How to Save the World in Six (Not So Easy) Steps by David M. Schizer

Author:David M. Schizer [Schizer, David M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781637587911
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Published: 2023-04-21T22:35:02+00:00

Chapter 7

Pivot

Experiment and Innovate

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck New York City, Lee Goldman had four months to go as dean of Columbia’s medical school. “In your last four months of fourteen years, you expect to glide through,” he recalled. “It’s not very often that you face perhaps the biggest crisis of your fourteen years at the very end.”

Responding quickly and forcefully, Lee urged the university to shift to online instruction. To ensure that Columbia doctors remained healthy enough to treat patients, Lee banned travel to conferences, as well as “meetings that bring together people who do the same thing,” he recalled. “What if you all get sick?” Lee and his team scrambled to find protective equipment “because we couldn’t ask people to take care of patients if they weren’t protected.” They also arranged a “massive redeployment” in which “something like 1,400 people were asked to do things they didn’t usually do, anywhere from seeing patients in the emergency department to handing out protective equipment.” To show support for his colleagues, Lee donned protective equipment himself to visit the emergency department and intensive care unit.

Even as Lee and his team were pivoting to meet this new challenge, they started thinking about how to pivot back once the worst of the crisis had passed. “We began early on to think about how we would ramp things back up,” he recalled. They figured out how to resume medical services unrelated to the pandemic, using televisits, socially distanced in-person visits, and other innovations.

In running these creative experiments, Lee and his team modeled the fourth “P,” which is “pivot”: nonprofits need to search persistently—even relentlessly—for ways to improve their work. Instead of continuing on the same path, they must keep scrutinizing the “who,” “what,” and “how” of their work. Do they have the right team in place (“the who”)? Are they pursuing the right goal (“the what”)? Is there a better way to pursue it (“the how”)? A nonprofit with the wrong people must replace them. Likewise, work that is outdated or subpar should be fundamentally retooled or scrapped.

Even when results are good, they can always be better. Yet this leap is challenging; success can dull a nonprofit’s resolve to do better. As management guru Jim Collins famously wrote in his book, Good to Great, “good is the enemy of great.”

To raise their game, nonprofits should improve on all fronts. How can they enhance quality? Can they do a better job of reaching the right beneficiaries? Can they help more of them? Can they get the same benefit at a lower cost? Or 90 percent of the benefit at 60 percent of the cost?

These pivots don’t all have to be revolutionary. Modest ones usually are easier to dream up and less disruptive to test. “Sometimes it’s really, ‘let’s put a little bit more salt into this batch of cookies’ or ‘let’s try a little of this or a little of that,’” observed Sarah Hemminger, co-founder and CEO of Thread, which connects Baltimore students with volunteers.

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