Creating Data-Driven Change
This article was written by Ori Carmel, Founder and CEO at Sowen. With over 20 years of executive and leadership experience, Ori applies his passion for problem solving and data driven decision making to helping organizations and companies drive meaningful impact at the intersection of doing good and doing well. He consults as Data Lead at Bloomberg Philanthropies, and previously held leadership positions at Twitter, American Express, and King’s College of London.
TL:DR
Nonprofit organizations often find themselves overwhelmed by challenges, spending most of their time reacting rather than innovating. Shifting from a reactive to proactive state requires a catalyst for change. This change can be triggered by stopping old habits, looking for signals of the future, and prioritizing actions to move forward. Three common triggers for innovation include focusing on strategy alignment, improving data maturity, and prioritizing collaborations. By addressing these areas, nonprofits can overcome stagnation and drive meaningful change.
Consider two realities…
In one, you are working hard to solve challenges that are evolving faster than your solutions. It’s a dire and all too familiar state for nonprofit executives. You are spending over 90% of your time and effort in reactive mode, putting out fires. As a result, the gap between your ability to solve critical challenges, and the scope of challenges you are dealing with, keeps widening. It looks something like this:
In the other, your rate of scalable solutions has received a boost, and you are now able to not only keep up with the biggest challenges faced by the organization, but actually get ahead of them! The challenges still exist, as does the impossible rate of innovation. But somehow, the organization was able to trigger a shift which helped the rate of solutions overtake the rate of challenges, creating a surplus of change dynamics. It looks like this:
No employee, executive, or leader in the social impact or nonprofit space would opt for the first reality and yet, most organizations struggle to shift from the first reality to the second. But why?
Catalyst of innovation:
Organizations need an event to break the patterns of repetitive behaviors, activities and transition into a state of surplus of change dynamics. There are no rules about what this event is, how long it should take to form meaningful and sustainable change. It can come in the form of a critical new hire, the integration of a new tool, or the establishment of a new process. It can come from individual contributors and program managers, or directly from senior leadership. It can come from best practices created in other organizations, or external input of consultants and advisors. The where and how matter a lot less than the triggering of a fundamental, sustainable change itself. When it happens, it looks something like this:
Triggering the Change:
In the most recent podcast episode of the Untapped Philanthropy podcast with Kerrin Mitchell and Tim Sarrantonio from the Fluxx and Neon One, Trista Harris, nonprofit futurist and CEO of FutureGood highlighted a three-step approach nonprofit leaders should consider when tackling the most challenging elements of their work in innovative ways. I think this can be a great framework to apply to thinking about the trigger of surplus of change dynamics for social impact organizations. It is described as:
Stop- Shift your framework from describing the problem and describe the change you are looking to make, and recognize that whether it’s changing of a mindframe, or a shift in priorities, or putting on ice something that isn’t going to contribute to your long term success- something has to give.
Look- Identify signals of the future that exist in the present to aid your thinking and planning, and use those to inform your strategic design, as well as your assessment of how well your programmatic execution is actually working today, and where it can be improved.
Go- Identify the activities and changes that will actually move the needle, and prioritize the strategic design and operational execution that will make those a reality.
It is the third I want to focus on here, because while intuitive, most non-profit leaders we speak to struggle to get started with the go part of the framework. They know there must be a catalyst that helps the hockey stick of solutions take place early on in their process. But they rarely know what it is, and how to find it. They are looking for a catalyst of change that will trigger a period of innovation.
Three Recommended Paths:
Since 2020 we have worked with almost 200 non-profits, foundations, and companies on their social impact strategy, execution, and measurement. While this list is far from exhaustive, the three most common triggers of periods of radical innovation we’ve found have been:
Recommendation 1: Focus Your Strategy
While leaders understand the importance of strategic alignment and direction, few are happy with the one they have, or the ways in which strategy is implemented into programmatic and tactical execution.
In their book The Balanced Scorecard, authors David Norton and Robert Kaplan note that 90% of organizations fail to execute their strategies successfully. In the Economist’s famous “why good strategies fail: Lessons for the C-Suite, we realize that 85% of leadership teams spend less than one hour per month on strategy, 50% spend no time at all on strategy, and only 5% of employees have a basic understanding of the strategy for the average organization.
Several biases lead to the failure of creating or implementing strategies. However, the dynamic nature of the problems we face, and the increasing rate of innovation and change around us renders the things that worked in the past quickly obsolete, or at least worthy of a serious version update. Non-profit executives, however, rarely have the time, resources, expertise, or support to critically assess their own strategies with meaningful insights.
To avoid this downfall, we recommend leaders take the time to ask three questions, as a starting point:
Does your strategy stem from a clear organizational vision, mission and purpose?
Is there alignment across all parts of your organization behind this single strategy?
Is your strategy driven and updated by insights rather than assumptions and inertia?
Does every single person in your organisation clearly understand your strategy?
Do I have the right people, tools, structures, processes, and knowledge to execute the strategy?
If not, is it the right strategy, or what needs to happen to bring those to the fold.
Recommendation 2: Improve Data Maturity
The ability of an organization to leverage data in every strategic or tactical part of its operation is not a choice, but an imperative. Imagine trying to do your job without a mobile device in 2024. Imagine not having the wealth of human knowledge at your fingertips. For Gen-X’ers like me, it’s hard to recall. For Millennials onwards, it’s downright inconceivable.
Leaders can and should assess their own ability to apply data across at all stages of organizational functions. It is more important to know where you are and improve over time than to try and find magic bullet solutions without considering the challenges of adoption and change management. We recommend leaders use the Data Accelerator Assessment, which examines data maturity and application across four areas:
Do I have the right people with the right skills and expertise in the right places?
Do I have the right processes for optimal data sharing and application?
Do I have the right tools to make timely, accurate, and safe data available?
Do I have the right data to answer our key questions and solve critical challenges?
The tool is free, easy, quick (5 minutes) and gives the user a strong view of the directional strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities faced by the organization. It also makes recommendations on where to focus based on an organization’s overall score, and score in each of the areas above. It’s not a surgical solution, but a great starting point.
Recommendation 3: Prioritize Collaborations
In his 2020 book “Humankind” Rutger Bregman explores the optimistic views of human nature, and the unique qualities, genetic and behavioral, that have turned us into the most dominant life-form on earth. While many factors impact this evolution, one stands above the rest- our ability to connect.
We cannot and should not compete with technology in its ability to perform rote tasks. But no AI can, (thankfully, for now) substitute human intuition, curiosity, ingenuity, and ability to connect seemingly disparate elements into a clear and more cohesive picture.
To harness the power of connecting, we recommend leaders to take the time to ask these three questions:
Are we speaking to and learning from experts in other fields and disciplines?
Are we open to new ways of doing things, even from our fiercest competitors?
Are we harnessing the power of partnering with other organizations, prioritizing the intersection of our vision and mission over the ego of our individual achievements?