The day begins at 4:30 a.m. You get out of bed, escaping the confines of a huge bed net and take a lukewarm shower. You grab a handful of peanuts and dried fruit that you brought with you because the lodge is not yet serving breakfast. You strategically consider the amount of coffee to make in your room’s hot pot because you know that it will be hours on the road without a rest stop. You meet the driver and your two colleagues from the local Room to Read office who will be joining you for the day, all of whom you met only two days ago but have long since felt like long-lost friends and your lifeline to the world.

The van is comfortable enough, and the sunrise glorious as you watch it unfurl behind the high clouds. As you drive the three hours to the first school site, you get an important window into rural life. On some drives, the scenery is breathtaking: lush forests, ocean views, vast open spaces. Other drives are jam-packed with one industrial center after another, streets heaped with trash and air filled with car exhaust, with very little natural life evident. Irrespective of the views, it is always fun to observe the rituals of life: people getting up; preparing for the day; opening their shops, or walking or riding their bikes to morning destinations; stopping to talk with friends and neighbors along the way. In some countries, you see women carrying water or large packages on their heads. In other countries, you see very few women at all.

Afternoon drives are like morning drives but in reverse, as people return home to end the day. In both directions, you often see groups of schoolchildren dressed in their uniforms on the way to or from school. The long journeys are filled with conversation. This is a great opportunity to learn about your colleagues, their work, their families, and their interests. You ask about the local political and economic challenges facing the country as well as the nonprofit landscape impacting their work. You learn why they love to work for Room to Read and what they would recommend to achieve even more impact.

Stops along the way include school visits of every kind. Sometimes you are greeted with flower garlands, incense, long rows of singing children and smiling adults, and well-rehearsed classroom activities. Sometimes you can enter a school with little notice, with a brief courtesy discussion with the head teacher, and then an opportunity to sneak to the back of a classroom or library to observe normal day-to-day interactions. Other stops on these days include meetings with local government officials, partner organizations, or small field offices with other field-based Room to Read staff.

These days in the field are some of the most fun and satisfying in our jobs. But they are also exhausting. Long car rides that go off the main road into increasingly bumpy dirt roads for hours at a time are surprisingly hard on the body and mind. Often the last couple of miles require transferring to a motorcycle or going on foot because of the rough terrain. Meetings and conversations all day long require you to be “on” and remain communicative, upbeat, and reflective. It is also important amidst the bustle to record, at least in your mind, what is working well and what needs to be adjusted in the collective work of local staff, partners, and schools.

The regular day often ends with a meal and drinks with staff before you retreat to your hotel room for hours of e-mail. You need to check in with your staff worldwide, approve work plans and invoices, review draft agreements, answer investor questions, complete slides for the board of directors, write a proposal or a report, and, of course, find time to say hello to your spouse and kids.

Workdays at home are just as busy. Although they may not start as early as 4:30 a.m., they can often last 12–15 hours. There are early-morning calls to Africa, late-night calls to Asia, and many more virtual and in-person meetings between the two. Sometimes, in the evenings, when your spouse asks about the day, it is hard to remember what you did (and not just because you are getting old!).

It can seem like a blur, an exciting but nonstop fire drill. Because the work of nonprofit leaders has many different facets, it is easy to go days, weeks, or even months and do nothing but simply respond to immediate needs. And because nonprofit leaders find it incredibly difficult to carve out the time to be forward-thinking, it’s that much more important to be strategic in vision and planning. Reminding yourself of this larger vision and taking advantage of tools to track your progress toward it can help leaders be more focused and impactful when managing their time.

This chapter is meant to help social entrepreneurs to shape that vision. We explain why it is important to set a vision, what to prioritize in the major domains of work, and how we have done this at Room to Read. We then discuss how vision setting and execution likely change at different times of an organization’s development.

Negotiating Urgent and Important Issues in Social Endeavors

Stephen Covey offers one strategy for digging out of this hole of endless overwhelming work (see Table 2.1). He suggests that we think about our daily tasks as falling into a simple time-management matrix.¹ One axis is labeled “urgency,” the other “importance.”

