 There, thanks for joining us. Another episode of the nonprofit show, thrilled to have you here with us. Today we have with us, Tim Locky, CEO, founder, the Human Stack, and you're gonna see his awesome logo in just a minute. But Tim's here to talk to us about the human stack and tech, and it's really nerdy, and I love that, and we're really glad to have you here, Tim. But before we jump into this conversation, we want to let you know who we are. So if you're seeing us for the first time or maybe hearing us for the first time, Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. I'm Jarrett Ransom, your nonprofit nerd, CEO of the Raven Group, and we are so very honored to have the support, the trust from our amazing presenting sponsors. So thank you so very much to Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, fundraising academy at National University, Be Generous, your part-time controller, staffing boutique, nonprofit thought leader, as well as the nonprofit nerd. I like to remind you to check out these companies, but not yet, so you can set your timer, 28 minutes, or as soon as we shut down, that's a good time to check them out because they really are here to help you elevate your mission throughout your community, and that's why they're here for the show, but they're really here for you and all that you do in your community. And if you missed any of our episodes, again, thanks to our sponsors, you know where to find us, Roku, YouTube, Amazon Fire TV, as well as Vimeo, and if you're a podcast listener, go ahead and queue us up there as well, listen to the nonprofit show, wherever you stream your podcast. And back to our guest, which I always like to ask this, and I already know the question, or I know the answer to this question, Tim, are you a podcast listener? I am, I'm not an avid podcast listener, but I do, I listen to podcasts and I learn so much. I'm so ADD, I keep forgetting to do it. I know this sounds like a crazy excuse, but I like tune in and then out, so it kind of goes inside this for me. That's like meditating for me, like I can't just meditate, right? Oh yeah, oh, meditating, oh my gosh, yeah, impossible. Squirrel, there's always something to say about fun. Oh, true. So Tim, you serve as the CEO and founder of The Human Stack, and for those of you watching, this is that amazing logo that I was referencing, check that out. It is fantastic. And then you can also check out The Human Stack or TheHumanStack.com. Tim, welcome, thanks for joining us. Thanks, it's so great to be here. Yeah, tell us a little bit about The Human Stack and a little bit about you. Yeah, so I've been working with nonprofits since I was 18 years old, so I'm really passionate about seeing the world be a better place. I wanted to be like a thought leader, a speaker, whatever, and found myself in the back rooms helping people with their computers over and over and over. And I finally realized, hey, this is my bit. This is the thing that I do. And so I leaned into that in 2010. I started a company called Now It Matters. Now It Matters helped hundreds of nonprofits get into Salesforce and work with that platform. And we saw the way that it was transforming and helping clients over and over. And then in 2019, something happened that just totally shifted me entirely and started The Human Stack or put me on the course to start it. You've probably been to all of these conferences like I have where they have these statistics about what's going wrong with technology. And it just bounces off, right? 70% of CRM projects fail, you know, on and on. One of them got into my brain and wouldn't leave me alone. And it was my friend, Brian Comar, put up a statistic that said 90% of nonprofits collect data but only 5% use that data to make decisions. Oh, my God. And it just couldn't let it go. I just couldn't let it go. So I started, why it was so meaningful to me was that this is not data collection. This is not the technology's issue. Like they have technology, they're collecting data. But they don't know what to do with it. And as a consultant, it was so striking to me. This is my territory. This is the thing I'm supposed to be doing. And I realize, I don't know for the hundreds of clients I've worked with, I'm not sure how many are in that 5% because that's not what I was aiming at. And it made me question, it was like a Jerry McGuire moment. I was like, it just made me question everything I had been doing. So I took the last half of 2019, I blocked off half of my calendar and I just set out to answer the question, how could we help nonprofits convert data to decisions? And the first thing I found was we don't really understand data. We don't understand what it's supposed to do or how to use it. And so fast forward, I just kept trying that out. I tried new ways of implementing with clients where I was pointing at that instead. What I noticed in looking at all my clients was the best clients that made the most traction, there was a common pattern, which is I worked with them for about three years and they did about three phases of work. And so I started to ask myself, if we had three years and three phases of budget, could I get them further with that same budget in those three years if I took a different approach? And I found I absolutely