Innovation for Social Change

Chapter 6Forming a Vision and Theory of Change

Faith is about taking the first step, even when you don't see the whole staircase.

—Martin Luther King, Jr.

How do nonprofits with outsize impact go about identifying the social problem they want to solve? How do they develop a vision and an approach? Can we extrapolate lessons and common themes from the origin stories of successful nonprofits? The answer is an emphatic yes.

Behind every organization is a start‐up story. It springs from a problem that, for whatever reason, wasn't being addressed by the private sector or by government. A few individuals decide to respond.

The organization of a nonprofit in its early start‐up days conforms to its founders' first steps to deal with a problem. Maybe they didn't succeed right out of the gate. Sometimes they had to learn the hard way and adjust. But they didn't give up. And those of us in mission‐oriented nonprofits are also carrying out the vision of the founders into new and perhaps unexpected territories.

The start‐up phase of successful innovation involves first seeing what no one else sees. In the same way that a scientist develops a hypothesis, the social change innovator develops a theory to solve a social problem and then undertakes a period of trial and error to test that theory. Doing this involves relentless effort and persistence, requiring founders to be deeply committed.

In the same way that inventors begin, we start to formulate a nonprofit theory of change by asking ...