Leah Kral | Human Progress and Flourishing Workshop

Summary

Leah Kral, a prominent speaker and author, presented at the Human Progress and Flourishing Workshop organized by the NDSU Challey Institute. Her focus was on how nonprofits can embrace innovation and strategic thinking to enhance their impact on society. Leah shared insights from her book "Innovation for Social Change," highlighting stories of successful and innovative nonprofit endeavors. She discussed key traits of innovative nonprofits, the importance of risk-taking and iterative learning, and the significance of discovering personal strengths to drive meaningful change. Leah's talk emphasized creativity, empowerment, collaboration, and strategic experimentation as essential elements for nonprofit success, encouraging both nonprofit professionals and students to find their unique "superpower" in social change endeavors.

Highlights

• Leah Kral presents at NDSU focusing on nonprofit innovation and strategic thinking 🧠.
• Her book 'Innovation for Social Change' offers stories and strategies for nonprofit success 📚.
• Discusses six key innovation traits: identifying needs, ideating, experimenting, and more 🚀.
• Highlights the importance of strategic empowerment and collaboration in nonprofit ventures 🤝.
• Encourages finding personal strengths ('superpowers') for effective social impact 💪.

Key Takeaways

• Leah Kral emphasizes the role of innovation in nonprofit organizations, encouraging them to adopt strategic thinking to boost societal impact 🌟.
• The workshop showcased inspiring examples from Leah's book, illustrating how nonprofits worldwide have succeeded through innovation 💡.
• Leah pointed out six key traits that foster nonprofit innovation, including identifying hidden needs, ideation, and experimentation 🔍.
• She shared stories of both large and small scale innovations, showing that even minor changes can significantly improve nonprofit effectiveness 📈.
• Leah encouraged individuals to find their personal 'superpower' to contribute effectively to social change, blending their unique skills and passions 🎯.

Overview

Leah Kral kicked off the Human Progress and Flourishing Workshop, brimming with excitement and wisdom. As a friend of the Challey Institute, Leah brought a personal touch to her presentation on elevating the role of nonprofits through innovative approaches. Her insights, drawn from years as a consultant and her own journey, provide a roadmap for nonprofits eager to enhance their ability to make significant societal impacts.

Her presentation tied the concept of strategic innovation with real-world examples. From the creative methodologies adopted by organizations tackling issues like poverty and education, to the radical shifts needed for broader societal change, Leah's stories inspired the audience. She shared the vital importance of learning from failures and igniting organizational learning through persistent experimentation and collaboration.

Leah's favorite part of the discussion was exploring the notion of discovering one's 'superpower.' This refreshing concept urged attendees to leverage their unique blend of skills and interests to drive change. For students and seasoned professionals alike, Leah's encouragement to blend passion with practice provides a meaningful pursuit in the collective mission for social improvement.

Leah Kral | Human Progress and Flourishing Workshop Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 good morning it's great to see so many people here today this is awesome uh excited to be back this year for another great Series so I'm John bitson I'm the manard family director of the Sheila and Robert chal Institute for Global Innovation and growth welcome to the human progress and flourishing Workshop in this Workshop we bring in Scholars from across the country to present insights from their research and experiences to the NDSU Community um and our topics focus on innovation opportunity and ways to
• 00:30 - 01:00 increase individual and societal flourishing I'm super excited that we have Leah crawl here today Leah's a great friend of The chal Institute she's really been helpful to us in strategic thinking um and a lot of the insights that she's given to us I think she's given in her book I haven't read the book yet but I'm excited to read it um and so we're going to hear about how nonprofits can innovate and use strategic thinking so I'm really excited and obviously everyone in here there's a
• 01:00 - 01:30 lot of people that are very interested in this topic and interested in seeing Leah and she said that she would uh autograph her book after so if you'd like an autographed book uh stick around so Leah crawl is an expert facilitator and author who helps nonprofits doing the hard work of building Civil Society to innovate and be more effective she writes about her work in Innovation for social change how wildly successful nonprofits Inspire and deliver results crawl is a sought after speaker and not
• 01:30 - 02:00 at nonprofit industry events writes frequently about her research and for decades has provided tailored Consulting to nonprofit teams and coaching for to social entrepreneurs across the country she has a passion for helping organizations achieve their missions and is an active volunteer in her community she holds a masters of arts in public policy from Duan University and is a returned Peace Corp volunteer in Jamaica from 2002 to 2004 to learn more you can
• 02:00 - 02:30 visit leac cw.com and again I'm super excited so let's all give a warm welcome to Leo [Applause] crawl wow well um thank you so much Sean for that kind introduction and thank you to The chal Institute for inviting me today I thought I'd start by just telling you a little bit about me and my story so my career took some wild twists and turns uh I started out in the for-profit world I'm originally from
