My Learnings from Ann Mei Chang 📓

Hey, Guys, I'll talk about my learnings and reflections from Ann Mei Chang and her book. I'll talk about my takeaways and how I derive meaning from her work and philosophy.

Wikipedia says, 'Ann Mei Chang is the CEO of the non-profit organization Candid. She is a technology expert, global development advocate, author, and public speaker'

But did you know a fun fact about her?

She actually wanted to become a mathematician in elementary school and that she wanted to major in Mathematics in college. It turns out she found it too theoretical and wanted to do something more relevant to the real world. Also, Ann's book "Lean Impact: How to Innovate for Radically Greater Social Good" was inspired by Eric Ries's "The Lean Startup." Turns out I have that book lined up in my reading list after I'm hopefully done with "Hyperfocus."

I really loved that her book used the business principles of the "Lean Startup" and applied them to organizations that work towards social impact. In her video and book, she talks about how organizations focusing on impacting people tend to want a linearly rising graph. In contrast, organizations in the valley want more of an exponential graph. While these two seem different, one thing she says, which really made me think, was what is stopping us from this exponential growth in nonprofits and organizations that focus on impacting people and changing lives. One example she talked about in both videos was the cell phone example; in Africa, people have more access to phones than to clean bathrooms. And she emphasized the disconnect between global problems and the strategies being deployed in organizations that impact people.

One thing that she also talked about in her book was goal setting, and that often our goals are unclear, I could see the same when I was writing my weekly goals in the velocity tracker Google sheet; the feedback I got was about setting goals with a clear impact and goals that can we answered with a yes or no answer. I see the same when she talks about goals often being too unclear and says instead of working towards "global poverty," one must set clear, measurable, and actional goals that can keep one accountable.

One thing she also talked about in the video was about falling in love with the solution rather than focusing on the problem. I often see myself in this position, like when I was thinking about the problem for the Google problem statement without even knowing the problem in depth. The only thing I could think of was to use AI in some way or another. I saw that I was fascinated by AI and loved it more than the problem we were working on.

And so what she says one might do to get to the right solution and to identify the right solution was to start small, and by small, she meant to begin testing ambitious hypotheses with minimal resources. She also talked about adding a new hypothesis in addition to the growth and value hypothesis. Social organizations should also add another hypothesis about the impact and always ask if my solution is achieving the desired social impact that I wanted. Adding to these first two hypotheses comes from Eric Ries's lean startup, which also makes people not forget about the social impact of the solution.

This addition makes organizations proactively seek impact and not focus on the metrics that don't matter the most, what she calls the vanity metrics, and that one should focus on the cost-effective option with the most significant impact.

My final thoughts for this is that to apply this to my own life, it's all about creating systems and how she talks about it as where an organization must test all the hypotheses using the build, measure, learn feedback loop; we should also in our lives strive to not let any stone unturned and that it teaches us (organizations) on to how to create growth (impact) with what is given to us.