Introduction
What if we were building solutions that we knew worked rather than spending months or even years planning and simply hoping for the best? What kinds of problems could we solve? How many lives could we change? As the director of an investment fund focused on startups with social impact, I think about these kinds of questions all the time.
In 2011, the epilogue to Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup suggested that an ultimate outcome of lean startup practice would be the creation of “new institutions with a long-term mission to build sustainable value and change the world for the better.” The idea was to make new businesses that would build a better world.
Of course, the world is full of groups that already have that mission: nonprofits, government agencies, and organizations devoted to social change. Five years after the publication of The Lean Startup, I’m excited to introduce a book devoted entirely to them. Since The Lean Startup was first published, a thriving ecosystem of organizations and investors has emerged that’s committed to learning how to make the social sector more effective through lean startup principles.
What is refreshing about social innovation is the scope and importance of the challenges being tackled. We’re not simply optimizing to sell more widgets. Rather, social sector entrepreneurs are applying their creative energy and rigorous analysis to some of the world’s most entrenched problems—problems that have persisted precisely because they resist easy solutions. This also means that we’re solving problems that are too important to be left to the inertia of “what we’ve always done” and too vital to be addressed only with good intentions.
This is precisely what encourages me about this moment and about Michel’s book. What the lean startup offers the social sector is a rigorous methodology to test new ways of solving problems. It provides organizations with a framework to quickly test new ideas and validate those that might be most effective. Critically, it saves social innovators our most valuable resource: time. Applying the lean startup methodology to social change allows for fresh experimentation that could transform society in ways that traditional social and business institutions may have overlooked or been afraid to try in the past. Lean startup thinking encourages us to get out of our heads and to test our proposed solutions in the real world to actually create massive, transformative social change.
When The Lean Startup was first published in 2011 the applicability of lean principles to the social sector was not yet as apparent as it is now. Early meetups were sparsely attended, and people expressed doubts that a business methodology could be applied to the social sector.
Fast-forward a couple of years, and we’ve seen everything from dedicated convenings on Lean Impact to a track for social innovators at the main Lean Startup conference. Most important, I’ve seen powerful examples of social change organizations applying lean principles to critical, world-changing work. Within our own portfolio at New Media Ventures, online organizing groups like SumofUs, activists for corporate accountability, are relentlessly focused on experimentation, routinely testing dozens of campaigns with their members before deciding—through evidence—which to focus on. Upworthy, one of New Media Ventures’ early for-profit mission coinvestments, itself started as an experiment and has since been hailed as one of the fastest-growing media startups of all time. Upworthy’s curators famously come up with twenty-five headlines for each piece of content they propose, alternatives that they can then test precisely to find out which headlines hook an audience.
We simply need more. We need more change and more progress, and we need more social sector organizations being effective agents of change. Finally, we need more specific examples of lean startup in practice in the social sector. This is where Michel’s book comes in, and it provides a great start focused exclusively on nonprofit organizations and government agencies.
The task now is to scale the practice of lean startup in the social sector, but how do we go about doing that? It’s not enough to highlight the work of social entrepreneurs. Funders play a critical role in advancing the cause. Some are eager to understand how to integrate lean’s focus on serving real needs in a measurable way. Others are risk averse by design. Funders in government and private philanthropy are stewards of limited resources, and it can feel safer to support things that have proved effective rather than innovations that might simply “fail fast.”
But I would suggest that the biggest risk funders face is not having enough impact. We’re going to need to change the way we fund social sector organizations if we’re to maximize our impact as funders. Because of its laser focus on measurement and experimentation (and, as Michel points out, service to those most in need of it), lean startup can actually provide the “validated learning” funders need to make better decisions every day about how best to spend their resources. Lean startup offers a way to elicit evidence of demand for specific solutions before a lot of money is spent.
Applying lean startup principles to the social sector or to the funding of social change is not without its challenges. Transformative social change can take a long time. Quick fixes and easy solutions are rarely available. Seemingly successful short-term solutions may have adverse long-term consequences, and when social change experiments fail, we fail real people in need. We all need to start sharing examples of what lean learning looks like in practice and destigmatize taking near-term risks to keep the focus on long-term benefits. I hope this book catalyzes honest conversations around these challenges and spurs us as a community to find creative solutions to address them.
Overall, a thriving culture of lean within the impact entrepreneur and funder communities could accelerate social change by removing taboos around experimentation and failure. If we can truly embrace the value of learning what works, then the social sector may be happily surprised by completely new innovative solutions that become widely adopted much more quickly than the forced models of the past.
Great nonprofits and great government agencies are not like great businesses. They are, first and foremost, effective agents of social change and uplift of the kind we all hope to be part of. With this book and with the growing lean startup community, we may be getting closer to that better world after all.
Christie George
San Francisco