Accelerating our Impact: Experimenting with an Innovation Mindset
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”
Rick Doble, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
by Hannah Barber
At times during 2020, both dimensions of Lenin’s observation—uttered a century ago—could not have rung more true. Sometimes it has felt like life has simply stood still, and we have had to endure a year of stagnation and hibernation while waiting for a global pandemic to pass.
However, at other times, we have had cause to reflect on the rapidity of change that we have witnessed. Confronted with the first major global pandemic in over a century, our communities have faced great challenges, but have also responded with astonishing and rapid adaptations and innovations in their response.
If nothing else, 2020 has laid bare the notion that we both need to - and can – rapidly innovate and respond to the world around us.
While some segments of society and the economy may embrace a ‘hibernation’ approach, for those working with children and families, this is simply not an option.
Child development does not stop in a crisis. The foundations of lifelong learning, health, and behavior are being laid now, in the narrow window that begins prenatally and continues particularly through ages two and three. These foundations will be as strong—or as weak—as the environment of relationships and experiences that young children find themselves in during this time.
Waiting for the pandemic to be over to get back to work simply is not in the cards.
Now is our time to do things differently.
What does “doing things differently” mean?
In a previous post, we explored the way in which the science of early childhood development, adversity, and resilience can help us start on the road to greater impact by asking the right question. In doing so, we can investigate how we might design conditions and experiences to promote strong, healthy development to ensure that children and families thrive.
“Child development does not stop in a crisis. The foundations of lifelong learning, health, and behavior are being laid now.”
Framing up the right question is an essential first step toward increasing the impact of our work with children and families, but it is not the end goal in itself. The perfect question alone will not shift the trajectories of young children and families.
Placed at the front of a business-as-usual pathway, even the best question will land us in the same place, with familiar results. And, it only takes a swift look around society to see that ‘familiar results’ leave us with marked inequities facing many children and families.
Our best programs and solutions have never really been sufficient and are even less so given the current challenges facing families. To create real change for children and families, we need a different approach.
This is not to say that past efforts have gone to waste. We must build upon everything we have learned as we continue to drive forward. This is not a message of inadequacy, but one of a dogmatic, relentless persistence to improve quickly.
And, it requires an innovation mindset.
What is an innovation mindset?
An innovation mindset enables a different approach to business as usual. Rather than starting with one solution, you remain open to multiple solutions, but commit to being incredibly clear about the problem to be solved.
Such a mindset allows the designer to be open to change, have a bias toward creativity, an ability to think big, unrelenting courage to challenge the norm, and be characterized by the speed of thought and action.
So, what does this look like in practice?
Engaging an innovation mindset means beginning at a different spot from where you may have started in the past. At the Center on the Developing Child, we have been working with teams who serve children and families all around the world for over a decade. Based on this experience, we have identified three key phases of work to shape and deploy your innovation work:
Co-create what success could look like
Understand precisely how you might get there
Iterate to understand the impact of multiple potential solutions
Step 1: Co-Create What Success Could Look Like
Last time, we explored the way in which the science of early childhood development, adversity, and resilience can help shape your problem frame. As we continue to seek greater impacts, this is key. Using this lens allows us to start with the end game in mind--that is, building strong brains and bodies in the earliest years of life. However, we must also remember that it is just the first part of a longer process.
The rest of this process involves getting ‘boots on the ground’ and talking with those who are living the problem that you are trying to help solve and will ultimately engage with your product or service.
Drawing on methodologies such as Lean Start-Up and Lean Impact, we learn that identifying and engaging with your ‘customer’ and identifying what ‘job’ you are helping them with are critical steps in framing up a sustainable version of success.
How do I identify my customer?
Now, the term customer may be a somewhat strange one to use in this context. This language is intentionally used to move us from the one-directional understanding of a service recipient, towards an understanding that there is value being exchanged on both sides. In the most traditional sense, it implies that users have choice and desires about the program or service that they use.
For many commercial ventures, identifying your customer is a relatively straightforward process. They are likely one and the same.
For those working with children and families, there is a reasonable chance it will be less straightforward. You likely have two types of customer: a buyer who pays for the product or service, and a beneficiary who is the end user of your product or service.
Understanding who these constituents are from the beginning (or at least who they might be down the road) and what success might look like from their perspective can help to ensure that what you build or design is actually useful over a sustained period of time.
Decreasing engagement with technological solutions over time or drop-offs in attendance are common barriers to success in this space, and often occur as a result of not quite solving a customer’s needs effectively. You can begin to address these by embedding the perspectives of your customers from the beginning.
As part of this work, it is also important to understand what options customers currently have available to address their needs. Conducting a scan of what is happening in the field already to develop your understanding of what ‘good’ currently looks like can help you to understand the bar for impact that you much reach and exceed.
