In May, two cross-functional teams from SAY San Diego including everyone from the CEO to frontline staff shared their journeys applying Lean Innovation strategies over the past three months to develop two new key organizational priorities: integrating service linkages across their organization and advancing their preschool/early learning programs. The chosen priorities advance SAY’s vision of opportunity, equity and well-being as well as the Live Well San Diego principles of Building Better Health, Living Safely and Thriving.

Through a two-day Bootcamp and 12-week Accelerator program with Moves the Needle, the teams spent time first gathering information from their customers (staff, parents and community members) to best understand the current environment and most important issues. They then developed bold solutions and ran a number of quick experiments to test the riskiest pieces of their proposed solutions.

After a significant amount of learning and gathering sufficient evidence, both teams are taking their proposed promising solutions to the next level of development:

• The service linkages team discovered siloed practices were obstructing their organization-wide ability to provide comprehensive resources. With simple resource sheets and staff engagement, they could remedy this challenge and explore eventual internal tech and staffing solutions.
• The early learning team is now creating a prototype "Social Benefit Preschool," to be co-designed with parents, deepen parental involvement, align more families with SAY’s overall mission, and expose more children from diverse and economically challenged backgrounds to an enriching and multi-cultural curriculum.

The process was “exhausting in an exhilarating way," said a team member, and “very eye-opening.” Another commented that the new way of learning and strategizing “pushed us outside of our comfort zone repeatedly but allowed us to bond and move forward in ways we didn't think we could.”

For more information about applying Lean Innovation Strategies to organizational development, contact Amelia Klawon, Co-Director of Nonprofit and Social Impact Programs at Moves the Needle at amelia@movestheneedle.com. To learn about SAY San Diego and their new priorities, please contact info@saysandiego.org.