497. Innovation for Social Change: How Wildly Successful Nonprofits Deliver Results - Leah Kral

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Overview

Meet Leah. She’s an expert in helping nonprofit teams break free from daily routines to foster creative thinking🎨 As senior director of strategy and innovation at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, she helps nonprofits approach their work in new ways to better achieve their missions and solve social problems. She urges nonprofits to embrace risks and adapt based on learning, sharing examples from innovative organizations like World Reader, and Alcoholics Anonymous. Drawing from her book, 'Innovation for Social Change,' she offers practical tools to inspire innovation at your org Tune in to add some game-changing innovation tools to your arsenal🚀

💡Learn

Sparking innovative ideas with design thinking tools

Ways we can move our ideas into action
How to create a theory of change

Today’s Guest

Leah Kral, Senior Director, Strategy and Innovation, Mercatus Center at George Mason University

“It’s far better to fail fast and fail small before investing too big.”

— Leah Kral

Episode Transcript

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Episode Highlights

Leah’s story and journey to where she is today (2:35)
The opportunity that exists for nonprofits today (5:55)
Design thinking + sparking innovative ideas within our team (10:15)
Traits that we can cultivate to embrace innovation (16:00)
How we can move our ideas into action (22:45)
Creating theories of change (26:45)
A powerful story of philanthropy in Leah’s life (35:15)
Leah’s One Good Thing: Empower people on the frontlines. (38:30)
How to connect with Leah (41:45)

Impactful Quotes

“Be clear about the specific social problem we want to solve because everything we do then cascades from that.” -Leah

“In the nonprofit world, we might have this fog of good intention so it's not always clear what the right steps are.” -Leah

“If we want to bring our innovation a game, we're going to face many obstacles and we have to be persuasive.” -Lean

“Our dazzling idea may or may not work, we have to find out. We can design small experiments to lower the risk and we can learn and adjust to scale our idea.” -Leah

“It's far better to fail fast and fail small before investing too big.” -Leah

“Experimentation can really help us learn and innovate and part of that, though, requires building in some expectation and toleration of failure.” -Leah

“It’s very important for leaders and organizations to have the right attitude towards risk and failure.” -Leah

“As we're running experiments and learning that theory of change might change.” -Leah

“Our theory of change helps us say, here's what we think will work and now we're going to test it.” -Leah