Moving Your Organization and Its Impact, Forward.

It’s so easy to get caught up in the day to day of doing our work that we neglect the bigger picture of our work.  We are so busy working in it that we don’t take time to work on it.

 Anna Mei Chang’s book Lean Impact offers three helpful questions for us to take a step back.  She calls them the three pillars of social innovation:  Value, Impact, and Growth and the questions are this:

What is the value our work is creating?

What is the impact we are making?

Can we scale this?  What does growth look like?

 These can be hard existential questions for us and for our organizations.  However, if we don’t make time with ourselves, our teams, and our boards to think through these questions in light of our mission, then we get stuck on a treadmill – working really hard, but not actually going anywhere.

 So, find ways to embed these questions and time for discussion in your staff meetings, your board meetings, and your personal reflection time.  You don’t have to make it weekly, but at least annually, take time to reflect on these questions so that you can make sure all the hard work you are putting into your organization is moving you and the impact you want to have forward.