could. So then nobody was interested in it. So for the last two years, I've been trying to figure out how to explain what I do that even my mom can understand it. And I've got that loaded if you wanna hear that. I'm glad to share that as well. But that's how I got to the human stack, which is just a couple of months old. We just launched the human stack a couple of months ago and the website went live just in October. So we're relatively new at just jumping onto the scene and talking about what it is that we do. Oh, this is fantastic. I love the journey. Thank you for sharing. And those of you, I encourage you to follow Lincoln with Tim on LinkedIn. He's very active. He's very honest and transparent, which I admire. So thank you for showing up authentically. Let's talk about some of these failures and what they look like. So the human aspect of tech failure, what is this? Like, tell us more. Yeah, absolutely. The way I think about this, and you'll find I'm always trying to relate things to story, but the way I think about this is if you think of Microsoft or Salesforce, BlackBod, all of these large software companies, if you think about them as car manufacturers, right? Then my old business was like a car dealership. And so people would come to Now It Matters and the dealership and I would help them order their cars. And we'd get the soft credit tow package and the donor-advised lighting and we'd get them all set up and then we would watch them wreck it on the way off the lot because the issue was they didn't know how to drive. Not that they didn't need, maybe they didn't even need a new car. We don't know, but they didn't know that they needed a driver's ed. And part of the reason for that is very simple. How many commercials for cars have you seen in your life? And how many commercials for drivers that have you seen in your life, right? Like we just, we don't realize that driving is its own skill. And then if you take that one step further, knowing where to drive is also its own skill. And so we're two issues away in human behavior from actually knowing what to do with technology. And right now all of the work that we do focuses on the tech stack, which is basically like saying, we have a driver issue in our country. And so what we're gonna do about that is make better cars, not make better drivers, which doesn't make sense when you think about it that way. It also doesn't make sense. Like I've got two kids and they are now drivers. I did not go and buy a new car for them so that they could learn how to drive. I did get a new car, but it was a banged up car. Like my point here is it makes more sense to learn to drive in whatever car you have than to go and buy a new one. So if you're in a CRM and it feels like it doesn't work before you move out of it, before you move to a different backend system, take a minute and really assess, is it the car that doesn't work or is it that we don't know how to drive it? Right. And so, and so that's where a lot of the failure in technology is actually not in technology. It's that humans fail tech more often than tech fails humans. And here's the other thing, technology doesn't care if it fails, it doesn't care about anything, right? It sells zeros and ones. It just does not care. Humans care a lot about it. Like our base code is not zeros and ones, which is just like a big nested if statement of true, false, you know, statements. Our base code isn't zeros and ones. Our base code is belonging. You know, do we belong here? And when it comes to our work, is do we belong here and are we gonna get paid? And so it's not necessarily safe to admit you don't know how to drive. So not only do we have a driver problem, but we have to hide that we have a driver problem as well. We had it from the boards. And the language for it is our system doesn't work. And that's true because information systems are part technology and part humans. And when we say the system doesn't work, a lot of times really what doesn't work is the humans. Yeah. Does that make sense? You know, I love what you're saying. And in the green room chatter, we were saying this, so many people will say, and they say it to me, Jared, I'm sure they say it to you. Tim, undoubtedly they say it to you. They'll be like, yeah, this software is a piece of crap. Why did we spend all this money? It doesn't work. And it's just such an interesting aspect of the whole thing that throws an organization into absolute frenzy. And I'd love for you to address this, the concept of tech stacks, you know, the waterfall versus the agility issue. What does that mean? And how do we look at this ecosystem? Yeah. Well, what I found was that we don't even have a concept of how to measure digital maturity, right? And so I call my business the human stack, because right now we only have one stack, which means that anything we're going to solution on, even if it's change management or strategy or adoption, it's change management and strategy of the tech stack. That's like saying, we have a driver problem. So we need to double down on our change management of how we build cars, right? It doesn't make sense. But that's because human imagination is so powerful unless we give it a framework to work on, we can't think past our imagination. The human stack then