Set An Aggressive Goal If You Want To Scale Impact

Scaling Impact

What I talk about in this episode:

• Problems are growing faster than we can solve them
• Incremental change won't help us catch up
• How to think BIGGER
• Why your new goal should make you uneasy
• How to think differently to achieve this new goal
• Leveraging the power of your team to innovate solutions

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course - https://nxtstep.io/impact/

Episode Transcript
0:00
Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about with is putting yourself in the mindset of scaling impact.

0:35
Now, the reality of the situation that we're facing today is that the problems that leaders and nonprofit organizations and their teams are attempting to solve are growing faster than we can solve them, which means we're going to need different solutions in order to be able to meet that growing demand. So this show is all about figuring out how to scale impact. So I want to share with you a thought process that you can use with your team to put you put yourself and your team in the right mindset and prepare yourselves as best as possible to put you in a position to be able to in fact scale impact.

1:12
So let me talk to you a little bit more about what I mean by that. So because these problems are growing so fast, the previous way that we've been attempting to solve them, which is typically some form of an incremental change, isn't going to cut right and so because of that, we need to think differently. We need to be thinking on a significantly larger scale and that alone will help us with the process of scaling impact. What I need you to to do is think about what your previous growth goals were before and better understand how much you were expecting those to grow over your previous baseline or the benchmark that might be 10% or 20%, or something like that. Now, if you truly want to scale impact, it's not going to be able to be done 10% at a time, you really need to do something that is an exponential step change. So I'm thinking somewhere between 2 and 4x, like 200% and 400%. As in how can you help more than double the amount of people that you're helping right now? Right and when you're setting these goals, you're already scaling up impact.

2:26
These goals should make you feel somewhat uneasy, because there will be more uncertainty when you're thinking about your growth goals that are this much larger than they have been previously and the reason why they should make you uneasy is because the solution should not be obvious and that is the whole point of this exercise. If the solution is not obvious, and you know what you've done before, is unlikely to work to solve these problems or challenges or help you reach these goals and it's going to challenge you and your team to think differently and that's exactly what we want.

3:02
That's the point, right? Think differently in order to scale impact. So if you set these aggressive goals and you need to think differently, in order to scale it you're going to have to consider any and all possibilities in order to help you get there. Now what this turns into and what I'll leave you with today is this will turn into a great opportunity to meet with your team and do some brainstorming to lay out the problem and the challenge that you have in front of you to talk about the kind of results that you're looking for. To get everybody on the same page with a goal of scaling impact. And to think through how you might actually be able to get there after everyone is on the same page and understands that what you've done before isn't going to help you get to where you need to go now.

If you'd like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit organization by more than double in less than half the time, I'd encourage you to sign up for my free 5 day email course at https://nxtstep.io/impact/.