conference venue, and right in the middle of DTLV--immersed in the city’s entrepreneurial culture day and night.

We’ve also made some changes to how the conference is structured. Instead of organizing workshops by company size as we have in the past, we've created more focused topic tracks that will highlight entrepreneurs in every industry. These workshops and keynote presentations will put you in the same rooms as innovators from across the world, representing businesses of all sizes, from many fields.

And because learning from peers is also such a critical part of Lean Startup, this year's conference will place a special focus on bringing together the Lean Startup Community, allowing enterprise executives, nonprofit leaders, NGO’s and of course startups at all stages to meet like-minded colleagues, share stories, and form lasting relationships.

With Zappos’ support, we've created a higher-end, more intimate conference centered around hands-on learning by doing and making meaningful connections with fellow Lean Startup practitioners. As a result, tickets are more limited than in the past and we expect them to sell out quickly.

I'm really looking forward to the changes, as well as the chance to learn myself. I hope to see you there.

Lean Startup Conference 2018
November 14 – 16, 2018
Zappos Campus, Downtown Las Vegas

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A Non-Profit Lean Startup: The Story of Adopt-a-Pet

David Meyer founded Adopt-a-Pet.com (formerly 1-800-Save-A-Pet.com) in 2000 as a way of ending pet overpopulation. Today it’s North America's largest non-profit pet adoption website, with millions of visitors to the site each month and partnerships with more than 17,000 animal shelters, pet rescue groups, humane societies and shelters.

When the non-profit was nearly acquired by a for-profit company several years ago, the time came to take a step back and re-evaluate what they were doing. “We decided that if we were not going to sell, we were going to really up our game,” says Abbie Moore, chief product officer. The result was a reframing of how they understood their mission. Instead of running a non-profit that happened to be a web site, they reconceived Adopt-a-Pet as a technology company that happened to be a non-profit.

Like many new organizations that experience huge growth, Adopt-a-Pet needed to figure out how to manage it effectively. The company had no real process in place for developing its product, even as the product was doing well. “We were a mess,” says Moore. “We still found a lot of success, but really in spite of our knowledge (or lack thereof) and not because of it.” In the areas where the organization was successful, there was no real understanding as to why.

Around this time Moore was introduced to lean principles through The Lean Startup and urged CEO David Meyer to consider them as well. “We were excited about that methodology,” recalls Meyer. Within a short time, Moore instituted a biweekly, mandatory “Lean Startup” meeting, where the entire organization was required to meet for an hour-long discussion of specific principles. “I would ask everyone to bring examples of how the principles would affect their department or the work they were doing,” says Moore. Everyone from engineers and designers to customer service and support staff was included.

There was some skepticism at first, but Moore kept asking more (and different) questions of her colleagues, a practice she continues. “I still constantly challenge everyone to list out and prioritize their assumptions, and to use MVPs to validate those assumptions,” she says. "One of our drumbeats is, ‘How can we make a year happen in a month?’ If it’s true that we’re going to be better at anything in a year, what can we do to compress that time so we don’t have to wait a year?”

One way the organization began testing its new ways of working was through a peer-to- peer adoption project launched in 2016. The project enabled pet adoption between individuals rather than through traditional animal shelters. It started with an MVP landing page, with Moore acting as the person behind the interaction, personally screening adoption applications and reviewing them with pet owners. By going to meetings with potential owners and adopters, she learned more about what the company needed to offer and what might be missing.

For Meyer, the most important piece of understanding how Adopt-a-Pet could and should reinvent itself involved the value the company was providing to its customer. “It was the realization that users can and should guide us; we don't have to guess at what they want. The whole concept of getting an MVP in front of people as quickly as possible in any form is about being brave and knowing that people will forgive us if it’s not perfect. They want us to succeed.”

For Moore, the two most important changes are the ability to launch a product quickly and to learn from iterations. A few years ago Adopt-a-Pet had metrics that included visitors to the site and how many emails were being sent to users. It was fairly basic information that didn’t offer the organization much insight into how the site was being used. Now the site is about engagements and activity and can measure the ways in which visitors are putting the site to use. Moore also assembled a growth and optimization team that launches test after test to learn how people use Adopt-a-Pet.com and the ways in which improvements can be made. And as the site has evolved, so has the technology that allows potential pet owners to connect with Adopt-a-Pet, more than half of whom now access the site through a mobile device.

