Has your organization hit a wall? Embrace the Pivot!

You love your mission: fighting climate change, or creating economic paths for disadvantaged groups, or feeding the hungry. It’s what gets you up in the morning even if it exhausts you by nightfall. And you secretly love the mechanism through which you work on your mission: your model, your services, your team, maybe even the building or office you work from. Maybe you created that mechanism and it’s your baby. Maybe it was broken and you fixed it. Maybe you stumbled into it but now it feeds your soul. So what happens when mission (the “what and why”) and mechanism (the “how”) no longer work together?

Maybe your mechanism is operating smoothly as long as you focus less and less on the target population you’re trying to help. Or possibly your mechanism just doesn’t work and can’t stay afloat financially. Or, just hypothetically, it could be that an evil government entity (Federal, state, or even local) is putting up roadblocks to slow or even destroy your mechanism. What do you do?

This is one of the most difficult decisions that can face any mission-oriented venture. It can happen to a for-profit, a non-profit, or even a function within a corporation. It creates a few stark choices. Do you try to stick with both mission and mechanism, and often watch both fail? Stick with a successful mechanism and let the mission drift away? Give up? Or do you do what most successful ventures have to do sooner or later: pivot.

Most successful mission-driven organizations have chosen the pivot – and embraced it. They have learned to pivot from one mechanism to another. Most have had to do this pivot 3-5 times, until they find the mechanism that enables them to deliver on their mission in a sustainable way. 

These are challenging times. The pivot is likely to be more and more necessary as functional government collapses, simultaneously increasing the need for mission-oriented work while decreasing the viability of mechanisms we’ve all learned to depend on.

The Pivot

The pivot is easy to describe and hard to do: stay solidly focused on the mission, but shift to a different mechanism.

Easier said than done. Organizationally, you’ve worked hard to sell investors or donors, employees and other stakeholders on that neat package of Mission + Mechanism. Now you’re proposing to dump the mechanism but somehow keep them all on board. 

Personally, you may have honed this neat package of Mission + Mechanism over a period of years, and now you may have to admit that the package is imperfect or unsustainable. Especially by the second or third pivot, the toughest audience may be yourself: how do you find the energy necessary to keep going?

The search for a new mechanism can also threaten the mission. Key stakeholders can get hyper-focused on a shiny new mechanism and lose sight of whether or not it really will achieve the mission. (That’s especially true when the new mechanism might involve a new brick-and-mortar building, as well-meaning supporters succumb to an “edifice complex.”)

It really can work!

Examples of successful pivots make for some pretty compelling stories. 

• Food trucks to school lunches (for-profit).  This for-profit impact start-up aimed at helping urban immigrant populations use their own ethnic foods to move onto a path toward sustainable income and wealth. The original mechanism chosen was food trucks. A process was carefully mapped out taking the target population from working on food trucks, to renting their own trucks to operate, to buying trucks and ultimately to brick-and-mortar restaurants. Local officials and media fell in love with the concept. However, the trucks that succeeded were primarily run by more financially-comfortable people, well outside the target population. The operational and financial numbers looked better and better, while the target population got less and less benefit. 

The Pivot: Investors helped with the difficult decision to pivot to an alternative mechanism. Moving through a succession of alternative mechanisms, including catering, food products, and school lunches, the organization is now thriving with a focus on “fresh prepared meals for kids, seniors and families as the dominant business.”

Learn more about Stockpot Malden

• In-person retail show to hybrid on-line/store/museum (non-profit). A non-profit start-up aimed at supporting the Zuni community. The Zuni Pueblo depends on revenue from the arts but is located far from the major Santa Fe and Albuquerque markets, often forcing individuals to choose between struggling at home with “subsistence art” or moving away from their community, family and traditions. The mission was to create “sustainable pathways promoting Zuni arts, education and economic development while respecting the traditions and lifeways of the Zuni People.” The original mechanism was a once/year art in-person show, piggy-backed on the largest indigenous art market in the world. This enabled Zuni artists to show and sell their work directly to the public at full retail prices.  The show was highly successful, called “…one of the world’s top ten best indigenous art shows in 2016…” The show was run again a second year; and across the two years, the shows presented over 250 artists, generating more than $650,000 in sales which all went directly to the artists and their families. This great start then hit the mission/mechanism wall. The once/year events were positive but incredibly labor-intensive, fell short of creating any “sustainable pathway”, and did not help with systemic challenges of generational loss of traditional skills. 

The Pivot: Over five years multiple workshops and meetings were held with the community and analogous efforts were explored. Several mechanisms were tried but failed to take off, including developing a museum with educational programs, and a gift shop within the community. Ultimately, the organization pivoted to building a phased development on an interstate highway outside the community, with easy access from the community. This started with an on-line store giving artists year-round access to the market, and has now has moved beyond “proof of concept” with a small museum with a storefront for in-person sales.

Visit the on-line store

 [Personal note: I’m still working directly with this project. If you’d like more information or to support us, go to https://www.thekeshifoundation.org/projects or contact me directly.]

Embrace the pivot

From these examples and others, we can draw a few lessons about how to pivot:

1. Keep the focus on your mission. Never forget why you started all this and who is really supposed to benefit.
2. Don’t fall in love with your mechanism. The way you thought this would work was certainly clever and seemed reasonable. It’s your baby. It’s hard to give it up. But sooner or later, you have to remember lesson #1 above.
3. Get help to focus and pivot. Don’t try to take it all on yourself. Use your Board and investors. Don’t try to keep them in the dark or just keep reassuring them. One start-up even created a “Mission Board” of investors to balance all the mechanism-focused operating and financial pressures from the Management Board.
4. Don’t get discouraged. Moving away from the mechanism to preserve the mission may be a sign of maturity, learning and progress. It may be the critical core-competency you need.

Embrace the pivot.