As the twenty‐first century winds up its second decade, it’s become more and more obvious – nearly to the point of becoming that rarely achieved thing, utter clarity – that innovation is no longer just a Silicon Valley buzzword. It’s not even just a technology buzzword any more. Organizations of all kinds – business, political, educational, cultural, charitable – know the choice they face is to innovate or to die out. Groups that have social good at the center of their missions, which do so much critical work in the world and are always striving to do more, and do it better, have also realized that this kind of evolution is the key to fulfilling their goals. I’ve spoken to countless organizations of this kind over the years that are eager and ready to embrace innovation. They know it will make their urgent work more focused, efficient, and better directed towards problems that truly need solving. They also know that following a Lean Startup–style process of experimentation will lead them to uncover areas of concern that they might otherwise not discover – an invaluable tool when we’re talking about poverty, hunger, health, safety, and so many other issues that need serious attention. There’s no shortage of good to be done in the world, and no one knows that better than the people who are invested in making social impact.

What they haven’t known, for the most part, is how to start innovating. That’s why Lean Impact is such an important book. Most writing on innovation is aimed at the business world, in which different rules and politics are at play. Lean Impact dives headfirst into the work of social good and walks through its challenges and opportunities to explain how to innovate within them. It’s comprehensive, totally straightforward, and illustrated with great stories about people who are already working in this way. Ann Mei Chang, whom I’ve known for many years, is the perfect person to write such a book. She learned all about innovation in Silicon Valley over the course of a twenty‐year career and then made a truly inspiring pivot into nonprofits and government. As the chief innovation officer and executive director of the US Global Development Lab at USAID, she had the awesome job of overseeing the Lab’s work identifying the kinds of breakthrough innovations that have meaningful impact on peoples’ lives, and also bringing in modern approaches and tools, including technology, to help transform the way development work is done around the world. As she says, she knew she had a lot to learn when she made the switch. She learned it well, and now, she’s sharing that knowledge and experience with everyone who picks up this book.

Lean Impact is full of inspiring stories of organizations pivoting to meet the true needs of the people they serve. They’re set all over the world – Indonesia, Liberia, Uganda, Kenya, El Salvador, India, Bangladesh, the United Kingdom, and right here in the United States. They range from a company that helps immigrants learn English based on data from customers about what they really wanted, to one that has so far provided 12 million solar lights to 62 countries and is aiming for more. There’s a story about how a passion for protecting orangutans led to the building of a local health clinic in Indonesia – a solution that would never have been arrived at without using Lean Impact techniques to discover that the real problem was a lack of local medical services. The list goes on and on: an innovation story that begins with something as simple as a soccer game; the evolution of a company that was founded to provide free eyeglasses into a force for political advocacy and policy change; a story about combating youth unemployment in South Africa; one about easier access to food stamps in California; and another about a housing and services network for the chronically homeless.

Along with all these real‐life examples comes a ton of practical information about methods for working in the current system, new funding models, and even ways to start encouraging change from within. Lean Impact discusses the ways organizations can serve their two very different, but equally important, customers – funders and users – a crucial skill set for success in the world of social good. It also pays close attention to funders themselves – foundations, government agencies, philanthropists, impact investors, and donors – offering tools that will help them direct their aid in ways that best support the projects they’re involved in. A book that explains this clearly and compellingly is a hugely important contribution.

I’ve had many conversations with funders who want to know how they can be more useful. More often than not, when I tell them they need to change the way they give grants and donations by funding actual outcomes rather than giving groups a large sum of money and waiting to see what happens at the end of a year (or two years, or more) they rarely call me again. Until now, this idea, and change of any kind, has simply seemed too radical a departure from the way things have always been done. Lean Impact will make it seem not only possible, but preferable. I’m thrilled to see the ideas in The Lean Startup used in these new, incredibly valuable ways, and to see how Ann Mei has developed and customized them to meet the particular needs of social innovation. Value and growth are the main dimensions of Lean Startup, and now a third one has been added: impact.

Impact is a critically important concept when it comes to social innovation, generally used in the context of measuring whether social interventions do or don’t work. But conceptually, it’s very similar to the problem of measuring success in a business before you have profits. That’s why lean methods are so perfectly suited to this kind of work. The only real difference is that instead of talking about maximizing shareholder value, Lean Impact talks about maximizing social impact. An advance party of pioneers, some of whom you’ll read about here, is already doing this, but we need more. This book is a way to help add to their numbers.