This small but powerful table encapsulates many important lessons. For our purpose, we highlight Covey’s recommendation that people should organize their work so they focus over time on fewer activities that are urgent and not important (quadrant III) and more of time on activities that are important but do not always have to be urgent (quadrant II). Having the time and space to address important issues in a thoughtful way is better than being rushed. This is not easy to do. It requires hard work and thoughtful planning, and reorienting oneself to be a strategic, proactive planner instead of a task-oriented manager. It also takes discipline and the willingness to delay gratification in merely checking tasks off a list. In the private and public sectors, the process of organizing priorities should be relatively straightforward.

In business, for example, financial profit is an extremely strong motivator and unifying force. All actions are ultimately organized around how to make the most money in the most effective and efficient way. The organizing principle in the public sector is similarly strong. Most government offices that are responsible for public services should have a very clear mission that drives its work. In most instances, a government employee in a line agency who arrives at the office on a Tuesday should also have a very clear sense about how to organize his or her day. We would argue, perhaps not surprisingly, that the process of organizing work in a nonprofit organization is more fungible. (Everyone thinks their own situations are more complicated, right?) Those of us running nonprofits have a lot more discretion when thinking about how to organize our time.

Yes, in the long run, we are accountable both to our investors and the people whom we serve. However, in daily activities, we have substantial flexibility. This reality makes the challenge of time management more acute. We must be especially mindful of how we organize our work to move from activities that are urgent but not necessarily important to a situation in which we are operating strategically and with reasonable pacing. Otherwise, we overstretch ourselves and our staff. We burn out quickly and our otherwise fantastic social movements disappear quickly into the heap of nonprofit graveyards lined with good intentions and unfulfilled potential.

The Nonprofit Two-Step (Cha-cha-cha?)

Most nonprofit leaders are driven by powerful social goals. We have never met a sincere leader who has been motivated by a boring or inconsequential goal. What we often find, though, is that leaders assume that identifying important social goals is enough in and of itself to start an organization. The actual plan for achieving the goal is often an afterthought or conceived only at a high level at the beginning. This is not a criticism. Having the audacity to dream big and start something new is hugely laudable. However, having a passion is very different from the ability to assess local needs and gaps that are not being met, develop meaningful social products and services, and then grow them for large-scale success.

Leaders need to be clear about (1) how, at a high level, the organization is trying to tackle the large, underlying social goal; and (2) what specific approaches the organization will pursue to achieve success—hence, the “nonprofit two-step.” Leaders must also then develop the discipline and grit to build organizational capacity and persevere through various stages of development to scale their impact.

Stephen Covey’s recommendation that people move from tasks that are urgent but unimportant to those that are important but not urgent assumes that we have a good understanding about what is important. This is something that we think about all the time at Room to Read. It is imperative that leaders take the time to ask whether they themselves and their staff are focusing on the important issues of organizational development and execution. Our management team at Room to Read does this every quarter. We hold a one- or two-day offsite meeting to reflect on our progress over the past quarter and how we need to adjust for the next quarter. We track our metrics for success in a succinct organizational dashboard and regularly question whether individual metrics need to be added, deleted, or updated.

This reflection process becomes even more comprehensive during our annual planning process, which is rooted in five-year organizational strategic plans. In all instances, data are collected by our country teams and our global office, fed into the dashboard, analyzed, and shared with our directors across the organization for necessary action. This quarterly planning and reflection is grounded in a higher-level set of assumptions about how we strive to achieve our goals. The fancy term for this that has become fashionable in recent years is “theory of change.” The idea is to have defensible assumptions about how the activities and processes that an organization puts in place help to achieve the expected outputs, and how those outputs are meant to contribute to longer-term outcomes and impact.

For example, Room to Read’s theory of change is that by collaborating with local communities, partner organizations, and governments in literacy and girls’ education, there will be more educated children in the world, which will result in more empowered, active, and responsible citizens.

Once again, the idea that we need to understand how organizational activities lead to desired outcomes might seem so obvious that it’s not worth mentioning. However, as we speak to nonprofit leaders, it is often a missing piece in their thinking. We therefore argue that it’s important for leaders of entrepreneurial social enterprises to think about their theory of change, be willing to poke holes (and have others poke holes) and question their assumptions about their approaches to achieving change, and be ready to adjust if they find their approaches falter or circumstances change over time.

The Three-Legged Stool Supporting a Theory of Change

Our thesis for scaling impact in entrepreneurial social organizations is that successful leaders must be clear about their theories of change and cognizant about how to evolve their related approaches in the different stages of organizational development.

