How Mission-Driven Organizations Maximize Impact with Limited Resources with Jason Fraser

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Convergence Podcast. I'm your host, Ashok Sivanand. If you're doing something that feels mission-oriented, but you're sacrificing the bottom line for it, you're going to change what you're doing so that you can make more money. That's in contrast to what I think of as a real mission-driven organization. On this show, we'll deconstruct the best practices, principles, and the underlying philosophies behind

[00:00:25] the most engaged product teams who ship the most successful products. This is what teams are made of. Hey folks, welcome back to another episode of Convergence.fm. If you were with us in season one, you might remember my conversation with one of my favorite colleagues from Pivotal, Janice Frazier. Janice and I talked about the book that she co-authored with her husband, Jason,

[00:00:54] called Further Faster, Far Less Drama. It's one of the most practical and actionable books on product and team leadership that I've come across. And today, I'm excited to welcome Jason himself to the show. Jason's been at the heart of some truly impactful organizations. He co-founded alongside Janice Luxor, spelled L-U-X-R, a company built around lean product discovery, which was later acquired by

[00:01:21] Pivotal. That's actually where we worked together and where I had the privilege of learning a number of facilitation and product discovery techniques directly from Jason and Janice. Since then, he's led teams at Pivotal and at VMware Tanzu Labs, both in the US as well as in Asia. He's mentored startups at Techstars and recently launched a company called Mission Ratio. It's a practice that's

[00:01:48] focused entirely on helping mission-driven organizations with maximizing the impact that they bring. Jason is essentially bringing the strategy and delivery methods that we often associate with startups and product teams in Silicon Valley into sectors like climate action, public service, and nonprofit work. After working with Earthshot, the global climate initiative founded by Prince William, and by his own account, after some encouragement from Janice, he made this work

[00:02:15] his full-time priority. Now, myself, as someone who's also very passionate about this space and often find myself and my team doing low-bono work to help purpose-driven nonprofit organizations apply the same tools, this conversation hit close to home for me. In the episode, we talk about what it really means to be a mission-driven organization. We also talk about the business benefits of putting mission at the

[00:02:43] center of your decision-making and how to craft or refine your mission so that it actually drives action. A concept that Jason calls mission ratios is something else we cover. Basically, the unit economics, I think, for social impact. And a repeatable method for identifying constraints and increasing leverage so you can do more with less, whether you're in a startup, a nonprofit, or an established enterprise.

[00:03:09] I found this to be a very energizing and practical and deeply thoughtful conversation about how we align values and operations and why that alignment is so powerful for achieving your mission. Let's get into it with Jason Frazier. Subscribe to the podcast to get future episodes as soon as they're published. If you find this helpful, give the podcast a five-star rating on your podcast app or hit that like button on YouTube.

[00:03:40] It was a pleasure to have your wife, Janice, on the show during our first season and talking about the book that you co-wrote together. And so it's lovely to have you here. The two of you have had like a tremendous impact on my career trajectory. And so it's a real honor to have you here. So maybe let's get started with, you know, some definitions. The term a mission-oriented organization or mission-driven organization, I feel like it's maybe overused. And anything that's

[00:04:06] overused tends to carry some ambiguity. So what is it to you when someone is a mission-driven organization? Most companies, you know, whether they're for-profit or not-for-profit or, you know, a charity or whatever, like everybody's got a mission statement, right? Like even Broadcom has a mission statement and they're like a big semiconductor company.

[00:04:32] Lyft and Uber both have mission statements, you know, and a mission statement is supposed to guide your decision-making. It's supposed to help you understand what it is that you do and how you do that for the world. But when you're a for-profit company, the fact of the matter is that money comes first. And the mission will always get set aside in favor of making money, right? So you look at

[00:05:01] Broadcom's mission, which is to improve digital processes. I actually, I scribbled it down because I thought I would need it. To improve digital processes and IT infrastructure for the largest companies in the world by enabling scalability, agility, and security. That's a mission. Like they've got a thing that they want to do. That's cool. But ultimately, and having worked there very

[00:05:23] briefly, they acquired a company that I worked for. Ultimately, they're about money. And like many big corporations, and I'm not, well, I am judging this a little bit. Like it's really all about the bottom line. If you're doing something that feels mission-oriented, but you're sacrificing the bottom line for it, then you're going to change what you're doing so that you can make more money.

[00:05:52] That's in contrast to what I think of as a real mission-driven organization, which is somewhere where you are sacrificing your financial gain in order to deliver on the mission. That doesn't mean that you are a nonprofit, right? You can still be a for-profit company. You can still like make

[00:06:15] decisions that allow you to have financial stability. But I think for me, mission-driven organizations are using their revenue as leverage to deliver more mission. They're not using their revenue to pad someone's pockets, right? And that's kind of how I make the distinction. I want to work with people who are trying to make the world a better place and whose like genuine

[00:06:47] reason for being is to make the world a better place, not somebody whose reason for being is to make money. And they sort of do something for the world at the same time. I think there's a good set of clarifying here where you can be for-profit and mission-driven. And the next point there maybe is compared to all businesses that have some kind of mission printed

[00:07:10] somewhere on a wall, you're really mission-oriented or mission-driven when given a competing trade-off between more profitability and mission alignment, you choose mission alignment. And I think there's many examples out there of folks who have been super profitable while also not having to deprioritize their mission when it comes in the face of that trade-off. So are there any like

[00:07:37] favorite examples you have of companies who are doing both great? You know, Patagonia's mission statement is something like, it's a very simple one. It's like, we're in business to save our home planet. In fact, I think that's exactly it, right? Right. And they channel their money towards things that make the planet better. They do climate work

[00:08:04] and stuff like that. Like, they're very clear about, you know, how they take their business and use it for good in some way. There are other for-profit businesses. Thinking of things like Cero Bikes, it's an electric bike company. X-E-R-O, right? That's C-E-R-O. C-E-R-O, okay.

[00:08:31] Yep, yep. And their mission is to empower everyday life with electric utility bicycles, making cities better places to live by offering electric cargo bikes as a sustainable and efficient alternative to cars for daily needs. So in contrast to Patagonia, like you look, if we're talking about mission statements, you look at Patagonia's, which is super simple. We're in business to save the planet, right? But you look at this one and it's like very detailed,

[00:08:58] but both of these are for-profit organizations. And both of them work hard to live by that mission. Like they chose to go down a path because they care about the outcomes for the world. I think in Patagonia's case, like they've gone as far as, I think, re-registering into a B Corp, which kind of like applies more legal binding to that mission.

[00:09:29] And then also, I think they famously, a couple of years ago, like transferred the ownership to a trust that's really focused on fighting climate change and super impressive branding, not just for your product to your customers, but also to your employees and gives everyone kind of a sense of alignment. I think if I think back, some of the decisions at Integral that we made, because it just didn't feel right. It maybe we went back and updated the mission statement because of that feeling that was in contrast.

