October 5, 2000 | Read Time: 5 minutes
By KENNARD T. WING
Foundations’ current obsession with “outcomes” reflects the American zeitgeist. It should come as no surprise that foundations are calling on grant recipients to specify the results they will accomplish — not just the activities they will undertake — and attempting to hold their grantees accountable for achieving those outcomes.
In education, the push is for performance standards. In medicine, success rates for different treatment regimens are being measured. In government, efforts are under way to emulate the incentives and performance measures of business, and in business, the push for results is leading companies to compensate executives with a greater proportion of stock than ever.
Although the accountability movement still has the sound of an evangelizing vanguard, in reality it’s been with us for years. While philanthropy may not have been the first to embrace the movement, it’s not too soon to begin holding the movement itself accountable. Unfortunately, the kindest early assessment we can make is “easier said than done.”
Among the problems: Many worthy results take a lot longer to accomplish than the attention span of most foundations. In the field of community development, for example, the kinds of measurable results that foundations get excited about don’t happen in 10 years. Transforming the Bronx from a wasteland, for example, took 30 years of hard work, and much remains to be done. The safe, attractive, prosperous community that foundations hoped would result from their investments there remains the ideal, not the reality.
Since it takes so long to achieve the outcomes we all want — known as “ultimate outcomes” — foundations are placing emphasis on results that can be achieved within the life of a foundation-financed project, so-called intermediate outcomes.
Where the ultimate outcome is neighborhood safety, an intermediate outcome might include organizing and training block-watch groups throughout the neighborhood. Similarly, if the goal is an attractive neighborhood, then the intermediate outcome might be to institute a program to help homeowners defray the cost of repainting the exterior of their homes. Such intermediate outcomes are not valued primarily for their own sakes, but because they have the potential to lead to ultimate outcomes such as safe or attractive neighborhoods.
But will they? In education, community development, job training, health, and countless other fields, nonprofit groups are trying to influence complex systems whose dynamics of change and development are poorly understood.
At the beginning of a foundation-supported project it is impossible to know what initial accomplishments will best achieve an ultimate solution. Nor will everybody agree which short-term accomplishments are most important. A foundation that demands commitment to intermediate outcomes at the outset of the project is fixing on means whose relationship to desired ends is unknown — exactly what the accountability movement was supposed to avoid.
What’s more, the emphasis on discrete measurable outcomes can become a straitjacket. The savvy community leader who knows that solving difficult problems often requires dealing with complex interactions of racism, poverty, family preservation, crime, substance abuse, jobs, and suburban sprawl may have to chop that nuanced understanding into bite-size bits to meet the demands of a foundation’s outcomes methodology. But doing so may interfere with accomplishing the mission.
Adding to the difficulties: The performance measures never quite live up to the outcomes that have been specified.
When the killjoy evaluator asks, “How will we know we have achieved this outcome?” the answer usually is a measure such as standardized test scores, which miss the deeper qualities of educational achievement, or a client or resident survey, which all too often substitutes perceptions for facts. And for programs operating at neighborhood or community levels, collecting even those inadequate measures can be extremely problematic.
Emphasizing measurable outcomes comes with many risks, including the danger that mundane projects with tangible results will receive foundation money more readily than those programs that aim to solve crucial problems in ways that cannot be easily reduced to a series of measurable results.
A university that seeks money to build a new computer center has no problem demonstrating its success to a foundation: “The building’s finished. Come cut the ribbon.” But ask the charity that receives a grant to improve the quality of public dialogue during presidential campaigns to provide a similarly attractive, simple outcome. It’s not going to be possible.
The result of the push for outcomes is most likely to be a triumph of form over substance.
Already, grantees are submitting plans to foundations where the lists of “activities” to be carried out — an approach supposedly banished by outcomes accountability — have simply been relabeled “milestones” to fit with foundations’ zest for the language of outcomes evaluation. In the end, all that will happen is that we’ll have a whole new set of paper forms and terminology for grant making the way it’s always been done.
That has happened at least twice before.
When Robert McNamara joined President Kennedy’s Cabinet, he promoted ideas about outcomes and performance measures that became standard procedure in the planning and budgeting processes used by federal agencies and were then adopted by foundations.
And Herbert Simon’s Administrative Behavior, published in 1947, is in some ways ahead of today’s writing on outcomes accountability. Particularly telling is Mr. Simon’s conclusion that our ability to manage by relying on outcomes is limited because we don’t understand the complex relationship between the means we control and the ends we seek.
Don’t get me wrong. We need to be clear about what we are trying to accomplish, and we need new and better ways for foundations and their grantees to get continuous feedback to determine what’s effective and what’s not.
Unfortunately, those vital elements are sometimes de-emphasized in favor of quixotic efforts to measure social change as if it were a well-controlled and well-understood mechanical process. By all means, let us focus on outcomes, but let’s make sure our accountability mechanisms don’t undermine achievement of the outcomes themselves.
Kennard T. Wing is an evaluator at the OMG Center for Collaborative Learning, a nonprofit research and consulting organization in Philadelphia.
