Hi, it's Mac and I'm back. What I want to talk about today is the whole idea of idea generation. The question is how do we come up with new ideas to solve the social problem that we've identified? And early on, you heard Jim Thompson talking about digging down into the problem and finding the root cause. And now, what we're going to be looking at is how do we find a way of attacking this problem and solving that problem? Now the first thing I want to point out is that many problems that people look at, social problems have already been solved somewhere else in the world or at least people have tried. And so, what you owe to both your beneficiaries whom you're trying to help and your supporters who are trying to help you is to do the homework and the thorough research of any earlier attempts that have been done to solve this problem. Because what this does is it provides you with the platform of opportunity to build off or modify people's earlier attempts. The closer your problem is to the earlier attempts, the more you can piggyback off the the work and experience or what other people have done. So, let me stress. There's no need to invent new solutions. The need is to generate funds by solving a problem. And if you can do it without coming up with new solutions, you can do it a lot more parsimoniously. You can do it a lot more with a lot fewer mistakes. So you should really try to create your own idea of how to solve the problem, only if you cannot find any examples of how other groups have tried to do this. So you might want to ask, where does one find solutions that other people have tried? And to me, going it alone without thinking through this is a sheer ego trip. Usually, dozens of programs have been tried and are widely reported. And in our addendum, we have a number of places where you can go to see where people have reported what they've tried to do in problems similar to yours. Just have a look, for instance, at ASHOKA. It's an organization that publishes dozens of stories about how people tackle social problems and were able to succeed in that process. So, think a little bit about the difference it makes for you to be able to take someone else's solution and repackage that solution to tackle your specific problem. Now as you try to develop the solution from looking at other people's attempts, start off by looking at successes. See if you're able to copy parts of what has worked already and apply that to your specific situation. But let me also say, don't blindly copy, because your circumstances are going to be different from the circumstances that have been tried before. So there are going to be new answers and then maybe some cases where what worked in one situation simply won't work in another situation. And you don't want to go off and try to copy that. The other thing to do which is a little more difficult and a little bit more difficult to find is to try and find examples of places where people, in trying to solve a similar problem, ran into obstacles, and disappointments. And think a little bit about what they did wrong or find out what they did wrong, because what you want to try to do is not repeat their mistakes. If you're going to make mistakes make your own darn mistakes, don't make somebody else's. Now a natural question that will come out of this exercise that you're doing is to ask the question, what if there are no examples that we can build off, we can't find examples. Well, life's like that. You might find yourself in a situation where there simply are no examples. And what you need to do then is begin to revisiting the root cause of what you found in your root cause analysis of what the source of the problem is. You remember that Jim Thompson suggested what you do is ask the questions, what's the problem? How does the problem occur? Why does it occur? Who experiences the problem? When do they experience the problem? Where do they experience the problem? We want you to go back and look at those questions. And then add a couple more which would help you begin to look at the possible differences between something that's a problem today and something that you might use to get rid of that problem. You want to add some not questions. Who is not affected and why? When does it not occur and why? Where does it not occur and why? So you can begin to tease out the places and spaces where your problem is not happening and you want to be able to move from where the problem is happening today to where you want to be able to do something about it. And now, the time invested in carefully attending to these questions. Well, that might seem like a nuisance to you, is each time you ask that question and think about that question, what it does is it increases the richness, and it increases the depth of your understanding of what this social problem is all about. And now we start to cut to the chase. You can ask yourselves, what might we change so this problem is reduced? What change conditions will increase the chances that the problem will not occur or the problem will end? And now, we're starting to tease out a possible solution to the problem. So you map out the actions that you could take to reduce the problem and the incidence of the problem, and so as many as you can. So ask yourself, what can we do to remove the reasons why people are affected? What can we do to ameliorate how people are affected to make it less intense? What can we do to reduce and improve on who will be affected? What can we do to reduce the times when people will be affected? What can we do to reduce the places where people will be affected? So, take a couple of minutes and think a little bit about how you might begin to respond to that set of questions for your particular problem situation. And now, the really important thing associated with this is to begin to think about how your solutions to these questions could be used to generate revenues or generate funding to attend to the issues. So here what we've still introduced tease out not just what can be done, but also what can be done to generate the resources that you need to do the implementation. Now, take all the answers to these questions to your what to change on a summarizing chart. So, you list all the possible changes that will ameliorate the problem. Think about how you might generate revenues or funding from these changes. Who may be willing and able to provide these revenues? And then list all the changes and sources of revenues on this one sheet. Step back and select the three to five most impactful changes that you think you can implement. So from that long list that you've generated, hopefully it's long. What you want to do is step back and say, what are the three to five most impactful changes that I can make that I think I can implement? And now, what you can do is put together a one page statement to describe what changes you want to implement to attack the social problem and how you're going to generate funds to do so. And voila, this is your first-cut proposed solution! Now what is going to happen is that as you go through this process, you may realize that your idea will not work and you may need to start again and this is going to happen. The problems you're tackling are tough, difficult problems. And there's no way that you can start off with a potential solution and just run through it linearly and hope not to run into any kind of obstacles and disappointments. This is the problem and the way that I like to phrase this often with people that are working in these programs is life's tough, then you die. You've got to live with the fact that you may have to revisit what you've done before. That you might have to go in detail to places where you thought you've put enough detail already. But if you want to do something