21st century changemakers
are creative, resilient, agile
and transformative

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I'm a social innovation and philanthropy strategist focused on lean practises that elevate your impact without exhausting your energy and resources

I’m Sarah Hughes

I love helping purpose-driven leaders solve the right problems and deliver nimble strategies that combine innovation with impact.

My hybrid career allows me to balance the tensions between purpose, profit and impact while having the empathy to understand that every social change journey is different.

Acting as your advisor, analyst or strategy designer, I can help you deliver on your ambition. Sharing your real journey, I support you by extending your insight with outside-in eyes. I energise and equip you and importantly, I always have your back.

Working closely together, we look with thoughtful attention at things like Lean Leadership, Problem Definition, Strategy Maps, Landscape Scans and Theories of Change. We execute Minimum Lovable Products, Customer Research, Mental and Business Models, lightweight experiments and continuous improvement. We tackle digitalisation, new technologies, community and collaboration, all within the bounds and possibilities of your culture, skills and operations. We think big, start small and relentlessly pursue impact - in order to level up and lean forwards with confident ambition. We get shit done and we've no time for fluff.

We do this in order to give you:

Nimble leadership paths for navigating uncertainty and growing your impact free from burnout
A people-driven internal growth engine rooted in respect and co-creation
Risk appropriate innovations that deliver verifiable learnings and value
Continuous improvement in all organisation areas open to change
Space to enjoy and share the journey

It's what you and your social purpose organisation deserve.

Shall we talk?

I do not benefit from this link

I'm a lean impact advocate

Late in 2019, whilst closing the doors of my traveltech startup, I read 'Lean Impact - How to Innovate for Radically Greater Social Good' by Ann Mei Chang. It was instantly clear that I had found the nexus of my own experiences in the non profit, small business and startup worlds.

Lean impact is where startup principles meet social impact imperatives. As a people-focused approach, lean identifies where you are and starts with what is already working. It then coaches you through cycles of continual learning, measurement and improvement until your value and efficiency are at their best. The exciting part is when you also look at your long-term impact audaciously and work backwards from these radical ambitions. Think theory of change on steroids and getting shit done.

If you are interested in learning more, I can recommend Ann Mei's book. If you are short of time you could instead read my synopsis, or if we work together, you might end up choosing it from my gratitude gift shelf!

Social change is multi-layered. This makes finding the right solutions and innovating more complex than in other sectors. In a seemingly counter-intuitive way, Lean Impact brings forward practises that simplify and validate the path to maximum impact.

It allows ethical leaders to work backwards from a notion of the problem solved and iterate forwards through the most effective increments of social good. Vitally, this is done in close collaboration with beneficiaries and stakeholders so that all learning is validated and all failures are paths towards success. In Lean Impact we do more with less and we learn by doing, so we always have real-world experiments in play and we routinely test our assumptions to be sure that we are making verifiable progress on the problem. The call to action for Lean Impact is to start with an audacious goal, much like asking yourself the question "are we trying to empty the ocean with a spoon?" (Ann Mei Chang). It is a joy to work with.

The 3 principles that underpin Lean Impact are:

Think Big – set audacious goals and build an engine for growth that will move the needle relative to the size of the problem
Start Small – build the agility to run fast experiments and drive feedback loops that will accelerate your pace of learning and reduce waste of time and money
Relentlessly Pursue Impact – identify and track the metrics that matter to increase impact and scale