Every good idea has a moment where somebody asks how we’re going to measure it. It’s usually early, then very often, and always before the idea has done anything of signifigence. It gives me shivers because when someone isn’t there to push it back to outcomes and legacy, I’ve seen what tends to happen next.
The idea stops being a thing that’s trying to do good, and turns into a thing that’s trying to produce numbers. Those aren’t the same, no matter how green the dashboard goes.
But measurement is seductive, and with enough will you can make it do whatever you like, but the pull is inevitably towards efficiency. Efficiency, by it’s very nature, is fast, it’s cheap, it scales, and it answers the question everyone’s really frightened of, which is having to prove this was worth the money (but not the effort, or whether it changed lives, or will continue to change lives).
So we reach for it. And we reach for it before we’ve done the slower, less impressive job sitting underneath it, which is deciding what the thing is for.
The order is the whole thing
If I ruled the world, no social value system would be let anywhere near a dashboard until it knew what, and who it was for. It had been built to help exactly those people, and was already doing it, in a small way, for real.
I’m not anti-measurement. I say those words often. I want to be clear about that, because it’s the bit people mishear. It’s just for other people to care about. I am about action and outcomes, and legacy. If Social Value is to be all things to all people, then we need people focusing on different parts of the Social Value economy – I will leave measurement to others, but I value it and it’s part of every Social Value project I’ve been part.
But the problem with bad social value is never the measuring – it’s the running order.
Philosophy first. Work out what you’re trying to change, and for whom. Then build it, deliver it small, and find out if it does the thing. Then, once you know it works, you bring the efficiency in to help it reach more people. Because then efficiency becomes a blessing. It takes something good and hands it to more people. Do it backwards, dashboard first, and you don’t get a slightly worse version of a good thing. You get a hollow one with excellent charts, that never worked, and now has the numbers to prove it never had to.
I hear you shouting through the screen at me – ‘but that takes time!’ Too right. and Social Value shouldn’t be timed, because legacy takes time.
What I mean by the two words
Let me be plain about the words, because they cause a lot of damage when they’re loose.
Efficiency, in my head, is the number machine. The Portal. The TOMs. The points and the proxy values and the quarterly return. The part of this job that looks like accountancy, it’s compliance and procurement orientated. Why? Because it is.
Philosophy is what should be the core, and that means it’s meant to come first. What is this contract for? What is it meant to change, and for whom, and how would you see that change in a person’s week rather than a box on a form? It’s the move away from ticking things and towards doing some good.
And my trade, mine, not just other people’s, went and built the number machine before it had finished that sentence. We started measuring before we’d agreed what was worth measuring. Do that for long enough and the measuring becomes the point, without anyone ever choosing it.
The bit I have to be careful about
Now, I need to square this with something I said a few episodes back, because a sharp reader will have it ready.
I argued, hard, for building the checking early. For someone independent whose whole job is to go back and see whether the good thing we were promised actually turned up. I meant it. I still do. But that isn’t the number machine I’m warning you about. Checking whether the value happened is philosophy finishing its sentence, the system turning round and asking itself if it did the thing it said mattered.
The number I’d hold back is the other one. The scoreboard people work back from, the one that becomes the reason the work exists at all.
Build it, then break it on purpose
There’s something I do with everything I build, and I’d bottle it if I could.
I build the best version I can, properly, with the full intention behind it, and I get it working in a small way for real people. Then, before I let it grow, I sit down and I do my very best to break it.
Because it will. Everything does, under load. So I build the fix for that now, while things are calm, and I put it in a drawer. When the good thing starts to strain, and a good thing under pressure always strains, I open the drawer, and the efficiency’s already sitting there ready to slot in, instead of me building it in a fortnight of panic with my hair on fire.
That’s where the dashboard belongs. Drawn up early, kept in the drawer, brought out when the thing it serves is working and starting to bend. Not poured as the foundation of a building nobody’s agreed the shape of.
Where the ideal meets the real
And now the objection, which is a good one – philosophy first is a very easy thing to say from where I sit. I’m the consultant.
I get to stroll in and tell a commissioner running forty contracts on a shoestring that they ought to build the beautiful bespoke version before they so much as log into a portal. The portals exist for a reason, and it isn’t stupidity.
Somebody drowning in contracts needed, and still needs, a way to keep their head above water, and a number-based system is a life raft when it’s at your chin. Telling that person philosophy comes first, when nobody’s handed them the time or the money to do philosophy at all, is a luxury belief, and it’s one I can afford and they can’t.
So the honest order involves resources. Then philosophy. Then efficiency. In the perfect world the resource is just there. In this one, getting it is most of the fight, and until that fight is won the life raft is doing the one thing philosophy can’t do yet, which is keeping people alive. In previous episodes I have said money should be set aside by commissioners from the money they receive from the contractors – but just ask how that works from the creators of National Insurance – it all ends up in the same pot eventually.
I still believe the order matters, I’ve just stopped pretending the order is free.
This episode’s open question
What’s the best thing you’ve ever watched die of efficiency?
The system that worked, that did real good, right up to the day somebody set out to make it scalable and optimised the life clean out of it. I’ve got one I still think about. I’d bet you’ve got yours. And I’d bet they went the same way, buried under a very good dashboard.
Tell me about it. I’ll read every answer. In the final episode, they get their say.
Lewis English is the founder of Underpin Consultants, working on social value, strategy and stakeholder engagement across the UK. If any of this is sitting on your desk, you can book a free 30 minute conversation here.
You can read previous episodes here.
