Skip to main content

Exploring A Challenge

If you want to solve a problem, have to stop and think about the problem first. Logical, right? 
Whether you want to tackle racial inequality, gun violence, climate change, or homelessness in your city you need to explore the challenge. Take notes, ask questions, do some interviews, reflect. This post introduces a couple of techniques you can use to focus on a new (to you) problem. You can use the tools here to help you shift your focus, or reevaluate whether you're focusing on the right thing. 

Say your interest is climate change. Maybe you've decided that getting people to consume less stuff is the key to reducing the effects of climate change in the future. If you don't know much about the problem, here are a few key points:

1. The world is warming up with alarming speed, mainly because of human activity. 
2. We may not be able to prevent some major changes like a 1-meter rise in sea level and permanent drought
3. Some would argue that adapting to those changes is more important than trying to stop AGW at this point. 
4. Many steps have been recommended including renewable energy, end to meat consumption, less consumption of everything, going back..

Responding to Climate Change - The Challenge:

Let's focus on changing behavior in the United States. We want to convince people to eat less meat, travel less, and cut out fossil fuels as much as possible. This is obviously a three-part challenge, and you would want to repeat the following exercise for each of them. So, here is the exercise:

Why do I want people to eat less meat?

- Because it takes lots of resources to produce. 

Why is the resource requirement important?

- Because there are too many people using too much water and land.

Why are water and land so important to fighting climate change?

- Well, water is the basis for everything and land is important for everything. 

Why would you try to focus on both?

- Well, I guess water is really more important than meat. 

Did I just change my focus? Sure, this isn't an awesome example of the "5 Why" technique, but I decided it might be worthwhile to look at water conservation after about 5 minutes of asking "why" about this and that. 

Try this one yourself. But, take a little more than five minutes. When you are done, come back and read about a technique for describing the elements of a social problem. This is a focusing exercise that might generate a real breakthrough. 

Impact, Awareness, Knowledge, Ability:

Slice and dice the problem. Write down the things that contribute to AGW. 

Next, create a table by hand or in a word processor. The left column will be labeled AGW Factors. This is where you write down those contributing factors. Create four more columns and label them Impact, Awareness, Knowledge, and Ability. You'll be rating each of those AGW Factors on each thing. Here is how it works:

Impact - How much impact does this really have on the problem? Can you quantify the impact on global climate? (Ideally, you can quantify the frequency of the behavior and the impact each time the behavior happens - more on that later)

Awareness - Do some research on Google. Find out how much people know about each of these AGW factors. 

Knowledge - How much do we know about changing this kind of behavior, using that kind of technology, the science behind the problem, et cetera?

Ability - How much can we really affect this factor, behavior, attitude with our available resources? The more fundamental the change, the longer it will take and the more resources it will take. For example, imagine a goal of cutting meat consumption in the United States by 50% in five years. Is this even remotely realistic for any organization or network of organizations? Getting half of American adults who currently eat meat to stop over the next five years is going to be tough. Getting twenty percent of American adults to go meatless one or two days a week might be more achievable for a real-world organization. Even so, that is a real stretch. 

Pick a social problem you care about. Spend about five minutes breaking it into pieces as described above. Then rate each piece on each of those dimensions. 


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

9 Ways Cognitive Bias Undermines Social Change Efforts

This is going to be the first of many posts on how cognitive bias might undermine social change efforts. Yeah, I know. I will do my best to keep this concrete and interesting. A number of quirks in how our brains work might lead to mistaken judgments in many areas relevant to social change: problem analysis, strategy, program design, and advocacy. Maybe fundraising. Taking effective action on a certain problem is what activists want to do, so we'll come back to fundraising later. 1.Confirmation bias may cause us to look for reasons why a certain strategy or tactic is the right one. Supportive evidence gets woven into the narrative, lending support to the need for more education for women or more gun control or whatever the topic might be. Negative information gets tossed out. 2. Bandwagon effect -This may be a real problem when the resources devoted to addressing an issue get all of proportion to the seriousness of an issue. Instead, bandwagon jumping siphons away money and v...
Post a Comment
Read more

Using SWOT Analysis to Rev Up Your Fundraising

Strategic planning, including SWOT analysis, is for small nonprofits, giant philanthropic foundations, and every other nonprofit. Every nonprofit that seeks financial support of any kind needs a strategy.  The point is to make a plan and work the plan. Business gurus have shared a bunch of strategic planning tools, some generic and some made for a specific purpose. This post is about looking at your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats - SWOT.  Knowing about your organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats is step one in planning your fundraising efforts.  SWOT - A Quick Review This is not the best place to run through SWOT analysis, but an overview will make it obvious why we need to do it. First, however, you should write down your fundraising goal. Then, you can do some analysis. Here are the steps: Strengths - What about your financial resources? What about your reputation and your connections? How big is your audience on social medi...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Powerful Tool for Nonprofit Planning 2

This is the time for another post on the social environment of nonprofit organizations. Yes, I know this is a bit esoteric and complex. I’m just going to break things down into a few (more) concrete) posts. Last time I mentioned that your organization’s environment has seven dimensions, each with three elements – capacity, rate of change, complexity. I know I mentioned strategy before, but consider also fundraising, social marketing, and advocacy strategy. To make it easier, here is the table I presented last time: CAPACITY COMPLEXITY DYNAMISM CULTURE ECOLOGY ? ECONOMIC ? DEMOGRAPHIC LEGAL POLITICAL ? TECHNOLOGICAL ? Because 7 X 3 = 21 there are at least that many questions you could ask about your organization’s environment. Last time I posed some generic strategy questions based on the above table. This time I just want to offer some more questions based on the seven dimensions and three elements. From the polit...
Post a Comment
Read more