Pilots for truly original work

Photos: Ameen Fahmy and (insert) Forty Two, on Unsplash.com

This area of the site was written for very experienced trust fundraisers.

Things come out differently when you hit the real world

If you look at true start-ups – people working in fields with extensive uncertainty – then their experience is completely unlike that described in our proposals:

An online games site ended up being used for sharing photos (Flickr)
A site to rate the attractiveness of women at a university became Facebook
Bubblewrap was originally going to be a textured wallpaper
The audience for the internet was the defence industry
Play-Doh was going to be a wallpaper cleaner

…and so on. (I saw this myself when I tried consulting: ringing my potential customers – Heads of Fundraising – it immediately became clear that the things they’d actually buy from me were very different from the things I’d hoped they would pay for.)

Steve Blank, Serial entrepreneur and Stanford Professor of Business, likes to say “There are no facts in your building. You have to get out of the building to find them.” When confronted by the real world, the ways you think you can make a difference can turn out to be very different.

This isn’t really just about commercial businesses. It’s highly analogous to our own worlds. People pay businesses for products because they have needs and that creates the demand for the service. If we think that demand isn’t as important for us, or that the end users shouldn’t have the same kind of control over needs because they’re not paying, then that’s deeply patronising and patriarchal.

However, if the entrepreneurs above had been funded under a proposal for a grant, they’d have failed! Almost guaranteed! For two reasons:

The proposal already spells out everything that’s supposed to happen
The Fundraising Department, if it spotted what was going on, would be fighting against the change every step of the way, because: that’s not what’s supposed to happen with the money

However, those companies pivoted to do something else because it turned out to be a much better idea than the one that was originally proposed.

Think about where the projects in our proposals came from. Some person had what they thought was a good idea. Either they were passionate about it or there was money from a funder and the idea took wings because FR was pushing it. However, the person having the idea was extremely busy doing their day job and barely had time to work it up into a coherent model, never mind reality checking it.

If that’s how different the real world probably is to the whiz bang new ideas you’re trying to fund, and if you want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem, how does it change your work?

Don’t over-sell the solidity of the innovative idea – and be prepared to go back to the funder when reality lets you down

You need to engage your funder well enough to clarify if they’ll go for genuinely pioneering work. If you then aren’t prepared to engage with Services and go back to the funder when there are changes, you’re doing your service users a disservice, by trying to force the organisation to deliver an inferior service.

Push a bit for better quality development of the idea

It’s hard to come up with an idea that fully fits your end users. The vast majority of businesses fail because they don’t understand their stormers and I think there’s a lot of similarity with charitable services: we don’t not understand either the end user or the partners that we need to work with in order to access them. That looks like either far too few service users using the service or the anticipated benefits not coming through.

However, there’s a cycle developed by Steve Blank for start-up businesses, that will enable you to get closer to the right idea:

Blank has a subtle and sophisticated process that’s spelled out in his book The Four Steps to Epiphany.

In the discovery phase, you’d be looking for things like: you understand the problem and that kind of solution would work; you know “funnel” whereby you narrow to the actual end users (so you recognise who to be approaching and who’ll drop out – who gets a bit of advice and who gets full-on help, for example); and you know what’s the smallest version of the service you can introduce to pilot the work.
In customer validation, you’re working out your actual service offering, including: resources needed; how service users get to hear about it; any key partners; the kind of relationships you have with service users and potential service users; and you;re getting feedback on the stuff you’re including in your budget.

The key, really, is that even before you need to have made contact with end users (and any other key parts to the delivery, like the youth clubs through which you’re going to deliver the service) and really discovered from them precisely what their issues are and what they need and who’s involved in the decisions as to whether to go ahead and why. You’ll know when they’re on board with your ideas, because they’ll stop politely answering your questions (because they’re nice) and start making demands of you. It’s only when you’ve got real clarity from them about what they need from you that you start putting the full idea together – and even then, you only know it’s right when the end users will really commit – meaning plenty of time, given that they aren’t committing money.

