In my previous article, I shared how the team at Exygy has continued to reinvent itself in order to realign our work and how we conduct ourselves with our mission and values. In doing so, we’ve tried some unconventional approaches over the years, including making much of our work open-source and coaching our clients on skills that would make our services no longer needed.
Over the next several months, I’d like to invite you along on a journey, through a series of articles, as we embark on another one of our unconventional strategies. I’ll share an account of how our team attempts to better align our time, effort, and investments with our unwavering mission to improve lives. I’ll share our processes, missteps and learnings with you as well. My hope is that this series encourages you to push your organizations to challenge the norms in service of creating more positive impact.
The Opportunity
As a consultancy, we spend the better part of our energy empowering clients to achieve greater impact. Over time, we’ve also grown our own backlog of ideas we’d love to pursue — only if there were clients willing to fund them. Like many organizations, we’ve tried to allocate a percentage of time each week to work on passion projects, but they almost always become neglected and shelved for “someday,” which rarely, if ever, comes around.
But why should something we’re passionate about be left for last? If we recognize unmet opportunities to support our community, is it not our duty to chase them regardless of our business model? We began to challenge whether we were doing enough to achieve our collective goal of building more healthy and resilient communities. In doing so, we shifted our thinking from “how might we serve our clients better?” to “how might we serve our communities better?” This new framing liberated us! It encouraged us to expand the ways we serve our community beyond consulting services. We decided to experiment with a few strategies in 2020, and one of them was to sponsor our own project.
The Experiment
We started by incorporating each of the new strategies into our organization’s planning process. Our team has adopted the OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) framework to plan and track our priorities. Starting this year, we allocated one of our three company objectives to pursuing our own project. We call this initiative “Exygy Labs”.
Making Exygy Labs an official OKR meant we had an accountability mechanism to set quarterly key result targets and measure progress regularly, just like we have been with our consulting work.
While testing this structure for the past two quarters, we’ve realized some early shortcomings and had to evolve our structure in a couple ways. Firstly, while this objective received more attention and team buy-in, we still struggled to balance this work against our consulting project commitments on a day-to-day basis. If we are to treat this project with the same intensity as our client work, we need to structure it the same way, including allocating a specific project budget we draw down on and staffing the team’s time on the project.
Secondly, we desired a more explicit definition of what success looks like for Exygy Labs. What would need to be true after each quarter for us to continue investing in this objective? We’re now in the process of defining stage gates to prompt regular assessments of the impact we’re making compared to our targets.
The Project
In light of the current crises, our team’s been drawn to supporting the most vulnerable populations in our community. We’ve kicked off conversations about how this pandemic has exposed and heightened structural inequities, and there’s so much more to do. At the top of our backlog of passion projects is addressing how the current virus is affecting the housing insecure population.
To help narrow our problem space into a more specific “how might we” statement, we asked:
- Who is most vulnerable in our community?
- What are the underlying pain points they are facing?
- Where can we add the most value, given our skill sets and expertise?
- Who else is working in this field and what are they already doing?
Over the past few months, we conducted research on how our community has adapted housing services, interviewed numerous case workers across the nation, and participated in volunteer groups such as the Emergency Design Collective.
Through this process, we discovered that many critical housing services have been delayed since the pandemic because front-line workers are struggling to adapt their in-person and paper-based processes. Based on these findings and our background in successfully digitizing workflows, we have narrowed our focus to addressing “how might we support front-line workers in a transition to a more tech-based, remote process?”
“How might we support front-line workers in a transition to a more tech-based, remote process?”
What’s next?
Heading into the third quarter, our team has set new key results for Exygy Labs, which include:
- Creating a working group from the community to help design and drive parts of the process *
- Ideating and prototyping innovations to support front-line workers’ transition
- Testing product-market fit to ensure the innovations are addressing targeted pain points
- Building partnerships with stakeholders and funders that will allow this innovation to scale
* It’s important to highlight that our team has recently made changes in our OKR process to more intentionally fight racism. We have committed to including strategies to foster more diversity in each of our objectives. For this objective, we will ensure that our working group includes representation from the QTBIPOC community.
This quarter is about forming a community around this initiative and taking action together. I’m excited to involve you all in the process and share this new journey with everyone!
I welcome your thoughts on how we can even better align our work with the needs of our communities. And I’d love to learn how you’ve challenged your team to act more in line with your values!
