Hi everyone, welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vizchen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist humility for change, for aggressive, in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Today's guest is Sienna Jackson, a two-time founder, systems thinker, and someone who's been rewriting the rules since she was a teenager. We were introduced through a former guest, Chris Hare, and right away I knew we spoke the same language. Real talk, human-centric ideas, and sharp thinking with no fluff. Sienna started college at 14, interned at the Weinstein Company by 17, and later led music and content at Spine Glass Media. Today she is the CEO and co-founder of Notera, a B2B software company, helping large enterprises control the risk of employment litigation and automate HR compliance. And yes, AI plays a big role in that. In this two-part series, we talk about chasing excellence without burning out, navigating boardrooms as the only one in the room. And why? Equity has to be measured if you want it to matter. Let's get into it. That brings us to a good that way, your social impact work. What made you step into that space in the first place? You mentioned earlier about being like an auditor, someone who helps organizations, understand the impact that made both the good and the unintended, but less rewind a little. What drove you to move from the movie making industry into social impact? And second, how would you describe your own approach to measuring and creating impact? We'll put that bullet to break that into two buckets. So like when I was in a mid-20s, by the time I was like, yeah, approaching like 27, no, even earlier than that. It would have been a couple of years even before that. So as I was like moving on through my career, I was doing all this stuff on the side for free of just like meddling in politics and doing things that were social good oriented. But even before that, I wanted to be a journalist, right? I wanted to be a citizen of the world and use storytelling through the lens of reporting for good. But I saw that journalism as an industry was already in a very bad way when I pivoted into entertainment. And by the tail end of my time and entertain it, so much had been changing in the industry. And I would say to like friends, I'd be like streaming's going to become the new cable. We're going to want to cut the cord, streaming, they're going to do bundles. Of course, like four years later, that's exactly what was happening. And I was just ready to pivot. I think I have a diary entry from like December, 2018 of Santa, you need to figure out what you want to do with your life. And you've got to like figure it out and just do it. That was 2018. I didn't start the startup my consultancy until 2020. But I had created the LLC in 2019. I started like, I bought a domain. I started like, just subconsciously doing little things that were like my offering to get ready for the pivot. It wasn't like a plan that I had in mine. And then in January of 2020, right after Grammy Week, I sent an email to like my top, you know, top couple thousand most relevant industry contacts. I was like, I'm doing some flimpack now. Okay. And that was it. And then Mark Chappen and Lockdown started and I was like, great timing to start a business. That was the year 2020 was such an inflection year, culturally in the United States. After the murder of George Floyd, people were calling me up and asking how they should think about things because people already had known me and knew what I was about. They knew I was always interested in the world and current events. And I had my fingers on a lot of different pies and I had relationships and networks outside of the entertainment industries. People already knew what I was that I was eclectic in my areas of interest. So people would hit me up and I said, okay, I'm happy to have the conversation, but you have to pay me for it. And so that's what kicked me off is like one email and that kicked off my entire career as an impact consultant. And as I started doing that, like right out the gate, I worked on like 2020 presidential election. So I worked on a big get out the vote campaign that ultimately registered like 114,000 voters. So I was already like right out the gate doing a lot of really cool projects. And it became quickly apparent to me that people were jumping on the impact train this idea and making a lot of claims that were it was just like it was just like marketing stick. It was like hollow marketing stick or like in these trying times, we love you so much and we believe that we use to shop our products. It's for the good of the world. And I was just I didn't like it. I was not impressed. And I would ask myself it's when people talk about change or they talk about making a difference or doing good. How are we defining that? Like people talk impact all the time. Very rarely will they follow it up with a workable definition of what impact is. And impact is simply it's the net positive change rendered as a direct and material result of your actions. So if you get an input and action, you should get a specific reaction or outcome that you can measure that you can quantify that you can predict, right? That you can build a model that says, okay, if I am investing X number of hours at this much money, this much capital, this much this, I should expect this to be the result. And I wasn't seeing that. And I took a while to find a community of practitioners that were in this space of it's called IMM impact management and measurement, right? People who are actually do things like an SROI analysis, like social account and investment analysis, who are applying global best practices or accounting standards for how we count for social value, how we how we build up models that actually give us a predictive analysis of how things get done for real. So now I'm also a board member at social value international's US branch, the social value international's like 60 member countries that used to be the SROI network 20 years ago. But there's all these organizations globally that work together with the UN sustainability, sustainable development goals. There's global impact investing network, which is