Behavior Drives Data Drives Behavior
Embracing the hard truths can make us more effective
Want to change the world? Then beware of unfettered optimism.
We are all familiar with the glass half full / glass half empty paradigm. It is a simplistic, black-and-white distinction; we classify ourselves as believing one or the other. It’s also a myopic, short-term view of the world. It describes our view of the glass today but says nothing of the future. Will we have a fuller cup tomorrow? Or will it empty completely? How long will it take to fill back up?
Those of us who are passionate about tackling the world’s biggest problems – extreme poverty, racial and gender inequality, environmental degradation, disease, and disability, to name a few – cannot afford to be pessimists. If we fundamentally believe nothing will improve, we’d be paralyzed into inaction and inevitability. We’d have no reason to get out of bed in the morning.
But the remedy is not merely the flip side of doom and gloom. Optimism, when unchecked, is just as dangerous as pessimism, maybe even more so. And do-gooder organizations the world over are prone to Pollyanna proclamations of positivity.
It’s evident, as one example, in the way social entrepreneurs, impact investors, and philanthropists broadcast a significant “lives impacted” metric (usually in the thousands or millions) in their messaging. The instinct is understandable: non-profits have to compete for eyeballs and dollars, while funders have to justify their mandates. But the drive to chase large, rosy numbers perpetuates a cycle of increasingly untenable standards. It is also a symptom of a recklessly pervasive philosophy: that with enough money and smarts, we can vanquish these big, hairy problems tomorrow. A more just, humane, and verdant world is right around the corner.
The problem is not so much inflation in impact numbers as it is a short-term mindset, a happy but misguided conviction that you serve a person today, and *poof!* they are transformed forever. Easy peasy, mission accomplished.
Many numbers reported by mission-driven organizations may reflect an accurate count of people they have reached. But for every Paulina who took a micro-loan and built a successful apple-selling business that is running one year later, there is a Paul who faced challenges that upended his apple cart and pulled him back into poverty. Rarely are these clients re-visited, and rarely are the longer-term outcomes reported. We love a good success story but never talk about the unsuccessful ones, though the latter are teeming with valuable lessons. A fixation on positive, immediate outreach makes it easy to lull ourselves into believing our own hype, that change can happen fast and is entirely within our control.
But the big, hairy problems we have chosen to attack are big and hairy for a reason. These are complex, multi-dimensional, systemic issues. There are myriad factors out of our control. If tackling them were easy, we would have done so long ago. So instead of leading with baseless optimism, let’s adopt rational optimism . This philosophy steadfastly believes the beasts will be slain in the end but is grounded in a pragmatism that expects the journey will be arduous and is prepared for all the ups and downs along the way.
Calidris works with mission-driven organizations to derive honest insights – both positive and negative – from impact data. This grounding in rational optimism is inspired by the story of Admiral Jim Stockdale and his harrowing story of survival after enduring eight years of serious torture as a POW during the Vietnam War. Interviewed by Jim Collins for his book Good to Great, Stockdale says, “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
Rational optimism may sound like an oxymoron. In fact, Stockdale’s own practice of maintaining faith in the long term while confronting present reality is referred to as the Stockdale Paradox. It is a balance, a recipe for resilience. While we may not be facing such horrific circumstances as Stockdale endured, we are regularly chipping away at monstrously complicated problems and seemingly intractable indignities. It is far more productive then to manage for the long view and acknowledge with unvarnished honesty the wins and losses in the short- to medium-term. The work is messy and complicated, and sometimes we take two steps backward for every step forward. Collectively, however, our impact reporting today glosses over this reality.
Calidris operates with another belief that behavior drives data drives behavior. The second part of this statement should be familiar to anyone who believes that data reveals insights that can inform decision-making and change within organizations. But the first part is also true – if we try to drive change through rose-colored blinders, this will influence the data we look for, collect, and ultimately report on. It is easy to bend data to suit our agenda. We’ll see only a tiny slice of the true impact of our actions. We’ll be convinced of a glowing, positive impact when our interventions may have produced mixed results.
If not resolved, those mixed results can come back to bite us and undermine our future success. So how can we make it more acceptable to acknowledge the hard truths?
If you serve on the board of a non-profit, ask about outcomes that did not go as planned and what the team has learned from the experience
If you are a funder, ask your grantee or investee to share failures along with their successes and work with them to course correct in light of these learnings
If you are a mission-driven organization, sprinkle one or two “negative” metrics in your impact reporting and share how this information has helped improve your programs
It behooves us to embrace these hard truths, learn from our failures, be public about what worked, what didn’t, and why, so we forge ahead fruitfully … all while maintaining a long view of a world we know is possible.
