A new lens for philanthropy

In a recent meeting with a bunch o' foundation folks, we were talking all around the issues relating to impact.  The conversation moved in a lot of different directions talking about things like philanthropy markets, and identifying a "unit of good", and how it is impossible to identify a unit of good, and accountability and transparency and who is accountable to whom and who needs to be transparent...  As the conversation rambled, I began to crystallize how I think about this.

The End Game
A just and equitable world without suffering.  To understand if we are moving in the right direction we need a lot of data and we need to all (philantropists, nonprofits, clients, and observers) be the solution we want to see.

A Reference Grid
I believe that we need to fight against the reflex to apply a financial metaphor to understand comparative good.  The financial metaphor is attractive because it gives us the ability to compare the goodness of one organization with the goodness of another.  However, this comparison is only relevant from the perspective of a donor.  And, it is only relevant to a donor that is concerned with the specific effect of his unique contribution.  It is this paradigm that drives the marketplace metaphor where product is packaged to be digested by the consumer.  Unfortunately, in this paradigm, the consumer is the donor; therefore, the product is marketed to him.  The goal is to create an environment where everyone is focused squarely on solving social problems without the noise that is created when two masters (donors and progress towards solution) compete for attention.

So, what I have tried to create in the graph is a way to examine efficacy along a three dimensional grid.  Efficiency speaks to transactional cost.  Impact speaks to social outcomes.  And, transparency speaks to an individual's or organization's ability to play well with others.  The more transparent you are, the better able you are to collaborate on solutions, to iterate through possibilities and improvements and to aggregate data so that regional and global progress can be made visible. 

The nexus of the grid represents zero where there is no Efficiency, Impact or Transparency.  The negative side is also important to examine.  For example, the negative end of the transparency spectrum moves from opaque to obfuscation.

We can plot an individual or an organization on this grid or it can be used as a way to understand more generalized progress towards solutions.  It is critical that we move beyond the granular approach of following a dollar from privilege to impact where accountability structures focus on the transactional layer, completely missing the donors and only tangentially focusing on solutions to problems.  Instead, we need and hold everyone as accountable to creating solutions.  We can only be successful if we are all impactful, efficient and transparent.

Two Lenses
Traditionally, we have looked at philanthropy as a supply chain problem where resources need to be sustainably located, allocated, transported and applied.  I want to show why I think that this point of view is ineffective and propose another lens that tries to take a more holistic or ecosystem approach.

Supply Chain
In a supply chain you need a supplier, doer/mover, and recipient.

Supplier
In philanthropy, or a donor centric model, the owner of the resources (cash, supplies, services, equipment, knowledge, etc) is in a position of privilege. Their ability to dictate the destination of their property infers upon them the ability to define accountability for the entire system. This tends to lead to a feedback loop the focuses accountability on the transactions, or the specific use of each resource. The philanthropists are placed in this class by virtue of having “plenty” and their accountability is to be philanthropic or to give away as much as they can.

Doer/Mover
This is the domain of the nonprofit or, more broadly, the social sector. This is where mission based organizations work to do things like end poverty or eradicate disease. They use the resources provided by the suppliers and report back to them with information about the delivery those resources.

Recipient
This model recognizes the recipient as the end of the chain. The accountability of the recipient is to receive those resources and to recognize their receipt. This accountability tends to manifest itself in providing permission for images on annual reports and websites of recipients having received. Additionally, their may be some programmatic accountability established between the Doer/Mover and the Recipient that focuses on the quality and/or quantity of the receipt.

This is a broken system. While there is a strong push for data, metrics and accountability, the accountability is far too granular and focused on individual performance relative to resource expenditure. While this is not irrelevant, it does not get us where we need to be, which is, a just and equitable world without suffering. This accountability structure is borrowed directly from financial systems where it is highly relevant because the goal is to have more resources received that spent, more apples in than apples out. Because there is no unit of good representing a standard for measurement for progress towards a better world, we do not have apples and apples, at least not at this level of granularity.

Looking back at the graph, on aggregate in the Supply Chain model, nearly all accountability is focused on efficiency. Transparency gets some attention in the relationship between the supplier and the Doer/Mover. Impact gets very little play. The narrative, or case study, is the most common example of an attempt to represent impact. Additionally, research studies certainly qualify as an attempt to understand impact but these studies take a massive amount of faith and extrapolation to have global or regional relevance in a dynamic world where we need to visualize solutions out in to the future.

There is no accountability structure that demands a system for monitoring progress over time towards a just and equitable world without suffering.

