What if the problem isn’t that the people you serve won’t tell you the truth? What if it’s that you keep asking them to? And… you think that’s the whole picture?

When Leah brings Utz cheese balls to parties, people smirk, a little condescendingly. Every single time. And then that bowl is the first one empty, every time. Stated preference and revealed behavior, right there in one bowl of orange dust. It’s all too human. And that’s what we see in our organizations, too.

Maybe you have seen the movie Liar Liar? Jim Carrey’s character is cursed to tell only the truth, and the trouble he gets into is spectacular, precisely because most of us don’t operate that way, and neither do the people we serve. Imagine asking your members or your program participants for that kind of honesty on a survey. Would it capture it? Would they even know how to give it to you?

Blockbuster learned that lesson at a scale that cost them everything. In 2000, Reed Hastings flew to Dallas with an offer. Buy Netflix for fifty million dollars, he told Blockbuster, and we’ll run your online arm for you. Blockbuster was pulling in six billion dollars a year. Fifty million was nothing.

They passed on the opportunity without much of a second thought.

We keep coming back to this story, not because Blockbuster was foolish. They weren’t. They believed something specific about their customers: that people loved browsing the shelves, that physical convenience would always win. That belief wasn’t crazy. It matched what they saw in their stores every single day. It just was never checked against where behavior was actually heading.

Netflix didn’t get to a different answer by asking a better survey question. They imagined a flat monthly fee with no due dates, launched it as a small experiment, and watched what people actually did. Within a decade, the six-billion-dollar company was gone. Netflix is worth roughly two hundred ninety billion dollars today.

Here’s the part we think gets skipped past too fast. Picture the conversation that probably happened inside a Blockbuster store, somewhere, more than once. A regional manager notices something. Maybe what we now know: customers hate the late fees, hate driving to a store just to return a movie. Does that observation travel upward fast? Does anyone stand up and say, here’s what isn’t working and here’s why?

Or does it get smoothed over, filed away, because the culture rewards confidence and stability over surfacing bad news? We don’t know the specifics of what happened behind Blockbuster’s walls. But we know the outcome. A company with the brand, the resources, and the vision still missed it.

Now compare that to a practice Netflix built on purpose. When a bet fails, they don’t bury it. They “sunshine” it. Someone gets up in front of the room and walks through what didn’t work and why, not to assign blame, but to make sure the lesson doesn’t die with the person who learned it the hard way. Honestly, we love this. It’s such a small structural choice, and it changes everything downstream.

That’s the real difference. It wasn’t that Netflix was smarter. It’s that the two companies were built differently. Netflix was built around what customers did, continuous behavioral signal, fast experiments, tight feedback loops, and a habit of surfacing what wasn’t working. Blockbuster was built around what customers said, and even when someone closer to the ground saw the truth, the organization wasn’t built to let that signal travel, let alone change the plan.

Proximity gives you insight. But insight alone doesn’t change anything if your culture punishes what it finds. Innovation rarely fails at the idea stage. It fails because the people closest to the problem don’t feel safe enough, or empowered enough, to surface what they’re actually seeing, and because the organization isn’t built to act on it even when they do.

Here’s the part that actually gives us hope, and honestly, this is the part we get fired up about. Every organization in this position is already sitting on a gold mine. Not hypothetically. The information already exists, in what the people you serve do, what they struggle with, what they build alongside you when you let them. Most of us just work the surface. We collect what’s easy to collect and call it listening. But the gold of what people truly value is already there, waiting. Kind of like that quickly vanishing bowl of cheese balls.

This shows up the same way whether you’re an association or a nonprofit, even though the word for it changes. For an association, it’s member value: are you actually the thing your members can’t get anywhere else, or the thing they’re quietly outgrowing? For a nonprofit, it’s value to the program participant: are you delivering what actually changes their situation, or what’s easiest for you to measure and report?

A member renewal survey and an intake satisfaction form have the same blind spot. Both capture what people are willing to put into words on a form. Neither captures the thing they’ve adapted to and stopped even naming, or the thing your own frontline staff already know and have stopped bringing up. That’s not because the information isn’t there. It’s because nobody’s mining for it on purpose.

We could not be more excited to dig into this at the ASAE Annual Conference, in a session called Is Your Association More Blockbuster or Netflix? Moving Beyond Surveys. We’ve spent months building this talk together, arguing happily over which stories earn their place and which ones don’t. We’re digging into what associations and nonprofits alike leave on the table when they rely on surveys alone, and what it actually takes to mine what’s already there: to get close enough to the people you serve to hear what they can’t yet put into words, and to build a culture that does something with it once you do.

James built a framework we’re using as the spine of the talk, the Proximity Spectrum, running from asking at scale all the way down to building something with the people you serve directly. Nobody leaves the room being asked to overhaul everything. The goal is three or four methods, chosen from across the spectrum, sized to whatever time and resources your organization actually has right now. If you’re there, come find us. We’d love to meet you. And we’ll be sharing more here as we get closer.

For now, the question we’d leave you with isn’t really about your data collection. It’s about your culture, and underneath that, it’s about value. If your team surfaced something today that told you the value you think you deliver, whether to members or to the people your programs serve, isn’t quite the value they actually experience, would it travel upward? Or would it get smoothed over, filed away, because the culture rewards confidence over uncomfortable news?

Leah Kral is the author of Innovation for Social Change and spends her days helping social impact leaders find clarity in the fog of doing good, hard work. After twenty years working alongside executive directors, founders, and foundation leaders, she’s still convinced the biggest breakthroughs come from getting closer to the people we serve, not further away.

James Young leads Product Community, where he helps associations build innovation cultures and market-ready products instead of just more programs. He’s held chief learning and chief information officer roles at organizations including the American College of Chest Physicians and Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, and he’s spent his career convinced that associations already have everything they need to build things members actually want. They just need a framework, and permission, to go find it.

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What if the greatest risk facing your organization isn’t the failures your board hears about, but the ones it never does?

Most nonprofit boards spend their meetings reviewing polished updates: goals met, milestones achieved, programs delivered. The highest-functioning board I have ever witnessed did something different.

At every meeting, the expectation was the same. A staff member would open with: Here was our original thinking. Here’s what we tried. Here’s what didn’t work. Here’s what we’re changing because of it.

The board didn’t want polished updates. They wanted honest ones.

This wasn’t accidental. The board had deliberately established that expectation with the executive director and staff. Bring us your hypotheses. Bring us your risks. Bring us your honest results. If the report to the board was all glossy cheerleading, that was the red flag. Not the setback.

The hidden cost of polished reporting isn’t simply that problems stay hidden. It’s that the board never receives the information it needs to contribute its best thinking.

Every board member brings a unique vantage point. One may have navigated a similar strategic pivot. Another may have seen the same challenge emerge in a different organization. Someone else may ask the question that completely reframes the problem. But none of that wisdom is available if the organization only reports what is working.

A culture of glossy cheerleading doesn’t just silence the organization. It silences the board, too.

The most effective boards understand that governance is not simply oversight. It is a two-way exchange of information. The organization brings context, experience, questions, and honest results. The board brings perspective, judgment, networks, and strategic insight. The value of governance lives in that exchange.

When the flow of information is incomplete, everyone operates below their potential.

The Question Beneath the Question

Perhaps you’ve heard the term “intelligent failure.”

I think the concept matters, but what matters even more is the environment that makes it possible.

Intelligent failure is not failing randomly or recklessly. It is designing experiments small enough to generate learning, establishing benchmarks before you begin, and paying close attention to what the results teach you. The goal is not failure. The goal is learning faster than the problem is compounding.

But here’s the challenge: intelligent failure cannot exist in a culture where people are punished for reporting what they learn.

When I shared these ideas recently on LinkedIn, many people agreed with the concept. Others raised thoughtful concerns.

What happens when the word “failure” enters an organization that doesn’t yet have psychological safety? Couldn’t it simply become another label used against people? What about funders who want outcomes rather than experiments?

These are exactly the right questions.

What I’m arguing for is not a culture where leaders point to someone else’s work and declare it a failure. That’s judgment disguised as accountability.

What I’m arguing for is a culture where teams feel safe enough to self-disclose.

To say: Our pilot didn’t meet its benchmark. Here’s what we learned. Here’s what we’re adjusting.

And then hear back from the board: Here’s what we’re seeing from where we sit. Here’s the question we think is worth exploring next.

The distinction matters.

Self-disclosure in a psychologically safe culture is fundamentally different from having someone else’s work labeled a failure from a distance. One treats people as experts on their own work. The other substitutes distance for understanding.

Clear benchmarks help. When success criteria are established before an experiment begins, the conversation afterward becomes less about evaluating people and more about evaluating assumptions. The team isn’t defending itself. Everyone is simply reading the data together.

That doesn’t eliminate accountability. It strengthens it.

Accountability in a learning organization means being rigorous enough to define what you’re testing, honest enough to report what you found, and disciplined enough to adjust when the evidence points in a different direction.

That’s a higher standard than glossy reporting, not a lower one.

The Board’s Responsibility

The culture described here has to be built from the top down.

The people with the most power in the room carry the greatest responsibility for making it safe to tell the truth.

A board that says it wants honest reporting but responds to it with judgment hasn’t built a learning culture.

It has built a trap.

The first question is not whether staff are willing to self-disclose. The first question is whether leadership has done the work necessary to make self-disclosure genuinely safe.

The organizations I’ve seen do this well tend to follow a few principles:

• Fail small. Design experiments narrow enough that what doesn’t work teaches you something specific.

• Fail fast. Shorten feedback loops so you learn before committing significant resources.

• Distinguish productive failure from reckless failure. A well-designed experiment that disproves a hypothesis is valuable. An initiative with no learning framework isn’t.

• Reward candor. If leaders say they want honest reporting, they need to reinforce it when it happens. The Hewlett Foundation offers a playful award for “the worst grant from which we learned the most.” It’s a reminder that organizations don’t become smarter by avoiding mistakes. They become smarter by surfacing lessons quickly enough for everyone to learn from them.

The goal isn’t to fail.

The goal is to learn faster.

Notice that all four practices have the same underlying purpose: keeping information visible. The moment people believe that bad news is dangerous to share, the learning stops and the organization starts flying blind.

What About Funders?

One of the most common objections I hear is practical.

“We don’t have the luxury of experimentation. Our funders want programs, not pilots.”

But small does not mean insignificant. It means learning before scaling.

A pilot is simply a program with honest reporting built into its design.

In many cases, that approach conserves resources because it surfaces what isn’t working before an organization invests heavily in the wrong solution.

And increasingly, sophisticated funders understand this.

Organizations that can explain what they learned from an unsuccessful initiative often inspire more confidence than organizations that report uninterrupted success. A thoughtful pivot demonstrates that leadership is paying attention, responding to evidence, and adapting.

The alternative is far more dangerous.