“I think a lot of nonprofits are run by super passionate people who have ideas about how to change the world for the segment they serve,” says Moore. “And I think a lot of them do what we did, which was a come up with a program that seems like a good idea, toil away to launch it, and then say, ‘That's done,’ and move onto the next thing. Nonprofits should really start from the beginning and recognize that their ideas about their constituencies and programs are just assumptions that need to be examined, then start from a place of learning, and prioritize that learning above everything else.” That’s where new growth (and in this case, new pets) comes from.

The Energy for Transformation

My most recent book, The Startup Way, is all about the methods and tools big corporations, government, and non-profits can use to innovate: think of it as Lean Startup at scale. One of the things people asked me over and over when I was talking to companies about how to start doing this kind of work, which can feel so daunting, was what it takes to kick off a transformation of this size. What motivates a company to take on such a huge amount of work?

I’ve seen three distinct driving forces behind this kind of change:

1. CRISIS: Sometimes, a crisis forces change. One of the stories I tell in The Startup Way comes from the Federal Government. The very public meltdown of HealthCare.gov, the government’s website designed to implement the Affordable Care Act, was a crisis of the highest order. A huge policy achievement almost went up in smoke because the process of creating the site was so poorly managed it didn’t work on the day it was unveiled. Ultimately, the crisis was the catalyst for real change at numerous agencies across the federal government, beginning with an epic lesson in what can happen if you rely on the traditional “safe” management methods the government used to build the original site.

2. STRATEGY: Other times, a new organizational strategy clearly necessitates a new way of working. At companies like Intuit, change was driven from the very top by a recognition that new strategic imperatives required a dramatic overhaul. This can work only when the most senior leaders in the company have bought into the new approach and are determined to see it through. It is also not the kind of decision that can be made lightly, which is why it becomes critical, after the first stages, to demonstrate how the new methods function and to lay the groundwork for full mobilization across the entire organization.

3. HYPERGROWTH: Success can be its own form of crisis. When a startup achieves product/market fit, it can be forced to grow extremely rapidly. As legendary Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen, also founder of Netscape and general partner of the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, put it (in one of the startup movement’s most famous pieces of writing):

“In a great market—a market with lots of real potential customers—the market pulls product out of the startup...And you can always feel product/market fit when it’s happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it—or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account. You’re hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can. Reporters are calling because they’ve heard about your hot new thing and they want to talk to you about it. You start getting entrepreneur of the year awards from Harvard Business School. Investment bankers are staking out your house.”

An Interview with Steve Liguori, Serial Innovator

I first met Steve Liguori when we were both working at GE, where he was heading up a lot of their innovation efforts. But he’s been a change agent for much longer than that. We spoke recently about his path as a serial innovator, his beginnings in marketing, and what he’s been doing lately with his experience in teaching big companies how to transform themselves from the inside out. I’m a partner in his latest venture, the Corporate Entrepreneur Community (CEC), the newest addition to his long history of reinvention work that spans industries ranging from football to banking. I hope you’ll enjoy the conversation as much as I did.




Your first big innovation was also a huge cultural moment. What was it, and how did it come about?

When I was at PepsiCo, I started the Super Bowl halftime show with Michael Jackson. This was in 1993, and I was the chief marketing officer at Frito-Lay North America. The first Super Bowl halftime show was sponsored by Lay's Potato Chips, which we were re-launching. We were trying to do something dramatically new and innovative from a marketing standpoint, and being owned by Pepsi, which had done Michael Jackson, and was legendary for commercials and crazy marketing, we thought, "Why can't we do something crazy and innovative?" So we came up with the idea of disrupting the Super Bowl by doing, basically, what's now the Super Bowl halftime show--something crazy during halftime that we could own as a marketing vehicle. Before that--you can go back and look at old tape--half-time was the same thing from high school football to college football to NFL football. The marching band came out and did a marching thing and then at home everyone turned off the TV or went and got snacks because the announcers came on and talked football. We knew someone who knew Michael Jackson's agent and that's how it came together. I just always had that gene to make change. We called it “business not as usual.”


Where did that gene take you next?