[00:10:00] And just are some of my favorite decisions that I've made. And in contrast, there's some things where, you know, we needed to keep the lights on or something else for a quarter. And we took on some work that didn't necessarily align. And everyone was able to look back and be, you know, and kind of know that there's a pain associated with straying pretty far from that. So mine are sort of anecdotal and experiential.

[00:10:29] I'm curious, if there's leaders out there thinking about kind of turning the dial a little bit more towards mission orientation, what are some things they should be considering in terms of benefits? Because I'm sure it ultimately impacts the bottom line. I just haven't thought about it very discreetly. Well, I mean, first, I want to bounce back to what you said about taking on work that wasn't necessarily mission aligned. I think that every mission driven organization actually has two kinds of work that they do. There's work to deliver on the mission.

[00:10:59] And so I call it mission and permission, right? It's work to deliver on the mission. And it's work that you have to do in order to be able to work on the mission, right? And that at its most basic, that's stuff like, you know, financial accounting and compliance and security and legal. Like there's like book work that you have to do just to be a business. But sometimes there's work that you have to do just to keep the lights on.

[00:11:27] And if you don't keep the lights on, you don't get to deliver on your mission anymore, right? And so I think in your case, you know, you are a consulting organization. You maybe took on a client or two that wasn't exactly aligned with who you wanted to be. But if you didn't take on those clients, you can't help anybody, right? It's like you got to put on your oxygen mask first. And so mission and permission is the way that I talk with people about that.

[00:11:54] It's like sometimes there's stuff you got to do just to be able to deliver on your mission. And it's okay to be pragmatic in that way. It's not, you're not like compromising yourself in some evil way as long as you don't go too far. I love it. This reminds me of a story I heard of a healthcare network in Chicago that I think I believe is run by a not-for-profit sort of Catholic group. And a quote that I heard similar to your mission and permission was,

[00:12:24] no margin, no mission. Where there needs to be a fuel that drives the mission. Money is oftentimes that fuel in the world we live in. And having that pragmatism, I think, takes some of the guilt or the conscience constraints away and allows you to kind of live in that bimodality and have both. As long as you know which one the priority is, I guess, right?

[00:12:48] Well, and I'm a little bit wary of sort of fetishizing capitalism. Awesome. Like, yes, there are B Corps that generate revenue and that revenue supports their mission. And that's fantastic. I don't believe that everything that the world needs to have done can turn a profit.

[00:13:11] But, like, there are some things we're just going to have to pay for that, like, you can't make it a business. And so I have seen a lot of, like, especially coming out of, you know, I live in Silicon Valley. I've been here for almost 30 years. I don't know. I've been here for a long time. And there's definitely a techno fetishism here, like technology is going to solve all our problems. Like, you know, screw nature-based solutions.

[00:13:39] We're going to make machines that extract the CO2 from the air and that's going to save us. And like, maybe a little, but not all. But there's also a sort of capitalist fetishism here that's like, well, we can just use business. And business will drive success, you know, for everything. And I just don't think it's true. Like, I think, you know, my focus, if you all haven't gathered already, one of my big focuses is climate stuff.

[00:14:06] And I believe that as a species, we have accrued a debt. And you can't pay down a debt and make profit off of paying down the debt. Like, you can mitigate future costs. You can pay less interest on that debt by paying down the principal. But you can't actually make money off of paying off a debt.

[00:14:29] And I think if we try to have all of our climate solutions driven by profit motive businesses, we're not going to do enough. Fostering an engaged product organization and aligning them with the principles around lean, human centered design and agile will more than likely lead to successful business outcomes for your organization.

[00:14:57] But getting started or getting unblocked can be hard. This podcast is brought to you by the player coaches over at Integral. They help ambitious companies like you build amazing product teams and ship products in artificial intelligence, cloud, web and mobile. Listeners to the podcast can head on over to integral.io slash convergence and get a free product success lab.

[00:15:24] During this session, the Integral team will facilitate a problem solving exercise that gives you clarity and confidence to solve a product design or engineering problem. That's integral.io slash convergence. Now back to the show.

[00:15:41] One thing I did want to bring back to is I think having this mission front and center and not just in text, but in action, in decisions made, in priorities that are being placed. There's a lot of benefit that you have in terms of aligning and engaging your workforce as well as attracting clients that both lead to more profitability.

[00:16:11] And so I'm curious what your take may be on that for folks who are maybe on the fence or looking for a little bit of inspiration to spend a little bit more time on orienting more towards the mission versus profit. One, you can feel better about yourself at the end of the day. But two, people want to work for something that matters. And if you've got a mission that people can support, it gives them purpose. People need purpose.

[00:16:42] Also, I think that people want to support companies that are doing the right thing, whatever doing the right thing means by that definition. But, I mean, we've seen so much of it just in the last, you know, I don't know, probably 10 years, but even more recently in the last few months where you have organizations that are stepping away from longstanding DEI policies, for example.

[00:17:08] And they take a massive economic hit because their customer base just says, like, that's wrong. Right. And I'm thinking about Target, for example, and you can contrast them with Costco who took an ethical stance and said, no, we actually we believe that diversity is a good thing. We believe that equity is a good thing. We believe that inclusion is a good thing. So, of course, we're going to keep doing those things. Costco's membership, like, skyrocketed.

[00:17:37] Target's profits plummeted. And so that's just an example of how people actually will vote with their dollars on ethical grounds. Right. And really, your mission is a reflection of your ethics. You know, you're showing people what you care about. And if you care about a thing that is meaningful to people, people will come to that thing. They will give you their money. They will give you their attention.

[00:18:06] They will give you their time and effort as employees. So I definitely think it's worth it. And I think there's a Deloitte study that they put out showing that millennials and Gen Z, not necessarily the folks who are in control of deciding whether the company is going to switch towards mission orientation or not. The folks who work there, and likely a lot of the consumers, too, are significantly more likely to work at a place where they feel a sense of purpose.

[00:18:35] And then I think specifically around environmental concerns and looking at things like the environmental charters that companies have as their job hunting.

[00:18:49] And so if not anything else, you're going to find way bigger access to talent pool as well as give your customers something more to consider when they're considering buying your product versus another one in terms of giving them that sense of purpose. In terms of folks who maybe don't have that mission spelled out, or they do, and someone's realized that, hey, no one actually looks at this.

[00:19:19] A funny story that comes to mind a lot is that this isn't exactly mission, but when it comes to core values, Enron had integrity as one of their core values that was on the posters, right? And clearly no one followed that. I think mission is kind of a similar thing where crafting the right mission is a pretty critical part to driving adoption implicitly to that mission.

