In times of change, following the process isn’t always enough. Real innovation comes from working iteratively - learning from what happens, and letting results refine the way forward.

1. 🚦 Startups vs Systems: The Process Problem

Processes are essential. They help us do the right things in the right order. Whether it’s a policy, a checklist, or a Trello board, they show us what’s supposed to happen next.

But there’s a catch: processes are built on the assumption that we already know what works.

And if you’re trying something new - launching a feature, running a pilot, introducing a tool - you don’t know that yet. Which means sticking rigidly to a process can get in the way of what actually works best.

2. 🧪 The Solution: Iterate Through Doing

Instead of executing a process at full scale, do one small version of the full process - then learn from the result.

Here’s the shift:

3. 🍰 A Story About Cake (Yes, Really)

Imagine you’ve been asked to bake five cakes - but you’ve never baked one before. Your playbook says:

1. Mix the ingredients
2. Put it in the oven
3. Add icing

You could do Step 1 for all five cakes… then bake all five… then decorate all five. We know that would be efficient, right?

But what if the recipe's wrong? You’ll have five sub-standard cakes.

Now imagine you bake just one cake from start to finish. Taste it. Adjust the mix. Try again. By cake five, you’ve got something truly delicious, bring on the Bake Off!

That’s iteration. And it’s exactly how teams can embrace uncertainty.

4. ⚙️ How to Build Iteration Into Your Team Culture

Here’s how to make sure your team stays led by outcomes - not stuck in processes:

• Default to pilots. When trying something new, do a small version start-to-finish first.
• Learn in loops. After each round, ask: What worked? What didn’t? What’s next?
• Document as you go. Let your process evolve from real results, not imagined steps.
• Encourage flexibility. Make it safe for your team to say, “This part didn’t work - here’s what we’re trying next.”

5. 📈 Why This Works in Digital Transformation

Whether you're digitising a programme, automating a task, or reworking team workflows, iteration gets you there faster - not by rushing, but by learning.

The best systems aren’t built from guesses. They’re shaped by doing, reviewing, and refining.

✅ Quick action steps

1. Choose one active project or workflow.
2. Identify one process your team is following blindly.
3. Pause and ask: have we ever tested this from start to finish on a small scale?
4. Try it. Measure the outcome. Adjust.
5. Document the new, improved version.

Being iterative doesn’t mean being chaotic. It means letting results guide you. Start small. Learn fast. And build better - one cake at a time!

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A bold, ready-to-launch concept for holding corporations accountable and sustaining the fight for racial justice.

In the wake of global movements for racial justice, many companies made commitments — some bold, some cautious, many public. But in the years since, progress has been patchy. Statements faded, dashboards disappeared, and the work of structural change too often stalled.

What if there were a platform that helped organisations not just promise change — but prove it?

What if racial equality movements had the tools to track, guide and accelerate corporate accountability across every industry?

From pledges to progress: a new kind of accountability platform

Imagine a platform where organisations could:

• Publicly track their progress on racial equity goals
• Choose from a library of carefully designed, justice-oriented metrics
• Tailor internal dashboards to reflect their culture, capacity and sector
• Showcase meaningful progress transparently to staff, customers and stakeholders

This wouldn’t be just a tracker. It would be a catalyst — for behaviour change, cultural shift, and measurable justice.

A flexible framework for deep accountability

The platform could be built around a bank of equity goals — co-designed with experts from across sectors — that:

• Go beyond surface-level diversity targets
• Address structural inequalities across hiring, retention, leadership, supply chains and more
• Include embedded resources, examples and checklists to support implementation

Each goal would come with a digital “card” that could be activated, assigned and tracked — transforming vague commitments into clear, owned actions.

Built to scale change across industries and movements

This concept isn’t just for tech giants or big brands. It’s designed to be:

• Scalable — for local charities, multinationals or sector bodies
• Customisable — from branding to goal sets and terminology
• Measurable — giving racial justice organisations the data they need to see who’s stepping up

A dual journey: internal change and public accountability

The platform could support:

• Organisations: through intuitive tools to select goals, assign actions, track progress and report internally
• The public: through transparent access to progress dashboards, stories and evidence of real change

It would create a shared space where expectations meet accountability — and where organisations are supported to do the work, not just perform it.

Immediate use. Long-term vision.

This platform could deliver impact across three key horizons:

1. Short term: Turn pledges into plans, and silence into structure
2. Mid-term: Create a rich dataset showing what works — and who’s working
3. Long-term: Shift sector norms and shape national policy through evidence and precedent

It’s not just a tool. It’s infrastructure for a more just future.

Let’s build it together

We’re sharing this as an open invitation — to racial justice movements, DEI coalitions, networks of accountability, and anyone determined to make equality real.

If you're ready to turn promises into progress — and want to put data, design and digital power behind your mission — let’s talk.

Because when it comes to justice, the world doesn’t need more statements. It needs systems.

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Using performance data for the sole purpose of determining whether someone or something has passed or failed is like using a smartphone solely to make voice calls. There is so much more that a smartphone can do if you are willing to embrace its apps. Similarly, there is so much that any kind of performance data can tell us about our work if we are willing to embrace its insights.

Fundamentally it comes down to our mindset. Our relationship with data is driven by how we see ourselves. For people and organisations that believe in their ability to continually develop, performance data is a source of insight that drives strategic decision-making across the board. Whereas among people and institutions where they define their ability by what they are able to achieve in the here and now, performance data is merely another yard stick to determine whether they have succeeded or failed. And with that comes the associated behaviours of blame, criticism and defensiveness when bad results are published. But when bad results can be hidden, it gives rise to other behaviours; fudging the numbers, deflection and corruption.