becomes the place that we can measure if humans are actually getting better at driving or not. So it's not just better cars. We need another axis, you know, on the graph that is where we measure humans so that we've got better cars, you know, which is really important. I'm not saying that cars aren't important. They're really important. And making them is not easy, but we also need to have a place that we are making better drivers. And cars are human agnostic. If you authenticate, it doesn't care who you are, right? And so just like that, we need humans to drive agnostic of the technology because the issue isn't, do we make good individual humans? The issue is how do we make good collective use? How do we drive? It's like those big ladder trucks where there's a steering wheel in the front and the back. It's not just simple driving. And so when it comes to waterfall and agile, what I noticed is that waterfall was developed in the 80s, you know, by large organizations that would go in and, you know, send a team of developers to literally build computers in huge rooms. And so in order to do that well, because it was so expensive, they created the waterfall methodology. And that has not changed since then. And the cost of code is now really, really unexpected. You've got low code, no code solutions that make that really, really simple and really easy. And so those methodologies and agile, most of the time agile is just like scope, creep for waterfall anyway, but the few times that it's done really, really well, it's still both of those methodologies are how you build on the tech stack, you know, but they're bad for humans. They create change saturation for humans. And so what I did was create a methodology that is focused on how you help humans get good at tech, independently of building the technology. So basically waterfall and agile don't work for humans. I built a methodology called digital guidance that is focused on creating a way to collectively learn how to use software. I don't care which software it is, it's just a way to learn how to do that together. That is so important. We've had many episodes, right? We're nearing 700. We've done this for three years. That is so many. Can I just say like, you guys have done such an amazing job of having so many guests and really great content. So thank you. Anyway, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. Stop, stop. No, really, no, really, yeah. No, it's been fantastic truly. And we met you and I at the AFP icon conference in Vegas. And, you know, one of the things we've heard over these episodes truly is, you know, our system sucks. No one knows how to use it. You know, we hate X, Y, and Z donor database. And really what we're learning, as you said, the driver sucks. Like the driver doesn't understand if it's a stick shift, how to drive a stick shift, if it's a high speed, right? And so we're so eager to jump ship and either get a new system or do another integration, right? Which is more money, more data points, more whatever. And then you've got this issue of the turnover, resignation, resignation, work force. So now not only do you have the car, you've multiple drivers. It's like a clown car, right? Yeah, absolutely. And also you're ironically always worried about the admin getting hit by a bus. I like, everybody's talking about admins hitting, but I don't know why buses hate admins, but it's like they're all after them. So it's funny, Tim, I did a strategy session for a transportation company. And they were like, can we not use that analogy here? We really don't like it. Yes, thank you. Good, yeah, absolutely. I'm right there with it. Yeah, so funny. Well, you know what you're talking about is the human side and the technical side. And ultimately, it seems to me the playing field is the field of emotion. Yeah. And I'm fascinated to have your thoughts on this because the frustration level is so real and so vociferous almost. I mean, like people complain about it to such an extent. How do we navigate this emotional side? Yeah, so there are economic considerations here that I wanna go into after this if we've got time because I think it's really important to understand how we got here and there's an explanation for it. But that aside, I said something really briefly about change saturation and I found this, this is not a technology consulting idea. And so I had to go research and find it and it was really fascinating. Basically change saturation is the ratio of disruption in an organization relative to the amount of capacity that organization has for change, right? And there's only so much capacity that an organization has to be able to change. And so if you think of that capacity like a coffee cup, right? Okay. Then, and you think of disruption as coffee, then essentially when a nonprofit comes to me or starting to look for new technology, there's too much coffee for cup, that's the issue, right? Like they're wanting the technology itself to create a bigger cup, which is what it does, by the way, like that's why it's so important. That's why it's so great is that it becomes a bigger cup. But the issue is that the way that we engage that nonprofit is that we start by pouring a new CRM into an already full cup. And if you talk about the most disruptive actions, actions