The 3 Commitments of a Data-Informed Organization: Part 1
Define the Results to Be Achieved
[Short on time? Read the TLDR version at the bottom.]
I wrote in the last issue that data-informed decision-making is a discipline, a set of commitments for how you approach programs or initiatives. In this issue we take a deeper dive into the first commitment, to define the specific results or outcomes to be achieved.
It often amazes me how enthusiastically organizations throw themselves into expensive efforts without being able to articulate what they will actually achieve. If you are going to expend significant resources on something, doesn’t it make sense to get really clear what you are getting out of it?
To be fair, that can be trickier than you think. There are a couple key issues.
Proximate vs Ultimate Goals
The first is that, if you are going to be effective, you have to get clear about two kinds of results: the immediate results of what you plan to do and the larger goal they are in service of.
Just as we too easily focus on the immediate causes of a problem without digging through to address the root cause, we can become fixated on proximate goals and forget what we’re ultimately trying to achieve.
You need to think about both. Take speed humps.
The immediate goal of a speed hump is to slow traffic down. It’s a nice concrete goal. And it’s easy to measure by laying pneumatic tubes or posting a police officer with radar. But is slowing down traffic the result we ultimately want?
What people in the neighborhood likely really want isn’t slower traffic per se, but a safer environment, perhaps because children play in the area or because there’s significant pedestrian traffic getting to stores or a bus or a school.
In other words, the proximate goal is just a means toward a larger ultimate one.
Why does it matter?
For one thing, you may not actually have a shared understanding about what the ultimate goal is. That means any “agreement” about the value of doing the project is based on individual, potentially misaligned or even contradictory understandings of what it will lead to. That can create future challenges.
Equally important, looking beyond the means to the ultimate goal makes it easier to explore alternatives. There may be better ways to achieve it, or alternatives that cost less or have fewer negative impacts on some stakeholders. Perhaps it’s enough to add or improve sidewalks, introduce traffic calming measures with less impact on emergency vehicles, or even explore ways to route more of the traffic away from internal neighborhood streets.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, clarity about proximate and ultimate goals is crucial to understanding how they are interconnected and ensuring you actually make progress on the ultimate ones.
Say you want to provide grant funding to a nonprofit that does financial counseling. The program performance focus is and should be on whether clients are able to successfully build savings or apply for credit cards or a mortgage. But if that is part of a larger effort to increase community resilience or address housing cost burdens, it is important to get clear what, specifically, the ultimate expected outcomes are. Which leads to the next key issue.
Getting Concrete: Who Experiences It and What Do They Experience?
What does it mean to get concrete about outcomes?
We often think it’s enough to describe in detail just what we will do and to measure how much and how well we do it. And then we wonder why we don’t meet people’s expectations.
For better or worse, people rarely care how much your organization does or even what it does. They care about the level of service or outcome they actually experience. Starting your performance management thinking from that experience will make communication easier and provide a better basis for conversation about the resources required to deliver that experience and the tradeoffs involved.
That obviously means getting concrete about who is doing the experiencing. The impact of speed humps on neighborhood residents is different than on delivery drivers or commuters through the neighborhood. In some sense though, the latter are easy. We basically know what their experience is: they get slowed down.
But what about the neighborhood folks requesting the speed humps? Will they be satisfied with just slowing down traffic? Only if it gets them what they want from the slow-down. And if you don’t get concrete about that, achieving it may turn out to be a crap shoot.
Once you’ve defined the expected results, the next step is to check whether they’re happening. That is the topic of the next issue.
Further Reading
The article above is part of a larger series. Here it is so far:
Links & Thoughts
Good things take time. “The more people insist that their leaders make changes overnight, the more likely it is that the new initiatives will not succeed.” Nice short post from Barrett & Greene.
Don’t do this with data. My comments on an article purporting to prove that “deterrence works.” The article is a smorgasbord of things not to do with data.
tldr
This issue examines the first of three commitments of a data-informed organization, to define the specific results or outcomes to be achieved. This is less straightforward than it seems. There are two important considerations:
You must distinguish between the immediate results you seek, e.g., slowing down traffic through the use of speed humps, and the ultimate goal, e.g., making the neighborhood safe for pedestrians. Knowing the ultimate goal is key both to more effective implementation and to exploration of alternative strategies.
Getting very concrete about what those results actually are. That’s not about knowing in detail what you will do, but knowing who will be impacted and how they will experience that impact. That is critical in setting you up for the next commitment: understanding whether your efforts are working.
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