Lean Impact is not only transformational for the social sector, though. My hope is that people in other kinds of businesses and organizations will also pick it up and, after reading about the dedicated people and clear strategies whose stories Ann Mei has gathered, think about how the products and institutions they build affect the world. All of us have more to learn about how we make impact so we can move together into this new era.

As I lie on the roof of a small boat puttering down the Ywe River, drifting past lush vegetation punctuated by the occasional flash of bright gold from the stupa of a Buddhist shrine, my mind turns over a jumble of insights from an eye‐opening day. I had arrived in the Irrawaddy Delta region of Myanmar the night before, after flying halfway around the world and bumping along for eight hours on largely unpaved roads. Following a restless night in the best local guesthouse listening to my neighbor’s hacking cough through thin walls that rose a foot short of the ceiling, I had eagerly embarked on one of my first field visits to witness the noble work being done to fight global poverty.

Myanmar was at a critical juncture. Life was gradually returning to normal after the 2008 devastation of Cyclone Nargis, which had killed almost 100,000 people. Hope for a brighter future was swelling, following the release of pro‐democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest and the first open parliamentary elections in decades. Yet, many people remained desperately poor, toiled on small family farms, and eked out an average income of less than two dollars a day. The program I was here to visit worked with some of these smallholder farmers in the delta region to improve their agricultural yields, and thereby their incomes.

My day started with an early three‐hour boat ride to one of these villages. As I walked among the thatched huts and surrounding fields, the women and men proudly showed me their thriving crops of rice and vegetables. I also visited the cramped shack where local staff slept during the week so they could provide training on modern farming techniques, supply improved seeds, and help form farming collectives to achieve better economies of scale. The dedication of both the farmers and the staff was inspiring. Everyone was working tirelessly to make life better.

Back in town, the leadership team explained how the program was managed. On one wall of the office hung a large chalkboard, with a grid listing each of the villages down one side and all the planned activities, along with their associated targets, across the top. At the end of each week, the local staff would convene to review progress and tally the number of people that had been reached. It was a well‐oiled machine.

But, breaking the cycle of poverty is incredibly complex, and we are far from having all the answers. So, I asked, how well were these efforts working? What improvements had been made to the program during the first two years? And, how could we help many more farmers? I got back a lot of blank stares.

I quickly learned that this isn’t how it works. As with many global development programs, the entire design had been laid out years before in the original grant proposal, largely by staff at headquarters back in the United States. The job of the staff working in the delta was to execute on this plan and hit their quarterly targets, not to learn and improve. To make matters worse, the total number of farmers being reached by the multimillion‐dollar program – perhaps several thousand – was tiny in a region of over six million people, roughly a third of whom were living below the poverty line.¹ Was it possible to do better? After the allotted four years, the program was slated to end whether it was working or not. Never mind if more help was needed there or in a neighboring area. The team could keep their fingers crossed for a new grant or another donor to take interest. Otherwise, it would be time to pack up and go home.

Back on the boat, as I soaked in the warm January sunshine, I thought that there had to be a better way. People are working so hard to make a difference, and yet their hands are tied. Executing a rigid, one‐off program is no way to deliver the most impact for the most people. We could do so much more. Over the course of my subsequent travels to countries as far afield as Liberia, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Guatemala, India, and Mongolia, I saw a similar scenario repeated over and over again.

I decided to devote the second half of my career to understanding these perverse dynamics and finding a way to improve the system.

TWO WORLDS COLLIDE

This may seem like an unusual reaction. Most people return from field visits with a burning passion to help the people or habitats they have seen, not grapple with the bureaucratic processes and management philosophy behind the work. But, I’m an engineer.

Seven years ago, after over 20 years in the tech industry, I made a long‐planned transition to spend the second half of my career trying to make the world a better place. That may sound trite, but it really was that simple. As much as I loved the challenges of building software, I knew I wanted to do something more meaningful in my life. The question was what. I certainly wasn’t an expert in poverty alleviation, healthcare, education, conservation, human rights, or anything else that seemed to matter. And, having long ago moved from software engineering into management roles, I wasn’t even particularly qualified to write code. Nevertheless, I plunged in with the sincere hope of finding a worthwhile way to contribute beyond merely stuffing envelopes.

