1 Making Change the 21st-Century Way

Making change is hard—even before you start making it.

Whether you’re in a big government agency, you’re confronting a problem in your own community, or you’re just trying to make a difference in a few people’s lives, getting started is a challenge. You convene meetings, make plans, find partners, agonize over the right approach, cajole donors or funding agencies, compromise. You build a model that a lot of people sign on to, you secure funding, and you get started.

The stakes are especially high for making change in the social sector because failure is often not an option. In contrast with the private sector, social innovation requires something harder to get than money—it takes political and social will. If an innovation fails to deliver a vital product or service the momentum required to try again is often dissipated for years.

Aware of these stakes, the team you’ve assembled is working from a playbook you’ve painstakingly built, but you launch into a world that hasn’t seen anything like this before. A new community forms around the idea. There’s an excitement about the change that will come, an anticipation of the start, dreams about the middle and the end, about the time when the world, in some measure, will be a better place. Whether it’s a new childcare center, an advocacy campaign to shut down a polluter, a trade association for dog trainers, or literally a new way of getting trains to run on time, a lot of work goes into gathering the energy and good will to get started.

And starting is when the real trouble begins. Sometimes the change you hoped to make actually happens, but, more often than not, there’s a hard road ahead for your initial vision to actually manifest or for the change you hoped for to be big enough to make a difference. You work with the risk that all the planning and good will has been for naught.

To the founding team this process feels unique, but it is in fact the pattern of much innovation in business, government, and the social sector. It takes a tremendous amount of personal, social, and financial capital to get an idea off the ground, but all too often when the initial plan meets the real world the results are nothing like those anticipated.

Just over a decade ago, a revolutionary way to make change emerged from Silicon Valley: the lean startup. Companies were starting and failing so quickly that the startup pattern no longer felt unique. The lean startup alternative bypassed the freight of a plan and securing social and political capital behind it to focus on where the change actually has to happen and where the best-laid plans almost always run into trouble: in their direct encounter with customers.