I got lured away to run a small, private cookie company, and from there I went to Citibank. Going from potato chips and cookies to work at Citibank may seem kind of strange, but I got recruited there because they were looking to reinvent the consumer bank. I was president first of Citibank New York, then Citibank Federal Savings Bank, which is all the U.S. branches. I introduced brokerage services into the branches, which was a huge business innovation because for the first time you could go buy stocks and bonds in the bank branch. The other innovation I headed up there was basically putting Citibank online. I personally bought the citibank.com URL and introduced the first internet-based online banking.


Were people calling this kind of reinvention innovation at the time?

This was during the internet explosion, so I’d say it was called the digital revolution 1.0. In 2001, I moved from Citibank to become the CMO of Morgan Stanley’s brokerage business, where I was tasked with modernizing and reviving the brokerage business there. Everyone needed to get everything online right away and didn't know what the heck to do. I was there to help put Morgan Stanley online, but also to integrate the very broker-centric aspect of the business. Doing both was a really complicated endeavor and I helped reinvent it.  We didn't call it innovation, but it was, because it was about how to transform a purely human-based business into a combination of human and online and get the best of both. Because I’d made a name for myself as an innovative marketer in consumer financing, I was then recruited by GE, which still had a consumer finance brand at the time called GE Money.


Can you talk about how you went from finance marketing to the kinds of innovation projects GE started taking on eventually, which was when we first got acquainted? Clearly there’s a through-line of a willingness to take risks, right?

GE Money ended up being significantly scaled back during the recession in 2008, and as that was happening I met with Beth Comstock, who was the CMO at that time. She said to me, "We've got all these industrial divisions at GE: GE Medical, GE Aviation, GE Energy. Do you think that the basic principles of marketing are the same there as in the consumer world?" And I said, “Is that supposed to be a trick question?” Marketing is marketing, whatever you’re talking about. Two weeks later, I was named the executive director of global marketing for GE at the corporate level, working for Beth Comstock. My charge was to modernize all the marketing departments across the GE divisions. But it wasn’t long before GE realized they had to get moving on digitalization at the business level--that everything that was going on at the consumer level was becoming really important for business as well. They knew they needed to get into industrial software and data. My role migrated over to that, and I was put on a task force to figure out how GE could begin to digitize itself and the industrial internet.

What that means is that If you're running a utility company, an airline, or let's say, even a railroad, the data that comes off of your equipment is invaluable to running your operation more efficiently. In fact, there's a term now, it's called, "OT," as in operations technology. So as opposed to just having data on how well your accounting's doing, an airline wants to know what its fuel efficiency is. A hospital wants to know what percentage of up time it has on its CAT scan machines. A power company wants to know whether they should be burning natural gas or taking power off of the solar grid because it's sunny in Southern California. We started all these change projects--sensors in airliner engines, or in CAT scan machines, so we could tell management how valuable that data is for them to help run the business better. It innovation of the product lines in businesses, and I was put in charge of coming up with new ways to do things around digitizing GE and modernizing the company. It was another example of me being a serial change agent.


This was around the time when we met, because all that change was getting stuck and I came along to try to help move it forward.

Yes. The teams would be all fired up. They'd start their journey. We'd get back to them in, say 60 days or so, and they'd say, "We didn't make any progress." And we'd say, "What do you mean you didn't do any work?" And they'd say, "We didn't say we didn't do any work. We said we made no progress." Why did they make no progress? It was because of people saying, "That's not the way we do business." The change agents were getting eaten by the business-as-usual.

So we decided we needed to go and attack head on how to do innovation from a cultural perspective, which turned out to be the Lean Startup methodology. With you, we eventually created a whole new cultural methodology at GE to get this new way of working kicked off. That was FastWorks, which you wrote about in The Startup Way.


How did that experience carry over into new projects?

I was getting asked very frequently to go present GE’s story about how they were figuring out how to do innovation completely differently. People were realizing they needed to change but didn’t know how to get started doing it in a big company. So I became sort of a pied piper both within GE and external to GE. At some point the light bulb went off and I thought there was a really broad need for this kind of information. I decided I wanted to teach big companies how to implement their own reinvention, by using Lean Startup as the core for updating their culture and leadership. So I launched Liguori Innovation to do that.