This visit to Myanmar was one of the early steps in my learning process. If I would have any hope of making a difference, I knew I first had to understand the work being done on the front lines. I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to learn from some of the industry’s best through my work in US government, at a top international nonprofit, and with the numerous partners of both.

Coming off eight years at Google, some of the Silicon Valley hubris had certainly rubbed off on me, for better or worse. Anything seemed possible. While I was leading the mobile engineering team in the late 2000s, turn‐by‐turn navigation was the number one feature request of mobile users of Google Maps. However, our path to market was stymied by a duopoly of map‐data providers, who offered licenses for a flat fee but required an annual per user charge for navigation services. Not something we could afford for a free product. When we brought this dilemma to Google’s cofounders, Larry and Sergey, they authorized an extraordinary effort: to drive all the streets in the world to build our own mapping database. The satnav industry, accustomed to charging users $5–10 a month for its services, was turned on its head.

Not only did I learn to think big, I also grew to appreciate the value of experimentation. Despite being an industry leader, Google doesn’t rest on its laurels. Each day it runs hundreds of experiments to test both major and minor enhancements to its services. Although Google didn’t invent web search, it out‐innovated its competitors by testing, learning, and iterating faster. As a result, Google products are appreciably better today than they were last year or the year before.

It was this perspective that I brought with me to the Irrawaddy Delta. I couldn’t help but ask, Is this working? Can we do better? Can we reach more people? And, is it possible to permanently transform the system?

Okay, I admit I was a bit naive. My boundless enthusiasm soon crashed squarely into cold reality. I quickly learned that social innovation – the development of better solutions to social and environmental challenges – is much harder than tech innovation. Funding constraints can severely limit experimentation. The needs of beneficiaries and the priorities of donors don’t always align. Short‐term wins are rewarded over long‐term growth. Measuring social outcomes is much harder than counting clicks. And, taking risks has far greater implications when it involves real lives.

Yet I firmly believe that the same techniques for innovation that have fueled dramatic progress in Silicon Valley can be the basis for creating radically greater social good. Since my trip to Myanmar, I have found more and more pioneering organizations that are taking this approach and showing compelling results. Innovation doesn’t have to be time consuming or expensive. In fact, by recognizing problems early we can save time and money.

Just as companies have a responsibility to maximize shareholder value, mission‐driven organizations have a responsibility to maximize social benefit to society. After living in both spheres, I was inspired to write Lean Impact to share my belief that innovation can transform the world in the ways that truly matter.

THE LEAN STARTUP MOVEMENT

In almost every industry, companies have sought to emulate the dynamism of Silicon Valley that has made it a hotbed of innovation. Not only have technology advances upended almost every aspect of our lives, but year after year solutions to problems both large and small improve by leaps and bounds. Emblematic of this unrelenting pace of progress is Moore’s law, which for more than 50 years has accurately predicted that the number of transistors on a chip would double every two years, delivering exponentially greater computing power. Why shouldn’t we seek the same pace of progress when it comes to the world’s toughest problems?

A burst of innovation in the software sector was unleashed in part by the transition from shipping software in shrink‐wrapped boxes to releasing in the cloud. Time between updates has gone from a year or more to days or even hours. And, by virtue of being online, companies can immediately see how users respond. Software development has been transformed. Eric Ries popularized this new approach to continuous innovation in his 2011 bestselling book, The Lean Startup.²

Eric’s goal was “to improve the success rate of new innovative products worldwide.” With The Lean Startup, he succeeded in launching a global movement. Today, thousands converge at related conferences and summits, an industry of consulting and training services has arisen, and self‐organized Meetups provide peer support and learning around the world. Eric’s second book, The Startup Way,³ squarely addressed the growing recognition that larger corporations must become more entrepreneurial or fall behind. And, increasingly, mission‐driven organizations are being drawn to these same best practices to further their work.

INNOVATING FOR GOOD

Perhaps not surprisingly, a number of barriers make it more difficult to innovate for purpose rather than for profit. But if anything, accelerating our ability to deliver solutions that work better and faster, and reach scale, is even more important when it comes to social challenges. We’re talking about improving and saving lives, not just releasing another app or making more bucks. It’s time for us to reinvent our approach to social good for the twenty‐first century.