gin, there's the impact management projects, there's a lot of academic, nonprofit, NGO institutions, like large institutions, investors, foundations that are all engaged in this work of furthering best practice, identifying like global reporting initiatives. So it's like there's so many now at this point, there's IFRS, there's like SASB and IFRS that have their own sustainability accounting standards, right? So that that was the area I wanted to play in. And for me, what was cool is that because of my entertainment background, my background working with creatives, with producing, with creating content that has a lot of impact on people that like grabs people and grabs attention. That was excellent because I could marry that background with this new very academic work that I was doing. And I thought two master's degrees I don't know what I thought, I found an MBA and I've also got the Masters of Science. So this also allowed me this pivot to pursue my more academic inclinations anyway. So basically, by starting my own thing and being my own boss, it gave me the opportunity to take all the things and I've always been interested in and always cared about and always wanted to seek wedded together. And now I get to do that. My kind of slogan is I'm approaching change at the intersection of cause, culture and capital. So how do we marry those concepts together? How do we leverage capital and how do we influence culture to further a cause? How do these things work together? Like these three seas of things for me. And that's been like a really cool journey. So I'm going into like my fifth year, Anthony. And right now I'm working on a very large, my largest project yet, which is an international collaboration and executive producing one of one of the largest non-dilute of funding events on the African continent specifically in Ethiopia. So we're, I'm executive producing the Great Rift Valley Innovation Summit co-leading that and that's going to be next year. So I'll be traveling to Africa for the first time. Be watching like a live pitch competition. We're partnered with the UN, the United Nations Development Program for this initiative and a bunch of other public and private sector institutions, large institutions to deliver money right into the hands of Ethiopian founders who are doing great work in healthcare and education, agriculture, the making a big difference in that country. We're the median age by the way, it's like nine. It's like a very, this very hungry, like very innovative. A lot of things going on. So I'm excited about what I'm doing in that space. Wow, honestly, I was just so drawn in by what you I kind of zoned out from coming up with more questions because I was so absorbed in your story. And while listening, someone in Sydney came to my mind, she is a former guest. Actually, one of the guests in season one, a founding guest, my classmate from Chicago Booth. She is from France, but currently in Sanago, Africa, serving as the technical advisor to the government, working on innovation and economic development. I feel like the two of you might really connect. You mentioned Africa, you mentioned Ethiopia being your biggest project yet. Who knows, maybe Sanago could be your next destination. Hey, I'll take any excuse to hop on and cleaning those somewhere new. It's really cool because I think that speaks to just the global nature of this work, which is really great because it's such a large community of people that are so smart and so multi-talented. And everyone is really motivated to make a difference to make a meaningful tangible impact. I often say to people like I'll point out to my peers, it's every problem that we have in the world is a man-made problem, which means that there's a man-made solution for every problem by that same token, right? So like we can we understand the contours of why things are the way they are or if something is wrong that something's amiss, we can understand the landscape and then build tactics and strategies and put things into operation that can make a difference. And part of my job is to explicate, first of all, the vision of what we want to go and then the tangible of how we get there, which is always it's a lot of project management work I have to do at the end of the day. It's a lot of it's a lot of ops. It's a lot of operations actually. You started this back in 2020, five years now and so much has changed since then. The worrying, the symptoms and even the conversations we're having around impact. As you've grown your business and expanded your advisory work, I'm curious what barriers have you seen or experienced along the way. Impact is a noble cause, no doubt about it and I imagine a lot of people supported in theory, but in practice what best in the way. Is it my set? I don't think money or technology are the biggest barriers. Those tend to be solvable. I love to hear from you to learn from you what real challenges have you run into. And how did you navigate or solve them? Yeah, I think the big thing that I noticed right at the gate was a lack of professional here community and network. Really what we're talking about is the whole global landscape of like philanthropy. Right. When we're thinking about like corporate social responsibility or ESG or evaluation and measurement, all these overlapping things, it's a lot of different gilsets that come to bear in this sort of work. But if I'm an accountant, I'm going to be a I'm going to be a CPA. I'm going to join my national association of whatever. Right. If I'm the lawyer, I have to pass the bar exam. That my JD, I join my local bar association. Right. You don't have that similar clear cut career progression for people who work in heaven. So there's a lot of work that needs to be done in terms of professionalizing the industry at least here in the United States. So part of what I am working on in my leadership role at social value is creating an industry survey. So again, this entertainment thing. I was like, I told my ears there. I was like, on the entertainment industry, we have we have industry surveys where we know how many people are employed in the entertainment industry. I know how many like above and below the line, we know what people's