• 02:30 - 03:00 Northeast Ohio and that's just what everybody I knew did there there's a lot of Industry there and I thought oh that's what I'll probably end up doing um but I felt like something was missing I wasn't sure what and so I took a kind of a wild detour and joined the Peace Corp so I was in the Peace Corp for two years in Jamaica and that's really that experience is what led me to fall in love with serving nonprofits um so for most of my career since then I've served as a consultant to nonprofit teams and nonprofit leaders um to help them ask you know how do we know if what we're doing is working and to ensure that
• 03:00 - 03:30 we're strategic accountable and effective and I facilitate workshops on program design help teams figure out how we measure success and so in the course of doing that I just really love that work um a few years ago I set out to write a book based on all this work that I'm doing um that would help the kind of people I'm serving to help busy nonprofit practitioners and then the pandemic happened so that gave me some quiet time to do research do interviews gather more stories uh so uh in addition to stories from my own clients I found other great stories from places like
• 03:30 - 04:00 Mayo Clinic Habitat for Humanity and many others that we'll talk about today um but Gathering those stories of nonprofit Innovation successes and importantly failures that took about two and a half years and I learned so much and I'm really excited to share a bit about the book with you all today um and I understand that this audience is a mix of students here at North Dakota State University who are interested in entrepreneurship but also nonprofit practitioners so um I think there will be something for both of you in this talk so I'll talk around 35 minutes or
• 04:00 - 04:30 so and then maybe 40 and then we'll leave uh 20 minutes for Q&A so why nonprofits why should we care about them why did I write a book about nonprofits so if you think about it nonprofits provide some of the greatest gifts to the world and take on some of its hardest problems think about how our work eases hunger or fights Injustice nonprofits that Advance education help break the chains of ignorance and poverty recovery programs and mental health counseling provide Healing Arts
• 04:30 - 05:00 programs lift the human spirit and I'm betting that a nonprofit has touched your life or the life of someone you care about in some way but good intentions don't automatically translate into impact so this brings us to a question why do some nonprofits punch above their weight while others misfire and if we could look under the hood of nonprofit successes and failures what could we find and what might we learn so what do we mean by non profit
• 05:00 - 05:30 Innovation I think when people hear the word Innovation a lot of times their mind goes right to the for-profit world and cool innovations that we all like like the iPad or maybe 3D printing that we now see at the dentist office but there's plenty happening and plenty of innovation happening in the nonprofit world too and the way I think about Innovation is just simply finding new and better ways of doing things and in the nonprofit world Innovation can be really big or it can be small so an example of a really big innovation and social change would be the American Civil Rights Movement they were highly
• 05:30 - 06:00 Innovative highly strategic and they brought about massive change or the creation of the 911 emergency phone systems that has a very interesting story and that came about from the collaboration of philanthropy and nonprofits and First Responders or the types of things that the x prise foundation works on these are pretty big Innovations um and my book is filled with those stories but Innovation can also be quite small and humble too and if you you know imagine like a a pro bono legal Clinic where people are
• 06:00 - 06:30 walking into the reception area and maybe uh doing their intake and filling in you know a lot of paperwork and forms um but what if someone maybe the reception receptionist has the idea of what if we could just switch to like an iPad intake system and while that seems small you just saved a lot of time and steps and resources now you don't have to have someone double entering you know that information into another database that's Innovation too right it's just finding better ways of doing things so both big and small ation matter and we
• 06:30 - 07:00 want to encourage both types and build it into our everyday workplace practices but how do we do that so as I dug deeper into the research for the book I found six key traits related to nonprofit Innovation which I'm going to share with you along with some stories and examples so the first trait is um to be someone who identifies hidden needs kind of like a detective and there's a great
• 07:00 - 07:30 story of this from a Greystone Bakery they're a Workforce Development nonprofit in Yonkers New York and the team at the bakery wanted to take on some of those hardest cases of the chronically unemployed and even homeless people and they work really hard to understand the problem they're trying to solve so their founder is an aeronautical engineer and a really smart guy and he he was so dedicated to this idea that he experimented with actually living on the street for a few weeks um
• 07:30 - 08:00 he wanted to better understand these clients that they were serving and walk in their shoes and what he learned from these immersion experiences was really powerful So based on his experience the team set to work incorporating lessons from those direct observation on the street to inform every detail of their highly unusual and innovative business model to help people gain skills and find employment for example Le they created
• 08:00 - 08:30 an apprenticeship program Open to anyone and the bakery has a first come first Ser waiting list for a position and no background checks or interviews are conducted an on-site social worker helps employees solve problems such as Stress Management Transportation Child Care subsidized housing and referrals for drug rehabilitation but make no mistake it's a tough Place sometimes fights break out at the bakery four out of five workers are gone within a week or two