Ecosystem
The Supply Chain lens breaks down because the tracking of the resources is preeminent.  With an ecosystem lens, I hope to show that the health and accountability of all the players is critical to success.  I first came across this model in Monica Sharma's work on transformational leadership. (Conscious Leadership at a Crossroads and, more relevant to this post, Personal to Planetary Transformation).  Ms. Sharma has constructed a model where where everyone, regardless of their role in as described above, is the source of the solution. 

Today, the most urgent and sustainable response to the world’s problems is to expand solutions for problems that are driven solely by technology, to responses that are generated from personally-aware leadership. Evidence shows this is possible in business and in development, and a few large-scale initiatives are now underway.

The Leadership and Capacity Development Initiative of the United Nations is one of these expanded approaches that I am directing. This initiative builds on successes, and works with a worldwide constellation of like-minded organisations and individuals. The purpose is to foster sustainable transformation at every level of society. A pregnant space for emergence enables actions that are sourced from deep within. Key components and systems are in concert and are aligned to the larger purpose. All strategies and actions embody wisdom, courage and compassion.

-Monica Sharma, Personal to Planetary Transformation

Taking a look at the circles graph above, Imagine that each outer circle holds those within in it.  This is not meant to be a bullseye, where the inner most circle is the most valuable.  Instead, imagine an ecosystem where each inner layer cannot exist without the context of those that hold it and each outer layer is given meaning through its interaction with those that it holds.

The inner most circle represents the world of action, transaction and technology.  This is where medicine is applied to disease or houses are built for the homeless.  In this circle, discreet actions are performed to address immediate causes.

The middle circle represents the system or context that influences and informs those actions.  This is the Supply Chain as described above.  How do we sustainably provide needed resources that will alleviate needless suffering?  The system circle has, justifiably, been receiving much of the attention in an effort to unravel and understand the complexity of the global problems that we face.

In Monica Sharma's work, she describes a system for providing medical attention to AIDs patients.  The system had the parts that it needed; resources were located and placed correctly to provide remedies and to alleviate symptoms.  However, the individuals within the system held deep prejudices about each other and without transforming these relationships, the system could not be optimized.

The largest circle is where my epiphany lies.  It represents self in the context of entrepreneurship or transformational leadership.  It is either that which grounds, defines or inspires an individual who is declaring a new future, or it holds the root causes, those assumptions, biases and prejudices that make a system feel immutable.  In the negative, it is the outer circle that creates the box, the one that we are all supposed to think outside of.  In the positive, it is this circle that will shift the paradigm, that will source the vector that both defines a new future and creates a visible path towards solution.

Conclusion
Optimizing the supply chain only addresses part of the problem and an exclusively Supply Chain focused approach to philanthropy skews accountability away from ultimate solution towards a far too granular focus on the efficiency of resource expenditure.  However, a more holistic approach like that described by the circular diagram should give us the full spectrum of an interdependent ecosystem that places  granular accountability with the individual and defines efficacy as the health of the entire system.

This post just describes the lens, I hope to continue this thinking with posts on the specifics of collecting data with the intention of monitoring accountability, ecosystem health and specific progress towards well defined solutions.  Currently, the rubric that I am using to understand this is Collaboration, Iteration and Aggregation.

More soon...

Comments

[gokubi]

Nice post Steve. I like the lens you've laid out. Makes a lot of sense.

[Gideon Rosenblatt]

Glad to see that you are digging deeper in this area, Steve.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about impact over the last couple years, and it truly is some of the most difficult, mind-bending work I've had to do. Thanks for the pointer to Monica Sharma's work. It's great and very much in line with work happening at Rockwood Leadership and other places.

Just out of curiosity, what if you flipped the order of the layers in the sphere so that the 'self' was on the inside? I know that's not how Monica had it, but it might help make it more intuitive to be working from the inside out...

Thanks for sharing the good thinking here.

[Conches]

Gideon, thanks for the comments. I had the opportunity to spend two days with Monica recently and it really helped me jumpstart my thinking.

As for inverting the sphere, I have had that exact thought myself. The reason why I have not done it is that I like the idea that instead of self being at the center and everything emanating from self, I prefer to think of self as holding everything else. It takes me out of my individualistic mind frame because it is silly to think that I, personally, hold everything and forces me to simultaneously examine self as me and self as everyone else. It is a context in which one can examine both self AND community simultaneously without subjugating one to the other.

[Bruce Barondes]

Such non-trditional approach to the customer description! thank you for this article.
http://www.business-development-metrics.com/

[Conches]

Bruce,

Thanks for the comment.