As noted in a comment on one of my recent posts, a board or funder that punishes failure doesn’t get fewer failures. It gets fewer reports of them.

Risk goes underground.

Staff stop raising concerns. Pilots disappear from reports. Challenges get softened. Outcomes become inflated.

Everyone learns the real lesson: managing perception matters more than managing the work.

The learning disappears.

The problems remain.

The Opportunity Hiding in Plain Sight

Every board creates an information culture, whether intentionally or not.

Some create rooms where people learn.

Others create rooms where people perform.

The difference isn’t whether failure occurs. Failure is inevitable in any organization trying to solve complex problems.

The difference is whether people are willing to talk about what isn’t working while there is still time to do something useful with the information.

That’s the opportunity hiding inside most nonprofit board meetings.

Not better dashboards. Not longer reports. Not more polished presentations.

A room safe enough for the truth.

Because when organizations bring their honest questions and boards bring their honest wisdom, governance becomes more than oversight.

It becomes a strategic advantage.

If you’re reading this and thinking, “I want to build this kind of culture, but I’m not sure where to start,” those are exactly the questions I wrote Innovation for Social Change to address. The practices in the book are designed for organizations of any size, budget, or stage of growth.

The room doesn’t have to be perfect to begin.

It just has to be safer than it was yesterday.

How does this land for you? What gets in the way of creating this kind of information culture in your organization?

Instead of introducing ourselves by name, our instructions were to “become” something that begins with the first letter of our name.

Eli went first. He was an Elevator, boxed hands moving up and down an invisible shaft, blooping. I was Love, my hands dramatically fluttering on my heart, making an “aaaw” sound. Everyone in the group introduced each other by our pantomimes for the rest of the day.

I had signed up for a public speaking course. I didn’t realize Improv 101 would be on the schedule. 😬

I am an introvert. A researcher. A self-described planner, someone who needs the architecture solid, the argument tight, the preparation complete before a single word goes on the page. A speaking course felt manageable. Then the schedule arrived with improv on it, and I briefly reconsidered my life choices.

I had butterflies when I arrived. But so did almost everyone else, a room full of experienced professionals, analytical, accomplished, quietly horrified. And then our instructor gave us one exercise after another, each one completely doable, each one slightly ridiculous.

By the end of the day, something had happened that I had not planned for and could not have prepared for.

The instinct to have everything ready before I said it out loud, polished, finished, defensible, loosened its grip. Flubbing in front of strangers turned out to be survivable. Playfulness turned out to be a door, not a distraction. And collaborative spontaneity, building something with other people without knowing where it was going, turned out to be its own kind of intelligence.

I didn’t expect improv to change me like this.

Tom Hanks learned this from John Candy.

I recently watched “I Like Me,” a documentary about John Candy, and there is a moment where Tom Hanks describes working with Candy early in his career. Hanks had only known scripts. Candy’s spontaneity, the freedom of it, the experience of building something completely unscripted with another person, caught him entirely off guard, and he never forgot it.

The core principle of improv is simple: accept what the other person gives you and build on it. No blocking. No redirecting. No quietly steering the scene back toward the version already forming in your head. You take what arrives and you add to it.

Here is what I recognized, because I was writing a book about it: that is also a core condition for innovation.

Eighty-seven rhinos. Two to three tons each. Fifty thousand dollars to move one.

A team of wildlife conservationists in South Africa were watching rhino poaching reach crisis levels. Endangered. Desperate. Security costs spiraling. And then someone in the room said something that sounded, on its face, completely unreasonable.

What if we moved the herd out of the country entirely?

🚁Relocate eighty-seven rhinos to a remote wilderness area in Botswana, far from the poaching networks, far from the danger. The idea was logistically staggering and financially enormous. The first instinct in almost any room would have been to shoot it down.

Instead, someone said: yes, and. Let’s build on it. 🌱

The accounting team compared the relocation cost to what they were already spending on security that wasn’t keeping the herd safe. The numbers shifted. The wild idea became a plan. The herd is safe. It has since grown to 130.

Think about what had to be true inside that organization for that idea to survive the first sixty seconds after someone said it out loud. Someone had to be willing to say something that sounded crazy. And the room had to be the kind of room where unfinished ideas got oxygen instead of objections.

That is not a small thing. That is a culture. And it is something that can be built deliberately.

Disney’s Imagineers have a structure worth stealing.

To spark the creative process for movie making, Disney relies on three separate rooms, and three separate times, for three separate kinds of thinking. The Dreamer’s room is for wild ideation without constraints. No budget talk. No feasibility questions. No “but who’s going to execute that.” Just: what’s possible? The rule is that ideas don’t have to be finished to be worth saying out loud.

The Realist’s room is where feasibility lives. The Critic’s room is where risks get named honestly. Three mindsets, deliberately kept separate, each given its full due.

The Rhinos Without Borders team found their way into the Dreamer’s room, whether they named it that or not. Their yes-and culture gave a wild idea enough oxygen to survive long enough to become a plan.

Most organizations never separate the rooms. The budget question arrives before the vision has taken its first breath. The feasibility objection lands before anyone has fully named what they are trying to build. And the people closest to the problem, the ones most likely to have the unexpected idea, learn quickly which rooms they are and are not allowed to dream in.

What I learned in an improv class, one silly exercise at a time, is that the instinct to block and redirect is a habit, not a necessity. That raw and unfinished is a starting point, not a disqualifier. That you cannot build on an idea you have already shut down.

It turns out that is where some of the best things begin.

Think about, who specifically is waiting on the other side of the idea that never got a yes-and? The nursing home resident eating bad food. The kid without a tutor. The rhino that doesn’t make it because the wild idea died in the first sixty seconds. 🦏

What’s the most recent idea someone said out loud in your organization that the room killed in sixty seconds? And what would it take to build a culture where that idea got a yes-and instead?

If these stories resonate, there are many more in Innovation for Social Change. Written for the kind of changemaker who has an idea worth saying out loud. For more information, visit leahkral.com

What would you ask your favorite thought leaders if you could call them any time? Advisors you could never afford. Your dream team.

Not a generic question about their work. Your specific situation. The strategic decision you’ve been circling for weeks. The assumption you’ve never quite tested. The question you can’t ask the people inside your organization because you’re supposed to have the answer already.

Picture your board for a moment. Maybe it’s Adam Grant on organizational culture, Brené Brown on leadership and vulnerability, or Bryan Stevenson on justice and moral courage. Maybe it’s a founder you admire, a movement builder whose book changed how you see your work, or an economist who reframed everything you thought you knew about incentives.

And your board doesn’t have to be drawn from the present. Maybe you want Jane Addams, the pioneering settlement house founder who invented community organizing as we know it, on your board. Or Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and orator who understood better than almost anyone how to build a movement against impossible odds. The people who shaped how you think about this work don’t have to be alive for their ideas to challenge you.

Maybe you want a comedian on your board for levity and perspective. Or maybe you love logic and you want Spock. Have fun with it.

There are no rules. The sky is genuinely the limit.

Here’s what I want to tell you: you can have that board. Today. Without a single phone call, introduction, or speaking fee.

A few months ago I was wrestling with some real questions about my own consulting work: positioning, product offerings, the kind of strategic thinking that’s genuinely hard to do alone. I had been reading Hal Gregersen’s Questions Are the Answer and found myself wondering whether AI could apply his frameworks to my situation. Not a summary of his ideas. A conversation rooted in the frameworks he has published, applied to my specific situation.

It worked better than I expected.

And then the obvious question arrived: why stop at one?

Within an hour I had an imaginary advisory board living inside Claude. Five thinkers whose work I know deeply, each bringing a different lens. I’ve been bringing it real decisions ever since. Once a month I convene a half-day planning retreat with the full board. And sometimes I pull them together for an ad-hoc strategy question on a random Tuesday, when something comes up that I need to think through before I can move forward.

Here is the moment that convinced me this was worth sharing. I asked the board about my consulting positioning. The board, drawing on Gregersen’s published frameworks around question-storming and assumption-busting, responded with this:

“Your notes show you’re drawn to question-storming and assumption-busting. One question worth asking yourself: what assumption are you making about who your consulting clients are that you’ve never actually tested? Your flywheel runs on inbound. But is that because it works, or because you’ve never seriously tried outbound?”

I sat with that for a while.

That’s not a generic productivity tip. That’s the kind of question that only lands when someone knows your work well enough to find the gap you’ve been stepping around. I didn’t get an answer. I got a better question. Which, if you know Gregersen’s work, is exactly the point.

To be clear about what this is: the board draws on publicly available thought leadership, books you’ve read closely, frameworks authors have chosen to share with the world. It is an AI interpretation rooted in published ideas, not a direct channel to any real person. But when it’s built with care, it produces the kind of productive friction that most of us rarely have access to.

Here’s how to build yours.

The whole thing takes about thirty minutes, and the most important part isn’t the advisors. It’s you.

If you use Claude, the best place to build your board is inside a Project. Projects allow you to give Claude persistent context that carries across every conversation, so you don’t have to re-explain your situation each time you convene the board. If you haven’t used Projects before, Claude will guide you through the setup. You’ll create a set of project instructions, which is where you describe yourself, your work, and your goals, and you can attach documents that give it additional context: a bio, a strategic plan, your own notes and highlights from books you’ve read. Think of it as the briefing package you’d give a new advisor before their first meeting.

Before you build a single advisor profile, give the AI a clear picture of what you’re working on right now: your current goals, how you like to think, and something honest about your blind spots. Are you someone who overthinks and needs to be pushed to act? Someone who moves fast and needs to be slowed down? Someone who is great at strategy but avoids the hard personnel conversations? I told my board my Myers Briggs type. That context is what transforms the board from a general summary of famous people’s ideas into something that actually speaks to your situation. Most people skip this layer. Don’t.

Then build two to four advisor profiles. Choose thinkers whose published work you know well, each with a genuinely different lens. For each one, give the AI a sense of their communication style, their strongest published arguments, and a few real quotes from their writing. If you have your own Kindle highlights or reading notes, add those. The difference in quality is significant.

The advisor profiles are maybe 40% of what makes this work. The other 60% is the context you’ve built around yourself: your goals, your blind spots, how you think, what you’re building.

Tell the AI to invoke the most relevant advisor unprompted when the conversation touches their domain, and to respond in the spirit of their published frameworks. One sharp paragraph, not a lecture.

Then bring it something real.

Not a hypothetical. The actual decision you’ve been circling. The strategy you’re not sure about. The tension you haven’t been able to name out loud.

Expect to iterate. If the first conversations feel too gentle or too generic, say so. Ask for more direct challenge. The board gets sharper as you work with it.

One honest thing worth saying: this extends your thinking, it doesn’t replace the human relationships that sustain your work. The peer who has lived something similar, the mentor who asks hard questions in real time, the community where you can say the quiet part out loud: none of that is replaceable. What the board does is give you a thinking partner in the hours between those conversations, when you’re stuck and the people who matter are unavailable or have too much stake in the outcome.