• 08:30 - 09:00 but they can always sign up again so the remarkable thing about their model is that everyone gets a chance and some succeed their model is a success in their field providing Dignity of work to those highest risk hirers who were previously thought unemployable you may have even tasted their brownies and been in Jerry's ice cream so they're radically different because they were willing to dig deeper into the needs of those they were serving so being an entrepreneur in a lot of ways is about seeing we're doing
• 09:00 - 09:30 detective work and identifying hidden needs of those that we're serving another trait is about ideating we're asking courageous questions it's good to start small but dream big so there's a great example of this in South Africa so imagine that you are at this nonprofit that's dedicated to um the endangered species of rhinos and you've
• 09:30 - 10:00 got a small herd of rhinos that you're trying to keep safe from poachers and poachers in South Africa are very clever they're very smart they have a lot of resources there's money to be made it's it's really kind of tragic but um so they will come in with night vision goggles and you know guns and um you know poach the rhinoceroses for their horns and so this is pretty devastating and so you're on this say you're working in this nonprofit and you're all just scratching your heads like what can we do you know we've we raise money that's
• 10:00 - 10:30 hard to come by where you know we've got teams at night trying to patol the grounds this is very expensive and then imagine if someone just kind of courageously raised their hands at this meeting and they're like well what if we relocated these rhinos to somewhere more remote somewhere more safe well that's a pretty radical idea right but they actually the team heard this idea out and they they identified a place in Botswana a different country was very remote and they started looking at the costs so rhinos way between two and
• 10:30 - 11:00 three tons they're dangerous animals you can imagine the looks in the room when someone propos a pretty wild idea but to their credit they started you know really thinking about this they realized the costs were about $50,000 to move one but that actually might outweigh the cost of all the security forces that they were paying so they gave it a try they explored this W wild gutsy idea and it worked the herd is now grown from 70 to 130 so I think that's a great story
• 11:00 - 11:30 so another example similar to that would be alcoholic synonymous so um you know usually there's a founder or a group of Founders who have a strong sense of a social problem that they're committed to solving but they just may not be sure of how they want to solve it and so you know they're trying things are kind of finding their way in the dark so uh many of you may already know some of the story of the founders of AA it's pretty
• 11:30 - 12:00 well known but um two two totally separate men who were both struggling with addiction uh randomly met and uh they were on a business trip and each of them had struggled for a long time with addiction and tried everything and back in the 30s and 40s people just didn't really understand much of how to deal with addiction and um sometimes people would be institutionalized or sometimes even lobotomies so it was pretty drastic um so these two men had tried everything but through a business trip and just
• 12:00 - 12:30 through a a conversation with each other they realized that they were helping each other and what they discovered was that there was power in one alcoholic talking to another and so they realized they had stumbled onto something that might help others and they quickly found it a nonprofit but it would take time years experimentation and failure for them to ultimately discover their famous 12-step model or even realized that members should be anonymous so they were learning by doing they were innovating so common denominator for Innovation
• 12:30 - 13:00 involves finding our way in the dark so experimentation risk and a willingness to fail goes with the territory so one of my uh favorite stories is from Mayo Clinic so Mayo Clinic is perhaps the best nonprofit Hospital in the world they're famous for
• 13:00 - 13:30 finding innovative solutions for people who are very sick their reputation did not happen by accident in interviews team members say that good patient outcomes are because they are empowered to carry out their organizational values one of those values is the needs of the patient come first and they seem to truly live this so team members are trained empowered and encouraged to put mayo values into practice and I'm going to quote now from a Mayo staff member who said if the employees choices are
• 13:30 - 14:00 either getting back to work on time or taking 10 minutes to get a wheelchair for a patient who seems unsteady the patient will get the wheelchair and I think that's wonderful that's bottomup empowerment and these values become part of their workplace culture guiding all decisions big or small in another story from Mayo Clinic the KN night staff were concerned for how noise can affect a patient patient sleep which is very important to the healing process so they came up with the idea to conduct noise
• 14:00 - 14:30 studies this led eventually to designing quieter flooring quieter wheels on food cards and lower decb for overhead paging that's Innovation and that's bottomup empowerment so the middle section of my book is really all about how to intentionally designed processes and systems that support a workplace culture of innovation through empowerment and collaboration so trait number four is about