About a year and a half into the new venture, I had another realization--which you’d also had--which was that people in every industry were calling me all the time with the same questions. It didn’t matter if it was a tech company, a finance company, or a manufacturing company. They were all struggling with figuring out how to make change in a large company. There are very few people doing it, just a core, small contingent of folks trying it. So I thought maybe the best way to help people figure out how to do it is to get those who are learning about it together with each other. The idea was to create a community of practitioners and let peers jump in and actually help each other as another part of the ecosystem they need to succeed at it.  That’s what the Corporate Entrepreneur Community (CEC) is for. It’s a very intimate setting where people can ask very specific questions of their counterparts at other companies that are similar to them in size and structure, but not in purpose, so there’s no competition. Things like, “What do you do when an executive comes in and says, 'Well, this seems great, but I'm still not buying into the process.” Or “We’re having a really hard time getting entrepreneurial people to stay in the company--how are you doing it?” It’s hard to have that conversation with anyone who hasn’t really lived inside a company of this size. There are several meetings a year, but it’s also a little bit of a matchmaker situation because people can call up and ask specifically to talk with someone we know has dealt with whatever their issue is.


Is the motivation behind your current work the same as it was when you started out at Frito-Lay or has it evolved in ways?

I really believe this is a huge need in society. These large companies have brought tremendous value to society from transportation, to electricity, to healthcare, to clean water.. And whether I love or hate Facebook, I don't think it's going to cure cancer, and I don't think it's going to get clean water to the billions of people that don't have clean water. These large, multi-national companies have global reach, and scale, but they are absolutely risking becoming dinosaurs because they're victims of the bureaucracy that they have created. That bureaucracy is necessary--they need regulations and controls on what they’re doing that affects people so much. But while you're making your quarterly numbers and doing all the things regulatory you need to do to pay the bills and stay out of jail, how do you at the same time completely reinvent yourself from the inside out? The specialty of what I do is to help answer the question: "How do you break all the rules safely?" That's an intentional oxymoron, and that's what these companies need to do.

New Power: An Interview with Henry Timms

To write their equally fascinating and practical new book, New Power: How Power Works in the 21st Century—and How You Can Make it Work for You, Henry Timms, the President of the 92nd Street Y, a major cultural and community institution in New York, and Jeremy Heimans, the CEO of Purpose, a company that builds social movements all over the world, joined forces to come up with a guide to navigating the world of crowds and chaos and connections we all live in.

They spent three years talking to practitioners, academics and researchers on the cutting edge of what they call new power, which flows from what they think of as the essential skill of the 21st century: the ability to harness the energy of the connected crowd. Their research and conversations took place all around the world and included everyone from the heads of intelligence agencies in Washington to frontline health workers in the Netherlands. They write about the battle and balance between old power to new power, and show how they’re fueling the defining transformation of our times. But like all fast-moving trends, sometimes it’s hard to see it clearly when we’re right in the middle of it, which makes New Power just that much more important. It’s a guide to spreading ideas, launching movements, raising money and much more.  

It was my pleasure to talk with Henry about what he and Heimans have learned about how power structures are changing, how people can get started making the shift from old to new power, how the principles of new power are related to the principles of lean startup, and the responsibilities that come with all the amazing energy being channeled.

It’s also my pleasure to offer three copies of New Power to readers, thanks to Henry and Jeremy’s generosity. Tweet your thoughts on our conversation with the hashtag #newpower and I’ll choose three winners at random on April 12th.



Let’s start with the basics. What’s the difference between old power and new power, and how did you and Jeremy get interested in defining them?

Jeremy and I came at the world from very different places. He’s an activist and movement-builder and launched movements like Avaaz and Get Up! and I run a 143-year old institution. But we were both trying to get our heads around what was really changing in the world. And so often, the conversations about how the world was changing were reduced to quite a shallow discussion about technology--it was all something to do with Twitter, or changing tools. But it wasn't really a conversation about power.

We both in our work started to ask, "What's the right taxonomy to think about all of these changes in the world?" and we galvanized around old power and new power. The old power world is the one we know well, which is very command and control, top-driven, managerial and based on downloading information onto the world. What's emerging is the new power world, which is much more about things that are made by participation, about upload, and about distribution models.

New power--that ability to harness the energy of the connected crowd--has really become the essential skill of the 21st century. If you look at all the people who are coming up on top right now, for good and for bad, what they have in common is the capacity to capture that energy. So whether we look at Trump and Obama and the unexpected victories that they both had politically, or we look at platforms like Uber or Facebook, or we look at movements like #metoo or March For Our Lives, these very different examples all share one thing: the people who are leading them have worked out how to harness this power of the crowd.


