A great model for effective change

Every morning I look forward to opening up my scanning system and checking for relevant new updates from my network: the people around the amazing organization RegenIntel (more on that soon), the organizations that make up my businesses supply chain (from Feedly to Obsidian to Anthropic and more), and recently from the watershed I live in (called the Long Tom Watershed), where I'm just starting to track about 30 organizations whose work impacts the watershed here.

I've mapped out those networks (with the help of my teammate Andrea, thank you Andrea!) and now I monitor them daily for opportunities and risks.

When I find something important in that system, I act!

A few weeks ago, I picked up a notification that a key funding organization, the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board, was holding a webinar on their Strategic Action Plan framework. I signed up for it, I shared it with a relevant organization I'm partnering with (they signed up too), and I'm excited to say that the event was amazing! So immediately valuable that when I had to leave the two hour call early for a sales meeting, I incorporated a Theory of Change I learned about on the webinar immediately into my next call!

And it's such a cool model. I wrote about it in detail here on LinkedIn. This is a model you can use to restore a flowing stream - or to grow a business pipeline of opportunities.

The gist is that Strategies lead to specific Actions, which result in Outputs. And those Outputs hopefully mix with the world in a way that drives desired Outcomes. But many complex Outcomes require more than one line of Strategy. If you can get aligned on each of the parts of that model with partners, if you can agree on the thesis statements inherent in each step, and then you execute well - hot damn, that's a good playbook for success!

So my opportunity discovery model delivered again: map, monitor, act. That's my favorite playbook to run with the organizations I work with, too. It's an awesome way to build capacity and systematically capture opportunities and risks, early and effectively.

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