Book Recommendation: Lean Startups for Social Change. The Revolutionary Path to Big Impact

Quick Summary: This book applies the business sector’s lean startup methodology to social sector projects, inviting practices for agility and flexibility in our initiatives as we improve or develop new interventions or organizations. Lean Startups for Social Change walks the reader through a process of creating small experiments, getting fast real-world feedback on them, and using that data to expand what works and discard what doesn’t. The lean startup mantra is “build, measure, learn.” This responds to a more traditional process of constraining our own options (often through the pressures of the nonprofit funding cycle) of developing a plan, finding funds to fund it, and pursuing it to its conclusion, even if conditions and needs change dramatically over time. This book invites practices of finding ways to be more flexible, and therefore more efficient, effective, and responsive to changing community needs. (Michel Gelobter. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. 2015)