Was there a moment in your own life and work when you first saw the effects of new power?

The 92nd Street Y is in New York, where one of the events we all pay attention to is UN Week. UN Week is typically the most old power week of the year. The only people who get anywhere near the action are people who have a UN Grounds Pass or who can afford to go to the Clinton Global Initiative. You had the most exciting people in the world here talking about the biggest issues of the day, and it essentially excluded most people. You couldn't get anywhere near it. Really, what UN Week brought New York was gridlock.

So about eight years ago, we at the 92nd Street Y – along with Mashable, UNDP and the UN Foundation – created the Social Good Summit which I think of as something that looks at the world through a new power lens. We said, "Instead of this being top-down-leader-driven week, how do you get people engaging in these issues in much more connected ways?" We opened up to thousands of bloggers and social entrepreneurs and others to come be part of it at the Y here. Then we encouraged people to meet up and create their own events around the world. We had meetings that first year in twenty-five countries where people collectively organized their own events similar to the Social Good Summit. Now we’ve counted 100 satellite events around the world. I’m speaking this summer at the Social Good Brazil event – which is larger than ours in New York City. 


Can you tell me a bit more about your own experiences transforming an old power institution into a new power role model?

The 92nd Street Y is all about strengthening community. In the old power world, the way we did that is people would come through our door and we'd offer them experiences. For years we've created programs and people would pick up the catalog and consume our programs. But all the new tools available now allow us to do that work in a very different way.

#GivingTuesday is a perfect example of that. We took one of the key values of the Y, which is around community and philanthropy and said, "After Black Friday and Cyber Monday, how could you create a day that was really about philanthropy? How would you create something that could really scale around the world?" And that was #GivingTuesday. The design of Giving Tuesday was very new power in a couple of ways. First, we never branded it. We never called it the 92nd Street Y’s Giving Tuesday, and the goal was never that it would be all about us. It was built so that other people would grab it and make it their own. Second, we designed it so people would improve it.

As a result, Giving Tuesday has morphed into all sorts of different hashtags and different campaigns around the world. I remember very early on when Baltimore turned Giving Tuesday into BMore Gives More--Baltimore Gives More. They decided they were going to make it all about how generous Baltimore is. Then the organization Dress for Success, which takes donations of clothing for women getting back into the workforce, turned Giving Tuesday into Giving Shoes Day, which was about women giving professional-appropriate shoes to those going back to the office. University of Michigan turned Giving Tuesday into Giving Blueday, and they used it to raise $5.5 million last year.

In the old power model, we'd say, "Cease and desist.” You've changed our brand, you've altered the frame. But in the new power world these are all signs that your idea is spreading in the right way. At the 92nd Street Y when we’re thinking about the future, we aren’t just thinking about new technology, but new models for building stronger communities.


How did you decide to expand your original Harvard Business Review piece on new power into a book and what the research process was like?

When we did the HBR piece, we started hearing from people around the world who had taken it and worked out ways of using it for their own needs. One of the best examples is a group of health workers and nurses in the National Health Service in the UK who built on the ideas in the HBR piece and made a curriculum for their own work.

We kept hearing, time and again, from so many different sectors that the old power/new power frame was speaking to them and to the challenges and options that they faced. Even spies, who are perhaps the ultimate old power sector, started to engage with the idea, realizing now that they're going to have to work out how to deal with a much broader and engaged and connected landscape if they want to succeed. So even intelligence agencies are experimenting around open innovation and open sourcing and all these things and they recognize that they can mobilize the crowd around the outcomes they want in the world.

The reason we wrote the book was to really lay out this set of skills that help people become more powerful. The book offers a new playbook for a hyperconnected world. It asks and answers questions like: "How do you think about spreading ideas?" "How do you think about transforming an institution?" and "How do you think about raising money?" For that last one, of course, there’s a very new set of dynamics around things like crowdfunding, which everyone now needs to understand. The book is very much a practical guide for how people can think about their own power and how they can think about being more effective in the world.


There are also some cautionary tales. I think it’s fair to say we’ve seen some of the dark side of new power lately, too.