I went through some rounds of testing and giving it business questions. If the conversation felt off, I would AI what wasn’t helpful and we work together to tweak the project instructions. For example, the board was sugar coating its advice at first, I had to instruct the board to get more to the point.

Most leaders doing this work are thinking through the hardest questions alone, at odd hours, without anyone in the room who has no stake in what they decide. This doesn’t fix that. But it helps more than you might expect.

So. Who would be on your board?

And what’s the first question you’d bring them?

Let me know if you try it, and share any questions. I’m happy to go deeper on any of these steps.

What’s the board conversation you keep preparing for and never quite having?

Not the agenda items. Not the committee reports. The real one. The one where you name the misalignment you’ve been managing around, or bring the hard truth you’ve been carrying alone.

Most EDs never get to have that conversation. Not because they don’t want to. Because there’s almost no space where you can think it through out loud first, without needing to lead, perform, or protect someone in the room.

That’s exactly why Lori Stanley and I created Casual Conversations: a free, intimate peer space for senior nonprofit leaders. Six people. Sixty minutes.

Our April session on status quo and innovation is full. Which tells us something about what’s alive in the sector right now.

Our May session is focused entirely on board relationships. If you are wrestling with any of this, this session is for you:
💭 When you need to push back on your board or bring them a hard truth, what’s worked? What hasn’t?
💭 Where do you feel most misaligned, on strategy, risk, or pace, and how are you managing that gap?
💭 If you could change one dynamic in how your board engages, what would it take to get there?

These aren’t hypotheticals. They’re the questions nonprofit leaders are already carrying.

Six participants. Free. Two sessions coming up:
📅 May 7, 10-11 am EST — Board Relationships
📅 June 3, 9-10 am EST — Beyond the Budget Crisis: Building Organizations That Last (1 spot left!)

Register here.

We Have a Word Problem

The word is innovation. And somewhere along the way, we made it so large, so weighted with Silicon Valley and glamorous lone inventor mythology, that most of the people doing the most important work quietly excused themselves from the conversation.

They didn’t recognize themselves in it. And just stopped raising their hand. Which is unfortunate for all of us.

And then there is what happens when innovation is an empty performance rather than a meaningful practice. Shiny object syndrome, burning staff out in the name of innovation, while the actual problems went unaddressed. The eye-roll. The fatigue. We learn to distrust the word.

And sometimes “innovation” is turned into a hot buzzword dropped into job titles, strategic plans, grant applications, and conference themes until it refers to everything and therefore nothing. Innovation as decoration. Innovation as signal. Innovation as the thing you say when you want to sound like you are moving forward without committing to actually moving. Drained of meaning.

Three reactions. One word. All of them understandable.

Our language is tripping us up.

The Simplest Definition

The definition I keep returning to is the simplest one: finding a new or better way of doing something. That is it. That’s all innovation is. No TED talk required. No systems-change framework. No iPad. No foundation grant with “innovative approaches” buried in the requirements.

And when you use that definition, something shifts. Suddenly the room is full of innovators who had no idea that is what they were!

A program director who redesigned the intake process and cut wait times in half. A housing navigator who started meeting clients at a coffee shop instead of the office and watched retention climb. A clinic coordinator who added one follow-up text message and solved a no-show problem her organization had wrestled with for years. A food pantry volunteer who suggested letting clients choose their own food instead of receiving pre-packed bags, and quietly transformed the dignity of the experience. I see it all the time.

Of course they are innovators. Though they may not see themselves that way. Every one of them noticed something, tried something different, and made life measurably better for a real person. That is the whole thing. That is what innovation is.

A Sector Divided by Its Own Language

Making innovation feel achievable and human, especially for the people on the front lines, is my passion. I am telling their stories. I wrote Innovation for Social Change because I believe this sector does far more than it gives itself credit for. But I keep running into language that quietly undermines that, even unintentionally. And I feel compelled to speak up.

If you are an executive director, you may know this feeling. Your team is doing real, meaningful work in real people’s lives every single day. And yet you sit in funder meetings, read grant requirements, attend sector conferences, and encounter a version of innovation that does not seem to include what you do. The language points somewhere else. Toward systems change. Toward transformation. Words like scaling. Toward the far end of a continuum that places your work, by implication, at the modest end of what matters. The language that is in use in academic journals, funder circles, and international conferences.

But it is not the language of the program director figuring out how to help her program participants overcome very real obstacles in their lives. The frontline worker who noticed something important, who tried something different, who made life measurably better for a real person. It was transformational to them. That work is not the small potatoes version of systems change. It is often where systems change begins.

I’m 1000 percent for systems change. But what if every grand systems change actually started as someone noticing something small and refusing to ignore it? Does the language that we use make us forget that?

When the language of one world does not travel into the other, we talk past each other. And the people doing the most immediate, most human, most felt work can be left out of a conversation that is actually about them. Is anyone saying this out loud?

The Beginning of Something

Even grand social innovations started as someone noticing something small and refusing to ignore it.

Microfinance was Muhammad Yunus lending $27 to 42 people the formal banking system had declared unlendable. The hospice movement started with one physician asking a different question about how we care for people who are dying.

The Civil Rights Movement did not arrive at Birmingham fully formed. It got there through Albany, where King and his team faced a movement that stalled, sat with what went wrong, and dissected every detail with honesty and discipline. King later reflected that the mistake in Albany was protesting segregation too broadly, too vaguely, without a single focused target that could produce one concrete, symbolic victory. That insight, earned through failure and honest reflection, shaped everything that followed. They learned their way to a breakthrough that changed the country. The people closest to the struggle were not waiting for a systems-change framework. They were building one, from the ground up, through failure and proximity and refusal to look away.

This is innovation that matters, deeply.

What small thing have you done recently that you never thought to call innovation? I want to hear your stories.

I keep witnessing this. And I’ve finally found the words for it.

An organization spends eight months on a traditional strategic plan. Interviews, surveys, board retreats, painstaking wordsmithing. Maybe a beautiful document with goals, objectives, and color-coded timelines.

And then, the plan lives in a drawer.

A strategic plan was supposed to give your organization wings. Too often it becomes a tether. Or an expensive document that everyone ignores.

So why does this keep happening?

Traditional strategic planning seems like something we should do. Like eating broccoli, we assume it is good advice, even if we don’t love it. It’s in every nonprofit management textbook. Grant makers seem to expect it. Boards assume it’s best practice. So we’ve never really questioned it. We just did it. And we assumed the quiet unease we felt was our problem, not the process’s.

Nobody questions it. And the assumptions underneath it stay hidden.

Yes, something always feels off. It’s never as energizing, as clarifying, as accelerating as it should be. The plan gets written. The binder gets made. The consultants get paid. And life goes on much as it did before.

To be fair, the intentions underlying strategic planning are valid. Clarity, priorities, accountability, direction. Nobody can argue with those goals. The problem isn’t the aspiration. It’s that the process we’ve built around those aspirations keeps falling short of them. But it doesn’t have to.

If that thought has ever crossed your mind, you’re not alone.

Does it feel like it’s getting in the way of creativity on the fly?

You sense that something is wrong. You know that when everything is pre-allocated, there’s no slack for the small experiment that might change everything. People stop experimenting. They comply. They go through the motions.

Have you ever watched a talented team member stop suggesting ideas? Not because the ideas dried up, but because the plan left no room for them?

It doesn’t have to be this way. I’ve watched teams come alive around their mission when given real clarity and real freedom. Eyes light up. Team members truly own the direction. Ideas are unleashed. I’ve seen it. And I can’t unsee it.

When COVID-19 hit in March 2020, food banks across the country faced an impossible situation almost overnight. Nobody waited for a committee meeting. Nobody pulled out a strategic plan. Frontline staff began pivoting immediately: drive-thru distributions, home delivery, mobile pantry routes. At Feeding San Diego, a drive-thru distribution served 1,200 vehicles in under an hour. What allowed those organizations to adapt so rapidly wasn’t a document. It was mission in people’s bones.

What would it look like if your team had that kind of freedom to navigate?

Does it feel like it substitutes for thinking rather than enabling it?

When a plan specifies not just the destination but every step along the way, it implicitly tells your team: we don’t trust you to figure out how to get there. Whether that’s the intent or not, the effect can be the same. People stop thinking and start reporting. They manage up to the plan rather than outward to the mission. The document substitutes for the thinking rather than enabling it. And the people closest to the work, the ones who most need clarity to act boldly, are the last to feel it.

Have you ever sat in a meeting where everyone was managing up to the document instead of actually thinking? Where the plan had become the point?

And it’s precisely in the unexpected moments where this matters most. A traditional strategic plan may guide the decisions you anticipated. But it rarely helps you navigate the ones you didn’t. The sudden trade-off, the opportunity that wasn’t in the plan, the crisis that arrived without warning. Those moments demand judgment, not a document.

We saw a glimpse of this in Spielberg’s movie Lincoln (2012), where the president gently advised a politician:

“A compass, I learned while I was surveying, it’ll point you true north from where you’re standing, but it’s got no advice about the swamps, deserts and chasms that you’ll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination you plunge ahead heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp, what’s the use of knowing true north?”

Social impact work is all swamps, deserts, and chasms. The terrain never cooperates. Your people need to be equipped to navigate, not just to follow.

Does it feel like strategy lives in a document rather than in your people?

Is your strategy truly alive in your people? Or is it encased on a shelf, waiting for the next planning cycle?

Here’s a simple test: can someone on the front lines of your organization use your strategy to make a sound trade-off on a Tuesday morning without opening a document? If not, it’s probably still too complex. Simplicity, clarity, and usability aren’t nice-to-haves in strategy. They’re the whole point.

The most innovative mission-driven organizations aren’t the ones with the most detailed plans. They’re the ones clear enough about their north star that their teams feel free to make sound decisions in the moment and find new and better ways to reach it.

“Strategy should work less like a fixed blueprint and more like GPS,” advises my friend and nonprofit leader Mike Le. I like that. Clear on the destination. Constantly recalculating the route as you learn, adapt, and respond to what the community actually needs. A two-year-old concrete plan doesn’t have that agility. Neither does a binder on a shelf.

In your experience, does strategic planning feel more like a living, iterative process or a lifeless document?

Does hidden arrogance silence the most important voices?

There is, I think, a hidden arrogance baked into the architecture of traditional strategic planning. Not in the people, who are almost always well-intentioned. But in the assumptions the process makes, assumptions so embedded they rarely get named out loud. That we can predict what a complex social environment will require of us years from now. That the people at the top of the organization have more relevant knowledge than the people closest to the problem. That a document can capture everything that matters. These aren’t personal failings. They’re structural ones. And they stay structural precisely because nobody says them out loud.