• 14:30 - 15:00 experimentation we want to create a collaborative workplace culture that leaves room for experiment and play spontaneity and Discovery and a great story of this is World reader so World reader is a nonprofit with a mission to bring digital books to disadvantage children and their families and when they launched back in 2010 they became began several experiments at the same time so so in one experiment they gave
• 15:00 - 15:30 Amazon Kindle e-reader machines or tablets to a small group of elementary students in Ghana like you see in the picture but and they were really excited they were jazzed about this this possibility but what they found was that when the children would play during recess the devices kept breaking so they they didn't expect that at the same time their team was experimenting with a mobile app which they ended up being surprised by they learned from observation that the young users much preferred so today um almost 200,000
• 15:30 - 16:00 users a month young users are reading books on the mobile platform so I think there's several really good lessons here one is they were very smart to spread their bets if world world reader would have gone all in on those Kindle e-reader machines that they were so excited about they may have never discovered the far better solution with the mobile app so it's far better to fail fast and fail small before investing too big experimentation helps us learn and innovate and we have to
• 16:00 - 16:30 build in some expectation and toleration of failure when we do that and that's hard um but it's important for leaders and organizations to have that right attitude towards risk and failure and there's a story I really love from the hulet foundation so the huet foundation offers a prize to their grants officers and encourages them to share what they called the worst Grant from which you learn the most and I think they offer a silly door prize and you know they gather the team together and they openly discuss their failures and I I think
• 16:30 - 17:00 that's great right so it takes the pressure off and allows us to be honest and even laugh at ourselves and uh one of my nonprofit clients has a board that encourages them to take risks and experiment and they tell them hey it's okay to fail as long as you're learning and you can explain um and I think that nonprofit would actually be in a lot of trouble if they didn't bring stories of failure and risk taking to their board um So based on what we learned from those experiments and failures we can
• 17:00 - 17:30 start to learn about what actually works and so through collaboration you know we can draw out these good ideas from our colleagues and stakeholders and design smart experiments that help us make the best use of our resources so I think it's also really important to as we're experimenting um you know this idea of organizational learning so we want to clarify what's working and what's not through
• 17:30 - 18:00 continuous learning and stress testing so that we can accelerate our impact so D Dr Martin Luther King Jr writes about the early days in the civil rights movement in his autobiography and if you haven't read that I highly recommend it it's a beautiful book um but he describes how they started small with just a small group of dedicated leaders and volunteers and really no financial resources and he describes their experiments with working to overturn terribly unjust Jim Crow laws and places like Selma Montgomery and alab Al Albany
• 18:00 - 18:30 Georgia and you know sometimes the efforts would fail and they would study what happened and they would try to learn and adjust and they knew they needed to start with some small winds and were deeply committed to expanding and scaling their efforts across the South and hoping to eventually overturn all Jim Crow laws Nationwide through achieving Federal legislation well of course changes like that are easier said than done they had you know a lot of opposition against them so how did accomplish things like
• 18:30 - 19:00 that so bear with me I'm I'm usually told the rule is not to have so much text in a in a slide but I just felt like this quote was so important so here's Martin Luther King pulling from his autobiography just talking I think this is very powerful and unusual you don't um always see this kind of uh humility and uh Fearless question asking asking but he said the mistake I made there he's talking about Albany Georgia was to protest against segregation generally rather than against a single
• 19:00 - 19:30 and distinct facet of it our protest was so vague that we got nothing and the people were left very depressed and in despair so what happened there the protesters you know were were very dedicated you know they were standing up against a very hostile police they were put into jail including Martin Luther King but then quickly released and then nothing changed so he goes on to say it would have been much better to have concentrated upon integrating the buses or the lunch encounter one victory of
• 19:30 - 20:00 this kind would have been symbolic it would have galvanized support and boosted morale so here's the learning part when we planned our strategy for Birmingham months later we spent many hours assessing Albany and trying to learn from its errors our appraisals not only helped to make our subsequent tactics more effective but revealed that Albany was far from an unqualified failure and we know the rest of the story the Civil Rights Movement changed the nation and they were incredibly strategic and ultimately successful
• 20:00 - 20:30 because they were willing to ask themselves hard questions like that and learn and adjust so then trait number six persuasion we have to be really good at this in the nonprofit world uh Kofi andan I love this quote don't raise your voice improve your argument so a key trait of innovation is about how nonprofit leaders learn to beat persuasive and this is so important
