It’s easy to just keep doing what you’ve been doing. Innovating takes intentional time and effort. So how do you know whether you should invest time and energy into innovating? Let’s start with what I mean by “innovating” in the social change arena… creating or improving a service, offering, or process with the aim of increasing social impact, scale, or value for your constituents. With that in mind, here are my 3 handy, dandy questions to ask yourself before deciding to innovate…
1) Can you achieve your ambitious goals through “business as usual”?
If yes… hey, that’s cool. Keep up the great work!
If no… if simply doing what you’ve been doing, with some tweak here and there are not going to get you to your goals, it’s probably time to invest some resources into innovation.
2) Are your solutions making a significant long-term impact on the societal problem you seek to solve?
If yes… Holy crap, wow, congratulations!
If no… maybe your solutions are awesome but you need to figure out how to scale up. Maybe you’re solving a short term problem but the long-term problem keeps getting worse. Whatever the case, if you’re just scratching the surface of a big problem, you might want to try out some innovative ways to reach more people.
3) Are you satisfied with the status quo?
If yes… umm, okay…
If no… I’m with you! We’re not the type of people to ignore mass incarceration; inequities in health, education, and economic prosperity; anti-black racism; power increasingly concentrated in the hands of the very few; persistently stagnant wages for the bottom 60%; climate catastrophes; the horrors of modern day factory farming; widespread abuse of workers; and on and on. There are so many problems in the world and many of them are actually getting worse, not better. If we want to disrupt systems of oppression, we need to disrupt our strategies for social change. Let’s innovate!
If you answered “no” to any of the questions above, be sure to invest some resources into innovating. I strongly recommend spending a little time learning how to innovate well by reading any or all of the following: Lean Impact (a 260-page book), The Promise of Lean Experimentation (20-minute read), Innovating for Huge Social Impact (10-minute read).