The thinking happened at the top, in a committee, with a consultant. It got transmitted downward through a document. As historian Daniel Boorstin warned, the greatest obstacle to discovery is the illusion of knowledge. Organizations that think they have a strategy because they have a document are victims of that illusion.

Have you ever watched a beautifully designed program land in a community that didn’t want it, didn’t shape it, and couldn’t use it?

And that distance from the top has a way of trickling all the way down to the communities we’re trying to serve.

A colleague shared two stories with me that I haven’t been able to forget. Details have been generalized to protect confidentiality, but the pattern they reveal is real.

A company donated tablets to a community without understanding the digital divide. Many families had no Wi-Fi at home. Children were left searching for a signal at the library, McDonald’s, or Starbucks to complete their homework. The plan looked generous on paper.

A medical device company identified a healthcare gap in a developing country and offered innovative technology to patients for free. But they never involved local stakeholders. The result: local healthcare professionals lost patients and income. And because training stayed only with foreign volunteers, the technology sat unusable until the next group of volunteers arrived. The plan looked innovative on paper. The strategy was never in the people.

This keeps me up at night. We go into this work because we care deeply about the people we serve. And yet the very process we use to organize that caring can end up putting distance between us and them.

So what would it look like to do this differently?

What if your team woke up on Monday morning energized by the mission? Not executing someone else’s document, but exercising their own judgment, creativity, and problem-solving in service of something they deeply believe in? That kind of clarity exists. I’ve seen it. And it looks nothing like a binder on a shelf.

Clarity, priorities, accountability, direction. Those are worth fighting for. The question is whether the process we’ve inherited is the best way to get there. Or whether there’s something better waiting to be designed.

I’m writing to my community of the fed up and the fired up. The ones who know something is broken and can’t stop believing something better is possible.

💬 I’m curious what your experience has been. What worked, what didn’t, and what do you wish had been different? Tell me in the comments. I read every one.

I’ve spent years facilitating nonprofit strategy sessions using “How might we?” questions. It’s a design thinking technique that opens up possibility - teams that walk in stuck on one solution suddenly see ten paths forward.

But recently, something clicked: If “How might we?” questions are so transformative for strategic planning, why don’t we use them for the most strategic statement of all - our mission?

And here’s the deeper truth I keep bumping into: Every nonprofit is fundamentally a hypothesis. We’re all testing theories about how to solve problems in the world. Yet most mission statements are written like we’ve already proven the theorem.

Most organizations state their mission like this: “We make the world a better place through accessible design for people with disabilities.”

Bold. Confident. Done.

But what if we reframed it as: “How might we make the world a better place through accessible design for people with disabilities?”

The Shift That Happens

· It acknowledges reality. You’re striving toward something, adapting along the way, discovering what works. Every nonprofit is essentially a hypothesis about how to solve a problem - we’re all figuring out what works.

· It signals humility. You’re not claiming to have arrived. You’re on the journey, learning as you go.

· It invites collaboration. A question opens the door for others to join, contribute ideas, and co-create solutions.

· It sparks curiosity. Questions invite exploration rather than closing down conversation.

It transforms your mission from a finished product into a living invitation.

What This Actually Looks Like

To experiment with this idea, I tried reframing some well-known missions as questions:

🏥 Doctors Without Borders: How might we deliver lifesaving medical care to people most in need, wherever crises occur?

🌍 Patagonia: How might we conduct business in ways that protect and restore our planet?

🎓 Khan Academy: How might we provide free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere?

When Doctors Without Borders asks, “How might we deliver lifesaving medical care to people most in need?” they’re not confused about their mission. They’re acknowledging that the HOW keeps evolving.

What do you think? What strikes me is that the question makes space for breakthrough innovations they haven’t imagined yet.

What This Means for Fundraising

Here’s what I’m curious about: will organizations that frame their work as ongoing questions rather than solved problems build deeper donor relationships? People don’t want to fund maintenance. They want to fund discovery.

When your mission is a question, every gift becomes an investment in finding better answers. Donors become collaborators in an unfolding story, not just supporters of an established program.

For example, Chip Heath and Dan Heath write in their bestselling book Made to Stick about the power of posing a curious question that draws an audience in, like a fascinating mystery to be solved. Your mission provides a similar opportunity. Not just to inform, but to invite.

One of my readers shared that he is noticing something shifting in the corporate social responsibility sector: companies no longer want simple donation-logo relationships. They want to solve problems together with their ecosystem of partners, employees, customers, and communities.

💡 When you frame your work as a question, you signal something valuable to potential partners: We’re curious. We’re learning. We have room for your perspective and contribution.

Donors increasingly want to be co-creators, not just checkwriters. The question format invites them into the work differently. Think about the difference:

· “We provide literacy programs” → Here’s what we do. Support us.

· Or, “How might we increase literacy rates in our community?” → Here’s what we’re solving. Help us figure it out.

One asks for money. The other asks for partnership.

Why Don’t More Organizations Do This?

If this approach is so powerful, why don’t we see mission questions everywhere?

Most organizations default to declarations because that’s what we’ve always done. Mission statements reassure stakeholders. A question can feel risky, like admitting uncertainty. Won’t a question format make us seem less credible to foundations or major donors who want proven solutions?

But there’s a difference between honest inquiry and lack of direction.

Consider the nonprofit Livestrong, which serves cancer survivors. They’ve embraced a mission question: ‘Which everyday cancer problem will we fix today?’ This isn’t uncertainty - it’s a commitment to staying grounded in real needs rather than abstract goals. Every cancer journey is different, so their question format signals exactly what they offer: We listen first, then adapt.

The barrier isn’t that questions don’t work. It’s that we haven’t given ourselves permission to try them.

My Own Mission Question

I’ve been thinking about this for my own work too. My personal passion and professional mission have always been guided by this tagline, “Igniting Innovation for Greater Social Impact.” Yet reframing it as a question creates a new energy: “How might we ignite innovation for greater social impact?”

This is the foundation for my writing, speaking, and consulting work, but explicitly inviting others into this journey with me is even more exhilarating. This is a burning question for our sector - and one I’ll never solve alone. We’re going to figure this out together. That’s the invitation I want to extend - whether to readers, audience members, or clients.

What I’m Still Wondering

Here’s what I noticed when I first posed this question to nonprofit leaders: It immediately generated dialogue. People started thinking differently about their own organizations. Some pushed back on the concept, which led to deeper exploration of what missions are actually for. The question did its job. It opened a door.

The same thing happens in my strategy sessions. When a team shifts from defending their current approach to exploring “How might we?” questions, the energy in the room changes. People lean in. New possibilities emerge.

Maybe that’s what our sector needs most right now - not more certainty, but better questions.

So, I’ll leave you with this: What’s your organization’s core purpose? How would it sound as a “How might we?” question? And what might open up if you invited your donors, partners, and community into that question with you?

You don’t have to change your official mission statement tomorrow. But try the question on. See what shifts. I’d love to hear what you discover.

As a response to shameful mischaracterizing of humanitarian and nonprofit work of late, today I am writing a valentine's day love letter to my nonprofit community. 💌

❤️ Nonprofits provide some of the greatest gifts to the world and take on some of its hardest problems. Many social problems aren't likely to be resolved by business or government.

🩷 A strong civil society is not to be taken for granted. The history of nonprofits and freedom is intertwined, just ask anyone living under authoritarian regimes.

🧡 Our work eases hunger, conserves nature and wildlife, and fights injustice. Nonprofits advancing education help break the chains of ignorance and poverty.

💜 Recovery programs, mental health counseling, medical care and research provides healing. Arts programs lift the human spirit.

🩷 Our work focuses on fragile at-risk communities, and helps make upward mobility more likely. None of this is easy, solutions aren't always clear. We are often finding our way in the dark.

💚 The fruits of nonprofit work are obvious and all around us and in our communities. Think about it, the work of nonprofits have helped you or someone you care about. So many people are counting on our work.

🧡 This valentine is dedicated to to all of those with big hearts who make life better for others, through small acts of kindness or courageous deeds of justice. Whether you donate, volunteer, or are carrying out the important work of nonprofits, stay strong, keep the faith. Your generosity makes all the difference. 💪

“Our protest was so vague that we got nothing, and the people were left very depressed and in despair.”

That’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. talking about the Albany Movement of 1961-62. Not one of his victories. One of his failures.

🔍 Here’s what strikes me about this quote: King didn’t hide from it. He didn’t spin it. He called it exactly what it was.

And then he did something that changed history. He studied it.

King and his team spent months after Albany asking hard questions. What went wrong? What did we miss? What can we learn? They dissected the campaign like scientists examining data from a failed experiment.

💡 The lesson they discovered was specific: they had protested segregation generally, rather than targeting a single, distinct facet of it. Without a focused demand, there was no clear victory to galvanize support or boost morale. The ambiguity that felt inclusive actually diffused their power.

This wasn’t just reflection. It was research. It was treating action as a form of learning.

Birmingham Was Different

📍 Focused targets: They chose specific businesses and public facilities.

💵 Economic pressure: They organized boycotts that hit where it mattered.

📺 Strategic media engagement: They understood how images would play on national television.

🎯 Clear demands: Everyone knew exactly what success would look like.

(King speaking with Birmingham police.)

The lessons from Albany became the blueprint for one of the movement’s most significant victories. Birmingham didn’t succeed despite Albany. It succeeded because of what Albany taught them.

What This Teaches Us About Change

The civil rights movement wasn’t just morally courageous. It was deeply strategic. Leaders took calculated risks, experimented with different tactics, and systematically learned from what didn’t work. They treated each campaign as both action and research.

🚀 This is intelligent failure: Take a risk, learn from what happens, adjust your approach, and build on what you learned.

This is different from avoidable failure, where we ignore the lessons and repeat the same mistakes. Or where we let our egos get in the way of honest assessment. Or where we’re so afraid of looking bad that we pretend the failure didn’t happen.

The Innovation Problem We Don’t Talk About

As we know, many nonprofit boards and major funders are often deeply risk averse. I understand why. Accountability matters. Stewardship is real. Nobody wants to waste donor dollars.

But here’s the tension. That risk aversion squashes innovation.

💔 Intelligent risks and intelligent failures aren’t wasteful. They’re essential. Trial and error isn’t carelessness. It’s how we learn what actually serves the communities we care about.

The Question That Changes Everything

✨ Albany wasn’t an unqualified failure. It was an education that made Birmingham possible.

Think about your work right now. What’s your Albany? What experiment didn’t go as planned? What pilot revealed something you didn’t expect? What assumption turned out to be wrong?

Those aren’t just setbacks. They’re data. They’re insights. They’re the raw material for your next breakthrough, if you’re willing to study them like King and his team did.

What would change if you treated your setbacks like scientists treat experiments that produce unexpected results?

