Fighting the Symptoms of Aging

By Heather McLeod Grant

In our last post, we made the case for why it’s important to invest not only in scaling social innovation by building startups around new ideas, but also in social innovation at scale by helping mature, legacy nonprofits extend and reinvent their impact. We looked at the assets that these nonprofits bring to the sector: national distribution platforms, social networks of members, reliable revenue from loyal donors, well-known brands, and the heft to shape their broader ecosystem.

 Just as there’s a pattern to the assets these organizations can leverage, so too is there a pattern to the typical challenges they encounter as they age. The downside of scale is, well, scale—organizations, whether for-profit or nonprofit, have to fight the creeping tendency towards bureaucratic sclerosis. It takes constant adaptation and innovation to stay relevant, and those muscles can wither if left unused for too long. The big difference in business is that companies face constant short-term pressure from the market to change or die. It should be no surprise that the business sector has paid much more attention to this issue of changing large-scale companies. Remember the “Reengineering the Corporation” manifesto back in the 1980s and 1990s? Or the “change management” wave in the ’90s, driven by technology innovation? Unfortunately, we haven’t had a similar large wave of “reinvention” or “socialintrapreneurship” in the nonprofit sector. Funding has mainly focused on the front-end of the pipeline, supporting new ideas, while large organizations have largely been left to fend for themselves.

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