A Growing Movement

The good news is that it’s already happening! The social and political stories of change highlighted at the beginning of this chapter illustrate how lean startup techniques are already driving unprecedented change in the social sector as well. As we’ll see later in this book, each of the examples at the beginning of this chapter used one or more dimensions of the lean startup toolkit to achieve extraordinary results.

Furthermore, there are lean startup techniques that the social sector has been using since long before the lean startup movement began. (Listening closely to “customers”… well, that’s called “organizing” in the labor movement.) What’s important, though, is how these techniques form a coherent, whole approach to starting and growing an innovation. From end to end, lean techniques help at every stage of generating and developing a new idea.

The tools of lean startups are for a wide array of actors in the social sector, from the individual entrepreneur to managers in well-established nonprofit and government agencies. They are for employees seeking to excel, and for funders looking for transformative change. The lean philosophy is for elected officials who strive to make a deep and long-lasting impact.

But there’s something else about the first examples in this chapter—about stories like Mott Hall School’s mentoring program—that remains astonishing. They feel, in the parlance of Internet startups, like sightings of a unicorn, a rare, mythical creature. But what they have in common with stories about Google or Facebook or Amazon is the revolutionary role played by information technology. Like those companies, each of these social and political efforts used information technology to make change happen faster than it ever had before in their respective domains.

That’s lean startups for social change—using lean techniques to achieve social and policy impact faster and more efficiently than ever before. And that’s what this book is all about.

The lean startup has been on the cover of the Harvard Business Review, but it’s still in its infancy, barely known outside Silicon Valley and a handful of business schools. It has barely begun to be adapted to nonprofit and government practice. This book introduces that practice: bringing the lean startup revolution into the field of social and policy change.