that's important, that's life may be. So, what are the key takeaways for the session? I think the first thing that I need to stress is that there is no need to invent. If you can, try to build off others' ideas. Of course, tailor them to your specific situation. But you owe it to yourself and you owe it to your supporters, and you owe it to your beneficiaries to do a thorough search for similar projects that have been tried in the past. Have a look at what was done. Learn what led to success or what disappointments occurred with these others. Decide what you need to do and what you can change, and how you might fund this change. So the key idea here is that I'm going to change, so that we move from the condition today to some improved condition. Now, what often happens is people will justifiably ask, what if our solution is wrong? And what I want to try to do, I want to use this as a closing admonition. Make no mistake, building a social enterprise is a lot of work. You need to be prepared to be disappointed. You need to be prepared to do many starts and many stops. You need to be prepared to do detailed work, so that it may have to be redone as you progress through your project. This is just part of doing something that's been a big problem in the past and has not been solved by anyone before. So, there's just no way that you can linearly start with some kind of a plan and expect it to unfold in the way that you laid it out in the first place. You're going to find yourself repeating stuff that you've done before in a slightly different way as you basically learn your way to what the final outcome is going to be. So, be prepared to experience and overcome disappointments along the way. If not, you will end up as a failure. And what you've done, if you think about it is parasitically used up scarce resources in that failure that others could have used elsewhere much better. One of the very first things that you need to do once you start thinking about implementation is to think of the people you must turn to for help and advice, as this project is launched and unfolds. Early on as soon as possible, you need to begin to recruit what we call an advisory group that will eventually evolve into an advisory board. There are two categories of people that you need on this advisory group. The first is on the ground advisors. These are people from the areas in which you're going to operate. The country in which you're going to operate the region in which you operate and what you're trying to get from them is their understanding of what the environment is like in which you're going to operate this business. These are the people that understand the market and the marketing. These are the people that understand the culture. They understand the local legal issues. They understand the local politics. They understand the local bureaucracy and they are invaluable in helping you make sure that as you package this rather challenging enterprise together, you don't go out there and make mistakes that are local mistakes. The second kind of advisory group are the people that you turn to for, let's call it technical and functional expertise. You may not have these skills, but you need these skills to operate the business. For instance, you may not know accounting and you need somebody to advise you that understands accounting, particularly the local accounting principles and laws. They understand the local law. They understand financing. They understand things like perhaps advertising. Anything that is needed for this business to operate and you need to be able to have access to those skills. Now I think the important thing is for the start, you don't need a bunch of formal advisors. You can start with a small group of informal advisors who provide you with advice and insights. And then as your business grows, you can add to it. An important thing to recognize is that you need to listen to the advice. Now I'm not saying that you necessarily heed their advice, but you need to listen. Because why would you have them as advisors, if it weren't for the fact that they give you advice? So you may not agree with them, but then you need to be clear why you've decided to do something different from what they recommended and have them sign off on that. So part of the deal when you start the advisory board is you say, guys, I want your advice but that doesn't necessarily mean that I'm compelled to follow the advice, because I'm going to be asking many people how to do this. And so you start the process with a relatively informal group, which we've talked about, an advisory group. And then as your enterprise grows and begins to prosper and become more complicated to operate, you can move to a more formal advisory bond with much more formal roles. And kind of a learn your way into what kind of an advisory group you want, depending on the stage of development of the enterprise. Now people often ask me, can you give me an example of how somebody went about assembling such a group? And let's turn back to Ilona, who was the woman who started the Zambia Feeds enterprise that we've heard about earlier in the program. One of the very first things that she did is she got and formed this partnership with the chief executive officer of a large milling company in Zambia. Because this chief executive officer and his technical people were able to provide her with a lot of information and advice about what it takes to build and execute a factory to generate poultry feeds. So with the technical side in place, the next thing she did is she found and she recruited an experienced salesman who knew Northwestern Zambia very well. This salesman had deep regional knowledge, who could advise her on things like marketing and sales, and point her to connections, and help her with getting access to the people who are distributors in those markets. Next step was to recruit a government veterinarian who was really skilled and expert in the implications of government regulations, and government bureaucracy for the launch and growth of their business. The next place that she went to was she actually went out of the country to South Africa and located a professor of animal science. Who could give her a wealth of advice about what the regional challenges are of running poultry programs in Africa. This was a person who was very skilled in understanding the issues of raising large numbers and large quantities of poultry. Then she also found a local expert, who was an expert in a poultry feeds and knew what it took to make mixes of food for chickens that depended on the stage of development of the chicken. What kinds of mixed feed mixes would lead to fairly rapid growth in the beginning and later as the animal got bigger and bigger, built on more protein and less and less fat. So, this kind of poultry feed expertise is something she could draw on. And then finally, what she found was important was to identify somebody who knew specifically what was needed to breed chicks. Because one of the key things that she found as she built this business is it's very hard to have a poultry farm, unless you have chicks that become chickens for sale in the market. And so she found somebody who was really skilled and specialized in how you breed chicks, so that there would be a guaranteed supply of chicks to her farmers who wanted to raise chickens. And so as you can see, she, overtime was able to build a very powerful cadre of people who she could turn to for advice. And eventually, she was able to accomplish a project which lead to, when we last looked at the enterprise, there was enough chicken meat being produced from her poultry feed to feed the whole of Zambia for five days. So let me tell you, an advisory board is important. So go forth and prosper.