[00:19:43] And I'm curious if you have stories from the field or any tips on arriving at a mission that is likely going to get you making progress there. Well, I mean, first, when I ask people what their mission is, they'll often tell me what they do. They'll give me a list of activities. We do this thing and this thing and this thing and this thing, which is different from what is your mission, right?

[00:20:12] And your activities are a way that you deliver on your mission. They are the through line between your mission and the outcomes that you create in the world. The stuff that you do is what makes that line, that connection. And so what that means to me is that people lose track of their mission. And I think this is especially true as companies get bigger and they start doing more and more stuff.

[00:20:36] It's easy to lose the mission and instead focus on the actions, right? And a lot of, in many cases I've seen, they're also not even really focusing on the outcomes of those actions. They're just like, this is what we do. So we're going to just do this thing. And so I think that's one of the challenges that comes up.

[00:21:00] But in terms of finding a meaningful mission statement, I mean, going back to what you do, I found my own personal mission statement through reflecting on the work that I had done over a long period of time and looking for the through line in that work. And this was like, I don't know, it was probably six or seven years ago at this point. I was like, what do I care about?

[00:21:29] What do I actually, you know, do? And I was thinking about, you know, going all the way back to when my wife and I co-founded our startup accelerator program and through all of the work that I had done after being acquired by Pivotal Labs and working with tons of clients and stuff like that. And all of it was about helping other people be more effective at what they did.

[00:21:56] And I was like, that's the through line is I help people think differently about the way that they approach their work so that they can be more effective, more engaged, more creative, more fully utilized and happier. And I was like, oh, that's my mission.

[00:22:19] Like by describing what I do in the imperfective, not just what I have done this one time or what I want to do in the future, but what I do over time, I came to a personal mission. And I revised that after leaving Labs post-acquisition when I started working with these mission-driven organizations and decided that I really wanted to focus my time there.

[00:22:48] I made a little revision on it that was, I will make the world a better place by helping people who are doing impactful work be more effective at delivering on their potential. So it's really the same mission, but I've retargeted that mission at mission-driven organizations or people doing impactful work. Right. So when you're thinking about finding a mission statement, whether it's for a company, I mean, a company, you should probably already have one, but maybe it needs some edits.

[00:23:16] But if you don't, what do you do? And, you know, we'll go all Simon Sinek on it. Like, why? Why do you do what you do? Why does it matter? Like you chose to do this thing over all the other things that you could have done. Was it just because you thought that was the path of least resistance to making a buck? That's true. If that's true, accept that and figure out like how it's helpful for your customers and maybe make helping your customers that mission.

[00:23:47] But otherwise, yeah, I guess, you know, reflecting on what you do and why you do it is the way to come to your mission. Yeah, I think there's a couple of things there that I want to make sure people are taking away.

[00:23:59] Because it can be fairly daunting, whether you're coming up with a mission and you don't have one and agreed you probably should, or you have one and you're not sure if it's really doing the job of what the mission should be doing. And things that I loved you did there were, number one, instead of looking inward, you looked backward. You looked historically at the things that gave you the most sense of meaning and purpose.

[00:24:28] And the data exists in all of us. Um, and I have made this mistake myself of trying to look inward and have a blank sheet of paper and feel very intimidated by it compared to just listing out actually using some of Janice's and your techniques of getting a sticky notes out and just trying to list out as quickly as possible with no censorship. What are the times that I felt like I was really in alignment and that true self was really thriving?

[00:24:58] Um, and so we all have the data. That's the first caution that I want to make sure everyone listens. Don't, don't get mired in, in, in looking inward when you can look back as well. And secondly, you revised it. And, and I love the wording of the revision there, by the way. Um, and I think we all change, the world changes and, and we mature and we transform. And changing our mission statement is okay.

[00:25:22] It's not something we maybe want to change every day, every week, but as we hit different inflection points and what we want to be working on and growth that we've had, changing it is okay and welcome. Is there anything else that you can think of in terms of tips or caution similar to that? I think a mission statement. Is only useful if it provides some rubric for decision making for you. Right.

[00:25:45] And so like when I look at my current personal mission statement, it gives me what three questions to ask about the work that I'm approaching. Um, one is what I'm doing, making the world a better place. Are the people that I'm helping doing impactful work. And I can just gut check that.

[00:26:07] And the third is, um, is what I'm doing, helping that customer be more effective at delivering on their potential. And if the answer to any of those questions is no, then I'm not doing the right thing. Right. And that's how the mission is useful for me. It gives me a rubric to evaluate the work that I'm doing or work perspective work. Even like, do I want to work with this client? Like, is what they are doing impactful by my definition?

[00:26:37] Do I believe that I could help them be more effective at delivering on their potential? If the answer to those questions is no, I don't want to work with them. So mission statements should give you that kind of guidance, I think. And it's something that's so personal that I think if you compared it to your partner's mission statement or your siblings,

[00:27:00] maybe someone that you're not necessarily directly working with, um, but you have a lot of respect for in terms of what they're doing. Um, it should almost be something that is not someone else's mission statement that tells you that, yeah, this is, this is truly mine. Um, compared to like, you know, we, we said integrity before as a core value, maybe even, you know, making the world a better place. You'd, you'd imagine most people, um, start out at that point of making the world a better place.

[00:27:29] And that'd be a lot of, there'd be a lot of alignment or commonality in that. And then it's the second two points that you bring up that make it more special and personalized to you and helps you with your decisions and your focus and priority compared to someone else who wants to make the world a better place, but in a different way, which you agree with, but you know, hey, that's not for me as much as I, you know, I respect what they're doing out there.

[00:27:54] And I think that may be another good gut check to, to know if, if it's something that seems really bland that everyone would opt into, maybe there's a little bit more digging deeper, right? Um, so I, I really want to talk about not just the mission here, but I know you've got, a methodology, a process, a framework maybe in terms of like taking that mission and driving like disproportional outcomes, like you mentioned. So let's maybe start with, you know, you've got this mission.

[00:28:22] Um, and then what are some things as an organization that might tend to get in their way of realizing that mission? Yeah. And how do you look at that? There's always constraints on delivery, right? So for a lot of mission driven organizations, the demand for the mission outcome is, is near infinite, right? Um, usually the demand for the outcome far exceeds the ability for any given mission driven organization to actually deliver on fully.

[00:28:52] Right. So like, if we're talking about decarbonizing the atmosphere so that we can stay below 1.5 degrees Celsius, as an example, like no one organization is going to be able to do that. Like we could all be sucking as much CO2 out of the air as possible, you know, and, and there's still more work to do. So demand is infinite, but resources are limited. Resources are always constrained in some way, right?

[00:29:19] And they can be things like, I mean, money's the most obvious and money is often a proxy for lots of other different things that, that money gets you to deliver on your mission. Like staff members, like facilities, like time or energy or, you know, equipment, or there, there's all kinds of things that, um, you're going to be limited on.