Looking for A Community of Changemakers?

🪴 Community matters. We encourage each other, learn together, and stand stronger for the people we serve, especially the most vulnerable.

That’s why Lori Stanley and I host “Casual Conversations with Lori and Leah”, a free, peer-led virtual gathering where nonprofit leaders connect, spark ideas, and problem-solve together. You set the agenda. 💬

Recent topics participants brought:

🔷 Fundraising asks and relationship-building

🔷 Capacity-building

🔷 The challenges of paternalism in our sector

🔷 Ethical storytelling

Bravo to this amazing group of social impact pros! Thank you for all you do to lift people up and make the world a better place. You inspire me. 💖

Want to join us? ☕

✨ Intimate sessions, just 6 participants per session

📅 Next session: Thursday, Feb 12, 10-11 am EST (only 2 slots left!)

🗓️ Plus new 2026 dates just added! Register here.

In Case You Missed It:

Having some great conversations about social impact innovation!

LOVED exploring scientific thinking in nonprofits with Sheela Mahajan! Link to our conversation here.

The people closest to the problem often see what leadership misses. I recently sat down with Dr. Marc Hardy on his Nonprofit Docs YouTube channel to discuss what gets in the way. It’s a question I hear often from leaders and changemakers who have ideas but can’t seem to gain traction in their organizations. We had a lot of fun! Link to our conversation here.

Image sources:

https://nmaahc.si.edu/object/nmaahc_2015.129.15

https://www.wearehumanleaders.com/latestarticles/rightkindofwrong

🎤 November is National Entrepreneurship Month, and it’s worth remembering that social change has always been driven by social entrepreneurs: people who see problems differently and refuse to accept “that’s just how things are done.” 💡 But what happens when encouraging innovation collides with the reality of workplace power dynamics? 🤔 Recently, a workshop participant forced me to confront this tension directly, and her challenge changed how I think about building cultures of innovation.

The Interview Question That Sparked A Great Conversation

🗣️ I was providing a workshop on nonprofit innovation at the Keystone Conference a few weeks ago, talking about the importance of speaking up, even when uncomfortable: a core principle of building innovative cultures. ✨ In the true spirit of innovation, I invited participants to disagree with me at any point during the session. 💚 I was delighted when they took me up on it, and we had a vibrant, challenging discussion.

🔍 To build a culture of innovation in nonprofits, I shared an interview question I use: “Tell me about a time you challenged the status quo or disagreed with a supervisor. How did it turn out?”

💭 In my experience, this question reveals whether someone will speak up when they see something that could be done better, even when it’s uncomfortable. 🎯 It shows me their character, their courage, and their problem-solving approach.

🚧 A thoughtful participant expressed some healthy skepticism. She asked: How realistic is it to expect people to challenge authority? Aren’t we ignoring real power imbalances?

✅ It was a great question: one that forced me to clarify what I’m actually looking for.

What I’m Really Screening For

❌ I’m not screening for people who only speak up when it’s safe or when they hold power. 🎯 I’m not looking for people who succeed every time they challenge something. That’s not realistic, and it’s not the point.

🌟 I’m looking for character, courage, integrity, and creative problem-solving.

📋 When someone answers this question, I listen for several things:

🤝 How they approached the disagreement. Did they build a case? Seek allies? Consider timing? These details reveal their strategic thinking and emotional intelligence.

🔄 What they tried when the first approach didn’t work. Innovation isn’t about getting it right the first time: it’s about persistence and adaptation.

💙 How they maintained relationships while advocating for change. The best change-makers don’t burn bridges; they build coalitions.

📚 What they learned, even if they didn’t convince others. Growth mindset matters more than a perfect win record.

The Best Answers Aren’t Always Success Stories

🏆 Here’s what I’ve learned: The best answers I’ve heard aren’t always success stories. 📖 They’re stories of people who found creative ways to influence without authority. 💡 Who learned from push-back and revised their approach. 🔧 Who created stronger arguments and built buy-in over time. ⏰ Who knew when to escalate and when to try a different angle.

⚡ These are the people who change organizations from within, even when they don’t have formal power.

Personal Agency and Duty

💪 Here’s what I believe: We may not always be in positions of power in our organizations, but we always have personal agency. 🎯 And in the nonprofit sector especially, we have a duty to try our best. 💙 Program participants are counting on us: not to be reckless, but to use whatever influence we have to advocate for better outcomes.

⚠️ Because if we only reward speaking up when you have power, we’re not building cultures of innovation: we’re reinforcing the status quo.

🔓 The interview question isn’t perfect. 🚪 But it opens a door to hear how someone navigates the messy, complicated work of making change happen in imperfect systems. 🔍 It reveals whether they see themselves as agents of change or passive participants in the status quo.

A Question for You

❓ As we celebrate National Entrepreneurship Month, I want to hear from this community: How do you balance encouraging innovation with acknowledging real workplace power dynamics? 🤔 Have you found ways to challenge the status quo without formal authority? What’s worked? What hasn’t?

🌱 Social entrepreneurship isn’t just about starting organizations: it’s about changing them from within. 💫 And that requires all of us to think differently about power, voice, and courage.

💬 I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

🪴 Community is so important. We encourage each other. Together we are stronger, together we stand up for those we serve, especially the vulnerable.

🛠️ If you are looking for a small group setting to build community, Lori Stanley and I host “Casual Conversations with Lori and Leah.” It’s free. You set the agenda. Here is what recent participants put on the agenda:
🔷Board member qualifications, roles and criteria for decision making
🔷How to improve donor confidence in your systems and processes
🔷Working with partner nonprofits and within ecosystems
🔷Considerations for launching an NGO in a particular country

☕ We keep it small and intimate and limit it to six participants.

📌 Join us! Our next session is Thurs Dec 4, 12-1 EST. Register here at this link.

In the world of social impact, we spend countless hours analyzing data, measuring outcomes, and refining strategies. We dissect community needs, organizational theories of change, and systemic barriers with surgical precision. But there's one critical element we often overlook in our pursuit of changing the world: truly understanding ourselves.

Self-knowledge isn't just personal development fluff—it's the foundation of authentic leadership and sustainable impact. The most effective changemakers I've encountered possess a deep awareness of their values, motivations, and blind spots. They know what drives them, what triggers them, and how their unique perspective shapes their approach to solving complex problems.

Recently, I stumbled upon an unusual icebreaker that cuts through the typical small talk: "What five movies should someone watch to understand you?" Not your favorites, but the films that would help someone grasp your values, character, vision, and quirks.

When I shared this question at our dinner table, the conversation that followed was revelatory. Each person's choices painted a vivid picture of their inner landscape—their relationship with adversity, their definition of heroism, their sense of humor, their deepest fears and aspirations.

Why Movies Matter for Social Impact Leaders

Stories have always been humanity's way of making sense of the world. The films we connect with on a visceral level often reflect our core beliefs about justice, relationships, resilience, and purpose. For those of us working to create positive change, these narrative preferences offer crucial insights into our leadership style and impact approach.

Consider what your movie choices reveal:

• Your theory of change: Do you gravitate toward stories of gradual transformation or revolutionary upheaval?

• Your relationship with power: Are your heroes reluctant leaders thrust into action, or ambitious changemakers seizing opportunity?

• Your view of community: Do you prefer stories of individual heroism or collective action?

• Your approach to conflict: Are you drawn to stories that emphasize dialogue and understanding, or those that showcase righteous confrontation?

The Five That Define Me

Here are my five, with brief explanations of what they reveal:

The Lord of the Rings exposes my belief in ordinary people stepping up to extraordinary challenges, the power of faithful friendship, and the long view required for meaningful change.

Paterson reflects my appreciation for finding meaning in daily routines, the quiet dignity of service work, and the poetry embedded in seemingly mundane lives.

Fargo reveals my fascination with moral complexity and how small compromises can lead to devastating consequences—essential awareness for any social impact professional. But I'm equally drawn to the absurd humor and the quiet decency of Marge and her community as they navigate chaos with integrity intact. I belly laugh every time at the dark comedy, yet the final scene of Marge and Norm winding down their day with simple, everyday goodness completely steals my heart. 💖💖

12 Mighty Orphans showcases my conviction that transformative leaders often emerge from the margins, and that hope and dignity can flourish even in the most challenging circumstances.

Spring Forward demonstrates my belief in the redemptive power of unlikely mentorship and second chances—core themes in much social impact work.

Ask AI for Themes from Your List

Here's where it gets interesting for our data-driven sector: drop your five movies into an AI tool and ask, "What are the key messages of these films, and what do those messages say about me?" The pattern recognition capabilities of AI can surface themes and connections you might miss, offering a unique mirror for self-reflection.

When I tried this exercise, the AI identified recurring themes around "quiet heroism," "the power of persistence over perfection," and "finding hope in broken systems"—insights that have since helped me articulate my leadership philosophy more clearly.

Making It Practical

For social impact professionals, this isn't just a fun conversation starter—it's a diagnostic tool. Understanding your narrative preferences can help you:

• Identify potential blind spots in your approach to systemic change

• Recognize what motivates and sustains you during difficult seasons

• Communicate your values more authentically to stakeholders and team members

• Build more diverse teams by understanding how different narrative frameworks complement each other

The Patterns That Emerge

When I shared this exercise on LinkedIn, the responses were illuminating. One social impact leader's choices revealed themes of heart, sports, teamwork, and overcoming obstacles despite the odds—suggesting someone who views social change as a collaborative effort requiring both emotional intelligence and athletic-level persistence. ⚾

Another professional's list reflected leadership, dreaming, neurodiversity, and badass women—painting a picture of someone committed to inclusive leadership and reimagining what's possible when we center different ways of thinking and being. 🫶

A third respondent's movies showcased nature exploration, adventure, philosophy, and justice—indicating someone who sees social impact through the lens of interconnected systems and believes in the power of bold action guided by deep reflection. 🛣️

Notice how each pattern suggests different strengths and natural approaches to creating change. The "heart and teamwork" leader likely excels at coalition-building and inspiring others through shared purpose. The "dreaming and neurodiversity" advocate probably brings visionary thinking and inclusive perspectives that expand what's possible. The "adventure and philosophy" changemaker may offer big-picture systems thinking and the courage to tackle complex challenges.

Each approach brings unique gifts to social impact work—and suggests natural partnerships where different perspectives can complement and strengthen each other.

Your Turn

So, what five movies should someone watch to understand you? Will they be epic tales of transformation, intimate character studies, or complex moral puzzles? More importantly, what patterns emerge—and how might those patterns be both your superpower and your growth edge in social impact work?

Share them with a colleague, feed them to an AI, or simply reflect on what themes surface. In a field where we're constantly trying to understand others—communities, beneficiaries, stakeholders—perhaps the most radical act is turning that analytical lens inward. Because the clearer we become about our own story, the better equipped we are to help others write theirs.