Yes, and that’s why the stakes are so high. If you agree that the essential skill of the 21st century is the ability to harness the connected crowd, you have to also agree that a lot of the people who are doing that well are not on the side of the angels. You look at the capacity of anti-vaccers to out-message health professionals. You look at the power of climate deniers to communicate better than climate scientists. You look at internet crazies who are doing better than academics who have all these truths and all these facts. There's this real surge of new power that is not ending up in the right hands. So while the first bit of the book is a practical guide how people can really get their head around this new set of tools, the second bit is a call to action--which is to say, we really need those on the side of the angels to get good at new power quickly. The voices of reason need to catch up.

I think we're also seeing the beginnings of a new kind of political consciousness emerging against platforms, who have gobbled up a lot of new power and extracted it for their own ends. There seems to be a very big market opportunity for someone who could create platforms that actually create meaningful and fairer connections with the people who create the value.


Who, in the course of your research, have you seen doing that most effectively?

So many of the people who are good at new power think about their work in an experimental, entrepreneurial way – with some real overlap with the Lean Startup method. Rapid experimentation isn’t something that’s just entrepreneurial, it's actually what the best mobilizers do. You talk to any long-time campaigner or activist; they'll tell you that's how they think about their own work-- just constantly experimenting until you see something that hits. I think that's probably the ultimate lesson of new power.  It isn't something you do once a year. It's a practice that people need to learn and get good at.

In fact, you can think about the Lean Startup movement itself as an amazingly effective exercise in new power. Leaders all around the world have grabbed the central frame, made it stronger and stepped up to organize, create and collaborate. They aren’t waiting for permission. They all now connect with one-another in dynamic and productive ways, but without a top-down old power mentality. Ultimately, Lean Startup is a community. 


How do those two aspects--the practical and the cultural--play out in the business world?

We think a lot about how many of the most powerful businesses we see now have new power models but revert to old power values. Uber's a great example; it has this amazing new power model with terrific execution. But they really resorted to old power values: secretive, very leader-driven, and very transactional in lots of ways and it, obviously, ended up costing Travis Kalanick his job.

Contrast that with a company like Lyft which is trying, with some success, to actually create a business that has both a new power model and new power values. New power values are much more about empowering the crowd, about more transparency and collaboration, and engaging with the wider world. For two companies who essentially offer the same service, there is a real return available around culture and values. When Uber and Lyft were in a recent price war, at the same time that Uber was seeing its drivers organize pickets against it around the country, Lyft, essentially, responded by organizing picnics. They're really trying to build enthusiasm and community amongst their drivers. It will be interesting to see where they go with this.

Facebook offers another example of a new power model with old power values. And the price of that is becoming clear. It's very much about centralizing value, it's very much about Facebook deciding what's good for the world and not the users. It's very opaque in terms of how it's governed and how the algorithms work. For businesses, we think the opportunity is for organizations to build a culture that is based on more than the efficiency of their algorithms, and fosters the human connection they have with people in their network.


What’s your opening advice for someone who’s in an old power organization and wants to start making change?
 
I think the biggest shift is not about technology, but actually about professional identity. It's about whether you are, in a committed and strategic way, really prepared to think about how you can engage more people more meaningfully in your work. For generations, the only real ask we had of our communities is "do what you're supposed to do" or "buy my product." That was kind of how the world worked. What's so interesting now is those businesses who are doing well are those who are offering more interesting routes to participation – far beyond “just consume”. Airbnb is a great example of that. They have worked out how to get their crowd to be their hosts, they've worked out how to get their crowd to fight their regulatory battles for them, they've worked out how to get their crowd to essentially be their advertising machine. Our argument is that for every business, every organization, every political activity, mobilization is now the key activity if you want to get ahead. The book offers the playbook for the new power world.

Lean Impact : Innovating for Social Good

Ann Mei Chang is the Executive Director of Lean Impact, the social good division of the Lean Startup Company. This fall, her book based her own experiences using lean approaches to innovate in the social sector, including during her time at USAID, as well as stories from nonprofits, social enterprises, companies, government agencies, foundations, and philanthropists all over the world, will be published. Lean Impact: How to Innovate for Radically Greater Social Good is going to be an amazing resource for so many people from innovators to funders and everyone in between. Ann Mei recently talked with me about the book, some of the structural problems that impede social innovation, how lean approaches are leading to better solutions, and how she came to Lean Impact. It was incredibly energizing!

Let’s talk about what the idea of lean impact is and how you came to it. It’s such an inspiring story of taking skills from one sector to another for social good.

