Most new and aspiring changemakers make a huge mistake early in their journeys.
They rely on vague notions of trying to solve the problem once and for all.
And I understand why, of course. We’re all eager to make meaningful progress.
But I see newbies adopting flimsy mission statements that ignore the details of how their actions will lead to the problem getting better.
They’re fundraising, lobbying, and protesting before they have a clear idea of how the problem can be influenced.
Putting the cart before the horse.
In reality, going straight for big action can hurt your opportunity for long-term impact.
Because there are no shortcuts. Influencing the problem and your community takes time.
And if you burn through your reputation with actions that actually make the problem worse, you’ll regret not being more deliberative.
So if you’re early in your changemaker journey, aim to be hyper-realistic with your time and energy so that every action makes a positive difference.
This can actually be the hardest part of changemaking – developing clear objectives, each backed up with practical actions that will lead to measurable improvement.
So today I want to help you avoid the impatient rush to “change the world”, and offer up another idea to help you get the ball rolling.
A Roadmap for Success
So let’s say your community has a big problem…but you don’t know what exact goal should be adopted or what actions to take.
This is the perfect time to design an easy-to-understand and straight-forward objective – say reducing the problem by 10% – and the series of sub-goals that, if attained, would achieve the objective. Then, each sub-goal could be further defined, with practical actions and accompanying metrics.
It sounds so basic, but building a fundamental objectives hierarchy can be a powerful start toward solving the community’s toughest problem. You can create it quickly. You’ll learn a ton just by producing it. And you can use your fundamental objectives hierarchy to get feedback from interested stakeholders and (hopefully) get their buy-in.
I’m a big fan of fundamental objective hierarchies – which I call problem roadmaps – in the projects I lead and also with my coaching clients.
So today I’m going to show you how you can create one.
Let’s dive in.
Step 1. Brainstorm a list of goals.
For example, a list of goals about reducing and/or ending homelessness in a community might include:
- Provide permanent housing solutions for all homeless individuals and families.
- Ensuring access to supportive services and resources.
- Establish emergency shelters with adequate capacity and resources to accommodate homeless individuals.
- Develop and implement outreach programs to identify and connect homeless individuals with support services.
- Advocate for increased funding and resources from local, state, and federal governments to address homelessness.
- Collaborate with community organizations, businesses, and faith-based groups to mobilize support and resources for homeless individuals.
- Provide job training, education, and employment opportunities to homeless individuals to facilitate their transition to stable housing.
- Ensure access to affordable housing options for low-income individuals and families.
- Address systemic issues such as poverty, lack of affordable healthcare, and discrimination contributing to homelessness.
- Increase the availability of affordable housing units through development incentives and subsidies.
- Advocate for policies that protect tenants’ rights and prevent discrimination based on housing status.
- Expand access to mental health services, substance abuse treatment, and other supportive services for homeless individuals.
- Develop and implement eviction prevention programs to assist individuals and families at risk of losing their homes.
- Educate the community about the realities of homelessness and challenge stereotypes and stigmas associated with it.
Phew! That’s a lot.
But it’s actually pretty similar to the result of any stakeholder brainstorming session.
Step 2: Distinguish between means and ends
Before you adopt all of these overlapping and interrelated goals, it’s a good idea to separate them into means and ends.
To do that, you can ask two questions of each brainstormed goal:
- Could this goal serve as a method to achieve another goal? These are means objectives.
- Does this goal represent the core reason behind your endeavors? These are fundamental objectives.
Here’s the previous 14-item list separated into means and ends:
Ends (Fundamental Objectives):
- Provide permanent housing solutions for all homeless individuals and families.
- Ensuring access to supportive services and resources.
- Ensure access to affordable housing options for low-income individuals and families.
- Address systemic issues such as poverty, lack of affordable healthcare, and discrimination contributing to homelessness.
Means (Means Objectives):
- Establish emergency shelters with adequate capacity and resources to accommodate homeless individuals.