What stories have shaped your approach to social impact? I'd love to hear your five—and what they reveal about the changemaker you're becoming.

We hear a lot about scale in the social sector. Funders love it. Strategy decks aim for it. It’s often seen as the gold standard of success. 📈

❓ But is bigger always better? Is it ever strategic NOT to scale?

What if more meaningful impact sometimes lies in going deeper, not wider? Perhaps hyperlocal? In building trust, transforming lives in lasting ways, and embedding impact in a specific place or community?

⚖️ How do we think about the pressure to scale with the value of depth?

🔹 Does every mission need to reach 1 million people to matter? Or can scaling take different forms than a single nonprofit's growth - perhaps sharing an idea, a process, or an operational model?
🔹 What trade-offs have you seen when organizations chase scale?
🔹 And when has scale worked—and why?

I asked my LinkedIn community about this, some reactions:

• Nick Takamine shared insights from a related concept of "rhizomatic seeding.”

• Matthew Kessler-Vaughn shared “Scale doesn’t always have to mean size. It can mean depth, alignment, or durability. I’ve worked with orgs that scaled by refining how they deliver services rather than expanding who they serve. One focused on strengthening internal systems so frontline teams had what they needed to show up fully. Their reach didn’t grow, but their impact deepened within the community.”

• Brooke Richie-Babbage shared a fascinating podcast on “how to talk about growth beyond the numbers.”

What about you? What are your thoughts about the tensions embedded in scaling? I'm curious how you think about it and look forward to your comments. 👇

Take a short survey: what do nonprofits need to spark innovation?

What’s getting in the way of social impact innovation in your work? What support would make the biggest difference? I’m surveying nonprofit leaders and changemakers to better understand the real challenges organizations are facing today—especially when it comes to innovation, strategy, and impact.

👉 Take the 3-minute survey here.

What I’ve been reading

💭 Are you a new nonprofit CEO—or mentoring one?

According to the Harvard Business Review, one-third to one-half of new CEOs fail in their first eighteen months on the job. That’s a sobering statistic—but it doesn’t have to be your story.

The Ultimate Guide for New Nonprofit CEOs by my friend Brian Quail is a practical and insightful resource for navigating the early days of leadership. Brian writes from his decades of experience in our sector, and I admire his spirit of generosity, pragmatism, and real world wisdom. Be sure to follow Brian if you don't already, and check out his book here.

Innovation conversations in the social impact community

Loved speaking with the CatalystNow Systems Working Group—a global community of social impact changemakers—about ideas from my book Innovation for Social Change. ❤️ 💪 This was such a warm, curious, and generous community of systems thinkers and doers. If you aren’t already a member of this global movement of social impact pros, run, don’t walk! And it’s free!

🛠️ If you are looking for a small group setting to build community, Lori Stanley and I host "Casual Conversations with Lori and Leah." It's free. You set the agenda. Here is what our thoughtful June participants put on the agenda:
🔷Nuances of AI adoption in a small nonprofit workplace
🔷AI pros, cons, cultural blind spots, and risks
🔷How to think about one's niche within the nonprofit sector

☕ We keep it small and intimate and limit it to six participants.
📌 Upcoming dates: Thursday August 14 10-11 am EST; Wed Sept 10 12-1 pm EST, and we’ll be adding fall/winterdates soon. Register here.

🎙️ I recently had the pleasure of joining Pooya Pourak on The Nonprofit Lab podcast—an energizing conversation about innovation, collaboration, and reimagining what’s possible in the social sector 💡🌍

We also talked about what innovation looks like when you don’t have big budgets—but you do have creativity, courage, and a clear purpose.

🎧 Tune in here if you're rethinking how your organization shows up in the world—and how we can build a more just, imaginative future together.

🎙️ Enjoyed being interviewed on the Untold Stories of Hope podcast, hosted by the inspiring community-builder Zion Enogieru and sponsored by the Destiny Connect Foundation 💫

We had a deeply personal, heartfelt, and hope-filled conversation 💛 — about encouragement, finding meaning in our work, and persevering through suffering, setbacks, and even despair 🌧️➡️🌈

We talked about how lives are changed one person at a time 🙋🏽‍♀️🙋🏾‍♂️, and the quiet, determined hope that fuels real social change 🌍

🎧 Tune in here if you need a reminder that what you do matters — more than you know 💥

Nonprofits are often seen as underfunded, overworked, and running on fumes. We internalize that image — like we’re just barely holding things together.

It’s time we flipped that script. Here’s the truth:

We’re not the withered branch — we’re the root system.
Invisible to some. Indispensable to all. 💪 ❤️

We hold up communities.
We nourish civil society. We save lives.
We create safety, healing, education, art, advocacy, and belonging.

When there’s a social problem business or government can’t solve —
we step in with creativity, heart, and entrepreneurial problem-solving. I share these inspiring stories in my book.

It’s time we saw ourselves clearly. Not as a sector in need of fixing — but as a force that fixes things. If you can’t tell, I’m fired up about this.

We’re not the backup plan.
We’re the original innovators. 💡
We’re the bridge-builders.
We are where heart meets hustle.

Authoritarian regimes know this. That’s why they try to silence, co-opt, or uproot civil society. ⛓️ But roots are resilient.

🌱 You can’t kill what’s underground, intertwined, and growing.
Not when it’s nourished by purpose, powered by people, and reaching toward a better future.

Bravo to the National Council of Nonprofits and many others for shouting this from the rooftops, they are gathering your stories, here is the link.

Community, the wind in our sails

🪴 Community is so important. We encourage each other. Together we are stronger, together we stand up for those we serve, especially the vulnerable. We creatively ideate together.

🛠️ If you are looking for a small group setting to build community, Lori Stanley and I host "Casual Conversations with Lori and Leah." It's free. You set the agenda. Nonprofiteers join from all over the world. Here is what our thoughtful April participants put on the agenda:
🔷Board member recruitment, roles, time commitment, term limits
🔷Replicable best practices, applicable to a wide range of circumstances
🔷National nonprofits, centralized vs decentralized systems and processes
🔷Resources in our sector, communities, conferences

☕ We keep it small and intimate and limit it to six participants.

📌 Upcoming dates: Thursday June 5 noon-1 EST (1 slot left!); Tuesday July 8 4-5 pm EST, Thursday August 14 10-11 am EST. Register using this link.

Loving the Nonprofit Hive!

I love the Nonprofit Hive community. Do you like speed networking? If you aren’t already signed up - run! I’ve been a member for the last year and a half and love the connections I’ve met. It’s easy to sign up, answer 5 questions about yourself, and simply opt in as you have time. You’ll get an email each week with time slots to choose from, and you’ll then be randomly paired with another nonprofiteer for a 30 minute virtual meetup. So many good things have come from my meetups in the Hive. Highly recommend.

What I’ve been up to

Recently I had the honor of speaking with 18 powerhouse nuns from Ghana and Kenya—entrepreneurial social change leaders 🌍 who are part of the Women Faith Leaders Fellowship at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. 🙏🏽

We discussed ideas from my book, Innovation for Social Change 📘—about piloting new ideas, learning through trial and error 🔄, navigating resource constraints 💸, and navigating layers of approval or being told, “this isn’t the right time.” 🚫⏳

Their work with vulnerable communities is full of challenges—and yet they persist, with courage, clarity, and compassion. They are savvy problem solvers. 💪🏾❤️ And their sense of humor and kind spirits completely stole my heart. 💖 Here is a link to learn more or support this important work.

🎙️ 🎧 Enjoyed a conversation about nonprofit innovation culture on the excellent Inspired Nonprofit Leadership podcast with host Sarah Olivieri. Check out our conversation here.

“These metrics are a waste of our time!”
“Management doesn't trust us.”
“We're making no decisions based on all of this data we collect.”

How many times have you heard phrases like these during a staff meeting or retreat❔

🎙️I loved discussing this with the great Carol Hamilton recently on Nonprofit Mission: Impact podcast. We explored what makes nonprofits truly💡innovative. One principle we kept circling back to: people closest to the work often have the best ideas about the right questions and evidence to help us assess if what we are doing is working. But they need a culture that👂listens. Listen in here.

Delighted to be interviewed by brilliant sector experts Julia C. Patrick and Sherry Quam Taylor on The Nonprofit Show about what innovation looks like in the nonprofit world. They had me on the hot seat about experiments, trial and error, risk-taking, and even that big scary word failure. 💡 Loved every minute, check it out via podcast or youtube.

Review of Innovation for Social Change:

An honor! A huge thank you to Jessica Whitmore, PhD(c) for this spot-on review. 📖

I’m so grateful for this community. I love the reader comments and engagement here on substack and on LinkedIn. Thank you for the encouragement, wisdom, and for all that you do to build civil society and lift people up. ❤️

💰 If you won a huge lottery ticket, would you give it all away?

🎞️ I recently rewatched the beautiful Oscar-winning film, Babette's Feast. It is about remarkable generosity that has the power to heal a broken community. The movie reflects the same spirit I see everyday in the nonprofit and philanthropic sector. The word philanthropy means love of humanity. This is why we serve.

A few days ago I met with a social change leader in Nigeria who told me that he grew up in extreme poverty and that as a young man, he had felt hopeless and abandoned. The healing work of nonprofits in his community changed his life. Now he is working alongside changemakers to continue the work and to restore hope for others. I wish you could have seen the spirit of love and fire in his eyes.

To my friends in the nonprofit sector, you have countless stories like this. In response to shameful mischaracterizing of humanitarian and nonprofit work of late, keep speaking up. Share your powerful stories of generosity and service. You are changing the world!

Whether you donate, volunteer, or are carrying out the important work of nonprofits, stay strong, keep the faith. Your generosity makes all the difference. 💪

What are you reading?

What are you reading for women's history month? Do you have favorite stories of women leaders and social change innovators? Far too many to list here but these are some of my favorites, the list continues to grow. I am halfway through The Blue Sweater, and it brings back memories from my experience overseas in international development. An honest portrayal of the complexities, challenges and lessons of poverty alleviation work that rings very true. 💪 💖 Bravo to these courageous and bold trailblazers!

What I’ve been up to:

Looking for ideas, encouragement, or perhaps just some fun?

🛠️ If you are looking for a small group setting to build community, Lori Stanley and I host "Casual Conversations with Lori and Leah." It's free, it's virtual. You set the agenda. Here is what our thoughtful February participants put on the agenda:

🔷Board members and executive directors, clarity of roles
🔷Monetizing and fee for service for nonprofits
🔷Funding freeze impacts on nonprofit services
🔷Volunteer management

☕ We keep it small and intimate and limit it to six participants. There are a few slots left for April, and we just added May and June dates. Join us! Register at this link.