I spent most of my career in Silicon Valley in the tech industry, about 23 years. Then about seven years ago, I decided to make a pivot to spend the second half of my career in the public or social sector, particularly focused on global poverty. I ended up doing a fellowship at the State Department, then I worked at a non-profit called Mercy Corps. After that, I served at USAID as the Chief Innovation Officer and the Executive Director for the U.S. Global Development Lab. It was really a dream job. Our charter was to identify breakthrough innovations that could really bend the curve of progress and also transform the way we the practice of global development itself. We worked on issues around global health, around economic development, around democracy and governance, around agriculture and access to energy--across the board and around the world. I became really inspired at the possibilities of taking some of the best practices for innovation that I learned throughout my career in Silicon Valley and applying them to solving some of the worlds' toughest problems.

What are some of the biggest issues with the way projects happen in the social sector that prevents those problems from being attacked in an effective way?

The traditional approach to global development, and much of the social sector, is to run fairly large size programs that are usually designed in detail upfront, then executed accordingly - something I call an enforced waterfall model. It’s very risk-averse. A foundation or government agency puts out an RFP, and non-profits or contractors then submit a detailed proposal. Then once an award is given, the grantee is expected to spend the next three to five years dutifully implementing on the program as designed.

There's very little room for experimentation, for risk taking, for iteration. You have to stick to the letter of the proposal. That's not a great way to innovate. At the Global Development Lab we were pioneering some different ways to tackle problems, to structure our funding so that we could give out smaller grants for people to experiment, give them a lot more flexibility to do so, and then give them increased grants based on their successes. This happened both through development innovation ventures--we called these DIV--which was an open innovation window where we took ideas from anywhere and across sectors, and also through our grand challenges, which we called directed innovation. Those would focus on specific problems where we felt like the solutions we had were insufficient and we were seeking to tap into the worlds' greatest minds to come up with better solutions that could move the needle.

You’ve now spent the last year writing a book about all of this, also called Lean Impact. Can you talk a little about why you wanted to do it in that format and about the process?

When I left USAID, I wanted to continue to take the things I’d done there forward, and a book seemed like the right way to do it. I think a book is a really helpful reference point that anyone can access, whereas only a limited number of people can make it to any individual conference or presentation. We’re also doing events and conferences, either in conjunction with the lean startup community or potentially some independent ones as well, along with workshops and consulting services, all with a nonprofit mindset of looking at how we can help the social sector as a whole become more innovative.

A book is a way to capture all the ideas in one place that can serve as a foundation. The intent of the book is to lay out how we can adapt the same approaches that we've seen lean startup bring to accelerating innovation in business to solving some of the world’s greatest problems.  Yet, innovation is far more challenging in the social sector, and doesn’t always easily translate. Lean Impact addresses these unique barriers head on, and shares compelling examples from different organizations who have overcome them. I talked to over 200 organizations in the course of my research for the book, and it’s been really inspiring to hear their stories of how they managed to innovate in the work that they do.

Were there any universal challenges among all the stories?

Absolutely. One of the biggest ones is funding. Startup companies are typically funded by venture capitalist or angel funding that is fairly flexible; you can experiment, you can take risks, and it’s expected, in a sense, when you're a startup company.

For organizations in the social sector, the funding that you get from government agencies, from philanthropists, and from foundations is often fairly restricted and fairly risk averse, as I was saying. It's a real challenge and this is the most common concern that I heard from the people I've spoken with. They wanted to innovate, they wanted to experiment, they wanted to take risks. But the way that they were funded, they felt like their hands were tied behind their back and they didn't have a lot of room to do it. That's one of the things that the book really focuses on: how to make the room, how to be able to do this type of work within the constraints that organizations often have.

Are there some solutions you’ve seen work even for organizations that are in the early stages of adopting lean methods?

I do think there are a lot of things organizations can do, even in the current landscape. It does involve taking some risk. One tactic is that some of the best organizations I spoke with have actually turned down grants that are too restrictive or poorly aligned. It's something that people are often hesitant to do, because they are trying to keep the doors open and they're trying to grow. It's very tempting to take money when it's offered to you. But some of the most successful organizations I know of were picky. They made the difficult choice to turn down money that was offered to them because it didn't allow them to move forward on the things that they thought would be most effective. They took a gamble that they could find other money that would be more flexible and many have. Sometimes it's just making that tough choice and really being patient to find the right kind of funding.