Getting everything on the page, together

One tool that’s worth considering is a modified version of Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas:

Osterwalder recommends that, when brainstorming the business that’s your solution to the issue, you don’t just do one of these, but you spend five or ten minutes on each of several possible solutions, then choose the best one.

Osterwalder and Blank would both make the point that, in the real world when things are uncertain, you should be using a big sheet of paper and using post-it notes to put points on – because ideas will be swapped in and swapped out as you go along and test things against actual realities. Whether your organisation can tolerate that level of flexibility will be interesting to see!

Ensure your project is going to be managed entrepreneurially – not the way the other projects are at the charity

Once you have your project, if it’s original enough, the chances are that it still won’t work as designed. That means you need management processes that will enable it to pivot quickly into being something else.

Get really close to the customers as you put your ideas together (end users / NHS)

This is by working hard at recruiting them and going through progressive iterations of development. You have to push them a bit, placing them in positions where they’re really having to jump one way or the other, rather than politely saying what they think you want them to. You know when it’s working, because they start trying to pull on you, rather than you pushing them. This is covered by the work of Steve Blank, especially his book, Four Steps to Epiphany. His big claim is that 80% of start-ups fail because they don’t understand their customers and his big slogan is, “There are no facts in your building – only guesses”.
However, the development work described above is initially with “innovators” and “early adopters” who behave in very specific, atypical, ways. As you move on to the next waves of people you want to recruit, you’ll be encountering people who act very differently, who are much harder to reach and who have different needs. This is explored in Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm.

Everything that follows is from the book Lean Start-Up, by Eric Ries.

Recognise and rank the key unknowns

This is a bit like a risk analysis and you’re prioritizing the most important elements that emerge. You then identify experiments with clear, auditable metrics to really learn the truth for each in turn. There’s a lot of discussion of “build-measure-learn” cycles. One of the key outcomes of developing a service, in this sense, is not having something that’s okay, but having clear knowledge that you can use to shape the best possible service. A danger is that people use the wrong metrics – they stick to top level indicators, that maybe look good but that don’t get to the heart of what’s really going on.
A well-known idea associated with these experiments is that of the “minimum viable product”. This is producing something the customer will interact with that will tell you what you need to know. It needs to be closely associated enough with the service you’re planning to get you the data you need, without wasting time on unnecessary development.
A critical decision is what’s the quickest way you can get reliable metrics as to where things are.
When things aren’t working, you need a good investigative process for getting to the bottom of what’s really going on (such as the “Five Whys”, which you’ll doubtless know). There are two key points, here: (1) the data needs to be rigorous and unambiguous, or everyone may try and interpret it to fit their personal agendas/viewpoints; and (2) when things have clearly gone wrong, you want everyone involved in the discussion meeting, or otherwise in many companies there’s a tendency to blame the person who isn’t there!

Making fundamental changes

If the first (or second, or third) approach isn’t going to work well enough, despite iterations to improve it, it’s essential that you’re prepared to kill it and move on. To set you up for that, you need regular “improve or pivot” meetings set up. Otherwise, it can be too painful to make that change and the can just gets kicked up the road.
However, at this stage no one has failed. All that has happened is that you’ve learned more about the reality of the situation through experimentation. Pivoting to a fundamentally different service, based on the learning, takes some accepting but it’s a significant step forwards.
How do you know if the pivot is a good one? Answer: the second time through, the improvements happen more quickly and you head towards a workable situation more quickly than the first time (even if you don’t actually get there and have to pivot again).
The art of good entrepreneurship is to get from starting out to the first pivot to the second and so on as quickly as is realistic. That maximises your chance of coming up with something really effective before you run out of road.

Scaling up

Geoffrey Moore’s work about how you then work differently with different groups is again very relevant. This is a great introductory video, which also touches on how you handle the issue of disruption within your charity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7M8oQcfczE
However, if you’re reinventing your work so that it appeals to different audiences then you can see that all the stuff above applies again because there’s so much change and discovery: building something closely with the end user; formulating hypotheses that you test; maybe making significant changes (though probably less dramatic ones); trying to find as efficient a way to learn as you can, so that you provide to the different groups as efficiently as you can.