• 20:30 - 21:00 because there are far more innovative ideas than there are resources nonprofits are usually pretty stretched they're working really hard to to raise money um so if you have an Innovative idea and you work in a nonprofit you have to convince other people we need resources right so we might have to convince our colleagues down the hall we might have to convince our boss our donors we might have to convince Superstar talent to recruit them to come work with us Grant M Grant makers might get a 100 applications but but can only fund five so um I have a chapter in the
• 21:00 - 21:30 book about persuasion and and lots of examples but as I was researching this some stories really made me laugh out loud I I was really surprised to learn that both Mother Teresa and Fred Rogers in the early stages of of their projects were often said no they were turned down and I was just like how could that be right I mean can you imagine getting to the Pearly Gates and saying yeah that's me I'm the one who told Mother Teresa her ideas were terrible um but it happened right people did and of course today we're well aware
• 21:30 - 22:00 of of the great things that Mother Teresa and Fred Rogers did but back then not everyone did they had to learn how to be persuasive to dust themselves off and try again so just like them if we want to bring our own innovation aame of course we're going to face a lot of obstacles and we have to be persuasive so I just kind of sped through these six traits pretty quickly uh just for the interest of time for this presentation um we just kind of skimmed the surface
• 22:00 - 22:30 but the book of course goes into a lot more detail with a lot of stories and it's really about the the how of innovation um you know there's a lot of books out out there that are kind of a little more academic or theoretical but this book is is full of stories and really intended for the busy nonprofit practitioner who's you know trying to build an institution and figure out you know how to how to um you know bring a a mission into reality so um towards the end of my talk I wanted to um uh really focus on the
• 22:30 - 23:00 students so so this part is is especially for you so what does it mean to bring your own Innovation aame so one of the chapters in my book is called discover your superpower we have to make the best use of our time talents and limited resources and we can't say yes to everything in life we're going to have to say no to some things and from what I saw from the stories of all these Founders you know and social entrepreneurs is we're really less likely to innovate or lead teams to innovate if we aren't focused so if
• 23:00 - 23:30 someone asked you to describe your superpower what would you say how do you think about that for yourself so this chapter provides questions that uh encourage a lot of self-reflection and prompt you to think about yourself your skills and your passion and it show share stories of nonprofit leaders and how they found their superpower so I just pulled some of those questions from the chapter uh just as a little teaser to to share what's in there but um think
• 23:30 - 24:00 about some of these questions for yourself so as you're seeking out your own career path and you think about maybe what you've experienced in life what you love or or what you don't like doing what really Sparks Joy or the converse what have you experienced you're like okay not for me uh maybe you go through a process of elimination and self-discovery do you have a wacky combination of interests so you think of Fred Rogers who found in Mr Rogers Neighborhood he had the weird kind of combination of of things he was
• 24:00 - 24:30 passionate about so he was really into puppetry he was a very talented musician uh he went to Presbyterian Seminary so had this kind of deep sense of of religious calling and he was really excited about the television industry I mean that is a weird combination right um but it makes perfect sense how something like those interests would lead to what he eventually created so what are your wacky you know is it economics and chess or you know what are what are sort of the odd um things that
• 24:30 - 25:00 you're passionate about I know for myself like I never would have thought I would get paid for for this or incorporated into my career but on the weekends I love reading biographies I just cannot get enough of like reading people's stories and thinking about you know someone who's maybe an underdog and just their life journey and uh and now I'm writing books and pulling out people's stories and sharing them with you all so you know who do you admire I really admire great business thinkers people like cvy and diming and Drucker
• 25:00 - 25:30 and it affects how I think about my work so it might be famous people authors thinkers or someone in your own life who do you admire and what does that tell you about yourself if you were to ask your colleagues hey could you just send me like 10 words that you think describe me what would they say they might really surprise you or another question that I really like is you know has there been a major life trial in your life and so if you think about Martin Luther King you know he I think something that really shaped him was these you know uh
• 25:30 - 26:00 terrible unjust Jim Crow law like this this uh major life trial that just made him really passionate about wanting to change change the world or Fred Rogers actually a lot of people may not know he had severe childhood Asthma as a child and so he was often isolated and not you know around uh Playmates and so to pass the time he started creating skits and puppetry so a life hardship sometimes can feel shape your gifts and who you
• 26:00 - 26:30 are and uh I think I included some books up there too just if that's something you're thinking about in your life these are some good resources that are helpful so uh one last thing along these lines uh I was really surprised when I ran across this it was already the book had already come out when I ran across this concept but I thought it was so helpful um so the Japanese concept of eeky is all about having direction or purpose in your life a reason for being and I think that's a really good place to start so when we start thinking about
