Skipped DAY7-8 as those were weekend days. We were in Taal... brilliant place, but my blog is more about my journey from professional and self-development perspective, hence I will skip the weekend!
What Exactly Can you Possibly do for a Social Venture in 1month?
We are the masters of document, proposal, value proposition creation, yet would these help a social venture? We did not think much so and time has started to validate that in case of Hapinoy's needs. At the beginning of a project, consultants spend considerable amount of time to define scope of work and this proved to be the case for our organization.
As we started diving deeper into the processes of Hapinoy and as we discovered some of the intricacies by talking to different stakeholders and employees of Hapinoy, we figured out a way to narrow down the scope further today. We believe this will be more impactful on Hapinoy's future. Mark was adamant on this type of a scope from the beginning and today things got a bit more concrete. Lesson#1. Scoping is an iterative process, as you start delivering some ideas or documents, scope can even change further... but that work you conduct does not get redundant as you spend time thinking, writing and explaining, things get clearer... so all of this is part of a cumulative thinking journey and each step was valuable, nothing was ever wasted!
Sometimes the thought process you go through reveals the best options to find a solution. Going through some selective complex processes, diving deeper into some of these steps, fundamentally challenging some of the reasons behind the very existence of several process steps provide you interesting perspectives on the challenges you are facing. In our case, these helped a lot.
This is crucial in answering my question as to how one possible could help a growing organization in social venture space...Finding the scope that can have tangible impact and that does not provide some simple fluffy deliverable with fancy toppings on it! This is the thing!
Social enterprises are more limited in time and money and constraint optimization is key to success. You cannot just recommend something and let them juggle with it, it has to be concrete, not 10000ft above the ground.
Other than this, as a byproduct of our engagement, I believe we could help Hapinoy so far in different levels:
1-As we ask them questions and take them through certain aspects of their business, I believe we helped them think differently and we will help them more in this space, since we still have 3 more weeks to go and we are in week 2 now!
2-We have not yet done, but we will conduct some design thinking sessions, though we are incorporating some DT elements already as we talk to them on an everyday basis. Yet, we believe they can benefit from understanding the fundamentals of design thinking as a side track.
3-They have some solid, end-to-end business processes, and we believe their flow charts can be enhanced by adding several new layers to those.
4-Skills on writing a business proposal with value driven point of view is something they can take with them forever in whatever they do, especially when there are times they need to pitch an idea to senior board members of their enterprise, or any external existing or potential stakeholders.
We are trying to squeeze in multiple things into 1 month.
I never wanted an organization to be successful this much. Seeing them grow will be a great boost for me and my colleagues. I am confident this will happen!
