Steven McCormick: Measuring the Wrong Thing

Nonprofits are not for-profits. It is very hard to measure results in a quantitative way in a not-for-profit organization. And as the adage goes, what you measure gets managed. If you put emphasis on things that are measurable, you actually may drive organizations to do things that aren't really adding up to the prize. Someone shared with me a little while ago, a guy named Mario Molino who is a very successful investor, venture capitalist, who's gotten deeply involved in the art and science and practice of philanthropy and has advocated for outcome-based philanthropy, said, you know, you do need to be careful though because As we saw in Vietnam, the measure was body count. You could count the number of bodies that were the result of a battle. And what happened? We lost in Vietnam. We drove all of the field leadership to think in terms of how many bodies did we get in that battle? And we're adding up bodies. But at the time, we were not— this country was not making progress in the political environment, in the economic environment, the social environment in Vietnam. And so I had no hope of winning in Vietnam. And the North Vietnamese were willing to keep putting bodies into the body count. Good example, but a sobering example of measuring the wrong thing. So in a not-for-profit setting, measuring success will require much more nuance, much more subtle ways of assessing progress, more like gathering evidence for a legal case than it is sort of counting something.