One of my close friends has a green thumb and has filled her home with plants. In fact, when I made the big move from Denver to Cambridge to join LabCentral, she adopted all of my big plants that were too big to fit in my car for the drive across the country.
For 12 years, she lived in a house with a decent-sized backyard that she never spent time in. Never even walked out onto the back porch.
About six months ago, she bought a condo that doesn’t have a yard at all. It just has a little patio off the dining area large enough for two patio chairs and a small table.
Recently, she texted me a picture of the cucumber plants she is growing on this tiny patio.
She has filled her patio with container gardens and is growing flowers, berries, and cucumbers now!
What changed to make her such a prolific outdoor gardener?
My friend didn’t change. The structure around her did.
When she went from having a large backyard that wasn’t easy to access or very inviting to spend time in to having a patio right off the dining area, she suddenly wanted to spend more time outside and to fill her space with plants that she already loves.
The lesson in this story for the Funding Innovation Lab?
The structure creates the outcome. We can change the structure to get different outcomes.
We don’t need to change people. We don’t need to change the way they think or even what they believe. We can change the structures within which we work to get the kinds of outcomes we want.
It is so easy and almost automatic to assume the solution will be found by asking people to change. But people don’t change easily if they need to consciously make a new choice, even when they really want to. (Cue every New Year’s Resolution in the history of forever.) Behavior change happens more naturally and seamlessly when the environment or structure itself supports the outcomes we want.
Constraints create the conditions for creativity.
There is an understandable tendency to think shifting an entire industry will require a massive lift. Lots of workshops. An awareness campaign. Millions of dollars.
Something big.
But just like my friend, who went from a big backyard to a tiny patio garden, constraints often create the conditions we need for creativity and breakthrough.
And real change happens in the 1% improvements consistently applied and aggregated over time. In the article I share below, in the “What We’re Reading” section, I think you’ll be surprised by how tiny an intervention can be to dramatically influence better outcomes. The changes will likely be so small, we forget we even made them.
I find this so exciting! Tiny changes are easier to try out, easier to incorporate, and easier to maintain.
At the Funding Innovation Lab, we’re looking at all of the details and observing how the flow of capital currently works to find points of leverage that can be improved 1% better through each of our tiny, fast experiments. Everything matters.
2024 Sprint Progress Update
The Funding Innovation Lab is live and actively working on experiments now! We will be keeping you updated on our progress with this weekly Progress Update section.
Phase 1: Design the Sprints for 2024 (July-August)
July 25: We announced the focus areas for this year’s two sprints at our Kickoff event
August 6: We finalized the sprint design teams and scheduled the meetings where these teams will determine what/how/when we will run these experiments
August 21: As of today, both sprint design teams have met to begin the work of designing this year’s experiments.
Phase 2: Facilitate the Sprints (September)
Details TBD
Phase 3: Open source the Sprint Results (October)
Save the date for our Summit and Results Reveal Party!
October 30th in Cambridge MA (registration coming soon)
What we’re reading
The Funding Innovation Lab relies on a large body of scholarship and research-backed approaches. Each week, we’ll share snippets from the sources we’re reading/watching that provide inspiration for the kinds of experiments we may run in the future.
Please go take five minutes to read the article, “Proven Tactics for Improving Teams’ Psychological Safety” in the MIT Sloan Management Review.
I share this article specifically because it does a phenomenal job of laying out the kind of experiment process we are using at the Funding Innovation Lab.
The experiment focused on “how” to achieve results through behavior design. It’s not enough to know “what” should change. To get real impact, we have to discover the tactical details that generate the outcomes we want.
The experiment’s two test interventions were very minor changes: A weekly email to managers with a suggested focus area for their one-on-one’s with their team.
The results from this study match the kinds of learnings I expect we will find with the Funding Innovation Lab: Yes, there are easy and effective behavior changes that we can adopt and the interventions are not a one-size-fits-all solution.
“The experiment showed that organizations can achieve meaningful change with a simple, low-cost intervention that causes minimal disruption, as in the case of our email communication. Big, expensive awareness campaigns and workshops aren’t always needed, so if you find yourself planning a webinar on psychological safety, consider whether you could shift behaviors by leveraging existing platforms and ways of working.”
There is one major way that our Funding Innovation Lab process differs from the article that is worth noting. The experiment described in the article was conducted within a single, very large organization, involving 7,000 people. This sample size is important for academic research in order to determine statistical significance.
The venture funding industry could never pull off a study of this magnitude. That is a big reason why we are taking the tiny, fast experiment route instead. And in a series of future articles, I’ll dig into our strategy for managing the experimentation process and applicability and scalability across a large audience.
The Funding Innovation Lab is a non-profit program, founded by LabCentral and led by Beth McKeon, with a mission to increase funding inclusion, access, and opportunity for women and BIPOC founders in the life sciences.
The Funding Innovation Lab convenes and supports innovators from across VC, universities, and entrepreneurial support organizations as they run rapid design sprints to solve the persistent systemic barriers and bias in the fundraising and capital deployment process. The Funding Innovation Lab has an open-source policy, sharing the wins and fails from these experiments here on Substack and with its community of practitioners with the goal to see widespread adoption and replication of emerging best practices in this field.