you can take in any organization, it is to switch up their backend systems, right? Yeah. And so what we're doing is we're trying to solve this, we need a bigger cup problem with a methodology that starts by pouring coffee instead of starting by creating a bigger cup. So, and what happens when you are a human and you face that much disruption and change saturation levels are so high that you don't have time to deal with that disruption. What happens is that you develop, you develop defenses for that and you develop stories in your mind to deal with the emotions that happen with that. Because you feel embarrassed, you feel frustrated. So, we would start a project and these already busy people would suddenly have five new meetings a week that they were in charge of and data that they were looking at for legacy data imports. And so we were creating more disruption. And what I wondered was, what if the first thing that we did when we started working with a nonprofit was to help them drive the car that they're in, even if they're gonna get a new car, why don't we start by teaching them how to drive in their existing car, which would functionally instead of pouring new coffee into the cup and creating more disruption, you would actually decrease the amount of disruption that they're experiencing. So, we just started with a simple idea of saying, we wanna fix what's not working in your system first. And when we did that, what we saw is that people relaxed into a process and could see the end game and we started using language like, we need to think of the tech stack as the hair because you can make changes in weeks and months. And the human stack is like the tortoise where we can make changes in quarters and years. And we need to slow this down so that we don't create all of this defensiveness, all of this frustration, this shame, this anger, this guilt, the resentment towards these systems. If you have a human that lives in resentment towards the system for an elongated period of time, they're going to seek control in their lives somehow. And the way they'll find that control is that they will use spreadsheets because spreadsheets maximize their individual autonomy and systems. So they'll export the data, they will start using their own. And so, and we start, we look at these, because it's technology, we have this temptation to look at it like it's zeros and ones. Again, the base code is all accuracy of true and false statements. That's not how it is. That's not how it is on the human stack. It is how it is on the tech stack. And that's really important. We need tech stack to just do that. But on the human stack, we have to understand it is about belonging. It is about how do I feel about this? And so, to your point about staff leaving, I don't think it's salary. I think what happens is staff are basically, nobody knows what really good tech staff are doing. They're excited about it, but their spouses don't understand it. Executive directors, their organization doesn't really understand the value that they bring. And a lot of it is non-promotable work. And then a consultant comes in and shines light of belonging onto these admins and recognize the hard work. And these admins suddenly find that they have more in common with the consultants than their org. And so, they leave not because of salary, they leave because they don't feel understood and included in their organization. So it is so cheap and easy to keep staff, just recognize their hard work and create accountability that is recognition based so that people are like, oh, okay, my work is seen and I'm understood and I'm valued here. They already chose to be with you. They want to be with you. They believe in your mission. This is not a hard win and you're never gonna compete on dollars. So don't even try. Just compete on the things that you've got, which is your impact that you're making in the world and create a culture of belonging. That culture, yeah. We don't have much time and I know we could talk forever and we're gonna talk to you more about technology in general. Talk to us about how we can truly assess these tech stacks and maybe you've already talked about it before, Tim, but as we wrap up the conversation today, how do we really assess? Because I have been on so many conversations where this doesn't work, we need this. This doesn't work, we need this. And now you've got literally hundreds of systems and they become all very siloed. So how do we assess this? Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing I wanna say is I'm gonna simplify a lot of this. So I just want to recognize, to my fellow technologists out there that are tuned in, I recognize that there's a lot more complexity than what I'm about to say. At the same time, we have to do a better job of sounding more human and play great tech for mortals. So I do wanna say it really simply. The first thing that I started to do was to say, how do we start evaluating not just the tech stack, but the human stack as well? So I took the years of experience I have and some of the surveys that we had sent out to clients for years and I looked through them and boiled them down to six things, six essential vitals, three of which are human stack and three of which are tech stack. And I created a simple