Book talk at Flagler College

Last month I had the privilege to escape the DC snow and travel to beautiful St. Augustine, Florida to speak with Flagler College students about themes from my book and bringing your innovation A game. 💡 Grateful to Dr. Derek Yonai and the Brown Innovation Center for hosting, a wonderful event. 🌴 What a stunningly beautiful campus.

Interview on the Nonprofit Leadership Podcast

🎙️ 💖 Enjoyed talking with Dr. Rob Harter on the Nonprofit Leadership Podcast about how to bring more innovation to your nonprofit. We spoke about why innovation is often overlooked in the nonprofit sector. 🎧 Check out our conversation and other great nonprofit podcast episodes here!

🍃🍃🍃 The last few months have been a whirlwind, I had the privilege to give a virtual book talk at Georgetown University. I’m enjoying a nonprofit leadership masterminds course taught by the great Patton McDowell. Was unexpectedly pulled into 6 fascinating days of jury duty. I’m enjoying working with my nonprofit clients on strategy, pilots and experiments, and streamlining and improving a grant-making process. And as a gardener, excited about the oncoming spring, and the cherry trees about to burst here in the DC area.

I would love to hear what you are up to - let’s connect! 😊

Best, Leah

As a response to shameful mischaracterizing of humanitarian and nonprofit work of late, today I am writing a valentine's day love letter to my nonprofit community. 💌

❤️ Nonprofits provide some of the greatest gifts to the world and take on some of its hardest problems. Many social problems aren't likely to be resolved by business or government.

🩷 A strong civil society is not to be taken for granted. The history of nonprofits and freedom is intertwined, just ask anyone living under authoritarian regimes.

🧡 Our work eases hunger, conserves nature and wildlife, and fights injustice. Nonprofits advancing education help break the chains of ignorance and poverty.

💜 Recovery programs, mental health counseling, medical care and research provides healing. Arts programs lift the human spirit.

🩷 Our work focuses on fragile at-risk communities, and helps make upward mobility more likely. None of this is easy, solutions aren't always clear. We are often finding our way in the dark.

💚 The fruits of nonprofit work are obvious and all around us and in our communities. Think about it, the work of nonprofits have helped you or someone you care about. So many people are counting on our work.

🧡 This valentine is dedicated to to all of those with big hearts who make life better for others, through small acts of kindness or courageous deeds of justice. Whether you donate, volunteer, or are carrying out the important work of nonprofits, stay strong, keep the faith. Your generosity makes all the difference. 💪

As we head into a new year and a new administration, we know people – regardless of party or socioeconomic status, are asking big questions – “What’s going to happen now?” Some questions will be solution-oriented -- “How will we work together to make sure our communities are safe?” or “What if we invited them in to talk?” Others, however, are likely to be more divisive -- “How could you possibly think that?” or “What’s wrong with them?”

Questions are powerful tools. So, it was timely that Warren Berger last year released a special 10^th Anniversary edition of his bestselling book, “A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas.” Berger shows us that questions – used thoughtfully – can help forge connections and build understanding, enabling us to move forward toward common goals. It was with this in mind that we were especially pleased to write this review and commentary.

By Marshall Ginn & Leah Kral

High Stakes

Asking courageous, provocative, and beautiful questions lies at the heart of social change. For nonprofit leaders, these questions are more than tools—they are catalysts. They challenge the status quo, surface hidden assumptions, and unlock new possibilities.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. Consider the transformative power of questions that sparked action: what if Habitat for Humanity never asked, “How might we ensure that everyone has a decent place to live?” What if the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. never asked, “How might we overcome unjust Jim Crow laws?” What if Share Our Strength never asked, “Why are so many families going hungry in our nation, and what can we do about it?” Their courageous questions led to game-changing impact.

In his bestseller, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas, Warren Berger offers a treasure trove of insights for nonprofit teams and social change makers. With the 10th anniversary edition, Berger introduces timely chapters on critical thinking, leadership, and influence—issues deeply relevant to the nonprofit sector. This inspiring and practical book shows how intentional questioning can spark breakthrough ideas and shape transformative action. Berger reminds us that questions can be a source of inspiration, healing, and transformative ideas for programmatic interventions in the social sector. We felt compelled to write this book review after falling in love with lessons which we quickly adapted into our own consulting work with philanthropic foundations and nonprofits.

Why Questions Matter for Nonprofits

Those of us carrying out the hard work of social change are often finding our way in the dark and grappling with many unknowns as we design programs and interventions, struggling to figure out what works. If we think about it, every nonprofit is a hypothesis – we believe our mission and interventions will accomplish what we set out to do, but we don’t know – we have to find out. We are often trying to see around corners, which can be a challenge as we press ahead without pausing to look up and ask “What’s happening?” Whether we like it or not, questions come with the territory. We can lean into our uncertainty and questions. Berger writes, “a good question is like a lever used to pry open the stuck lid on a paint can.” And “One of the best descriptions I’ve found for what questioning does is this: It enables us to organize our thinking around what we don’t know.”

Putting Questions into Practice

What does this kind of intentional questioning look like in practice? Berger shares a story of a Philadelphia pastor who was actively searching for better ways to serve at-risk young people in his community. He described how questions changed his approach, “Instead of trying to tell local youths that he knew what they needed,” he related, “I decided to ask, ‘What would you do to reach yourself?’” This simple yet profound shift led to innovative programming designed in partnership with the community it served.

There are growing trends in the nonprofit sector that make questions more and more relevant. For example, there is a growing recognition that top-down approaches aren’t the answer, as practitioners call for trust-based philanthropy, empowerment evaluation, and appreciative inquiry. Questions can be empowering and energizing as we collaboratively ask, “How might we do this better?” Our sector struggles with burnout, but questions, used the right way, enable us to learn, to partner, or to confidently say no to things, freeing up our time for better use on more impactful efforts. They can help us when we feel “stuck” and unable to move forward. As Berger states, beautiful questions are “ambitious but actionable.” After all, if you’re not going to do anything about a situation, “You’re not questioning, but rather complaining,” Berger asserts.

Transforming The Mission Statement

As nonprofits discern their role, they might well consider Berger’s suggestion that we transform the tried-and-true mission statement into a “mission question.” We must ask ourselves hard questions about not just what we do, but why we’re doing it in the first place. His framework for confronting a changing landscape can be used by any organization as part of strategic planning. The nonprofit ecosystem is constantly shifting, and organizations must be prepared to investigate how their industry is changing or understand the trends which are most likely to have a profound impact on the future.

A Framework for Innovation

Questions can provide a useful framework through which we can foster innovation and creativity. The book follows three major questions “Why?” “What if?” and “How” and explores how answering those questions leads to new understandings and perspectives. Leah’s book “Innovation for Social Change” uses similar questions alongside stories of nonprofit organizations who used the Why/What if/How framework to achieve transformational results.

Berger specifically cites “Appreciative Inquiry” as another way creative questions can make a difference. This approach focuses on envisioning a positive future by encouraging organizations to ask, “What is?” followed by “What could be?” and culminating in “What should be?” It builds on success, asking how that could be replicated, rather than focusing on a problem that needs to be fixed.

These and similar models can bring energy to a nonprofit’s work. Questions are assets, things to be supported, and even encouraged, for both leaders and team members. We should not be afraid of questions or to ask questions. Questions are what lead to inspiration as organizations look for solutions and envision a way forward. They become ways through which we can connect in positive and productive ways. Conversations that might have started with “Why didn’t you?” can be transformed to ones that begin with “How might we?”

Questions are also useful tools. One of Marshall’s foundation clients gathered grantees together to ask basic but valuable questions, such as “What’s happening in your organization?” “What’s keeping you up at night?” or “What might we be missing?” The organizations were grateful for the gathering, appreciating the safe space a funder had created where questions were encouraged. And the answers to those questions informed the foundation’s future grantmaking.

Overcoming Barriers to Questioning

One might ask, “If questions are so great, why don’t we use them more?” What gets in the way of asking questions? In philanthropy, one consistently identified roadblock is the power dynamic between funders and nonprofits. Nonprofit team members may be uncomfortable asking questions, fearful to be seen as challenging. Further, funders can come across as using questions to “check up on” rather than inspire or engage with nonprofits. Berger raised this point as he related the story of how public education advocate Deborah Meier challenged the educational system regarding how questions were often used with young students in ways that discouraged curiosity or exploration.

A Must-Read for Nonprofit Leaders

“A More Beautiful Question” is compelling, highly readable, containing story after story that will inspire you. Though most of the stories in the book are from the for-profit business world, the lessons are still highly relevant to those of us working in the nonprofit world. As you read the book, you will undoubtedly find yourself saying, “That can apply to philanthropy,” or “I’ve seen nonprofits take this very same approach.” It’s a great read for executive directors, program managers, board members, grantmakers, or advisors. It would make a great book club choice for your team.

You are guaranteed to find examples, concepts, and ideas that immediately resonate with your work, your career, your organization, or your personal life.

Final Thoughts

Questions are not just tools; they are transformative forces that shape how we see and solve problems. Berger’s book reminds us to embrace curiosity and to view questioning as an asset—one that empowers nonprofits to navigate complexity, foster innovation, and drive meaningful change. As Berger asserted, beautiful questions are, in fact, “ambitious but actionable,” and this mindset can unlock the full potential of nonprofit leadership and teamwork.

By:

Marshall H. Ginn, principal of Capital Philanthropy and a 30+ year veteran of the philanthropy and nonprofit sector.

Leah Kral, author of Innovation for Social Change: How Wildly Successful Nonprofits Inspire and Deliver Results (Wiley, 2022), and principal of Two Larks Consulting.

As I celebrate my book’s 2 year anniversary, I'm excited to share that the Nonprofit Hive is hosting a giveaway for my book, Innovation for Social Change: How Wildly Successful Nonprofits Inspire and Deliver Results!

If you are involved in the great work of social change, the book is full of real world stories of nonprofits that punch above their weight - and how they do it. What does innovation and experimentation look like for the nonprofit sector? What does it look like to scale good ideas, and find partners and build communities and ecosystems?

Speaking of communities, if you aren’t already familiar with The Nonprofit Hive, it is a vibrant community of changemakers, and it's free! I've been an active hiver since it launched.

How it works: After signing up and answering a few questions about yourself, each Thursday you'll have the option to be randomly paired with another changemaker for a 30 minute virtual speed networking conversation. Bravo to Hive founder Tasha Van Vlack who recognized the need in our sector for a place where we can build community, energy, ideas... It's buzzing!

Here is the link to enter the giveaway. Entries are open until January 17.

Casual Conversations with Lori and Leah

Pssst, nonprofit executive directors and board members...

We are jazzed! Join nonprofit consulting guru Lori Stanley and me for some Casual Conversations, a free wheeling Q&A session where you can bring your questions and dive into real conversations about the trials and excitement of nonprofit work.