[00:29:45] Uh, and those limitations affect your ability to deliver as much mission outcome as you could. Um, so I, I refer to those things as confounding constraints. You can also think about them as the inputs, um, for your, for your mission. Uh, right. So it's like you have staff members, staff members are an input, right? And your mission outcomes are, are on the other side of that.

[00:30:13] And so the term confounding constraint, um, I hadn't heard it until I was researching the episode. Um, how is it different from a constraint if it is? Um, uh, um, confounding constraints are things that, um, I think about them as being direct inputs to your mission.

[00:30:35] Um, uh, so if you are, if you're a mission driven team, your organization is basically just a mill for turning your inputs into mission outcomes. Right. And those inputs are limited in some way. And you always want to maximize the amount of outcome that you can get for those, those inputs. So, um, they are confounding because you can't get more of them.

[00:31:03] They are finite in some way. So like I've only got X number of dollars in donations or grant money this year, and it's going to be a real struggle for me to get more. Right. So the amount of money that I've got is, is constrained. So I have to figure out how to maximize my mission outcomes, regardless of that amount of money. Um, uh, the number of staff that I have, I just, I can't hire any more people.

[00:31:30] Um, I can't fit them in the office and the work we do requires that they can't be remote or whatever. There might be some other like reason why I can't get more people. So like people could be a confounding constraint. Um, I think, you know, maybe, maybe it's easiest to talk through kind of a metaphor that I use for the whole mission ratio concept. And that is a soup kitchen. So a soup kitchen is a mission driven organization.

[00:32:00] And the mission is typically to provide meals for people in need. Right. Um, and there are lots of different constraints that they might run into. So if, if we assume that there's always going to be more people who need a bowl of soup, that they really need to maximize the, the number of bowls of soup that they put out. Um, then what are the constraints that they have? Well, the first we could look at is dollars in donation money to bowls of soup.

[00:32:28] And that gives us one lens to evaluate our operation and, and figure out if there isn't more that we could do. Uh, maybe we could get a better discount on some of our ingredients, right? Maybe, you know, there are other things that we could do with our money that would allow us to provide more soup for the same amount of money. But that's only one lens.

[00:32:50] If we then look at, well, our soup kitchen is small and we really can only have three staff members on duty at any given time. How do we produce as many bowls of soup as we can with only three staff members? And that's a really different question from how do we produce as many bowls of soup as we can for a limited amount of money. Then we can look at things like cooktops. Okay, we've got three staff members, but we've only got two burners.

[00:33:18] How can we produce as many bowls of soup as possible with only two burners, right? And so each time you swap out that input side for something new, it gives you a different lens for evaluating your operation and thinking about ways to optimize it. And I honestly would recommend using multiple lenses because that drives the most optimization.

[00:33:48] If you stop with money and often this, because it's the most obvious, this is where people go. They're like, how can we maximize this for our dollar, right? But money is such a big and vague thing that like you could do some work there and it might help, probably would help. But if you're not digging deeper and looking at the other constraints, the other things that are sort of part of your value stream that could be blocking that delivery,

[00:34:15] then you're missing out on opportunities to maximize that impact. So I love that example there. And maybe let's build on it to help understand the work you do a little bit more. So you've got a soup kitchen and I recall you saying that there's a number of constraints, starting with real estate, leading to the number of people that can be in there, the number of cooktops that are within the real estate space of the soup kitchen.

[00:34:43] And these are all factors that ultimately limit or constrain the conversion of input donation dollars to number of soups that go out there. I guess that the work that you do and keep me honest here is really helping the folks who maybe run the soup kitchen, run this initiative with looking at the number of ways

[00:35:10] and breaking this problem down into actionable steps so that they can ultimately maximize the number of soups for the same dollar, as much as you may be trying to increase the number of dollars as an input in parallel. I help people see those things. You can't work on them if you can't see them. So I help people identify those constraints that they have.

[00:35:37] And again, constraints and inputs in this case are kind of the same thing. It's like you've got a finite input that you want to squeeze as much out of as you can. So like you look at cooktops, one possible solution, if you've got limited cooktops, buy bigger pots, right? You've only got two burners. If you put a five-gallon pot on that burner instead of a three-gallon pot, you've got two more gallons of soup from the same burner, right? So it's like that's the kind of thinking.

[00:36:07] And you wouldn't necessarily get to that if you're only thinking about dollars to bowls of soup. Because dollars to bowls of soup doesn't lead you to that conclusion. But cooktops to bowls of soup does. And that's why I think it's important to be able to analyze different aspects of that. I guess it's a value chain and see like where are all the places where we could be driving optimizations.

[00:36:36] And we're dancing around it, but this is the definition of the mission ratio. Like the mission ratio is the unit economics for mission-driven organizations, right? So for-profit companies use gross profit as their primary thing for measuring their success, right? It's like how much money – and this too is a ratio. How much money did we spend to deliver what we deliver? And how much money did we earn from delivering what we deliver?

[00:37:05] And you do a little math on that, you end up with gross profit. So it looks like it's just a number, but actually it's a ratio. Money spent to money earned. But when money is not your concern, when bowls of soup is what matters, you can't use gross profit. So you need some other kind of unit economics thinking that helps you optimize your operation. And that's where mission ratios come in.

[00:37:30] And it allows you to look at, you know, all the inputs that you have and the outcomes you want to deliver. You look at that as a ratio and you figure out how you can make the outcome side bigger. And then ultimately improving that ratio or the leverage associated with it is a way to operationally improve the impact of your – in service of your mission.

[00:37:59] And I imagine knowing your work and Janice's work from the past, this isn't a magic trick that you go into and you intuitively come back with. There's usually more of a methodical process that, you know, you can rinse and repeat outside of a soup kitchen and for another organization. So if we maybe stayed with the soup kitchen example, talk to us about like a methodical approach to increasing that leverage. Yeah.

[00:38:25] Well, I mean, the first thing, Janice and I got an opportunity to do some work together, which is always great. I mean, we wrote the book together. We had started a company together. We've worked together on and off for a long time. But she had an old client she's been working with for a long time in the consumer goods space. And they asked us to come and help them work through a problem that was blocking them from hitting their net zero emissions goals by 2040.

[00:38:54] So they've set – as a company, this is a very large global company, they've set a goal of being net zero CO2 emissions by 2040. And they genuinely want to do this, which is really cool, I think. And they're struggling. And so they asked Janice and I to come and help them.

[00:39:17] And the problem that they were facing was that the folks in the lines of business for this organization weren't getting decision-ready data that was helping them make good decisions about how to change the products that they were selling so that those products could have a lower carbon footprint. But the software, the internal software team for this organization said, hey, you know, we built this great software and it totally works.

[00:39:46] And why aren't you just using the software? The folks in business were saying the software doesn't actually work. So there was this disconnect. And what we did was we sat down. We got a bunch of people from different lines of business in the room and we got the software team in the room.

