The Disruptor Podcast
"The Disruptor Series," your blueprint for groundbreaking innovation, started as a periodic segment of the Apex Podcast.
This is not your standard conversation around Design Thinking or Product Market Fit; this is the series that dares to go beyond conventional wisdom, confronting the status quo and exposing the raw power of disruptive thinking.
Our journey begins with intensely provocative dialogues that set the stage for the unexpected.
With a focus on Experience Disruptors, Product Market Fit, and a range of other captivating topics, we bring you face-to-face with the ideas that are revolutionizing traditional buying and selling experiences.
But we don't stop at ideas; we dive into their real-world applications.
"The Disruptor" offers an unfiltered glimpse into the lives and minds of those who are being disrupted, creating disruption, or strategically navigating it.
Our guests range from industry veterans to daring newcomers, all willing to share their experiences in shifting the paradigms that define their stakeholders' experiences.
If you're tired of business as usual and eager to question the preconceived notions that hold back innovation, "The Disruptor Series" is your ticket to a transformative journey.
Tune in, disrupt yourself, and become an agent of change in an ever-evolving landscape.
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The Disruptor Podcast
Design Thinking Meets Nonprofit Leadership: A Practical Guide
John Kundtz introduces his new book, "The Five-Step Not-for-Profit Strategy Blueprint," designed to help executive directors strengthen collaboration, governance, and growth.
This interview-style review examines how nonprofits can transform strategic planning from static documents into dynamic processes that drive meaningful impact through stakeholder-centered design thinking.
- The "epiphany bridge" concept shifts focus from internal guessing to stakeholder co-creation
- Design thinking's double diamond framework guides teams through problem exploration before solution development
- Five implementation steps: empathy to insight, walking in stakeholders' shoes, need to success statements, launch and adapt, and driving results
- The "cupcake roadmap" approach starts with small pilots before scaling to larger initiatives
- Common traps include one-and-done planning, ignoring stakeholder voices, overestimating capacity, and "strategic silence"
- AI can serve as a co-pilot in summarizing feedback, clustering insights, and suggesting KPIs
How will you start planning for a brighter future, maybe even starting today?
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Hi everyone, john Kunz here, host of the Disruptor podcast. I just released a new book in the Disruptor's Not-for-Profit Leadership Excellence Series. The book is called the Five-Step Not-for-Profit Strategy Blueprint. It's designed to help executive directors strengthen collaboration, governance and growth. For something different, I asked Notebook LM to review my book and share a short summary in their interview style. I hope you enjoy this edition of Board Rebound. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 2:You know that feeling right. You've sat through countless strategic planning meetings, big ideas flying around, only for that polished plan to end up, as well, what we call shelfware just gathering dust, not really driving impact, Right, yeah? So today we're digging into that. We're taking a deep dive into John M Kuntz's the Five-Step Nonprofit Strategy Blueprint.
Speaker 3:Exactly, and our mission really is to give you a playbook, something proven, something that shifts strategy from just a document to a living process, something dynamic. It's about collaboration, better governance, real growth.
Speaker 2:And making sure it actually lines up with what stakeholders need, precisely Aligning the mission with their actual expressed needs.
Speaker 3:It actually lines up with what stakeholders need, precisely Aligning the mission with their actual expressed needs, not just what we think they need.
Speaker 2:So what triggered this kind of thinking? I mean, I've been there that sort of deja vu in planning meetings.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:And you might remember hearing about things like Project Sedona, that corporate story where a team got totally stuck.
Speaker 3:Tell me more.
Speaker 2:They focused internally, you know, on the tech, the cool stuff, but they missed the mark on what clients were actually looking for. It kind of stalled everything.
Speaker 3:That's a perfect example and it leads right into this idea of the epiphany bridge, that moment of realization.
Speaker 2:Okay, the epiphany bridge.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's that fundamental shift. You stop guessing internally and you start centering everything on the user experience, on stakeholder co-creation.
Speaker 2:Pro-creation involving them directly.
Speaker 3:Exactly. It's not just a minor adjustment, it's the breakthrough. It turns those static plans into something alive, something impactful. They saw this work really clearly in a nonprofit pilot back in 2020.
Speaker 2:OK, so how do we actually build that bridge? What's the structure? You mentioned a framework.
Speaker 3:Right. The foundation is design thinking, specifically the double diamond framework.
Speaker 2:It's a double diamond.