Step 2: Be Precise in Understanding How You Might Get There
Now that you have defined the problem from a range of perspectives, you have a broad sense of what success looks like.
Now, it’s time to get precise in figuring out how to get there.
Why?
One of the major barriers to significantly moving the needle for children and families is a lack of precision in identifying the desired outcomes and the logic needed to make meaningful change.
In political and funding environments that favor quick wins and fast solutions with little tolerance for failure, program design and evaluation can often take a ”kitchen sink” approach. In other words, many different actions are taken to hit a multitude of measured outcomes. This situation is designed to avoid the seemingly unenviable situation in which we see no significant change.
This approach is understandable given the context, but it is also a significant reason why the early childhood field is stagnating in its impact. It limits our ability to understand the precise causal mechanisms that make a difference for children and families.
This “black box” impedes our ability to share what we know works (and doesn’t), and makes the journey towards scale even more complex than it already is, as it begs the question, “What exactly are you scaling?” Understanding these active ingredients will ensure that the journey to scale is about more than reaching more people, but reaching more people, with impact.
So, how do you get precise?
When you are building from scratch (rather than amending an existing program, product, or policy), step two is all about backwards mapping your pathway to success. This is the step in the process that steers you far away from a kitchen sink scenario.
Mapping this pathway – often known as a theory of change or logic model – is not a new concept. And yet, unless it is done with a deliberate effort to map the precise impact logic, these documents can fail to help us unpack the black box of how our programs and policies work. Rather than a series of broadly related arrows on a page, we must think about logic chains as a series of very precise dominos that ultimately end in the outcomes that you have identified.
Now, this is not novel. And yet, precision at this level often doesn’t happen. Deepening our understanding of not only what works, but how it works, is an important step in deepening our impact – and its speed of uptake – for children and families.
Step 3: Iterate to understand the impact of multiple potential solutions
Taking your theory of change to action rarely happens as seamlessly as it is outlined on the paper. In fact, when engaging with an innovation mindset, it actually should not. Continual improvement comes from trial and error and learning along the way.
This applies equally to those who are building from scratch, as well as those who are innovating with existing programs and services.
This is the time to get outrageously curious about whether your solution works, how it works, and how it could be better. Think of it as solution dating.
Leading with curiosity is a stark contrast to the way in which some programs and solutions are currently built. Rather than thinking about evaluation as an opportunity to prove that your solution works, think about it as an opportunity to improve how it works.
To do this, we can turn to our friends in Silicon Valley for inspiration. There, we find the fast-cycle iteration model.
Fast-cycle iteration provides the opportunity for fast, immediate feedback on lean versions of your final product. And when we say fast, we mean fast. You may be able to engage in a round of fast cycle iteration in a few weeks, perhaps a month. This is quite a difference when compared to the five years it takes to get results back from a randomized control trial.
“Rather than thinking about evaluation as an opportunity to prove that your solution works, think about it as an opportunity to improve how it works. ”
Fast-cycle iteration is the same mindset adopted by many of the best innovators of our time.
Amazon famously runs thousands of tests per year. Google likewise. Our customers also deserve the very best at the fastest rate we can possibly get it to them.
In fact, the very strongest solutions can answer three questions:
· What works?
· For whom does my solution work?
· Why does it work?
These questions may seem simple, but they require an enormous amount of discipline to answer with authenticity. Once you are on the pathway towards addressing them with clarity, they can also help you can precisely shape the messaging of your work to convey its value to your customer, otherwise known as your value proposition. Doing this allows others in the surrounding ecosystem to understand where your work starts, where it stops, and how they can amplify it.
As we turn the corner into 2021, we will have to think carefully about what we do, how we do it, and the pace at which it can occur. If there is one silver lining that can be taken from 2020, it is that we know we are capable of rapid change and adaptation to solve pressing problems. And we can be inspired by those amongst us – be they scientists, public health officials, school leaders, businesses (large and small), communities, families or individuals we know – who have creatively and courageously shown us this potential.
Join us as we embark on this journey ourselves. Let’s make decades happen.
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For more information the Center on the Developing Child and science-based innovation, please visit their website.
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Hannah Barber joined the Center on the Developing Child in 2017. As Project Manager, Hannah leads strategy and content development for the Center’s Science X Design offering, a suite of strategies to support the design, evaluation, and scale of sustainable policies and practices using the latest insights from the science of early childhood development, adversity, and resilience. She works with a range of national and international innovators, including policy makers, system leaders, practitioners, and social entrepreneurs. Hannah brings extensive international experience in child development and adult learning.
She holds a BA in Politics and International Studies, a Master of Teaching from the University of Melbourne, and a Master of Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.