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Monthly Archives: October 2011
October 26, 2011, 6:30 pm
Playing Devil’s Advocate for the Greater Good
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The U.S. Army has taken steps to expand the range of options it considers in its decision making. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
The U.S. Army has formalized the role of “devil’s advocate” into its decision making—a practice the United States Agency for International Development and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have adopted in their fight to eradicate polio.
Groups are good at carrying out tasks, but they don’t make wise decisions, Greg Fontenot, a retired colonel and director of the army’s University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies, told participants at PopTech’s annual ideas conference in Camden, Me.
Group dynamics make it difficult to imagine alternative solutions, and group members’ false assumptions and biases feed off of each other, explained Mr….
October 25, 2011, 11:29 pm
The Power of ‘Power Posing’
Next-generation space suits, the collapse of Iceland’s banking system, and changing perceptions among Africans about their place in the world were among the dizzying array of ideas that charity leaders and others gathered in the small town of Camden, Me., to discuss—all as part of an effort to stimulate new thinking about social change.
PopTech, the New York nonprofit that organizes the annual conference, hopes that exposing participants to work outside their areas of expertise will lead to interdisciplinary collaboration and spark new approaches to fixing social problems.
With strains of the “Wonder Woman” theme song opening her talk, Amy J.C. Cuddy, a social psychologist at Harvard Business School, discussed her research on body language and how it can change the way people feel about their status—something that could come in handy for the people nonprofits…
October 19, 2011, 5:07 pm
A Star Turn for Little-Understood Banking Groups
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Starbucks customers who give $5 or more to the Create Jobs for USA campaign will receive an Indivisible wristband.
While the Opportunity Finance Network welcomes a big donation by Starbucks to its member organizations, the network hopes the new partnership will also raise the profile of its members—nonprofit groups that provide banking services in low-income communities—and help them do a better job of explaining their missions.
The coffee giant is kicking off the Create Jobs for USA campaign with a $5-million gift—and starting November 1, the company will be asking customers at its 6,800 stores to contribute as well.
The money will go to the more than 180 community-development finance institutions that make up the network. These organizations make loans to small…
October 19, 2011, 11:39 am
Applying Design Thinking to Health Care
Intrigued by last week’s post about IDEO using design thinking to fight poverty? Then you might want to check out this provocative essay on The Atlantic‘s Web site:
When design focuses on understanding the needs and desires of customers, it has the potential to improve health care–and maybe even medical research, says David A. Shaywitz, co-founder of a the Pasteur Project at Harvard Medical School. The project focuses on improving ways to help patients.
Dr. Shaywitz writes: “Medicine has spent a lot of effort focused on a physician’s idea of a patient, rather than developing a more nuanced view of life from the perspective of the patients themselves.”
What do you think? Are there other fields that could benefit from design’s focus on understanding the lives of clients?
October 19, 2011, 11:20 am
Ideas Conference Will Stream Live This Week
Each fall PopTech holds an ideas conference that brings scientists, technology experts, social entrepreneurs, and others dedicated to social change to the small town of Camden, Me.
The idea is to spark innovative ideas as people with different types of expertise come together and learn about one another’s work, says Andrew Zolli, the New York charity’s executive director.
“We think there’s a lot of genius in the white spaces, in the places between the disciplines where they converge or they diverge,” he says. “You can often find new approaches that have never been tried before.”
Much of this year’s conference, which takes place Thursday through Sunday of this week, will stream live online. (You can sign up on the site to receive an e-mail reminder when the broadcast begins.)
The theme of the meeting is “The World Rebalancing,” and speakers include Unity …
October 17, 2011, 9:00 am
‘Disruptive Forces’ Face Nonprofits
With a bigger share of America’s population reaching old age and growing more diverse, social-service organizations are in for some big changes in the not-too-distant future. Adding to the challenge: the turbulence in government and private financing.
For the past six months, the Alliance for Children and Families—a membership group for human-service charities—has interviewed nonprofit leaders, gathered focus groups, and conducted surveys to identify the emerging trends organizations must embrace to succeed.
Today the alliance has published its findings in a new report, “Disruptive Forces: Driving a Human Services Revolution.”
Sparking Conversation
Some of the six trends detailed in the report will sound familiar, such as the need for nonprofits to demonstrate to potential donors the results of their programs as well as the emergence of new types of financing that…
October 10, 2011, 9:52 pm
Get a (Project) Room
Laura Weiss is vice president for service innovation at the Taproot Foundation, a nonprofit that makes pro bono talent available to organizations working to improve society. Before joining Taproot, Ms. Weiss was an associate partner at the design company IDEO. She is also a former architect and educator.
A temporary project room at the Taproot Foundation created with foam-core board
Here’s a suggestion for getting more out of a group that’s working together on something creative: get a room.
Most of us are tethered to our desks at the office, so collaboration often means e-mails, phone calls, and the occasional meeting to connect the dots. Sure, there are plenty of software products that can help teams collaborate when they aren’t in the same location. These are exciting developments, but on …
October 7, 2011, 9:36 am
Bill Gates’s Innovation Book Report
A lot of folks seem to be thinking about innovation right now–including, it turns out, Bill Gates.
The Microsoft co-founder-turned-philanthropist recently reviewed Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, by Steven Johnson, on his Web site, The Gates Notes.
Mr. Gates agrees with Mr. Johnson’s argument that innovation isn’t about “eureka” moments but instead taking existing ideas and putting them together in new ways.
“The decision to start Microsoft, for example, wasn’t based on a momentous flash of insight,” he writes. “It was based on incremental developments in a nascent personal-computing industry, the fact that Paul Allen and I had access to mainframe computers at the high school we attended, and our hunch about what people could do with computers in the future.”
What books and articles have influenced the way you think about fostering…
October 6, 2011, 12:56 pm
Innovation: Start by Stopping
Innovation is as much about what an organization stops doing as about the new efforts that it starts, says Rick Wartzman, executive director of the Drucker Institute, which is dedicated to carrying on the work of the noted author and management consultant Peter Drucker.
“Every organization has a finite amount of resources,” says Mr. Wartzman. “So the first step toward innovating is what Drucker called ‘planned abandonment.’ It’s figuring out what you’re going to stop doing to free up those resources and to stimulate the search for the new.”
Mr. Drucker recommended that every few years organizations review all of their products, processes, and distribution channels, essentially putting each one “on trial for its life,” says Mr. Wartzman.
During that exercise, he says, the organization should also try to determine where each product, process, and distribution channel…
October 3, 2011, 6:08 pm
Taking Design Thinking to the Nonprofit World
An IDEO designer talks with residents in Kumasi, Ghana, about sanitation.
For the past 20 years, the design firm IDEO has helped companies like Apple, Ford, and Bank of America develop new products and services. Now the Palo Alto, Calif., company has started a nonprofit arm to take its approach to innovation to the charitable world.
IDEO.org, the new charitable effort, officially started last week and grew out of the company’s work with nonprofits in recent years.
IDEO’s approach to design starts with learning as much as possible about the people who will eventually use the product–their lives, their needs, their aspirations–rather than starting with a hypothesis about what they need, says Patrice Martin, creative director of IDEO.org. Too often, companies and organizations start the process…
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