• 26:30 - 27:00 ways to be more Innovative in your own life or on your career Journey when those things in the quadrants are aligned then you're so much more likely to be fulfilled entrepreneurial and innovating and each of the social change innovators and Founders in my book had found his or her eeky guy so I encourage you to find yours and I promise to leave time for Q&A so I'm really eager to hear your questions um but yeah there's information about how to how to reach me
• 27:00 - 27:30 I have a website um I'm active on LinkedIn and Twitter there's a really um great community on LinkedIn for nonprofit uh professionals so feel free to reach out and connect with me and uh after the Q&A I guess uh uh there will be book signing outside so I'm glad to to meet you and sign your book but with that I'll turn it over to you all because I'm a very eager to hear your questions and I'll repeat the questions for folks who are uh online with us [Applause]
• 27:30 - 28:00 uh in the back this isn't a question so much as an observation that these six principles are important in business also yes there's absolutely no change they they're always useful to you in life period thank you yeah um uh for the people online the comment was that those
• 28:00 - 28:30 six principles are very relevant in the for-profit world as well uh I 100% agree with that and when you get into the nuances of my book uh you know that's where you'll start to see kind of the subtle differences um between nonprofits and for profits but yeah also government right or life in general I I think these kind of you know principles of Entrepreneurship are are relevant uh no matter no matter where you are um I'll to U definitely open it up for another question but one more uh comment related
• 28:30 - 29:00 to that so sometimes nonprofits are really challenged with you'll have a lot of board members sometimes will come from the for-profit world really excited about successes there and then just kind of have this uh you know well-intentioned desire to say oh well this worked really well over here now let's do this in the nonprofit world and that can be a little hairy um and I'm really glad that I got to have a foot in both worlds so I've experienced you know many things that I I love about the for-profit world what I tried to do in the book was thoughtfully translate
• 29:00 - 29:30 those things so that they make sense in a nonprofit environment you know nonprofits don't have profit uh instead we're usually serving a mission and that can be incredibly hard to to measure improve results um but I had a lot of fun taking things from uh the for-profit world like Six Sigma or design thinking used by companies like Pixar and uh testing them out with nonprofit teams and kind of tailoring them and making them our own so uh yeah thank you for that for that comments any other questions or
• 29:30 - 30:00 comments yes so thank you for your talk in developing embracing supporting a culture of innovation for social change in a you just mentioned like Ka Sigma but any other like practical tools systems um that you can incorporate into your organization to develop definitely yeah I'm a systems person like I
• 30:00 - 30:30 mentioned Demming is one of he's really my one of my intellectual Heroes Edward Demming is the father of Quality Systems and um yeah I love all his thing so yeah I'm a systems person so the book while I I've shared a lot of stories with you I've I've kind of um wrapped those uh systems and processes in in stories um so they're in there U like the first third of the book is where I'm taking um design thinking which is used by companies a lot of creative companies marketing compan compies like Pixar um
• 30:30 - 31:00 and what would that look like in the nonprofit setting and so the whole first third of the book kind of takes you through the steps of how you might do that and um I'll be brief but uh so the way I kind of made my own Lea version of design thinking that I tested with nonprofit teams is to break it into four questions uh what's desirable what's scalable what's feasible so that's the thinking part and then the fourth is how might we then design small experiments so a lot of these stories that I I shared with you actually are part of like teaching how we might use those
• 31:00 - 31:30 steps of design thinking that that's one example um but the book is really just packed because that's my heart um I'm so glad you asked that because systems and processes are are definitely what I'm all about and so there's a lot of that in the book that was a great question uh yes I one of the things to
• 31:30 - 32:00 [Music] how Okay I I think I I heard maybe 60%
• 32:00 - 32:30 of that but tell me if I'm if I got this right but I think you're asking okay so you're encouraging failure and experimentation how do you how does that how do you um keep from becoming demoralized um that's a really good question I um yeah I think it's just so important um like the example from World reader right they they ran two experiments at the at the same time one failed one succeeded and to me like I don't know how you can really innovate without being willing to take risks and
• 32:30 - 33:00 experiment it's trial and error you know is is a otherwise you know if if we're not experimenting if we're not willing to to fail then how are we ever going to push through or find new discoveries um but you have to an organization really has to have support from the Top If the leadership or board doesn't you know has no Toleration for risk then it's probably not going to happen but um I Ed story after Story in the book of um how those kinds of risk and experiments led to something really good so to your