[00:40:03] And we had a chemist from this company actually go up to the front of the room and illustrate the value stream for one particular chemical that this company uses to produce a bunch of their different products. And, you know, it starts at a palm plantation in Malaysia, which is already a sad story in terms of CO2.

[00:40:26] But it starts at a palm plantation in Malaysia with palm kernel oil and moves through a series of, you know, transportation and refinery stages until it becomes a completed chemical that is then used as an ingredient in some of these other products. Well, we illustrated this whole value stream every step. You know, it moves from Malaysia to Hong Kong and then in Hong Kong, it gets transferred to a ship that goes to Benicia and, you know, California.

[00:40:54] And it just on and on mapped out this whole process. And we marked on the process where the software that they were using was actually seeing the transportation or transformation. Because those are the places where carbon enters the system. Like you're using energy to either move the product from place to place or to make a change to the product in some way. Right. And so that adds carbon load.

[00:41:22] So we pointed out all the places that the software sees in green. And then we pointed out all the places that the software didn't see in red. And by the end of the exercise, the leader of the software team literally had his face in his hands and was like, my God, I had no idea. Right. He thought he truly believed that the software that they had was effectively tracking the full carbon footprint of these products.

[00:41:50] And we made it visible for him and the rest of the team that it was not. In fact, it was missing like 60 or 70 percent of the steps in this process. And so the data that he was providing really was not decision-ready data because nobody could trust that it had any resemblance to accuracy. And neither Janice nor I are experts in carbon accounting.

[00:42:19] But we knew that because there was this big disconnect between the lines of business and the software team, we had to illustrate for them somehow where that disconnect was coming from. And the best way to do that was to show the value stream and show what the software was tracking and wasn't tracking.

[00:42:39] And so, yeah, like you said, we have systems, we have tools that we apply to helping people understand what their operation actually looks like and where they might be able to identify those ratios that matter. And ratios that matter. And if we focus on the matter part, there's ratios all around.

[00:43:06] And like with everything else, a constraint that we have is just the capacity of the human attention that's in the room amongst the folks that you have available to you. And then there's only one thing that any of us can work on reasonably at any given time. And so prioritizing these is super, super critical. And so how do we whittle, what's the process of whittling down the handful or the one or two ratios that really matter?

[00:43:36] So we can comfortably ignore all the others and focus on the top ones. Yeah. I think about two things there. One of them comes directly out of Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, which is a book by Richard Rummel that I think is my favorite strategy book. There's some bulk in it that maybe could have been trimmed a little bit. But a lot of the core ideas from that book I think are just fantastic. And the one that really sticks with me is tractability.

[00:44:08] If you are looking at a thing that you are just completely blocked from gaining any traction on, like that's not a thing you should focus on because it's not productive. Right. So like if somebody has broken their leg and you're with them, you say you're out in the wilderness and your friend has broken their leg and you got to hike back,

[00:44:35] you know, to your campsite and get to your car so that you can get to, you know, whatever emergency services. You're not a doctor. You're not going to focus on setting the bone and like trying to heal their leg. That is not tractable for you. And if you spend your time trying to figure out how to set the bone on their leg, you're wasting effort.

[00:45:01] Like sun's going to set and you're going to be far away from your campsite and, you know, the tigers will get you. I don't know. But like, so you have to focus on what's tractable. What you can do is you can help that person be mobile and helping that person be mobile is really different from fixing their leg. Right. So you start thinking about, OK, how can I help this person be mobile? Maybe there's a way that I can make a sledge that I can drag them on.

[00:45:27] Or, you know, maybe I can, you know, chop a branch off a tree and make a crutch for them or something like that. But like, so tractability matters a lot because if it's intractable, you're spinning, you're wasting your effort. The other thing that I think about that is secondary tractability is leverage.

[00:45:48] So once you have found the things that you can work on, you have to figure out which ones are going to drive the maximum impact. And some of that might be might be gut check. You know, you might not always know. It might be a hypothesis. I think that this thing is going to drive more impact than this other thing. So let's, you know, move down that path.

[00:46:13] Sometimes there's factual information, you know, and and so you have to use your judgment for when you need to go digging for a little bit of facts, digging for a little bit of research. There are carbon solutions. I was talking to somebody about this the other day. Carbon solutions that like actually are more effective than some other carbon solutions. And so if you've got a choice between the two, like pick the more effective one. And that's just factual data that you could actually go look up somewhere.

[00:46:43] But when you're often in in in business or in like trying to create outcomes for humans, things are often fuzzier than that. And you just got to like go. I'm pretty sure this is the path that's going to produce more outcome. And so we'll give that a try. But don't be afraid of of changing your mind if it feels like that's not doing what you want it to do.

[00:47:10] And I think a big company like the one that you're talking about probably struggles with using their gut. And then that leads to them not prioritizing what they apply their focus toward. And then that ends up diluting the efforts. When reality, you know, if I just look at two arbitrary options, one of them can maybe have like a 30 to 50 percent improvement if we can do it.

[00:47:38] And another one will have 300 to 500 percent improvement. There's the same range or margin of error in both of those. But I just know off the bat that going after the second one is going to be way better. So now look at the tractability on that. And, you know, that's a I feel like every time I talk to you, there's a new two by two that I walk away with and like tractability to the leverage two by two is a new one. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:48:02] I mean, so going back to the not always having the data with this particular company, we had a bunch of chemists in the room and we had supply chain experts in the room. And like part of what I try to do is bring in the people who actually have the subject matter expertise.

[00:48:26] Because like I said, you know, a little while ago, I'm never a subject matter expert in this stuff that I'm working with people on. Like I've got a client in the health care space. I have no subject matter expertise in the health care space, but I help my client every time we meet because I can help him think stuff through. And he's got the subject matter expertise.

[00:48:45] So we try to have the right people in the room so that if something really does have like factual things that like are knowable, then we've got people there who either know those facts or know how to find those facts. And we've also got the people who are going to have the most informed, you know, gut reaction to things, even if they don't necessarily have the facts.

[00:49:14] They have the principles. They have the grounding in the discipline that helps them go, yeah, this is probably going to be a better option than these other ones. So I'm curious. You were in the room, I presume, right? Yeah. While this whiteboard exercise happened. Did it seem like the chemists and the supply chain folks and the software folks knew each other from before or were you doing intros alongside them? So they knew each other. Yes, they knew each other, but they weren't close.

[00:49:42] Like this was the most time that they had spent together, like as one team. Yeah. And I think that's another thing that happens with organizations that big multinationals like that one is that we forget that we can easily go talk to Bob or Sally that we see at the water cooler or the cafeteria and go ask them that question instead and reduce that range from 300 to 500 down to whatever they think it is. And you have full access to them.

