Lean Social Entrepreneurship: Lessons from Changemaker Bootcamp

My plan for figuring out what I want to do next consists of:

  1. Going slow. Giving myself time to rest, reflect, and play.
  2. Listening. Trying to understand the challenges that changemakers are facing, and learning what cool things others are doing in the world.
  3. Experimenting. Learning aggressively, and sharing what I learn openly.

I’ve been applying the principles from The Lean Startup as a way to carry out my experiments in a disciplined way. I’m also determined to do my experiments in an open way, so that people who are curious and motivated can see what I’m doing and learn from every step and misstep along the way.

My primary goal is to figure out ways to scale collaborative literacy. My hypothesis is that information is a less critical need than experience.

There are a thousand books, articles, and blog posts that correctly outline the skills and mindsets that changemakers need to be successful. There are also top-down trainings focused on delivering information. On the other end of the spectrum, there are leadership development programs and other kinds of retreats. Finally, there’s coaching, which is the closest thing out there to supporting the kind of practice I’m talking about.

There’s a huge gap in the middle for what I’m calling balance bikes for changemakers — safe opportunities to practice real skills repeatedly with real-time feedback.

My initial experiment has been Changemaker Bootcamp. It’s designed to be a safe, structured place for changemakers to get more intentional about the work that they’re doing and to practice skills needed to work skillfully with groups.

My role is guide, not teacher. I’m designing workouts that do not require an “expert” to do, just as you don’t need an expert to teach you how to run. I’m also sharing those workouts openly, so that people can do them on their own, organize their own workouts, or even start their own bootcamps. This is part of my strategy to scale, which is to start a movement rather than attempt to own a market.

If I do decide to try to build a business around this, I see this openness as a differentiator rather than an obstacle. People appreciate an ecosystem, community-oriented mindset, and I believe my experience and reputation will draw plenty of great people. (It behooves me to prove the latter.) This is the Internet-equivalent of a platform play, except without the subversive creepiness around monetization and privacy.

I’m now on my second iteration of my experiment with Changemaker Bootcamp, and I’ve been keeping detailed notes of what I’ve been learning on that website. Here are some metanotes about what I’ve been learning and about my process overall.

Practice Works

Practice indeed works. I’m trying to be more disciplined about quantifying impact, but thanks to the weekly feedback loop, I can see firsthand people developing skills that they are immediately putting into practice.

This work feels fundamentally different than any of my consulting projects ever did. As a consultant, I focused on crazy, complex projects that benefited from my unique experience. I was applying my college-level skills toward a specific goal, while also trying to help my clients move their own skill levels from junior high to high school.

Now, I’m removing myself from the equation. This is about helping others go from second grade to third, from third grade to fourth. No shortcuts. But by moving slowly and deliberatively, I think I can have a much greater impact.

Frankly, even though I worked with top leadership on my consulting projects, I feel like I have more leverage helping the changemakers I’m helping now. It doesn’t sound as sexy as working on California water issues or leading a culture change process for a global biotech Fortune 500 firm, but it feels more meaningful. I’m loving it!

Minimal Viable Product, Working Openly, Building Ownership

Being disciplined about Minimal Viable Product is challenging. I’ve had to be very focused about what I’m trying to learn, and to move even before I feel ready. In the two bootcamps I’ve done, we’ve had four different locations, and we’re moving to our fifth location next week.

The workouts are still rough and will need many more iterations before I feel confident about their effectiveness and replicability. But that’s the point. I wouldn’t be able to refine them by simply thinking really hard about them. This is practice for me, and it’s what’s allowing me to refine the model.

The website is well below my standards, but it’s serving its purpose as a vehicle for sharing learning, and I’m getting a remarkable number of newsletter subscriptions. (This is further evidence of how we often throw away money on aesthetics rather than being laser focused about what we actually want our websites to do.) Working through these iterations has helped me shift my design priorities to things that I think will have a higher impact.

The biggest returns have been from working openly — making my participants and my followers partners in my experiment. It’s easy to feel self-conscious about wanting to deliver value, but my participants seem to appreciate that I’m practicing with them and that I don’t know whether this is going to work. Simply by participating, they are helping me, but they’ve all gone above and beyond that, finding different ways to support what I’m trying to do. I don’t know that this would have been the case had I been proprietary about this process or if I had tried to project an aura of polished expertise as opposed to incomplete learning.

Market Questions

Last month, I surveyed my network to try to better understand the obstacles that changemakers are facing. (I’ll publish a full synthesis next week.) Only two out of 107 respondents even mentioned the word “practice.” No one’s been clamoring for something like Changemaker Bootcamp.

I’m essentially trying to define the market, which is a high-risk, high-reward place for an entrepreneur. It’s contingent on me to explain my vision clearly, to connect it to the real challenges that people are experiencing, and to see if people find it compelling.