• 33:00 - 33:30 question of how do you keep from being demoralized maybe like immersing yourself in those stories you know so that can give you a lot of heart right and put wind in your sales um I yeah that's that's the best way I can think about it I yeah any maybe someone else wants to weigh in on that I don't know yes sorry I'm sorry about to hijack you so two things first well I'm Professor cross and I teach in our public policy program here everything
• 33:30 - 34:00 she said is spot on uh and I've got your book to read and I've got it giving it I just stole extra director but if if you're looking at this and you're like this all sounds great it does but oh my God how do I do this right how do I find the needs how do I come up with Solutions where do I even look how do I write how do I test it how do I design an experiment and at least in my classes how do I psychologically with that I have no idea what I'm doing and I'm just
• 34:00 - 34:30 pretending uh consider the public we offer public policy classes on the level and the level the fact that it says public in the title and it's offered by the political science program we are not specifically focus on government programs the way you do this is the same in business and nonprofit in government so please can and you will eventually know what you're doing just that's great so uh for the folks who are joining us online uh a
• 34:30 - 35:00 shout out for the public policy program here at NDSU and uh yeah that's a that's great advice I mean there's lots of resources out there and I really do try in my book um you know there's like I think 13 chapters but I'm basic what I've shared with you here in this brief time is I've just given you kind of the sexy stories right but in the book I I definitely break out a lot more in detail of the how it's to me that's really what the book is about it's for busy practitioners uh wearing mini hats and it to break out the how of innovation with practices and and things
• 35:00 - 35:30 you can do no matter what your nonprofits resources whether you're big like Mayo Clinic or small with like a three person you know 25 person staff right as I've worked with John right hopefully these these principles can help any any size nonprofit any other comments or questions uh yeah yeah sorry could you share a favor biography that you've read oh gosh let's see I mean yeah I love to nerd out on these things and all over the place like I'll read comedians like
• 35:30 - 36:00 Mindy Kaling she was a lot of fun or uh you know people from history like George Washington um some of them I did incorporate into the book like uh you know Fred Rogers his story is so interesting or Martin Luther Kings wow to have to pick one oh that's hard yeah thank you I think I saw another hand raised in the back I may like to expand a little bit on comment you made about Boards of business people on do a lot of
• 36:00 - 36:30 things my experience is that but for not a profit people as you mentioned people go the props are passionate about the cause but when you Che talk to them about Concepts that they consider to be business oriented they Che out they see that as being antithetical yeah to what they want to do with their passion so what you want to do this avoid using business terms you have to convert them into passionate
• 36:30 - 37:00 terms that they can relate to I've experienced this like I remember a priest I work with he said fin turn around he says this is what you tried to get us to do a few years ago yes but father you didn't listen you didn't understand um keep away from the business com translate them into passionate comments yeah that's great that's a brilliant comment um uh for the folks online that the comment was when
• 37:00 - 37:30 there's this challenge of uh people on boards who are often from the for-profit world trying to convince people and nonprofits of good practices we have to be really mindful of our language I agree aund a thousand per. um I do that myself too um yeah I've learned the hard way like a I remember just simply using the word strategy will turn people off you know like people in nonprofit oh why are you bringing that business speak in here right so while it's something they very much needed I learned to say okay not I
• 37:30 - 38:00 won't say strategy um you know what what's sort of the logic of how you want to get from your vision so using logic instead of strategy would be you know just one example but I do that all the time and that's a great great Insight um do we have any I don't know if there's a way to hear if there are questions from folks online no okay okay great any other Yeah question so so I know that you're very good at me so I I mean I think one of the things that maybe is complicating a
• 38:00 - 38:30 complicating factor for nonprofits that isn't as much for profits is how do you measure success and so um like how do you know if when you do an experiment did I fail or not how long do I continue to experiment before I know I should abandon it and look for something else so can you just talk a little bit about measur excellent yeah so the question was uh measurement and evaluation could be really really challenging for nonprofits so I have a whole chapter on that in the book and uh I'll just I'll
• 38:30 - 39:00 I'll kind of tell you how it's laid out but uh I think one of the first steps we can we can do measurement in so many bad ways and so there's a book called The Tyranny of metrics which I recommend to everyone uh I I run across in nonprofits this book The Tyranny of metrics it's about a 4-Hour read and the author is really clever he uses HBO's The Wire like stories from the police and school system where metrics can go disastrously wrong like things you don't want to do like you can measure are the wrong thing you can incentivize the wrong things you