[00:50:12] So these are some fun new terms that I'm going to use, no doubt. And I could probably use another example. And especially in the world of ratios, you call them ratios. In my brain, for whatever reason, a fraction works easier than a ratio. And nevertheless, I think a lot of folks really focus on the numerator or the input in that case.

[00:50:37] And I feel like there's also, you know, in our lean agile work, if we can cut out 80% of the stuff that you think you need to build and build a roadmap with only 20%, it looks like you're going five times as fast, even though everyone's typing just as fast in both cases. And so do you have any examples from the field in terms of folks who kind of work on the leverage or work on the denominator here? We used to do workshops with the White House.

[00:51:08] We did them for Obama's second term. We did like six or eight of them. And then I think we did eight for Biden's term. They would have these groups. It was like a professional development program. And they would bring in these senior administrators from all kinds of different government agencies. And we would do some workshops with them. And Janice was doing a workshop with one of these groups. This was back in the Obama administration.

[00:51:37] And there was a woman there from Citizenship and Immigration Services. And she was a little skeptical of the workshop. She was like, I'm just not sure how to apply this stuff. Like, the problem that I have is that the president has tasked my team with processing an additional 85,000 refugee and asylum applications over and above our standard quota. But I don't have any additional budget. I don't have any additional staff.

[00:52:07] Right. And I don't know how what you're showing me here is going to help me solve that problem. Janice was not going through mission ratio stuff. So, she was looking at risk assessment. And it's a workshop we call Assumptions and Experiments, which helps people identify critical assumptions in the work stream that they're trying to deliver on.

[00:52:31] And validate those assumptions to make sure that they're not, like, driving themselves down the wrong path or that they don't get tripped up by risks that crop up later. And so, anyway, Janice was like, yeah, I mean, that sounds like a difficult problem. I don't know. Maybe just go think about it and, you know, get back in touch with me if something comes up for you. I'd be curious to hear how it works out.

[00:52:53] So, a couple months later, this woman actually came back to Janice, like, hit her up and said, you know, I went back to work. I was thinking about what you said about assumptions. And I decided to treat each segment of the asylum application form as an assumption that there was some security or administrative value to it.

[00:53:19] And to validate those assumptions, I went looking for the people who actually read and use those sections of the application. So, this person's team's job was basically processing handwritten applications and typing them in to a system so that other people could have access to them.

[00:53:39] And what she discovered was that something like 30% of the fields in the application, and these are like text fields where people are like writing stories, right? 30% of the fields were never looked at by anyone. They had no security value. They had no administrative value. It was just extra text that her team was pounding in. And so, she went back to her team, and this is like a classic lean startup kind of experiment, too.

[00:54:09] She went back to her team, and she said, okay, I want you to stop entering these sections of the application. Just leave them blank. And she waited to see if anybody would complain. Nobody ever complained. Nobody ever missed it. So, nobody came back to her and was like, hey, what happened to this section, right? And so, she learned there that truly nobody was looking at this.

[00:54:33] And by eliminating that 30% of the application that her team was typing in, she was able to make up for the shortfall in time that she had. So, she gained leverage on the mission by changing, in this case, the output, not outcome so much, because she didn't change the outcome. The outcome was that an application is successfully processed, right?

[00:55:01] But the output was a complete, every field filled out application. She was able to change that output. And that maximized the leverage that she had so that she could deliver more outcome, more applications processed per the same staff hours, right? If we looked at her ratio, it was like staff member hours to applications processed. That's the ratio, right?

[00:55:31] So, she had the same staff member hours, but she processed more applications by cutting out the parts of the application that were not useful, right? So, you can think about what are things that you could eliminate from your mission outcomes that don't have a negative impact on your mission outcome.

[00:55:55] Maybe you're doing too much stuff and there's stuff that you don't have to do, but you could still produce exactly the same outcome. So, making sure I understand it, this woman worked in administration at the White House. And the outcome here was increasing the number of processed or successful applications. And one of the inputs to that outcome is the number of applications.

[00:56:23] You can assume that the more applications go in, the more successfully processed applications there would be. And she had this constraint of only so many staff, as well as the time constraint. And so, she can't hire more people and she's got to get more applications through within a finite amount of time.

[00:56:42] And instead of trying to fight for more funding or for an extension, she found a way to increase the leverage by shaving off the denominator or the second side of like, okay, what's the amount of work that's really needed? And then thereby, if you cut out 30% of the data entry needed, you can assume that there's 30% more applications that are being digitized and then ultimately 30% more that can be approved. Yeah.

[00:57:12] Change the amount of work. If we look at the soup kitchen example with staff members to bowls of soup served, one of the things that you could do there that's very similar, it's like analogous to this, is buy pre-prepped vegetables instead of buying whole vegetables. So, if you buy carrots and onions and celery that's already chopped up, then your staff members that are on duty at any given time, they're spending more time cooking and less time cutting. Right?

[00:57:42] And so, she kind of did the same thing. She was like, what's a way that we can shortcut the work that the team is doing that doesn't negatively impact the outcome that we want? Yeah. And I think another takeaway here, you know, I always picture like my first day at a job. And then once you do all the HR stuff, they're giving you like real contextual onboarding. And when I was younger, I used to assume that was all gospel.

[00:58:09] And now, you know, as a consultant, we're going in and doing onboarding and we've got our own frameworks and everything to try and extract as much information as quickly as possible. The whole time knowing that, hey, this is all arbitrary. We need to know it to align with the client and work with them. But there's a lot of assumptions baked into here that these clients have been working here for 10, 20 years. And assume that, you know, it's someone over in chemistry or someone over in supply chain that just has to do it this way.

[00:58:36] Whereas they're really all arbitrary stones that can be turned over. And then it's a matter of figuring out which ones are more tractable, which ones give you the most leverage to choose which ones to go turn over first. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I've seen so many organizations like there were organizations that came to labs, you know, where where we met. Who you'd ask them why they do a thing and they'd say, well, that's that's the rule. That's what we that's the way we do it. We've done it this way forever.

[00:59:03] And I'd be like, OK, that rule was made by a person 20 years ago. That person had less information than you do now. And like they were they were no smarter than you. They were no better than you. Like you can literally just change that rule given that you have new information. A lot of this is like around application security and things like that.

[00:59:32] Like people would walk in with these rules that were so outdated. They'd be like, but we have to follow this process because this is how we've always done it. And I'd be like, that process was created by humans. You are a human. You are actually smarter than the humans who created this process. You have way more information because the world is really different. You should make a new decision.

[00:59:57] And it didn't always help because sometimes those rules were intractable in and of themselves. Sometimes they were a gospel. But some sometimes people kind of went, oh, yeah, you're right. It literally was just like it was probably some 24 year old, you know, in 1995 who like decided that this was the way we do security. And like things are different now.

[01:00:24] For our folks listening that maybe have a sense of what their mission is, they have a sense of the ratio and really the most important parts, the ratio of the matter within there that help them move the needle. So they have visibility into those confounding constraints that are limiting them. And they're looking to find ways on increasing impact or increasing the leverage.

