Greater Impact & Less Friction

My year has already kicked off with discussions of national innovations to tackle social housing across Canada, scalable impact finance storytelling models for New Zealand, and the unique challenges of distributing through the Pacific Islands, which are made up of 13 countries, each with their nuance, relationships and customs!

Whilst Australia is relaxing over Summer, the rest of the world is getting after it ;)

What's been consistent in these discussions is that when we've looked at the effort to do something high-quality that supports the short and medium-term objectives of each project, it takes the same time and planning commitment as each business owner expected to get a ‘basic outcome’ or ‘a start’ on the initiative.

Factoring that it takes just as long to do an average job, the choice in each instance has been to do what’s necessary to create a quality outcome, because it’s going to generate high value, that compounds over time, and thus a much better return on investment.

Question: What level of quality are you happy with when you do things? How does this choice effect your results over time?

Can you do better than an Impact Report 10 months from now?

Click here to watch the short video about this topic.

If you're really about creating change with stakeholders, I think there's a better way than creating an impact report at the end of each year and then choosing whether or not you're going to put relevant data in, to congratulate yourself and appear great to the rest of the market.

I don't mean to be too pithy there, but what I'm seeing is that people come up with their theory of change and say they're going to implement it and that will impact stakeholders.

What if each quarter or even each month we went to those stakeholders and asked them how we were impacting their lives? What if we built into the program, into the distribution of funds, into the requirements of service providers?

It’s possible to ensure the money works in a loop of speaking to stakeholders, asking them unscripted questions so you get real answers, capturing those responses, and putting them in a format people associated with the impact assets or the investment can access.

I’m talking about your funding partners and your team, and if you’re willing to let it outside your inner sanctum, maybe even your peers, advocacy groups, regulators or the public at large.

What would it mean for you if the people you claimed to be impacting were regularly sharing how you impacted them?

Potentially, the people who trusted you in the first place with the money would turn around and congratulate you;

"Oh, it's working. Wow. Thanks. I wanted to know that it's working" - they can then take that and share it with their peers and their colleagues and say to them;

"Hey, you know how I've been rabbiting on about this impact stuff? Check out this. We're making a difference."

And they can turn around and think to themselves "Maybe I could be making a difference too?".

And if you did that incrementally through the year, not only could you pivot when challenge occurred so that you truly made an impact in your stakeholders’ lives, when you get to the end of the year you will have useful, gritty substantiation to your impact report!

Rather than getting your Impact report out at the last minute and putting it in a pile with all the other impact reports throughout the year, what about having this ongoing, near-real-time conversation?

How about having an ongoing discussion for your peers, stakeholders and investors to self-actualize inside the possibility we are all creating together?

Wouldn't you rather be making an impact that matters, adjusting on the fly and regularly validating your theory of change with your stakeholders?

Hope is not a strategy as they say, and all it takes is a nuanced digital layer integrated between the planning and the implementation to make this happen.

I think that's a much more powerful way to go than simply leaving it to the end of the year and doing a retrospective.

Reducing Friction

When you think of the last three or four projects you did, what type of friction did you encounter that delayed the process or affected the quality of the outcome, and where along the chain of stakeholders was that friction encountered?

Often I find people don't take the time to map out this chain of encounters, and it's very rarely longer than five or 10 touch points, and this train of events recurs often again and again when you zoom out a little from the day-to-day operations and look across your key departments.

Some may call this customer journey marketing, but often the initiatives that will drive your business forward, where you are working on the business and not in the business, contain a unique set of stakeholders and a growth edge for your team and organisation.

With a little bit of forethought and asking some fundamental questions, you can identify this chain of friction.

Then you can prepare for it by giving each person in the chain what they need to reduce that friction and improve the quality of your outcomes.

A way to calculate the value of doing this is to reflect on the axiom that time is money and do a back-of-the-napkin calculation.

Calculate the cost of wages of one day for the people involved in this linear chain.

Then work out how much quicker something would get done if you didn't encounter these points of friction, or at the very least, if the time it takes to overcome or work through and resolve them, was reduced by a third or half.

Question: Thinking about your next project, and listing the people your team will need to interact with, what if you were prepared ahead of time, and had what you needed to reduce the friction? What does your value calculation look like?