• 39:00 - 39:30 can pay attention to the short term over the long term like um you know you can be patting yourself on the back for something that you think is really great when it's not so there's all these ways that nonprofits um you know you you need to be accountable right we can't just wink at our donors and say trust us um so how do we do that right and so um I start my chapter off by saying yes there are all these way things we don't want to do but then what should metrics do for us and so to me they help us answer this question of how do we know if what we're doing is working to me that's in
• 39:30 - 40:00 essence you know what what metrics and evaluation can help us with and then I go into a lot more detail in stories and examples of nonprofits doing it really well and not so well in that chapter um so I don't know if I answered your yeah um question but yeah that and that's a huge difference between uh the for-profit world and and nonprofit worlds uh that that makes nonprofits unique so yeah any you other questions or
• 40:00 - 40:30 comments yeah in the back do you find more success with national organizations or with local organizations um I don't I don't know if I've um yeah the question was have I personally found more success with national nonprofits or maybe small local nonprofits um yeah I don't know if I've seen a difference between the two like so much much I think has to do with that Spirit of leadership and openness and
• 40:30 - 41:00 some of those traits you know that I described that willingness to take risks and experiment and be Entre you know entrepreneurial thinking to me that's the most important thing um but you know they're all important uh nonprofits come in all shapes and sizes all sorts of Industries Hospital education Social Services um so uh so yeah I don't I don't know if uh I mean uh so I've worked for 18 years at a really large well to me large 200 person nonprofit
• 41:00 - 41:30 and they were super entrepreneur the marcada center at George Mason University so a lot of the stories I shared here were from them and they're to me a larger uh nonprofit but I mean there's trade-offs and everything as you you know I have a chapter in the book on organizational design and how to Think Through uh the structure of your organization and thinking through tradeoffs of you know large or small organization um so yeah I feel like I may Ed there a little bit but um that's my answer any other yes
• 41:30 - 42:00 yeah I I heard a link between but I didn't hear the rest a link between Innovation and social change ah let's see um so yeah in my book uh I was so originally when I first started writing the book I was just thinking about nonprofit Effectiveness
• 42:00 - 42:30 because that was kind of the nature of the work I was doing with clients just helping them think through strategy and evaluation and um but then as I started Gathering the stories what really jumped out at me were were these what I I think of his Innovation like breaking through and finding new and better ways of doing things inventing things and and I found that really exciting um so uh social change like uh the example of the American Civil Rights Movement I thought they were uh super Innovative and strategic um they really did bring about
• 42:30 - 43:00 social change you know in their work um so I I thought that story was probably one of the the best of kind of widespread social change and how they did it um I also looked at other kind of large nonprofits that are pretty well known like Habitat for Humanity um they've built many many homes right so I'd consider that social change and the book goes into their sto their origin story how they started and with just a handful of dedicated Founders and and kind of how they how they did that so I
• 43:00 - 43:30 don't know I hope I I hope I answered your question yes can you speak to the lessons you learned working in the fields in Jamaica oh yeah working in in Jamaica yeah so I included some of that in the book um yeah they uh the whole peace score experience um is so interesting because in a way you're living almost like a missionary you know you're you're serving a community that's very poor so that poverty part is is difficult and challenging um but at the same time I I saw a lot of kind of
• 43:30 - 44:00 Heroes rising to the occasion and and that changed me that experience um and that's where I my career took a turn I'm like I want to find a way to to apply these good practices that I learned in the for-profit world but I want to help these kind of heroic people trying to do good so there's a lot of those stories in the book um sometimes failure like uh one of the stories was uh during our our training in the Peace Corp uh we were told go into community and just figure out something that they need and you know make a work day and do something
• 44:00 - 44:30 and so we're still pretty new um so there are you know about 20 of us American volunteers and we found this Ravine full of trash they were kind of homes and then Ravine and we're like bye gum we're going to help this community we're going to we're going to have a trash cleanup day and uh but what we failed to do we never actually talked to the community to figure out like did was this something that they needed did this make sense and so we were all proud of ourselves we spent a very hot day in the Jamaican son you know cleaning out this Ravine and we couldn't we had posters up
• 44:30 - 45:00 everywhere we couldn't figure out why the locals weren't joining us um but the lesson there was you know and two weeks after we did it the Ravine filled up again and there were good lessons there like um you know just kind sometimes arrogance or or going in and just not talking to the people you're serving um what we would have learned from if we would have talked with them is that there were no good options you know what they needed were better options for trash disposal they had no alternative ative but to just keep putting it in the Ravine um so there are a lot of stories
• 45:00 - 45:30 like that of um just Lessons Learned and uh people that that I really respect doing doing amazing things