quiz that is six questions that bothers me that it's that simple because I studied econometrics, but that's all it takes. We don't need to make this that much more complex. And the idea there is, okay, you take this quiz, people take it, it's less than two minutes to take and you get some sense of where you're at on your tech and human stack. Part of what's so valuable about that is that if your solution fit, which is one of the tech stack vitals, if your solution fit isn't well sized for your organization right now. Yeah. There are five other things you can work on like data quality, which is gonna have to get addressed at some point, right? And accountability structures and your digital strategy and are you actually fixing the small things in your system that break, you know, your lower case problems. So I created this so people could just take it as free, it's on our website, thehumansstack.com slash quiz and people can grab that, just get a sense of where they're at with that. And if they wanna do that for their entire organization, we offer a review for that. And part of what I wanna do is to help people avoid the six figures and 18 months of setting up a new system needlessly. If you need a new system, great. But what if you don't and you just need to not use your own system right now, there are not that many services that do that. Yeah. You know, I heard this very Sage woman tell me once, you dance with the one that brought you. That's you, Julia. And if we have this system, we need to learn to dance with the system, right? We need to learn to dance before we get a dance partner. And we've got a lot of analogies going in this conversation, right? We've got cars, we've got coffee cups and now we have dance partners. So just love it. But that's so important. And so Tim's information is on the screen. Those of you listening, that's not a telephone, that's supposed to be earbuds, thehumansstack.com. So do check him out. I love this, Tim. Absolutely love it. Thank you. We met again, you know, in IRL as Julia says in real life in Vegas. Love what you do. Now you're in Montana, but do you work across the nation? Yeah, I'm entirely remote and I'm building an online course so that smaller nonprofits would have access to this methodology. So yeah, from wherever, just hit me up on LinkedIn, find me on TikTok or find me on my website would love to interact. Look, you're on TikTok. I'm terrible on TikTok, but I like it. It's fun. That's good. You know, your website is amazing. It's really great. Thank you. It does address, I want to use the word simplification, but that's not really the right word. It's more logical approach to understanding the difference between the human aspect and the technological aspect and that frustration that everybody falls into and then it becomes such a dramatic and overwhelming situation that you can't cut through it to address what needs to be done. And so this has been a fascinating, fascinating conversation. Yeah, I've really enjoyed this and I really appreciate your perspective on this because there's not an organization out there that comes forward and says, we love our technology. It's all working perfectly. I mean, you just never ever hear that. And what a shame because you and I have said this from the get-go, you know, the pandemic has really amplified our need in the sector and the nonprofit sector to embrace technology to a greater degree and with more efficiency. And with more emotion, it's okay to be afraid of technology and if you feel ashamed about it, like, that's okay. Like let's start having that conversation because that's the only way we'll get to the zeros and ones is when we start with, hey, how do we feel about this and why? And do we feel prepared to lead on it? So, yeah. Wow. Well, this has been a fabulous, fabulous conversation. Again, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy, been joined today by the nonprofit nerd herself, Jared Ransom, CEO of the Raven Group. Again, we are so blessed to have these amazing sponsors. Most of you have been with us since the very beginning of the creation of the nonprofit show. So we want to express our gratitude to Blumerang, American Nonprofit Academy, your part-time controller, be generous, Fundraising Academy at National University, Staffing Boutique, nonprofit thought leader, and the nonprofit nerd. These are the folks that are joining with us day in and day out to get this amazing information out. I just have to say, Tim, the human stack logo would look really good on this. Yeah. I was just saying the same thing. Feel free to add it. I will talk, I will talk for sure. No, thank you so much, yeah. It's really been fun. I've loved your energy and I've loved your approach. Passion. Yeah, it's been really cool to hear that. And it dovetails to so many things that I face in my own company, when I'm out in the community, I'm hearing these messages. And I love your approach. It's been a lot of fun. Thank you so much. And thanks for all that you do for the nonprofit community. It's really important. Well, thanks. It's a lot of fun. Hey, everybody, as we end another episode of the nonprofit show, we want to remind ourselves, our viewers, our listeners, our guests, to stay well so you can do well. We'll see you back here tomorrow.