Today is the first day of the second annual Conference of Nonprofit Communities of Hawai`i. This morning, I attended a fantastic panel on innovation, which was a great lead in to the theme of the conference: Delivering Innovation: The Future is Not What it Used to Be and actually fit really well with the plenary that Trista and I will be presenting tomorrow, “Cultivating Leadership Across Generations.” The moderated panel offered perspectives from business, nonprofit and philanthropy on encouraging a culture innovation in Hawai‘i’s social sector.
Here are my notes with some of the best insights from the speakers! Hope you can take something useful from the conversation. I know I did.
Panel Discussion: Culture of Innovation in Hawaii
Kelvin Taketa, President and CEO of Hawaii Community Foundation
Hank Wuh, Founder and CEO of Skai Ventures
David Derauf, Co-Executive Director of Kokua Kalihi Valley Comprehensive Family Services and Board Member at Association of Asian Pacific Community Health Organizations.
Kilikina Mahi, Senior Program Officer at Hawaii Community Foundation (Moderator)
Kelvin Taketa on Passion and Keeping Your Nose Up
Innovation is hard work. We’re not so much taking about invention, but the sensemaking. Pattern recognition. Each one of you is working like a dog every day – your nose down focused on the spreadsheets, hard to look up and see what else is out there. What is the solution for our sector is to put things together that already exist. Steal ideas from other organizations. Keep our noses up.
You need passion to give you a sense of the mission that makes you want to change things and come up with different ideas to do the work. Need a sense of urgency to make it through the change process – this starts in organizations to implement.
If you look at everything as having a possibility of risk, you can become risk-averse. Think of failure as a learning opportunity instead.
The key word around boards is support. There are a lot of important roles a board plays in an organization, but there needs to be a balance between the mundance and the generative. Have conversations with board and staff – this is the way innovative ideas start to emerge. If your meetings are all committee reports, you don’t have an environment that supports innovation. You need room to ask the question WHY.
Biggest barrier to innovation is time, then money. Where do you get money from foundations to do something different that’s not best practice? If it’s not been proven yet, it’s not best practice – and most funders are not supporting it. In our sector, the capital is not rational – there is no rational marketplace for capital. Perfect example – how many people donate to church? How many of you give because your church has a high Charity Navigator rating?
Foundations are often more concerned about their own insitutional innovation versus the innovation of the sector. We need to think about giving “patient capital” – when you stick with organizations in the long haul and give them the license to innovate.
Hank Wuh on Young People, Competitiveness and the Importance of Recognition
Trust your instincts. Don’t ask for permission. Just do it! It’s about purpose – we need to use innovation to solve problems that need to be solved. Do you know the average age of the engineers who built Apollo 13 that took us to the moon? 26. Young people are so free and unstructured in their thinking – very little baggage. They are free to explore. Listen to young people – their thinking is unobstructed – sometimes they can see a direct path to something you cant see.
The nonprofit marketplace is competitive – - so many organizations competing for limited dollars. Attention will go to the organizations who are most visible. If you believe innovation is key to competitiveness in the marketplace, you must steer your organization to become more innovative.
Recognition is important. If someone tried something different, they need to be recognized for their effort, so they will be more likely to do it again a second and third time.
David Derauf on Capacity, Community and Collaboration
Innovation is about restoration and renewal. Part of the hard work is reaching out and reaching across, expanding your network to different sectors. It’s easy to imagine that the problems we have will be solved by someone else “out there” or a panel of experts, but each one of us has a role to play. The solutions for the community will come from the community.
The hallmark of community is capacity – but we’ve lost that feeling. Look at “positive deviance” as an approach to social change. There are deviants in a positive way. People who come up with innovation solutions, despite the challenges to implementing them and getting them to communities who need them.
Ideaas are important. What if we woke up asking ourselves “what can I fail at today?” Work with people in the community – they not only know about the problems the community faces, but also the assets the community already has. They can tap into their rich networks. Try to hire from within the community – value diversity in your staff. We value language diversity in our organization.
The easiest thing to do is to default to our own zone of comfort – you need board members who will push the envelope a bit, to question everything the organization is doing.
Be mindful of the staff who are doing the work. They deserve ample amounts of praise. Don’t get so caught up in innovation that you forget about the need for high performance in the day to day work.
Problems can’t be solved in a one-year funding cycle. Need a long-term strategy since problems are multi-generational.
Kilikina Mahi on the Culture of Innovation
We keep hearing about the need to do more with less. But we think it’s time to do different with less. Highlighted Hawaii Community Foundation’s Island Innovation Fund.
Kilikina also shared the Inc Magazine article about seven steps to a culture of innovation. (The Inc piece is a must-read and complements my series on the four kinds of nonprofit leaders we need now.)
- Fuel passion
- Celebrate ideas
- Foster autonomy
- Encourage courage
- Fail forward
- Think small
- Maximize diversity