I’ve been relatively quiet about recruiting participants, as I’ve been focused on a specific demographic (currently in an organization, but no C-level or executive leaders). I’ve managed to find enough participants for my initial experiments, but I’m nervous about my ability to recruit participants at a wider scale once I start doing this “for real” (probably the next bootcamp) with a fixed price and many more available spots.

My sample size is way too small to draw any conclusions, but there have been two noticeable patterns. First, of my six participants so far, one comes from a social venture, the rest are from nonprofits and philanthropy. I think this work is hugely beneficial for businesses in a way that translates into profit as well as impact, but I haven’t drawn that crowd so far. I also think the bootcamp would benefit from that diversity of experience.

My friend, Justin, has correctly pointed out that my language is very social-sector oriented. For example, people in companies don’t necessarily identify with “changemaker,” even if that’s exactly what they are. I’d rather not do a focused offering specifically for for-profits, but I may have to explore that.

Second, all of my participants have been women. I’ve had one man apply, and a few others express interest, but it’s been predominantly women. There are probably reasons for this, and my sample size is too small to draw conclusions anyway. The bigger question is, what have I learned from this?

In this bootcamp, my participants have mentioned multiple times how great it is to be in the space with a great group of women. I’m wondering whether I should be more intentional about marketing this toward women or even doing women-only offerings (which again, I’m reluctant to do). I had actually been thinking about giving all of my participants — men and women — copies of Lean In, so maybe the universe is trying to tell me something.

Focus, Focus, Focus

I have a long list of experiments in mind, but I’ve been forcing myself to focus on one at a time. That’s counter to my personality, but it’s been a very positive discipline, and I think it’s really helped Changemaker Bootcamp evolve.

I’m about ready to try a second experiment, however. The challenge for me, as always, is to focus on just one, and to take it slow.

If you have thoughts on what I’m doing now or what I should do next, post them below!

Changemaker Bootcamp: An Experiment in Practice and Mentorship

Starting today, I will be embarking on a new experiment, which I’m calling, “Changemaker Bootcamp.” I’ll be creating a space for changemakers in organizations to:

  • Get clear about the kinds of shifts they’d like to see in their groups (be they their own organizations or broader)
  • Get clear about how to facilitate those shifts
  • Practice the skills necessary to facilitate those shifts

I have two wonderful guinea pigs co-learners, who responded to a quiet call on this blog last month and who will be embarking on this journey with me. (I’ll be saying more about them later, and they’ll be saying plenty about themselves and their projects on a group blog.) We’ll meet for 90 minutes once a week for the next four weeks, at which point we’ll all reflect on what we’ve learned, and we’ll figure out what happens next.

Why Am I Doing This?

The Brief Summary:

  • I am passionate about figuring out ways to boost the world’s collaborative literacy, which will result in a world that is more alive.
  • The biggest barrier to changemakers developing these skills are finding productive opportunities to practice them.
  • I’ve had the unique opportunity to learn and practice these skills for the past 10 years. I’d like to create similar opportunities for others who are similarly motivated.
  • I am anxious to explore ways to create “balance bikes” for changemakers — structures that help changemakers learn these critical group skills. This bootcamp is a first experiment in this.
  • I love this stuff, and I’m excited to try something new, challenging, and potentially impactful.

The Longer Summary: I devoted the past 10 years to practicing skills for helping groups work more skillfully together. I had to carve out my own path, and while it was meaningful and gratifying, it was also painful and arduous. While I was tremendously motivated (some might say obsessed) and worked hard, I was also very lucky. I had amazing mentors, peers, and partners, people who believed in me, encouraged me, offered me amazing opportunities to try stuff and to learn (despite lots of stumbling), and provided me with critical feedback.

I want to give back, but I want to give back bigger than I got. I want to leverage what I’ve learned over the years, my wonderful network of friends and colleagues, and whatever reputation I might have in this space to give other changemakers safe opportunities to practice, stumble, and learn.

When I left Groupaya at the end of last year, I thought the best way to share what I learned would be through writing. I’ve changed my mind. I have some good stories and I might have a unique spin on how I articulate what I’ve learned, but I don’t have much to say that hasn’t been written a thousand times already. There are already lots of books and articles on collaboration, collective intelligence, learning, openness, participatory processes, and facilitating change. Lots of them are decent, some of them are very good, and some are even extraordinary.

What’s missing are safe opportunities to practice these critical skills. My friend, Jon Stahl, wrote a provocative blog post about social change movements two years ago, where he summed up the problem as follows:

Social change work is hard, long-term work.

Like most hard work, it takes a lot of practice to get really good at it. Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers claims that it takes about 10,000 hours (10 years) of practice to really master something.  I don’t see why social change organizing/campaigning should really be any different.

People who have the skills to be outstanding social change activists have lots of choices and opportunities in their professional life — they have the leadership, analysis and “getting things done” skills to be valuable in many fields.

So, given these realities, are social change movements structuring themselves to attract highly skilled potential superstars and to retain them for the 10 years it takes to attain mastery… and beyond, into the most highly productive years that follow?