- Develop and implement outreach programs to identify and connect homeless individuals with support services.
- Advocate for increased funding and resources from local, state, and federal governments to address homelessness.
- Collaborate with community organizations, businesses, and faith-based groups to mobilize support and resources for homeless individuals.
- Provide job training, education, and employment opportunities to homeless individuals to facilitate their transition to stable housing.
- Increase the availability of affordable housing units through development incentives and subsidies.
- Advocate for policies that protect tenants’ rights and prevent discrimination based on housing status.
- Expand access to mental health services, substance abuse treatment, and other supportive services for homeless individuals.
- Develop and implement eviction prevention programs to assist individuals and families at risk of losing their homes.
- Educate the community about the realities of homelessness and challenge stereotypes and stigmas associated with it.
Step 3: Convert the fundamental objectives into pragmatic goals
Now, let’s take a closer look at each of the 4 fundamental objectives to make sure they are realistic and pragmatic.
The last thing you want to do at the beginning of successful change initiative is to adopt unrealistic, utopian goals.
It may seem like the right thing to do, but unachievable goals only serve to undercut incremental gains and sow pessimism when they aren’t attained.
So, let’s reframe each fundamental objective into a more pragmatic, achievable goal:
- Provide permanent housing solutions for all homeless individuals and families.
- Pragmatic Goal: Secure funding and resources to transition 25% of homeless individuals and families into stable, temporary housing within the next two years.
- Ensuring access to supportive services and resources.
- Pragmatic Goal: Establish mobile outreach teams to connect homeless individuals with immediate support services, aiming to reach 80% of homeless populations within the city within the next year.
- Ensure access to affordable housing options for low-income individuals and families.
- Pragmatic Goal: Increase the availability of subsidized housing vouchers by 15% over the next three years, targeting low-income families with children and individuals experiencing chronic homelessness.
- Address systemic issues such as poverty, lack of affordable healthcare, and discrimination contributing to homelessness.
- Pragmatic Goal: Implement a job training and placement program to assist 50% of homeless individuals in securing stable employment within the next 18 months, addressing some of their fundamental causes of homelessness.
Step 4: Determine what accomplishing each of these pragmatic goals will ultimately achieve
Now it’s time to imagine achieving each of your pragmatic goals.
What an amazing day that will be!
By analyzing each one using local knowledge about the problem’s size and scope, you’ll get a back-of-the-envelope sense of how much you could actually reduce homelessness.
In our example above, I’ve estimated that achieving each of these 4 goals will likely reduce homelessness in my community by approximately 10%.
That’s a huge amount, especially considering the persistent rise in homelessness over the last few years.
So, I’m going to adopt that as my fundamental objective.
Step 5: Organize the fundamental objective, pragmatic goals, and means into a hierarchical structure
In the final step, arrange everything you’ve created in the previous steps into a hierarchy, with one fundamental objective at the top and pragmatic goals in the middle. Then, each of the means are added at the bottom as contributing to one of the pragmatic goals.
Here’s how it looks for our example:
Notice that not every brainstormed means made it into the final roadmap.
And that’s OK. You can’t do everything, and some ideas don’t contribute as much to the fundamental objective.
Create your problem roadmap before acting
If you follow these steps, you’ll have a super clear, super pragmatic roadmap for reducing homelessness in your community. Or tackling any other complex problem.
And I want you to remember: dreams of big impact are great.
But creating a clear ultimate objective and pragmatic goals, each backed up with practical actions that will lead to measurable improvement – now that help you achieve impact rather than just talk about it.
See you next Tuesday.
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Whenever you’re ready, there are two ways I can help you:
→ I’m a strategic advisor for the toughest societal problems like poverty, crime and homelessness. People come to me when they want to stop spinning their wheels and get transformative, systems-level change.
→ I’m a coach for emerging and executive leaders in the social and public sectors who want to make progress on their biggest goals and challenges.
Let’s find out how I can help you become transformational.