[01:00:49] What's a way that y'all might use that helps foster that creativity or ideas or look for the assumptions within the system that make it seem like it's the way it is now that can solving for it can lead to bigger impact? Yeah, there's a tool that I came across. Actually, a former client introduced me to it. And it's called Impact Mapping. And it was originally developed by Ingrid Dominguez.

[01:01:16] And then a guy named Goiko Adzic wrote a book about it, a big, big blue book called Impact Mapping. I've got it lurking here somewhere. And it's a really interesting tool that I think really helps drive, like you said, that creative process to see where are the possibilities of things that we could affect. So an impact map starts with a goal.

[01:01:44] You have a goal on the left. I'm trying to do this from your perspective. So you've got a goal over here. Then you think about who are the actors at play in that goal. And I'll walk through some of this in more detail in a second. But you've got a goal. You've got actors. You've got impacts that those actors could have on your goal. And then you have deliverables that your company could do to support those actors to deliver the impacts to support your goal.

[01:02:13] So it kind of like bounces back and forth a little bit. But basically, if you take a mission ratio like staff members to bowls of soup served, you can turn that into your goal by flipping things around and saying more bowls of soup per staff member. Like that is our goal. We want to provide more bowls of soup per staff member. So that's now the goal. So an impact map has goals on the left, then actors.

[01:02:43] Those are the people who are involved with the goal. You've got impacts. That's things that the actors could do in order to have an impact on the goal. And then deliverables, which is things that you could do to help the actors do the thing that they could do to support the goal. So it kind of bounces back and forth a little bit, but it'll be clearer with this example. So I'm going to talk through – we talked before about soup kitchens.

[01:03:09] There's a very specific soup kitchen that I'll talk through that's called the World Central Kitchen. It was founded by Jose Andres in 2010. And their mission is to provide meals to people in crisis. And they do this all over the world. Most recently in Ukraine and Gaza, in Florida after Helene and Milton, and most recently in Los Angeles after the big fires that we had in January.

[01:03:36] So they provide meals anywhere people are in situations of crisis. And they've got a really novel way of doing this that Chef Andres refers to as a software, not hardware approach. They've got something like 140 full-time staff. And yet they're able to kick out literally thousands of meals per day in disaster areas all over the world. And they do this because they have a system.

[01:04:05] It's like an operating system that's capable of running a food prep and distribution operation. And the hardware – and this is where we're getting back into that soup kitchen metaphor I used – the hardware part, like their cooktops and things, actually comes from borrowed infrastructure from local restaurants that still have working kitchens in this disaster area.

[01:04:29] But because they work in disaster areas, the number of working kitchens is still limited, right? There are some places where the power is out or the gas is out or maybe the restaurant's been destroyed. And so we still have limited cooktops. So we'll assume that that's what we're solving for. We're looking at meals served per cooktop, okay?

[01:04:53] Okay. So given that constraint, with the mission ratio being cooktops to meals provided – because I always put the input on the left and the outcome on the right – cooktops to meals provided – we'll take that and turn it into the goal on our impact map. So we flip it around and say the goal is to provide more meals per cooktop.

[01:05:20] So we place that goal at the beginning of the impact map. Then we think about who are the actors that are involved in that goal. There's the restaurant staff. These are local, not World Central Kitchen people. The restaurant staff who are doing the cooking in their facilities. There's the person receiving the meal. And finally, there's World Central Kitchen staff. And those are the people who are kind of enabling this whole process to happen.

[01:05:47] So next, we think about the impact section on that map. Each of these actors has different ways that they can impact this transaction. So the restaurant staff can support us by cooking faster somehow. They can provide more meals by cooking faster. They could increase the volume in each increment of cooking. This is going back to having a bigger pot on the stove, right?

[01:06:16] The World Central Kitchen staff could source more cooktops somehow. The meal recipients, our third actor, they could potentially cook for themselves. And that doesn't change World Central Kitchen's mission in any way. Their mission was to provide meals to people in crisis, not cook meals necessarily. So the meal recipients potentially could cook their own.

[01:06:46] For the deliverables and for the restaurant staff, a thing that we could do for them is we could send them pre-prepped ingredients so that they spend more time cooking, less time cutting. I mentioned that before. Or maybe we could find them some volunteer prep workers or something like that. Or we could send them bigger pots to increase the volume of what they cook. For the World Central Kitchen staff on the ground who are trying to source more cooktops,

[01:07:14] we could print flyers for them or we could launch a social media campaign or something like that. So that's a thing we could do. Finally, the meal recipient. We could enable the meal recipient to cook for themselves. And that's what's really clever about World Central Kitchen's operation, is that they realized that if there are some restaurant kitchens that are still working, there are probably some home kitchens that are still working too.

[01:07:43] So they essentially increased the number of available cooktops by enlisting home cooktops as well. So the people who can cook for themselves at home don't have to burden the restaurant system that they've got. They can cook their own stuff. So WCK, World Central Kitchen, provides meal kits for those people and lets them cook it at home.

[01:08:07] So that's, I think, a good example of how looking at an impact map and seeing the people involved in your transaction and seeing what those people could do and then how you could support those people in doing those things. That's what drives you to finding those places where you've got the most leverage and can drive more outcome. So some things for me to remember, like keep on track with the goal.

[01:08:37] And in this case, it was getting the most number of meals to people. Looking at the various actors involved, the employees of World Central Kitchen, the restaurant staff they were enlisting, and also the customers or the end beneficiary, like the person at the home that they're looking to support. And then looking at the constraints across the entire map versus what maybe seems obvious to the eye at first.

[01:09:04] And the more we, like most things, the more we are able to deconstruct a system, the more ideas can flow into optimizing the system. Hey, Jason, there's a few questions that I'd like to ask everyone that's on here. And the first one's on an inspiring team. So what is a favorite team of yours? This could be a fictional team or a real team. It could be a team that you were on or a team that you made known about that really inspires you.

[01:09:34] I, I'm really inspired by the team at the Earthshot Prize right now. I think they're, they're doing incredible work. If they offered me a job right now, I would say yes. Wink, wink. We'll send them, we'll send them a note. That is, that is a team that I would love to join. They're, you know, they're having a massive impact.

[01:09:59] A ratio that's important for them is dollars, actually pounds. They're a British organization. So pounds awarded to pounds of catalyzed funding. And they have awarded 15 million pounds in prize money over the last four years. And they have catalyzed over 86 million pounds in follow-on funding. That's a hell of a ratio. Like, I think it's pretty impressive.

[01:10:29] And yeah, they're just, they're, I got to spend time with them in Cape Town last year. And I've done some work with them since. And they're just, they're very effective. And they're just lovely. They're kind, thoughtful people. And led by someone from the British royal family, if I remember? It's actually founded by Prince William. Yeah. And then the CEO, though, is the former chief innovation officer. And then I think chief sustainability officer from Nike.