salaries are. We know what titles are. We know what roles are. We know who was doing what and what qualifications they need to succeed. We don't really have something equivalent for our industry, our discipline. And we need that. That's something I'm going to be rolling out sometime in the new year. I was lucky because I had the initiative to hunt people down. I knew I needed for peers. I needed colleagues and I needed people who were in this space longer than me and that were more knowledgeable. And I took the time to hunt them down. And I think that's something that maybe not everyone getting their start has the benefit of that. So usually when I talk to young people, because I do a lot of talks, I do a lot of public speaking, I teach workshops. When I talk to young change practitioners, people who want to work in impact or sustainability and have no idea how to get started, I usually come at them with a list, get on this newsletter, get on that newsletter, get here's this party, this event series that happens or this networking session that happens in LA. So that when it comes to impacts to state sustainability space here in Los Angeles, I feel like I have good handle on that. The thing that I will tell people all the time is you can't silo yourself. I think the one of the big challenges I see in my space, especially when I like dealing with my clients, it's like siloing. Like the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing or communicating to each other. And especially if it's cross-sactor. If you have one party here who's like in the nonprofit world, they really only know how to talk to other nonprofit people. Do you have someone over here who's either private sector? Maybe they work for a big firm and they only know their industry, but they want to make a difference on this problem. How do you create a bridge between these two poles? As of my background and the diversity of experience I have, I can speak to each party in their own language and draw them together and build a coalition. So I think that gives set of being able to speak to people in their language, but together coalitions that are intersectional, that bring stakeholders from very different backgrounds together and get them on the same page and then have a goal and guiding them to achieving that goal. That's my superpower and what I do. And that takes just time and trying and thinking about, oh, ways, you have a goal, have that vision in your head of what it is you're trying to achieve in the world and then work backwards from it. But ask yourself, like, what does it really want to see happen? And then say, okay, how do I make that happen? And who do I need on my side to get to this jeton? Oh, it sounds like the missing pieces are simply resources or funding. It's really about people, talent and the lack of real coordination. Community, coalition, like you said, humility, all of that ties directly back to your mission, pursuing change at the intersection of culture, capital and cause. I think we've covered some incredibly powerful ground today. But before we close, any final thought you'd like to share, maybe something we didn't get to or message you want to leave with the audience. Whether it's about impact, AI or something else close to your heart. I think for anybody in your audience that wants to use their work to make a difference in the world, who wants to do good, understand that every single person has their own unique way of doing good in the world. You have something unique to offer that's entirely yours. It's a kind of going back to the idea about art as self-expression. There's something in you, something unique about your background or your experience or your point of view or your skill sets or your talents that you can uniquely apply. So if you look out at the world and you see a problem that really bothers you, first ask yourself, where are the helpers? Who are the people who are already doing good work in this area, who are addressing this problem? And then how can I uniquely contribute to that work? How can I roll up my sleeves and help the helpers? Because that's what I find usually yields the most immediate results and it also helps if you feel like overwhelms with the world and overwhelmed with all the things that are going on and you say, oh, how can I possibly make a difference all on my own? You can't look for the helpers and help them. And then you'll, you won't be alone and you'll also be doing a lot of good at the same time. That's such a powerful reminder and honestly I needed to hear it too. I'm going through my own transition at the moment. There surely things that bother me challenge me. But like you said, the key is to look at who's already working on those problems I care about and then ask, how can I add to that? Where can my skills, my background or even my voice help amplified that problem or solution? And from there it becomes about execution, collecting the right data, tracking what matters, making smarter decisions, measuring your risks and accelerating both the scale and death of impact over time. Yeah, it's partly. Yeah, I think even with the show like that and you've already heard me tell you, I think Michelle like this, if you're connecting to people who might not otherwise get the chance to hear this certain perspective or maybe they they're in their own career journey and are really struggling or they're really seeking something. So if they're, again, it's like everyone has their own special and unique way of doing good. And that brings our series to close. The NS Journey is proof that change doesn't start with the loudest voice in the room. It starts with clarity, curiosity and courage to take the first step. Whether she's guiding companies through complex decisions or helping entrepreneurs and founders across Africa scale the ideas. She reminds us, every man made problem has a man made solution. And often the most powerful thing you can do is help the helpers. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you like what you heard, don't forget, subscribe to our show, leave us top rated reviews, check out our website and follow me on social media. I'm Vizchen, your ambitious human host. Until next time, take care.