In fact, leaders should think about three different approaches that, in unison, promote their audacious goals: (1) programmatic, (2) operational, and (3) strategic. Although each of these approaches is important by itself, they are all mutually reinforcing. An organization is in a much better position to succeed and scale if these approaches are clear and well understood by staff members, participants, investors, and other stakeholders.

A programmatic approach outlines your organization’s activities, the expected outputs, and the intended impact you hope to achieve. It answers the question “What do you do and what impact are you hoping to create?” An operational approach then explains the “how.” How will you implement those programmatic activities in terms of staffing, financing, legal, administrative, technology, marketing, and communications and fundraising structures and systems, as well as track success over time? Finally, a strategic approach defines your plans to scale up and leverage your organizational efforts for greatest impact and system-wide adoption.

Being clear about the programmatic, operational, and strategic approaches that reinforce your organization’s theory of change builds confidence. You can then make the right day-to-day decisions to drive your organization forward. This clarity can also help guide action at any given stage of your organizational development so you know when to say “no” or “not yet” and focus on the most important activities. It can also help leaders understand when an approach has outlived its usefulness, and thus can be the impetus for change. Programmatic, operational, and strategic approaches need to be highly functional and mutually reinforcing to keep an organization balanced and increasingly impactful over time. The importance of this balance is shown in Figure 2.1.

Programmatic Approach

The first important approach, programmatic, explains how the activities your organization engages in work, and how activities affect desired outputs and outcomes. We define a program as a set of linked activities that are meant to achieve specific goals. An easy way to organize one’s thoughts about this is to develop a table that includes five columns: (1) activity, (2) input(s), (3) output(s), (4) intended outcome(s), and (5) explanation. We give two examples in Tables 2.2a and 2.2b for just one activity from each of the Room to Read’s Girls’ Education Program and Literacy Program, respectively.

Activity	Input(s)	Output(s)	Intended outcome(s)	Explanation
Facilitating monthly life-skills sessions with adolescent girls	Tested and results-driven program design, instructional materials and training activities for social mobilizers, and regular check-in visits with program participants	Specific number of girls trained in life-skills education	Girls become competent in their decision making and skills to negotiate their life goals with family and community members	Many girls in underserved communities do not appreciate that they have the skills and rights to think about what they want to achieve in life. Life-skills sessions create this understanding and help girls communicate about this in a positive and respectful way.

Activity	Input(s)	Output(s)	Intended outcome(s)	Explanation
Developing grade 1 and 2 children’s storybooks and nonfiction books	Tested and results-driven program design, instructional materials, and training activities for authors and illustrators	Trained authors and illustrators who create high-quality children’s books, and books themselves	Children’s access to more book content enhances their interest and increases opportunities to encourage reading habits	Many low-income countries do not have much experience with children’s books—much less books of high quality—and therefore need model books to spark demand in schools and in the commercial book-publishing sector.

Mapping these expectations in a simple way forces a leader to become clear about how the program is supposed to work and be in a better position to explain it to staff and supporters.

After completing this table for all activities in a program, it can be helpful to represent the logic of the overall program graphically, with arrows that specify the directional relationships among the inputs, outputs, and outcomes. We also include any important assumptions as part of the model.

Figure 2.2 summarizes the most recent logic model of Room to Read’s overall Girls’ Education Program.

From Start-Up to Maturity, and Everything Between

What should be clear from the discussion thus far is that well-articulated programmatic, operational, and strategic approaches, embedded in a clear theory of change, are important tools for focusing organizations’ planning and execution. This is key even from the earliest days of an organization’s life. However, it is often the case that these approaches change over time, too. Leaders of ESEs need to be sensitive to environmental and organizational shifts as well as their own learning and adjust their approaches as necessary. In reflecting on Room to Read’s own history, we believe that we have achieved a good balance between continuity and change. We have held fast to our highest-level organizational priorities instead of succumbing to the temptations of enticing new opportunities. We have even reduced the scope of our work at times to focus it more on what was strategically important to us. From our inception, we have also maintained a core set of values that have driven our organizational culture since its inception.