[01:11:00] She went and joined as the CEO. She actually, I'm sorry, she just left like last week. And there's a new CEO now. A related question is about, like, maybe a product or a service that you recently unboxed or experienced. That just felt like, hey, the team behind this really, did you just get it? There's something special here? Is there anything that comes to mind? I mean, there is an organization that I'm part of right now.

[01:11:27] I'm participating in a fellowship called the Climate Base Fellowship. It's a 12-week intensive educational experience around climate-related stuff. And they are just crushing it. Like, I have delivered programs before, never to the scale that they're doing it. And I know what it takes to deliver a program well.

[01:11:54] And, like, tactically, they are so dialed in. Like, they do hours and hours of programming every single week, every single day. There's, like, three or four things on the calendar every day. And everything works. Like, everything is just really dialed in and buttoned up. I'm super, super impressed by it.

[01:12:18] If we had to go with a product, then I have a polytune guitar tuner that I got recently that I took it out of the box. I plugged my guitar in and went, oh, yeah. And it's, like, it's a very simple device with one button and a little display. And my guitar is always in tune. And, like, I love my polytune guitar tuner. But, honestly, I don't think that much about products anymore.

[01:12:47] I think more about people and stuff that people are doing. So, I think if I had to pick one or the other, it would definitely be as a climate-based team for just the way that they deliver on their program. And if you had to guess, what do you think their mission ratios are? Climate base's mission is, like, to accelerate climate solutions by helping people find careers in the climate space or something like that. It's kind of, it's originally career-focused.

[01:13:16] I feel like their mission is drifting to something that might be a little more powerful even. But, in terms of ratios, I think they do look at how many people they help place in climate-related jobs. So, they started as a jobs platform and they added this fellowship later. And, their goal is to help people transition from traditional careers to climate sector careers.

[01:13:45] And so, they look at, you know, how many people they're actually successfully placing at organizations and stuff like that. As far as the input side, the ratio, like, their staff, they're, like, 15 people. I would think about things like, you know, how many people are we placing per staff member? Do we gain more leverage by staffing up?

[01:14:09] Or, do we gain more leverage by changing our prioritization, changing the work that we do so that we can place more people per staff member that we have? That's wonderful. That's wonderful. We'll make sure to have a link to them in the fellowship in the show notes as well. Thanks. I do have a couple of things to plug. I have two workshops that are going to happen in mid-June. The week of June 16th, I'm doing three sessions of my Essential Collaboration Patterns workshop.

[01:14:38] I'm going to do a session that is timed for EMEA, Europe and the Middle East and Asia. I'm going to do – or, sorry, Europe, Middle East and Africa. I'm going to do a session that's timed for Asia Pacific. And I'm going to do a session that's timed for the Americas. So, that's Essential Collaboration Patterns. That's, like, the kinds of tools and techniques that Janice and I taught you, you know, in facilitation training all those many years ago.

[01:15:04] And then I'm doing a mission ratio workshop on June 22nd is the tentative date right now. But maybe I can give you a link that goes to my events page and folks can just see when those events – when they actually get slated for. But those workshops, the mission ratio workshop is all about identifying your companies, your teams, your personal mission ratios and how you can improve.

[01:15:31] We'll go through the impact mapping exercise and stuff like that. So, good workshops coming up. And, of course, we've got a book. And the book helps. We'll have – we've already got show note links from Janice's episode. And we'll have those up again for the book. And what's the best way for folks to get a hold of you if they want to learn more or get your help? Honestly, the best way right now is to find me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty easy to find on LinkedIn. So, look for me there.

[01:16:00] And I respond to direct messages on LinkedIn. And then we can connect. And I'll talk. If people want to talk, I'm always happy to talk. So. Awesome. Well, hey, Jason, thanks a lot for making the time with us, man. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed that episode with Jason Frazier about mission-driven organizations. Early in my career, someone gifted me the book, Let My People Go Surfing, a book that was written by Patagonia's founder.

[01:16:29] Ever since I read it back then, this topic has been something that occupied my brain space. How can companies have a dramatic net positive effect on the world while also being focused on profit? Integral, we got to explore this further through our not-profit, Integrate Detroit. It was a coding finishing school for boot camp graduates and self-taught engineers and aimed largely at bridging the race and gender gap amongst the technologists in the city of Detroit.

[01:16:58] What we did was put on a 13-week program and curated to folks who already had day jobs. So we had three evening sessions during the week and a full day on the weekend. And I'm proud that almost all the graduates went on to find meaningful careers in technology and had increased opportunities as well as earning. Some of our best folks at Integral started out in the program and rose to the ranks of manager and lead engineers and have gone on to do really great things in their careers.

[01:17:27] And I wanted to share some of the things where it didn't just help our community, but also helped us as a corporation. I already mentioned that it was a pipeline of talent for us, especially underrepresented talent. It also had some inadvertent benefits for us. There was more of an articulation about our brand that came about as we spoke about Integrate Detroit. We'd find more folks in the community and in our customer base drawn more to us,

[01:17:54] not because we were the best at building products and product teams, because there was an alignment in helping foster growth in the community in a similar way that they saw in their vision. We also had a platform to attract executives from our own talent pipeline, as well as our customer talent pipeline, as a result of creating volunteer opportunities for folks who also wanted to help in a similar way and had similar skills. Helping this pool of talent with the maturing into the industry also helped fortify our methods and practices,

[01:18:25] which ultimately helped us improve the talent maturity amongst our customer base, who we collaborated with, as we modernize their operations in their software teams, as well as even their culture. This no doubt helped us a ton with establishing ourselves as a company in this community, finding amazing team members to work with, and ultimately growing both our revenue and profit as well along the way. So if you're considering a mission-oriented initiative or doubling down on your mission as a company,

[01:18:54] and not sure if it's worth the distraction or risk or the cost, know that there are long-term benefits that come into play here more than I ever imagined when we started. And even if it doesn't show up in the next week's sales pipeline, there's a ton of benefit in attracting talent, establishing your brand, and what you stand for, as well as finding more customers for your products and services. Now don't get me wrong, this wasn't smooth and perfect.

[01:19:20] It took the typical ruffles that comes with starting a new initiative, and also got sometimes deprioritized as we rode the ups and downs of our day jobs at Integral. One thing that I'm sure of upon reflection is that the decisions we made in alignment with the mission are the ones that I feel most proud of, and the ones where we deprioritize the mission are the ones that only worked in the short term and don't really feel that good anymore.

[01:19:48] Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Convergence.fm. We will be back next week with more content on fostering engaged teams who ship delightful products. We'll see you then. Thank you for joining me on the Convergence podcast today. Subscribe to the Convergence podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your content.

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