Hey friends,

In this season of Theory of Change, I briefly explore frameworks imported from the marketing and tech world that don’t always survive contact with mission-driven work.

This week: Jobs to Be Done, the Silicon Valley darling of customer-centric design.

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WHAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE

Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) started life as a way to explain why people buy products.

Clayton Christensen popularised the core insight: people don’t buy a drill, they buy a hole. They “hire” a product to help them make progress on a few levels: functional, emotional, and social.

In theory, it’s truly elegant. If you understand the progress people are trying to make, you can design services that truly help them get there.

A bunch of the organisations I advise and coach will tell you how much I like it. But in the world of nonprofits, funders, and community movements, it often produces the opposite of what it claims.

Let’s get into why.

WHERE IT FALLS APART

JTBD assumes a market relationship between maker and user. The organisation observes, learns, and serves. The user chooses, pays, and leaves feedback.

That logic can break down in mission-driven work, where relationships are not transactional but civic, collective, and ethical.

I’ve seen three main problems show up repeatedly:

1. Many nonprofits use JTBD to “understand communities” while still keeping control over what gets built. For instance, most local journalism still functions as extraction: tell us your story so we can package and sell it back to you. A climate collective might frame the job as “help me act on climate anxiety,” yet still hold strategy and credit. Empathy becomes extraction.

2. Proper JTBD research is heavy: hours of interviews, cluster analysis, quant surveys. Most nonprofits don’t have that capacity, so the method gets reduced to buzzwords and sticky notes. Practice collapses under the weight of the method.

3. JTBD’s strength is incremental improvement (i.e. optimising what already exists). But social missions often need imagination, not optimisation. If you’re trying to re-shape power or build new civic norms, you might need more.

A BETTER WAY TO THINK ABOUT IT

For my money, the biggest issue in most mission-driven work is not always how well we understand people’s needs; it’s who gets to define them.

Communities are invited to inform the work but rarely to own it.

The alternative is shared agency: co-designing programmes, sharing authorship, experimenting with cooperative or membership structures that make communities co-owners, not participants.

But that also means turning the lens inward. How good are we, really, at listening? For instance, what would your own team say about your personal ability to listen, as a leader? Just as with listening, the main JTBD risk is doing it performatively.

JTBD is built for optimisation. It works best in stable systems with clear needs. But social-change work often tries to create needs and norms that don’t yet exist. And if you’re working on democracy or climate or poverty, the “job” can’t always be articulated. The work is to help people imagine what might be possible.

My recommendation, then, is to use JTBD lightly, as a discipline of clarity, but pair it with creative, participatory tools: story circles, scenario planning, speculative design. Invite in artists and filmmakers and architects. Folks who have made a career of dreaming things up.

Because, as Zara Rahman wrote recently, our sector’s real bottleneck is a crisis of imagination.

TRY IT THIS WEEK

“Creative, participatory tools” sounds abstract, admittedly. So, try one of these to make it real:

1. Scenario sketch (30 mins)

With your core team, imagine it’s 2030. Write two headlines:

1. “We succeeded beyond expectations.”

2. "We failed completely.”

Compare what changed in each version. Adjust one plan accordingly.

2. Speculative sprint (30 mins)

• Pick one challenge (e.g. fundraising, trust, burnout).

• Ask: “If we rebuilt this from scratch, what would we keep, drop, or invent?”

• Sketch the best idea on paper. Share it with key community or team members for reaction.

By the end of the week, you’ll have new insight, a wider horizon, and at least one idea worth testing. Now you can take Friday afternoon to read deeper:

• The original Jobs to Be Done

• Tony Ulwick’s Outcome-Driven Innovation, arguably JTBD's precursor.

🌊 WAVE GOODBYE 🌊

Zara’s article really got me thinking about imagination capture. She says it way better than I ever could:

“What are we fighting for, not against? I heard comrades and colleagues explain the biggest barriers they’re up against, the particularly bitter structural issues they’re seeing, the urgent problems they’re grappling with. And in each session I attended, I asked: and what would you want to see, in a world where you could decide? 

Nobody could answer. I don’t mean that they didn’t have the answer somewhere inside them, because I fully believe that given the space and time to explore, they absolutely do; I mean that people were physically unable to answer the question. Very few people had a clearly articulated vision for the futures that they actively wanted.”

As a leader in this space, the struggle can feel endless. Focusing on the enemy is a way to fuel the fire in organisations whose reserves are dwindling.

But Zara reminds us (and I guess I’m trying to do the same with this newsletter) that you have permission to think big sometimes. To rethink old paradigms. To imagine new futures.

Thanks for being here,

Adam

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