Creating opportunities for others to practice skills for effective changemaking will be far more impactful (and frankly, far more enjoyable) than writing a book.

What Will I Be Doing?

“Bootcamp” isn’t simply a marketing term. I’m loosely modeling this after fitness bootcamps, with an emphasis on building core strength, creating good habits, and doing rather than discussing. This will not be a “training” in a traditional corporate sense, as my emphasis will not be on delivering content, but on learning through practice.

I had lots of interesting conversations as a result of my call for co-learners, but I decided to focus on San Francisco-based changemakers embedded in organizations who had specific projects on which were embarking.

I limited it to San Francisco to keep this first experiment simple.

I’m focusing on changemakers embedded in organizations and who are not formally leading their organizations because I think that’s where the biggest opportunity for impact is. It is the opposite strategy of when I was a consultant, where we only took on projects that were sponsored by C-level leaders. We did this because we felt it would give our projects the greatest chance to create sustainable change and, frankly, because C-level leaders were generally the only people with budgets big enough to afford us. That was good for business, but it also increased the chances for impact, because it meant the organization had more skin in the game. It was the right strategy as a consultant, but it’s not the most impactful strategy from a systems perspective.

I also favored changemakers who had specific projects in order to keep the work grounded. I think the skills they develop will be applicable to everything they do, but I want to have specific goals in mind to create a sense of urgency as well as to tie this development process to their everyday work needs.

I will be doing the same exercises as my participants, since I myself am a changemaker based in San Francisco, and I have a specific project (this one) that I’m working on. We will all be working transparently, blogging about what we do and what we learn, because working transparently is a critical changemaker skill, something that we all need to practice.

I’ll also be sharing all of my “workout plans,” along with the metrics I plan on using to track my progress. I would be thrilled if others “stole” the idea and the plans, because we need a lot more people doing this kind of thing, experimenting with ways to do it more effectively, and sharing what they learn so that we can all benefit from it.

What Do I Hope to Learn?

  • Is this a model that helps changemakers learn the skills they need to be learning?
  • What are the actual and potential impacts of such a process?
  • How can I tweak the model to make it even more impactful?
  • How can I get better at implementing the model?
  • Is this a service that changemakers want?
  • Is there an opportunity to build a business around this?
  • Is this something I enjoy doing?

How Do I Follow This Crazy Experiment?

We’ll all be sharing our experiences on a group blog, where I’ll also be sharing annotated “workout plans.” I’ll also likely be writing some stuff here on this blog.

If you’re interested in following along and perhaps even participating in future experiments, please subscribe to my mailing list by filling out and submitting the following form:

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“Balance Bikes” for Changemakers

How do you make it safe to learn?

A few months ago, I was chatting with a friend who races dirt bikes, and he was talking about the challenge of picking up the sport when you’re an adult. The problem? The bigger you are, the harder you fall. Because falling is riskier as an adult than as a kid, it’s harder to learn the intricate nuances of balance. If you don’t practice falling, you will never be effective.

Then he added, “You’ve heard of balance bikes, right?”

I had not. I — like many of my peers — learned to ride a bike with training wheels. It was a harrowing experience. I would spend a few days happily riding around with training wheels, and then my Dad would say, “Ready to try without?” And I would always say no. I had zero confidence that I could ride without them. Somehow, my Dad always managed to get me to try, and more often than not, the experiment would end quickly.

As it turns out, training wheels do the opposite of what they are supposed to do, which is to train kids to ride bikes. In order to learn how to ride a bike, you need to learn balance. Training wheels actually discourage you from learning balance.

Balance bikes are bikes without pedals. Kids sit on the bike and push themselves forward with their feet. When they want to stop, they put their feet down. Balance bikes provide the same security from falling as training wheels, but they help you to learn balance in the process.

For the past few years, it’s been hip to tout failure in the social sector. It’s well-intentioned, but it’s tremendously shallow, largely manifesting itself in big talk and ill-conceived failure contests. Failure competitions are the training wheels of changemaking. They don’t make it any safer to take thoughtful risks, and they don’t create a real path for learning how to make change meaningfully.

What’s missing from the social sector right now are balance bikes — structures that support learning the right things by lowering the cost of falling and by encouraging practice.

What are examples of balance bikes for changemakers?

I think one example is practice-oriented mentorship. Most professional cooks learn their craft through staging, where they’ll work for free on their off days in another chef’s kitchen. They’re not simply shadowing other cooks. They’re doing real work with peers and mentors. This is not just a well-understood concept among cooking circles. It’s prevalent practice.

The closest thing to this in the social sector are incubators and accelerators, both of which I think are fantastic. However, I think there’s room for something less formal and more incremental, something that looks and feels more like staging.

What do you think are potential balance bikes for changemakers? Please share your ideas in the comments below!

Photo by Kate McCarthy. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.