Organizational leaders often face a barrage of sales pitches promoting the latest tools and best practices for change management. The flood of information can be overwhelming, implementation challenging, and the costs high.
Let's look at two approaches and see which one is best suited for your nonprofit.
Comparing the Basadur Simplexity Thinking (developed by Min Basadur) process with Purpose Driven Impact (PDI) (developed by
Stewart S.
) framework reveals key differences in approach, focus, and outcomes. Both are designed to foster innovation and solve problems, but they target different aspects of organizational development and strategy. Let’s break down the comparison and identify which might be better depending on the context.
1. Core Approach: Creativity vs. Purpose-Driven Innovation
- Basadur Simplexity Thinking: This method emphasizes creative problem-solving and collaboration through divergent (idea generation) and convergent (idea selection) thinking. It focuses on helping teams identify, explore, and solve problems, often with a strong emphasis on creativity and teamwork.
- Purpose Driven Impact (PDI): The PDI framework focuses on disciplined innovation, operational excellence, journey & process mapping, and lean marketing strategies, grounded in the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) framework. It is more holistic and purpose-driven, aiming to create impactful solutions for nonprofits by addressing unmet needs, reducing waste, and enhancing efficiency through a structured process.
2. Problem Definition and Focus
- Basadur: The problem-finding stage is often open-ended and flexible. The framework can be used to solve various types of challenges, whether operational, strategic, or product-related. It thrives on the creative exploration of problems and solutions.
- PDI: The PDI framework, on the other hand, is goal-oriented. It begins by identifying the unmet needs of individuals (or customers) and seeks to provide solutions that save time, reduce costs, and increase marketing effectiveness. PDI’s purpose-driven approach makes it more targeted than Basadur, as it starts with clear organizational objectives—maximizing impact and operational efficiency.
- Basadur: The process follows a clear, linear path of problem-finding, idea generation, solution selection, and implementation. It encourages iterative thinking but doesn’t prescribe specific metrics for success.
- PDI: PDI is structured around three pillars: Disciplined Innovation, Lean Marketing, and Operational Excellence. Each of these has defined objectives, such as: Using innovation to reduce waste and create value. Enhancing marketing effectiveness through lean strategies. Promoting operational excellence by optimizing processes and minimizing inefficiencies. PDI’s structure is therefore more systematic and holistic, touching on multiple aspects of an organization’s performance.
4. Creativity vs. Disciplined Innovation
- Basadur: Creativity is central to Basadur’s process. It allows for the broad exploration of problems and ideas, encouraging team members to think freely without constraints in the early stages of problem-solving.
- PDI: While creativity plays a role in the PDI framework, it is more grounded in disciplined innovation—which means focusing on innovation within constraints. PDI emphasizes solving problems through structured approaches like JTBD, market research, and process optimization. It’s more about innovating with purpose and efficiency rather than exploring all possible creative ideas.
5. Flexibility vs. Purposeful Action
- Basadur: Basadur’s process is flexible and adaptable to any problem or organizational need. It can be applied broadly across different types of challenges, allowing teams to find their own direction as they move through the problem-solving process.
- PDI: PDI is purpose-driven and therefore more focused. It’s designed specifically for nonprofits and faith-based organizations, aiming to help them operate more efficiently and deliver impactful solutions to their audiences. It’s less flexible than Basadur, but it’s highly effective in situations where nonprofits need clear strategies to increase impact and reduce waste.
6. Qualitative vs. Quantitative
- Basadur: Largely qualitative, emphasizing collaboration, brainstorming, and creative thinking to find solutions.
- PDI: The PDI framework incorporates both qualitative and quantitative elements, particularly in the lean marketing and operational excellence components. You may use data to assess marketing effectiveness, optimize processes, and drive innovation based on unmet needs.
- Basadur: Can be used to solve customer-focused problems, but it isn’t inherently customer-centric. The problem-finding stage can emerge from internal challenges as well.
- PDI: Strongly customer-focused (or in the case of nonprofits, audience-focused). By using the JTBD framework, PDI identifies the specific jobs or unmet needs of an organization’s stakeholders and creates strategies to meet those needs efficiently.
8. Implementation and Measurement
- Basadur: After ideas are selected, the team implements them, but there’s less focus on post-implementation analysis or long-term measurement of impact.
- PDI: Includes a strong emphasis on measurable outcomes and continuous improvement. The framework is designed to track how well solutions are working, focusing on operational excellence and marketing effectiveness, which makes it easier to assess the return on investment (ROI) or kingdom impact in the case of faith-based organizations and nonprofits.
Basadur Simplexity Thinking is better for:
- Those looking for a flexible, creative framework to solve a variety of internal and external challenges.
- Groups that need to explore problems from multiple angles and find creative, collaborative solutions.
- Situations where the problem is unclear or evolving, and there’s a need to first define the problem through exploration.
Purpose Driven Impact (PDI) is better for:
- Nonprofits or purpose-driven organizations that need structured, goal-oriented solutions to enhance impact, efficiency, and sustainability.
- Organizations that want to focus on specific unmet needs, lean marketing strategies, and operational excellence to maximize resources.
- Situations where the goal is to innovate with purpose—using disciplined innovation processes that are directly tied to measurable outcomes and strategic objectives.
- Teams that need a holistic framework that integrates innovation, marketing, and operations in a systematic way.
- Basadur is ideal for creativity-driven, open-ended problem-solving across a range of scenarios, especially when flexibility is needed and the problem isn't well defined.
- PDI, with its disciplined, purpose-driven approach, is more suited for nonprofits or faith-based organizations looking for structured, actionable solutions that enhance operational and marketing effectiveness while driving innovation in a systematic way.