Too many organisations find themselves in the second camp. Toxic for company culture and an anathema to collaboration, the fixed mindset puts people and organisations on a pathway to decline. When you are avoiding the signs that things are going wrong because you are more focused on the face you feel you need to portray to the outside world, you deny yourself and your organisation the opportunity to turn things around.

And turnaround is possible. Just ask any successful athlete. They belong to the first camp that feeds on performance data as fuel for growth. According to Carol Dweck whose research explained the growth mindset versus the fixed mindset, the growth mindset comes down to a single decision: whether you choose to believe the science that says that when you go beyond your comfort zone to try new things, your brain forms new neurons and you become smarter. There are pressures on us that make us not want to believe this because it introduces a risk: what if the potential improvement does not happen? Yes, but what if it does and moreover, what if you could stack the odds to increase the likelihood that it did?

That’s the role for coaching versus criticism. You have a wealth of expertise at your disposal that can be used to catalyse improvement in performance. Consider internal experts within your organisation, consider your peers in other organisations who have faced and overcome similar challenges. And for the challenges that involve breaking new ground in places forerunners have not tread before, lie the tactics of innovation and experimentation. These three growth accelerators can be used with a growth mindset to coach better performance out of your teams and your partners.

If you are a senior leader in any organisation, are you cultivating a growth mindset among your teams or is there a culture of hiding poor results? If you are a funder in the civil society sector, do your grantees and contract holders know that you expect a growth mindset of them or are you using their performance data purely as a yardstick for success and failure?

The reality is that we live in a world where we spend more time on criticism than we do on coaching. We put more emphasis on saying whether something is right or wrong than on understanding how to make things improve. This isn’t the path to progress. But as with all journeys, we can change the path we take.

Makerble’s dashboards enable you and your teams to view your performance data through a progress lens. Whatever the outcome you are working towards, Makerble enables you to diagnose where progress is stalling and see the effect of new approaches on the metrics that matter.

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Perhaps we’re more familiar with the idea of a Funding Gap. Certainly there are days in our life as a startup that we have become very familiar with it. Days long since gone, because of sheer stubbornness and faith. But the one thing we’ve always been passionate about is brand.

Last week in the NCVO UK Civil Society Almanac, new numbers about the third sector came out. In particular one number caught my eye. It’s long been the case that the biggest brands in the charity sector attract the most funds. The latest data shows that 3% of charities attract 81% of funds. That’s powerful, and we need to start to ask why it's the case. One reason cited in the Almanac is that the very large organisations (0.4%) actually draw in over half of the sector’s income so already that top 3% (which includes the 0.4%) have a fair head start.

But why else do the very large organisations attract the most income? In the hundreds of funder focus groups we’ve done, I’ve come to understand that yes, there’s a funding gap; but there’s also a Branding Gap. Individual donors, whose donations NCVO now report make up nearly half the sectors income (see the video here for an overview), have expressed a fervent desire to discover new charities to donate to. But it can be impossible to find one that resonates and even if a donor succeeds in this, if that charity doesn’t have evidence that what it does works, it’s a leap of faith. Donors want to donate to the best charities doing something about an area they are passionate about. It can, simply, feel safer to rely on a trusted brand because brand quite often, and size, are markers of trust and approval, aliases for ‘best’. It’s the same reason we buy Heinz ketchup, or Coco Pops. At Makerble I've heard donors state “I wanted to find a small childrens’ charity to donate to but I couldn’t, so I gave to a well known one instead’ (Names removed). They have asked friends but not all of our friends are mines of information when it comes to unearthing small, resonant charities for us to fund.

The Branding Gap means that on the one hand, charities find it difficult to attract donors. They can’t say “HERE WE ARE AND WE’RE FABULOUS!” loudly enough for a donor passionate about what they do, to notice them in amidst the noise of the internet and other media. On the other side of the coin, donors do want to find them but they don’t have the tools, the resource or the know how. Importantly they also don’t have an alternative mechanism of trust. The current donor experience, which many including myself and our team at Makerble are seeking to improve requires a donor to donate with very little real, lucid information to read up on before. Once a donor makes a donation, it’s not clear what has happened to it, so why risk it at all?

This branding gap is one reason why myself and Matt as founders linked arms back in the day. I had worked in charities and Matt was an ad man who had also worked in this world. From the start, we’ve been conscious that smaller charities need a powerful brand to compete with the larger charities and Makerble we hope, can help. I want for us to be the friend and champion of the small and medium sized charities who do incredible work but don’t have the resource to shout as loudly as we can as a team. Because once we shout about small charities and their medium sized counterparts, we know from our research, we’ll attract some of that 81%.

In fact it’s not even about the limited pot of 81% that larger charities receive. Back in 2013 New Philanthropy Capital published a report which found that in the UK £665 million would be given by people who already donate, in addition to current donations if they understood where their money went or if they were able to see that charities 'did a better job'. So there’s a truth there that needs to be acknowledged which is that evidence matters. Data, opens up conversations with donors and also has the capacity to grow the number of donations available. Data can be not only an incredible source of information for teams but also the new benchmark of trust.

So surely, if you are a small charity and you want to increase your chances, measure what you do. Share it with donors and shout about it via sites like ours. Because there is ample opportunity out there to re-balance the scales and to draw more funds into the sector if we all work together to draw the spotlight onto what we achieve and inspire more generosity.

You can read the highlights of the NCVO Almanac here: https://data.ncvo.org.uk/

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