Scaling The Mission: How Nonprofits Can Use Lean Sigma Logistics For Enterprise Growth

If you work in the nonprofit world, you know that scarcity is never a challenge around passion. There are tons of passionate, talented people working on great missions who will never hit truly game-changing scale because passion can’t solve complex social problems.

In order to scale like a business, mission-oriented organizations need to think and act like ones when it comes to operations and logistics.

“There is a gap between having a great mission and massive impact, and that gap is filled with operations, almost exclusively.” Todd Cohen, Founder of sortable.com

Lean Sigma Defined:

Lean Sigma is a system for approaching operations that combines two ideologies:

Lean: Lean Thinking is centered around eliminating all forms of “waste”. (Time, resources, duplication of steps) In a business setting, lean operations improve the flow of value to the customer.

Six Sigma: Six Sigma organizations work tirelessly to reduce variance and “defects”. Six sigma leaders obsess over data and finding ways to problem-solve so that there is zero margin for error.

Where Lean Sigma prevents loss of profit for businesses, it prevents loss of mission for nonprofits.

Organizations that run entirely on hustle and willpower (as opposed to a repeatable operating system) burn out their best talent and plateau at small-scale. When you map out the “value stream” of how a particular program is delivered –you see where resources are poured out (and wasted) and where partnerships can pick up the slack.

An Example: Scaling Food Recovery Through Logistics

Let’s walk through a specific example of how this might look.

When my team set out to build the Charity Freight Program, we didn’t set out to ship just truckloads more food. We set out to redesign how food recovery logistics works completely.

The problem with food recovery is that it operates completely locally. Farms and food donors don’t ship food. They need a local nonprofit to pick up that food — unload it — and deliver it to their intended destinations. Too often that’s where the stream ends.

We looked at every step in that food “value stream” and thought about who could absorb those steps at scale. Then we went ‘lean’ and partnered with corporate logistics companies who could absorb entire portions of that process. Once we had engineered those relationships out, we had built a national footprint by harnessing underutilized capacity from trucking companies who get paid to drive across the country anyway.

Think you need to ask your team to hustle more? Try engineering a smarter system.

Three Steps to Lean Sigma for Nonprofits:

Below are three things that you and your leadership team can do today to see if Lean Sigma logistics could revolutionize your operations.

WHITEBOARD IT: Pick one of your core programs.

Grab a whiteboard and map out every step that it takes to execute that program from top-to-bottom.

You’ll quickly identify redundancies (do you really need 3 levels of approval?) overlaps (who else enters that data point?) and bottlenecks.

ASK “5 WHYS”: Teach your team to solve problems (vs. put out fires). Everytime a process falls apart, ask WHY? five times. Each answer should shed more light on the root problem.

Problem: Delayed shipment.

Why did the shipment get delayed? truck didn’t show up to pick up food bank

Why ? because the paperwork didn’t get filed correctly

Why ? the person who usually files it was out sick.

Why wasn’t someone else assigned to do it? no one else knows how.

Why ? because we don't have an SOP or training.

Before you try to patch something up, dig down until you find the true root cause and fix it.

AUDIT YOUR LIFT: Look at your value stream and identify steps that are resource intensive.

Ask yourself, where could those steps be absorbed by corporate partners?

There is a great resource of infrastructure in the private sector just waiting to be leveraged by social organizations.

You just need to build the relationships to tap into it.