Initially published on Oct 2, 2019, Updated May 2022.
What if Impact Thinking helped you with getting much better at what you do? Maybe you need a better value proposition and better strategic positioning. Maybe you need to improve your storytelling. Maybe you need to develop a stronger culture within your organization, to motivate teams and inspire people outside of it. Or maybe you need to build a (better) framework for action as well as the related assessment tools…
The good news is, Impact Thinking can help you with all of this because it creates an opportunity for you to think about what clearly matters, and to figure out how to make a difference. for real.
In this Impact Thinking 101 article, we explore the idea that ‘Impact’ can dramatically improve the way you conduct your business, wherever your business is.
Getting into the discussion.
Ever hear of Impact Thinking? Probably not, yet Impact Thinking is extremely important from a business perspective. Why? Because business strategies built with Impact in mind are much stronger than those which don’t.
Think about it. If running a business is a matter of solving a problem for someone, what could be more useful than starting from the final Impact you want to have (we call that Impact Thinking) when it comes to building or improving your operations?
There are many ways to look at things here, so we will focus this first article of the Impact Thinking Series on explaining why Impact Thinking can be relevant to your business (whatever your business) and what it could change for you should you decide to use it. More articles will be published to explore the “how” side of things – stay tuned and sign up to our newsletter to be kept in the loop.
In the main, there are three main advantages with using Impact Thinking to build whatever you are trying to build.
First and foremost, bringing Impact into your development-building work will help you with positioning yourself. Looking at Impact – i.e. the end result – gives you an opportunity to draw a much clearer and more efficient big picture of what you are trying to do – and that can make a big (very big) difference.
Second, as with reverse engineering, using Impact as a starting point allows you to build a very practical framework around your project. Time-frame, milestones, Key Performance Indicators, team meetings, so forth and so on, Impact can help you to build a process that would otherwise be rather difficult to develop.
Third, and that’s the best news of all, Impact Thinking works for everything. Are you trying to build a business? Impact can help you. Are you trying to build leadership in a field or another? Impact works there too. Are you an academic looking at ways to build better research? Impact works there as well.
Impact thinking 101: Why Impact?
Let us start with the basics here: why should you think in terms of Impact when building a project?
The question is obviously legitimate, and the good news is that the answer is very straightforward. By making you look at what result you want to achieve and by making you think about the difference you will be made on a person or on a community, Impact Thinking gives you an opportunity to build a very big and precise picture of whatever project you are working on.
Common flaw: the ‘so what?’ issue.
In our experience as business and Impact development advisers, many projects share a common flaw. The original idea is good, usually, but then… so what? Good storytelling is rare, business plans lack credibility, so forth, and so on… and as a result the actual potential for Impact of the project is limited.
Startups (as well as bigger companies) build great products that they see as the last trendy cool thing on the market, yet their strategy is often shallow because they lack a big picture. Who is going to buy the product? Why will they buy this product and not another one? Is the end-user the actual buyer?
Leaders face a similar problem. They want to be known for being charismatic, yet when we dig the existence of a clear message is often a problem. Why? Because the ultimate beneficiary of the message isn’t identified and therefore the storytelling isn’t sharp.
We mentioned research projects earlier, remember? Well, the same applies to researchers. In many cases, grant applications are written yet the actual benefit of the project on society (outside of enriching literature, we mean) isn’t clear and hasn’t been considered. Again, who benefits from the project? How does the research make a difference? Who will have an interest in supporting? So forth and so on…
Ultimately, what is the point of having a great product, service, or expertise if the project holders are incapable of explaining precisely what their work and efforts are going to change, who will be affected, and how they are going to make that happen?
Impact as a solution.
The above may sound surprising, but in our experience what we describe here is a very common reality. In all these cases, however, Impact Thinking can help because it provides a fantastic opportunity to think differently.
Instead of building a project for the sake of building a great project with all the budget available (a common mistake), thinking in terms of Impact helps with slowing down and with taking some time to step back and look ahead.
From a broader perspective, knowing what Impact your business has and what difference it makes on the world (or on a given community if you want to play it modestly) can also help with team building (because people are more committed and efficient when they know why they do things. it can help with inspiring people from the outside. And, of course, it can help with building some stronger storytelling that everybody around you (team or not team) will be able to use to promote your action.
‘Just’ vs ‘Wow!’
When you look at your project from an Impact perspective, the first thing you see is usually whether there is a Wow! factor in your project – or not. Think about it right now. Take a minute to think about what you do day after day.
Are you just an architect? Just a lawyer? Do you just build car parts? Do you just serve junk food? Do you just try and fight poverty? If you answered yes to one of those questions (or if you feel like your situation is close to one of these), then chances are that your project is missing a Wow! factor. And that tells a lot in terms of the Impact that you won’t have.
If, however, your job is to build the most beautiful hotels for the most demanding clients, defend under-represented people, reinvent Asian cuisine with a modern twist, or to empower women by giving them access to education… then the story is different.
What you have here is a source of storytelling and a massive potential for curiosity and questions. Which between you and us is clearly what you want… Very different.