What will people want and embrace? Can we make a more transformative impact? Is it possible to reach the scale of the enormous need? While we certainly don’t have all the answers today, we have a responsibility do everything in our power to find them. To maximize our chance of success amid such complex challenges, we need a methodology to manage risk and accelerate learning.

The demand for social innovation is real. In a 2017 survey of 145 nonprofit leaders, the Bridgespan Group found that 80% considered innovation to be an “urgent imperative,” but that only 40% believed that their organizations were set up for it.⁴

Lean Impact will challenge you to think bigger, by expanding your vision of the potential for change. Perhaps counterintuitively, it will also encourage you to start smaller and to accelerate learning by validating your assumptions before making larger investments. Above all, it will urge you to keep a laser focus on your mission, which may lead you beyond your initial solution or even institution. I hope you’ll join me on this journey to blaze a path to greater impact and scale.

HOW THIS BOOK IS ORGANIZED

This book is divided into three parts: “Inspire,” “Validate,” and “Transform.”

Part I, “Inspire,” makes the case that audacious goals and a relentless drive to maximize impact are as important as, if not more important than, altruism in our pursuit of social change. When our current interventions fall well short of the problems we aim to tackle, we must look further for better solutions. New paths inevitably entail greater uncertainty, thus a scientific approach to iterative learning is needed to reduce risk and help us determine what works. We have a responsibility to society to do more.

Part II, “Validate,” dives into the core of the Lean Impact methodology, detailing the process of continuous validation through a social innovation lens. Real‐life examples from around the world will demonstrate how to increase the value you deliver to beneficiaries, identify engines that can accelerate growth, and maximize your resulting social impact. We’ll also explore techniques to test assumptions and speed up your feedback loop using minimum viable products (MVPs).

Part III, “Transform,” tackles the broader ecosystem that must be engaged for social good. Many intractable problems require a systems approach to address market and policy failures. One of the biggest barriers to social innovation is the nature of funding, which has the power to facilitate, but more often undermines, experimentation. And, for Lean Impact to take hold, organizations need a culture that embraces risk and rewards ambition. The book ends by considering how social purpose has become increasingly interwoven into business practices, investment options, career choices, and consumer purchasing. More and more real solutions will cross conventional boundaries.

WHO SHOULD READ THIS BOOK?

Whether you are a funder, service provider, entrepreneur, policy maker, academic, or champion of social good, you are here because you care about long‐term sustainable impact. At the same time, we all face enormous pressure to help people who are suffering today, to generate immediate results and positive stories, or to simply keep the lights on. We are running so fast with so little that it’s hard to imagine how we can possibly do more. Yet we must.

No meaningful social change happens in isolation. We work in complex systems that extend far beyond any one organization. In order for impact to stick, we must deploy interventions, raise funds, engage communities, reshape markets, change policies, and more. Thus, this book is intended for the full spectrum of people who seek to deliver greater social good through their professions, time, or money. Note that innovation is not just for startups. While we often associate the term innovation with scrappy social enterprises and disruptive technologies, it is equally essential for the continuous renewal and enhanced performance of existing programs and larger institutions.

Lean Impact will help those working to build and scale social interventions – from nonprofit staff to social entrepreneurs to corporate project managers – deliver dramatically better results. It will help those funding social good – from foundations to government agencies to philanthropists to impact investors – create the incentives that enable social innovation to thrive. It will help local, state, national, and international governments support measured risk taking and adopt more effective interventions for public good. And, amidst a rising tide of citizens inspired to contribute to society through their time, work, and money, it will help the broader public recognize the pathways that can maximize their own impact.

I don’t claim to have all the answers. Rather, I hope to help us all ask the crucial questions that will steer us towards a more promising path forward. This book draws on my interviews and visits with over 200 organizations across the United States and around the world, with diverse roles and structures, tackling a wide range of social challenges. I have learned from and been inspired by their practical experiences, successes, and failures, and hope you will be as well.

For this journey, all you need is genuine curiosity and a readiness to take action. Even small steps can make a huge difference. If you’re not sure where to start, turn to the next page.