Introduction: Why use this approach

Who is this for?

This guide exists to help teams navigate the question "how can we make a difference and start something that really works?" This approach uses more rigour than guessing, but with less effort than completing an in-depth theory of change development process. This e-book exists to help members, or leaders, of a team evaluate the landscape of a topic area and their own skills before jumping in assumptions-first to solve a problem. This approach can also be used as a curriculum design for a coach or facilitator aiming to help a team over a period of time.

Quick but measurable

Personally, I love the process of identifying a theory of change (your map of how what you're doing will shift the external world and make change). But writing a theory of change is hard and can be overly mechanical. Teams can take too long to think through what they're going to try, or not put any time into strategy at all - just running with pure ideas. Both are less likely to get a good result. The Impact Canvas approach is supposed to give you a lean pathway to collaborate on working out what to try, based on some great scoping. This guide should also help you how to work out what to measure, without needing measurement or evaluation to be someone’s full-time job.

Enabling collaboration

It's never too late to go through this process, whether you've been a team for a month or many years. The impact canvas approach relies on a collaborative culture where teammates are welcome to name issues and ideas. It won't work effectively in a context where people are not speaking freely with each other about what they think works and doesn't work. You can also use the guidelines and sessions of the lean impact approach to enhance your team culture & learn to think together better.

You will work together as a group to:

• Understand your strengths

• Notice your existing biases and assumptions

• Dive deep into an issue you care about to understand what causes it

• Explore and expand your vision for a society you want to live in

• Focus on what only you can do

• Try things and review your thinking frequently

• Marry measurement and meaning with a insight focused evaluation method that works for you

The lean impact canvas can help you assemble all of these pieces over time. Working through the assignments in this guide will help you fill it out completely. Give yourselves enough time to work through it together.

Problem-Solution Fit

One of the key ideas behind the Impact Canvas is that while startup culture and starting things tends to be about ideas, solving complex issues in society is better done as an enquiry. Coming up with an idea outside of the context in which you're intervening is a recipe for a whirlpool of unintended consequences. We cannot continue to build a culture around silver-bullet ideas and hero-preneurs. The Impact Canvas is about building teams that ask questions together and prototype their way forward. Even something you think is THE PROBLEM may not be the problem at all, that's how important it is to stay in the questions. There's also an issue of scale. Think community gardens to prevent climate change. A mismatch of problem and intervention leads you somewhere mildly empowering, but not necessarily effective.

As you identify the nature of the problem, you will see what kinds of interventions seem most relevant given the factors at play. This will help you focus and give you somewhere to start even though many issues in today's world seem insurmountably tangled. If there is a supermarket chain coming into your local neighbourhood and contributing to gentrification and a reduction of locally owned businesses, is the problem at the level of the main street stakeholders? Is the problem at the level of regional housing prices? Is the problem at the level of city policy on building and land use? Or is it about a subsidised oil price making multinational food companies outcompete local producers? The truth is, it’s probably a bit of everything. But through some investigation you can discover which problem to tackle first for greatest leverage. One of the most powerful ways is to fill out the impact canvas as a group to discover new ways of thinking about problem-solution fit through thinking about the surrounding system and root causes of the issues.