We have also made major adjustments over time, too. Could we have evolved differently? Could we have leapfrogged over some phases of our development and gotten to the result sooner? Perhaps. Clearly, organizations can always be more thoughtful in daily decision making. However, we also believe that it took a certain amount of grit, experience, and organizational learning to move from one phase of growth to another. All in all, we believe that the 18 years it has taken for us to make it this far were well spent. Our organizational foundation is solid for future scale because we have grappled deeply with the different phases of our work over time. We needed to build the organizational culture, infrastructure and support systems, program designs, proofs of concept, and recognition to achieve the kind of impact now that we sought from the beginning of our work. We also needed time to make mistakes and correct them along the way.

Can other organizations evolve to maturity faster than we have done? Yes! In fact, that is the intent of this book. We hope that other organizations can learn from not only our successes but also our mistakes and avoid some common pitfalls. At the same time, we also recommend strongly that organizations not try to push too far too fast and take shortcuts that could limit their long-term impact. For example, don’t go after that mega-grant before you have the capacity to implement it well. Don’t make people think that your organization has achieved its aspirational goals before it really has done so. Premature pronouncements about success can lead to unproductive decision making.

Social entrepreneurs are impatient. We want to achieve world change as quickly as possible. This is not necessarily for our egos or personal ambitions (though we need to check these regularly, too!) but because we want the world to benefit from what our organizations offer. In many cases, our work can make the difference between life and death. So we feel a sense of urgency to scale our work as soon as possible. However, it is important that leaders resist the urge to do too much too quickly. It is only through this discipline that leaders can move into the coveted Covey quadrant of important but not urgent work. One of the ways to do this is to have a good sense of how mature your organization is at any time.

For this book, we would like to focus our discussion about the importance of time and organizational development phases to three: (1) start-up, (2) transition, and (3) maturity. Start-up extends between the time that a new organization is a flicker in the eye of its founders to the initial stages of development. It is the time when initial organizational missions, structures, and approaches are conceived, seed funding is raised, a core team is built, and initial program activities get off the ground. At the other end of the spectrum, maturity is the phase of organizational development when major systems are in place, programmatic approaches and operational systems have been tested thoroughly and validated, at least some leadership has been in place long enough for there to be institutional memory, and there is deep, enduring support for the organization’s work among investors, partners, and other stakeholders in the organization’s success. The transition phase is everything in between start-up and maturity. It is the tough phase of adolescence in which participants can see the possibilities of scaling and success but do not yet have all the experience or pieces in place to realize the organization’s full potential.

What is important to note about the three stages of organizational development is that there are no hard and fast beginning and ending points. In many ways, they blend into each other. We liken the stages to William Bridges’s “transition theory” as explained in his book, Managing Transitions,⁴ that we have used in times of change management at Room to Read. Bridges describes the process of transitioning from an old way of working to a new way of working and the “neutral zone” that sits between the two. This construct also works well for our concept of the phases of organizational development. We adapt Bridges’s graphic, in Figure 2.3, as follows.

This diagram is powerful for several reasons. First, it illustrates that while the phases of organizational development are somewhat fluid and overlapping, organizations are largely in start-up, transition, or maturity at any one time. An organization’s theory of change and related approaches need to consider its phasing so as not to overstretch its resources but also to take full advantage of its situation. Knowing when your organization is deep in the transition stage is particularly important, as this is the time when the sophomore slump discussed in Chapter 1 can weigh you down, overwhelm your efforts, and stifle development. You must be patient but also deliberate in your efforts to break through and enjoy the benefits of maturity on the other side. The need for organizational determination is at its peak at this transition stage as you no longer have the same start-up enthusiasm as in early days but also do not yet have mature systems in place to take up the slack. Knowing that you are in the transition stage can push you to develop your human resource systems further to retain talent, or begin to codify your standard operating procedures to reduce duplication, complexity, and workloads and therefore the need for additional staff.

Table 2.3 describes the relationship between organizational approaches and phases of organizational development. It summarizes how Room to Read has conceptualized these relationships over time.

Although the specific content of each cell may be different for every organization, the descriptors can also be used as a reasonable guide for newer organizations seeking to scale.

The following chapters delve deeper into these relationships between organizational change and implementation strategies. We share some of the stories of success and failure that have shaped Room to Read’s path, as well as our current thinking about the next step in our own organizational journey. We also describe how we have tried to balance our unending quest for improvement and greater impact with the need for pacing, stability, and the understanding and enthusiasm of the tens of thousands of people who make this work possible.