This is a comfortable space to:
✨ Share your wild dreams and ideas and ask how to make it a reality
🤔Discuss challenges to find a way through
💡 Gain fresh insights
🔑 Leave with actionable strategies

Whether about leadership, strategy, or navigating day-to-day hurdles, we’re here to help you confidently move forward.

🗓️ Two upcoming session options (Jan 23, Feb 21). And Casual Conversations is free! Here is the registration link.

What are you reading these days?

📖 Just finished The Cathedral Within by Billy Shore, lots of deeply personal insights about the passion behind being a change maker. Read about the vision, philosophy and workings of Share Our Strength, an organization that is fighting child hunger in America, and learned about their capacity building initiative, Community Wealth Partners. I will be following them with great interest. Hat tip to Craig Swistun for recommending it.

📖 Loved Bill McKendry's Do More Good. We are fortunate to have his talents and marketing expertise in our sector. Written with heart, this book will help with fundraising, marketing, and the thinking behind programmatic impact and who we are serving. It will spark ideas. Highly recommend.

📖 Re-reading Man's Search for Meaning, excited to join a virtual book club just starting up, hosted by Wendy Wolff of Maryland Nonprofits. Our sector is all about healing and lifting people up, and this is a deeply transformative book, the author chronicles his experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during World War II.

📖 The Launch Pad provides an insider's view of the intense silicon valley startup accelerator, Y Combinator. How they spot talent, how they make selections, how they coach startup teams. While it is a for-profit VC sort of book, there are definitely ideas and gems we can learn from and translate for the nonprofit sector as we design, launch, and seek funding for program interventions.

📖 If you saw the movie Oppenheimer, then you may recall scenes featuring conversations between Oppenheimer and Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. How did this nonprofit powerhouse come about? Pursuit of Genius shares the startup story. Full of lessons about donor intent, difficult choices, will be especially of interest to philanthropic advisors.

Talking innovation on the Purpose and Profit Podcast

🎙️ I had so much fun discussing nonprofit innovation in this episode of Purpose and Profit Podcast, with co-hosts Dave Raley and Carly Berna!

💡 We discuss what innovation looks like for nonprofits, and how innovation comes in all shapes and sizes – from major social changes that affect entire people groups, to smaller, systematic changes that streamline inter-organizational processes.

🔨 We talk about workplace cultures that encourage bringing good ideas forward, challenging the status quo, risk taking and experimentation.

🎧 Watch or listen now here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And congratulations to Dave on his brand new book, The Rise of Sustainable Giving!

These last few months have been a whirlwind, full of connections, travel, and joy.  Here I am, back home in Virginia with North Dakota on my mind. Watch out, or the people of the Great Plains will steal your heart. ❤️

It was an honor to speak about social entrepreneurship a few weeks ago with NDSU students, faculty and community. Such thoughtful questions from the audience, and fun conversations with current and future social change leaders at the book signing table. 💪 A huge thanks to the Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth at North Dakota State University for the invitation and the charming hospitality.

The big sky landscape of Fargo is just…wow! My first trip there was far too short, I want to come back to visit the Badlands and Minnesota Lake country. If I’m lucky maybe catch the northern lights. Next time! 🌾 ☀️ 💫

Linkedin Live conversation about nonprofit innovation

If you have 30 minutes to spare, folks tell me they enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. Great questions about nonprofit innovation, challenges, impact, accountability, experiments, I was on the hot seat! 😁 The creative team at Scope and Sequence are kindred spirits who are passionate about human flourishing and nonprofit storytelling. 📽 Be sure to connect with them and check out their work.

What leads one to work in the nonprofit sector?

The journey to working for social change is often deeply personal. ❤️ Honored that the Nonprofit Hive invited me to share my story, in Planting Seeds of Hope: The Vital Role of Nonprofits. And if you aren’t already involved in the Hive - a fantastic speed networking community for nonprofiteers - sign up, I hope to see you there.

Innovation for Social Change book club

That day when amazing social change leaders invite you to a book club discussion of…your book! Loved the thoughtful questions. Deeply honored that my book was selected by the We Are For Good community. ❤️ A vibrant community of change makers.

Some exciting life changes

In September I came to the end of a journey in one of the most transformational and meaningful experiences of my personal and professional life. Serving an entrepreneurial nonprofit for 18 years has been a joy. Deeply grateful to my colleagues at Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

💡 Their passion for students and for solving social problems is contagious.  🎓 As heterodox thinkers, they embody the idea that economics is an adventure and an intellectual deed of courage. ❤️ This has been meaningful, fun and creative work. My Mercatus peeps have encouraged me, helped me grow, taught me new things, their stories and wisdom informed my book! 📖

I will be opening a new chapter with wind in my sails and a full heart – stay tuned! 🎉❤️

Have you ever experienced an “unconference” or a world café? What was your experience?

Some years ago, leading up to my first unconference, I was skeptical. If no one is preparing PowerPoints or lectures, how on earth will anyone learn? And then, the event took me by surprise. People learned. People engaged.  The energy was so much higher than the traditional “sage on a stage” format.  I became a believer.

What’s it all about?

Nonprofits are experimenting more with unstructured conferences, and this is a good thing for bottom-up innovation. Participants decide on the agenda and topics. People gather and begin with some icebreakers, and then they answer some initial questions on a white board, such as what topics they came to learn about, or what expertise they have that they are willing to teach. From the white board, a loose agenda for the day is created. Designated areas are set up where people can go to teach, learn, or discuss that particular topic. 

Compared to traditional lecture-style presentations and planned workshops, this is more spontaneous and flexible. It prioritizes peer-to-peer learning and interactions.

My own nonprofit had an all-staff retreat yesterday, an unconference. We built relationships anew, learned more about each other’s work, and shared actionable ideas.

My friend Patricia Munro also relies on an unstructured conference format for World Café Europe.

No need to overdesign.

Rather than overdesigning with processes and formal structures, sometimes the better approach is for leaders to forgo the temptation to organize and instead simply get out of the way of entrepreneurial people. This can make all the difference in whether teams can achieve their entrepreneurial best, constructively solve problems together, and accomplish the best possible outcomes.

Would love to hear your thoughts or experiences about this, feel free to share in the comments. Or, for more information about unconferences, I’m glad to share materials, just send me a DM on LinkedIn or through the contact me form at leahkral.com.

In case you missed it

Enjoyed speaking on a panel about 📈 measurement and evaluation at the annual conference of The Association of Private Enterprise Education in Las Vegas. Always an honor to be surrounded by dedicated teachers with such passion for their students. Was impressed by students presenting their dissertations. Caught up with old friends and made some new friends. 😊 Saw Elvis impersonators! Vegas is a, um, zany place. Made a side trip to beautiful Zion National Park and Bryce Canyon. Stunning.

Had a fun podcast conversation with host Adam Morris! Relentlessly curious, Adam is the founder of GiveBackHack which brings idea makers together to pitch and develop sustainable solutions to pressing social issues. 💡 Check out the podcast here: https://peoplehelpingpeople.world/2024/04/18/leah-kral-innovation-for-social-change/

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said, "It is not enough to aid the wounded man on the [Jericho] Road. It is also necessary to work to change the conditions of the Road which made robbery possible." This is the inspiration behind the Better Samaritan Podcast, at the intersection of humanitarianism, faith and the call to love our neighbor. ❤️
I was honored and delighted to be a guest on the show! A conversation with heart, with hosts Jamie Aten and Kent Annan, founders of the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton College. Listen in here.

It’s not every day that you wake up to discover that two powerhouse consultants released a fun YouTube video discussion of your book! Delighted by how Lori Stanley and Jay Smith brought their own experience and keen insights as they engaged with the book’s stories and ideas. 💡 Thank you, Lori and Jay, wow. Looking forward to more book discussions like this! Hat tip to Nonprofit Hive and Tasha Van Vlack - where we met. 🐝

What's different about a board that supports a culture of innovation? What is your experience? 🎤Thoroughly enjoyed being interviewed by board expert Hardy Smith in Innovative Nonprofit Boards. If the name sounds familiar, he is the author of “Stop the Nonprofit Board Blame Game” - his website, blog and nonprofit reading list are fantastic resources.

Next up - getting ready to take a mini vacation to the nearby Eastern Shore, eat Maryland blue crab to my heart’s content, enjoy campfires, and watch bald eagles glide by. Happy sigh… 🦀

Can nonprofits design evaluation and metrics that get in the way of innovation?

Yes. When designed poorly, they can waste our time and even be counterproductive.

But when a metrics and evaluation approach is designed as a meaningful feedback loop, it can help us answer questions like:

💡 How do we know if what we are doing is working?
💡 Did we achieve our intended outcomes? How did our beneficiaries fare?
💡 Processes – how did we do?
💡 Structures – how well did we organize our efforts?
💡 Comparison of approaches – which worked best?
💡 What are we learning from our experiments?

Evaluation and metrics, done right, are highly valuable. They can help us identify problems, such as cutting waste or lukewarm programs, as well as opportunities, like discovering better tactics and strategies for continuous improvement.

Take the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, which has a strategic effort for infection prevention. They began to closely track how many patients developed infections after surgery and assess how the infections were developing. The effort helped them identify ways to reduce the number of infections by half.^*

Discovery is a process of asking questions, testing, learning, adjusting, and iterating.

Better information might help prevent overly optimistic thinking about something that isn’t working. We might have barn sized blind spots. We might have status quo bias. I've seen it. Evidence and information can help us overcome these common and very human biases, and provide far better service to our nonprofit's clients and beneficiaries.

For more on how to lead teams through designing metrics and evaluation that support innovation, see Innovation for Social Change, chapter 7: Evaluating, Learning, and Adjusting.

* R. Abelson, “Managing Outcomes Helps a Children's Hospital Climb in Renown,” New York Times, September 15, 2007.

In case you missed it:

Delighted and honored that Innovation for Social Change is reviewed in the latest Voluntary Sector Review and the Journal of Nonprofit Education and Leadership❤️ With gratitude to Dr. Kara Lawrence and Dr. Salvatore Alaimo.

Last week I had the privilege to speak about nonprofit innovation with the 2024 Fellows of the Stand Together Foundation. We talked about lessons from Greyston Bakery, Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, the leadership of the American civil rights movement, The Nonprofit Hive, and more. With gratitude to Program Manager Sally Hoffmann for the gracious invitation.

This! I received this photo from my hometown library. 💖 Thank you, Wayne County Public Library - such an important, formative place to me as a young girl hungry for learning, and to so many others.

It was an honor to be interviewed by the Philanthropy Roundtable! "Failing to empower people on the front lines, the ones doing the work, will be everyone's loss. These are the people with the best ideas." Read more here…

Honored to talk about Innovation for Social Change with thoughtful students in the Masters in Nonprofit Leadership Program at Pacific University, and cohosted by the Nonprofit Association of Oregon. We had a candid discussion about how toxic vs. healthy workplace cultures can impact innovation.