Speaker 3:Think of it as the engine. It pulls you out of that shelf where trap. It guides teams through two cycles diverge, then converge twice diverge and converge, expand, then focus. You got it. The first diamond is about exploring the problem space, really opening things up understanding all the angles before you narrow down and define the actual core challenge. You don't jump to conclusions Exactly. Then the second diamond is about generating solutions creatively, brain swallowing wide again before you converge again, picking the best ideas through testing, prototyping, iteration.
Speaker 2:Can you give an example?
Speaker 3:Sure, think about that nonprofit working with, say, disconnected students. Instead of just defaulting to, let's add more programs.
Speaker 2:Right the usual response.
Speaker 3:They use this approach. They really listened, understood the students journeys and realized the real need wasn't just more stuff, but creating connected pathways. It reframed their whole mission.
Speaker 2:That makes sense and you said this framework supports a more agile approach, shorter cycles.
Speaker 3:Yes, absolutely Break strategy down, which sounds great, but how do you do it? That's where Koen's five steps come in. Okay, let's walk through them Step one. Step one is empathy to insight. This is crucial. It starts with mapping stakeholders who are they really? And defining a super clear challenge statement, the anchor for everything else. Totally, it forces you to move from just assumptions about people to understanding their actual lived experiences.
Speaker 2:And step two builds on that.
Speaker 3:It does. Step two is walk in their shoes. Here you use empathy maps.
Speaker 2:Empathy maps says does thinks, feels, those ones.
Speaker 3:That's the one. It's a powerful way to systematically uncover those hidden frictions. You know the unspoken motivations and frustrations. What are they really thinking and feeling?
Speaker 2:OK, so we've mapped them, we've empathized. Now what? How does that become strategy?
Speaker 3:Good question. Step three is need to succeed. This is where you distill all those insights into really crisp opportunity statements Making it actionable, really crisp opportunity statements. Making it actionable Exactly, and there's a template. The persona needs a way to do something specific so that they achieve a desired outcome. Simple, but it keeps you focused on the need.
Speaker 2:I like that Ties everything back.
Speaker 3:Then, step four, launch and adapt. Now you brainstorm the big ideas, but you don't just pick randomly, you use a prioritization grid.
Speaker 2:Value versus feasibility, I assume.
Speaker 3:You got it. Plotting ideas based on how much value they offer versus how feasible they are to implement helps you make smart choices, and you mentioned AI earlier.
Speaker 2:Yeah, can AI help here?
Speaker 3:Definitely Think of generative AI as a co-pilot. It can help summarize stakeholder feedback, cluster quotes for empathy mapping, even brainstorm initial ideas or suggest KPIs later on. Freeze up the humans for the insight part.
Speaker 2:And you mentioned something about cupcakes a cupcake roadmap.
Speaker 3:Ha. Yes, that ties into step four and five. It's about low-risk testing Instead of building the whole giant waiting cake first.
Speaker 2:Which might be the wrong cake.
Speaker 3:Might be the wrong cake. Start with a cupcake A small, quick, pilot version of your idea. Get feedback fast, learn, adapt.
Speaker 2:I love that analogy. So step five brings it all together.
Speaker 3:Step five drive results. This uses an agile-based roadmap built on that whole cake experience idea.
Speaker 2:Cupcakes, birthday cakes, wedding cakes.
Speaker 3:Exactly, cupcakes are your quick wins. Birthday cakes are medium-sized initiatives, wedding cakes are the big, long-term strategic pushes.
Speaker 2:It avoids that old, rigid waterfall approach where you plan everything up front and just hope it works, much more adaptive. But look, even with a blueprint like this, things can go wrong. What are the common traps?
Speaker 3:Oh, definitely Big one is the one-and-done strategy trap. You make the plan, it looks great.
Speaker 2:And then it goes on the shelf Back to square one.
Speaker 3:Precisely. Another is skipping the stakeholder voice, relying on assumptions instead of real input Fatal.
Speaker 2:Also probably underestimating execution capacity, trying to do too much.
Speaker 3:Huge one, biting off more than you can chew. And related to that is not saying no enough. Strategy is about choices. If you're not saying no to some things, you're not really being strategic. Kuntz calls it strategic silence. It's a killer.
Speaker 2:Strategic silence. That's powerful, not making the hard choices.
Speaker 3:It really underscores that strategy isn't a document you create once. It's a practice, it's ongoing and you know what. You don't need to be perfect.
Speaker 2:Just purposeful. Exactly, be purposeful.
Speaker 3:So the message is really just start Let the people you serve, your beneficiaries, be your compass. That's how you cultivate real impact. Maybe the question for everyone listening is how will you start planning for a brighter future, maybe even starting today?