The other problem I would say is that because of how the social sector is structured, we often have a mindset that everything needs to be done fairly big. We create these proposals, we run these big programs. Innovation in general and particularly with lean approaches, should start small. Experimentation isn't something that takes a lot of money. That’s more of a mindset shift: even if we don't have a lot of flexibility, we should take what flexibility we have and for example, just get out of the building. Go talk to your customers. Spending a day doing that can glean enormous insights, even if you're not able to completely transform the way you work. Injecting what you can by running a few small experiments or talking to customers can make a big difference.

What would you say to people who might say that starting small is a little pointless when facing such huge problems?

There's this great graph that the World Bank put out in a report a few years back that really shows the progress that we've made on some traditional poverty alleviation intervention, such as clean water, access to electricity, access to education, and so forth. What we've seen is very slow but steady progress. But if you overlay that with the trajectory of adoption of mobile phones, for example, you see a completely different curve where there's an acceleration of adoption that rapidly eclipses all of those traditional problems. Mobile phones were this new innovation that people wanted, that solved real problems for them, and that had a business model that enabled rapid scaling.

I think it's absolutely possible to bend the curve of progress when it comes to global poverty. What it means is rather than brute forcing our way there--by taking the tried and true things we've been doing for decades and needing another dollar to reach another person--we need to step back and look at how can we find more effective interventions that get us greater bang for buck. We need solutions that people really want and embrace and we need to look at different ways we might go about solving some of these problems and finding one that has the capacity to reach much greater scale and impact in what we are doing today. That’s exactly what small experiments are for.

Who can make that happen? Is it up to funders? Or the people getting the grant money?

I'd love to see funders take a different stance in terms of how they give out grants and the kind of flexibility they offer, to really shift the way they fund to better support innovation in the industry. But I think grantees can help with that shift. One of the things that I've been a big advocate for is building in an innovation window when you apply for a grant. It may very well be the case that your funders out there are going to fund a certain way, so you need to write a proposal to access that funding. But you can include in that proposal, say, a 5% innovation window, where you say I'm going to use 5% of those funds to experiment in order to try to figure out how I can make the other 95% far more cost effective or impactful or scalable. It's a very good use of money. When you show that experimentation does really yield results, then hopefully the funder might consider even larger windows in the future. It's not necessarily what funders are thinking, but by taking some of that risk, I think the reward can be really outsized in terms of what they can deliver in the long run.

It’s pretty clear these issues really need to be addressed from a lot of different angles at once. Can you talk about how lean impact fits into that?

In the social sector, it takes a whole ecosystem to get projects done. In business, the individual business can do a lot on their own: You create a great product, you can go out and there's infrastructure to market that product, to take payments for the product, to be able to distribute the product and so forth. In the social sector, one non-profit, one social enterprise often can't solve the problem completely on their own. They need to work with donors, other partners, government policy, distributors, missing infrastructure. Just getting payments or getting distribution for products can be a big challenge. It ends up being a much more complicated problem that involves bringing together multiple players, multiple stakeholders that can really tackle the problem from different angles. So this concept of lean impact is for all of those stakeholders as well as the philanthropists, foundations, or government agencies distributing foreign aid. It can also be for individuals who are looking at how they can most effectively volunteer their time or make donations of their money to be able to create social change in the areas that they care about.

What stage would you say social sector innovation is in, overall? And what’s needed, besides just spreading the word and the methods, to help it grow?

Innovation has become probably the most overused buzzword in the English language. In the social sector, there has been a lot of interest because people are seeing the kinds of results that innovation is having in business, and they see an opportunity to make better, faster progress on intractable social issues. However, in many cases, I think there has been a misunderstanding of innovation--which has resulted in lots of new ideas being generated for social good, but very few of those ideas are reaching significant impact at significant scale.

One of my favorite quotes is from Thomas Edison, who said that genius is 1% inspiration, and 99% perspiration. That inspiration is the invention, the new idea, which we absolutely need to get started. Lean impact is about that 99%, which is the blood, sweat and tears that goes into the constant testing, iteration, experimentation and feedback loops that take a germ of a great idea, and turn it into a solution that really can reach massive impact at scale. Ultimately the reason to become more innovative is to become more effective, and make a bigger difference more quickly for more people.

To learn more about Lean Impact, go to leanimpact.org