Did you miss the Catapult Labs conference on May 19? Then you missed something extraordinary.
But don’t worry, you can get the recap here.
The event was sponsored by Catapult Design, a nonprofit firm in San Francisco that uses the process and products of design to alleviate poverty in marginalized communities. Their work spans the worlds of development, mechanical engineering, ethnography, product design, and evaluation.
That is really, really cool.
I find them remarkable and their approach refreshing. Even more so because they are not alone. The conference was very well attended by diverse professionals—from government, the nonprofit sector, the for-profit sector, and design—all doing similar work.
The day was divided into three sets of three concurrent sessions, each presented as hands-on labs. So, sadly, I could attend only one third of what was on offer. My apologies to those who presented and are not included here.
I started the day by attending Democratizing Design: Co-creating With Your Users presented by Catapult’s Heather Fleming. It provided an overview of techniques designers use to include stakeholders in the design process.
Evaluators go to great lengths to include stakeholders. We have broad, well-established approaches such as empowerment evaluation and participatory evaluation. But the techniques designers use are largely unknown to evaluators. I believe there is a great deal we can learn from designers in this area.
An example is games. Heather organized a game in which we used beans as money. Players chose which crops to plant, each with its own associated cost, risk profile, and potential return. The expected payoff varied by gender, which was arbitrarily assigned to players. After a few rounds the problem was clear—higher costs, lower returns, and greater risks for women increased their chances of financial ruin, and this had negative consequences for communities.
I believe that evaluators could put games to good use. Describing a social problem as a game requires stakeholders to express their cause-and-effect assumptions about the problem. Playing with a group allows others to understand those assumptions intimately, comment upon them, and offer suggestions about how to solve the problem within the rules of the game (or perhaps change the rules to make the problem solvable).
I have never met a group of people who were more sincere in their pursuit of positive change. And honest in their struggle to evaluate their impact. I believe that impact evaluation is an area where evaluators have something valuable to share with designers.
That was the purpose of my workshop Measuring Social Impact: How to Integrate Evaluation & Design. I presented a number of techniques and tools we use at Gargani + Company to design and evaluate programs. They are part of a more comprehensive program design approach that Stewart Donaldson and I will be sharing this summer and fall in workshops and publications (details to follow).
The hands-on format of the lab made for a great experience. I was able to watch participants work through the real-world design problems that I posed. And I was encouraged by how quickly they were able to use the tools and techniques I presented to find creative solutions.
That made my task of providing feedback on their designs a joy. We shared a common conceptual framework and were able to speak a common language. Given the abstract nature of social impact, I was very impressed with that—and their designs—after less than 90 minutes of interaction.
I wrapped up the conference by attending Three Cups, Rosa Parks, and the Polar Bear: Telling Stories that Work presented by Melanie Moore Kubo and Michaela Leslie-Rule from See Change. They use stories as a vehicle for conducting (primarily) qualitative evaluations. They call it story science. A nifty idea.
I liked this session for two reasons. First, Melanie and Michaela are expressive storytellers, so it was great fun listening to them speak. Second, they posed a simple question—Is this story true?—that turns out to be amazingly complex.
We summarize, simplify, and translate meaning all the time. Those of us who undertake (primarily) quantitative evaluations agonize over this because our standards for interpreting evidence are relatively clear but our standards for judging the quality of evidence are not.
For example, imagine that we perform a t-test to estimate a program’s impact. The t-test indicates that the impact is positive, meaningfully large, and statistically significant. We know how to interpret this result and what story we should tell—there is strong evidence that the program is effective.
But what if the outcome measure was not well aligned with the program’s activities? Or there were many cases with missing data? Would our story still be true? There is little consensus on where to draw the line between truth and fiction when quantitative evidence is flawed.
As Melanie and Michaela pointed out, it is critical that we strive to tell stories that are true, but equally important to understand and communicate our standards for truth. Amen to that.
The icing on the cake was the conference evaluation. Perhaps the best conference evaluation I have come across.
Everyone received four post-it notes, each a different color. As a group, we were given a question to answer on a post-it of a particular color, and only a minute to answer the question. Immediately afterward, the post-its were collected and displayed for all to view, as one would view art in a gallery.
Evaluation as art—I like that. Immediate. Intimate. Transparent.
Gosh, I like designers.
EvalBlog 
Conference Blog: The Wharton “Creating Lasting Change” Conference
How can corporations promote the greater good? Can they do good and be profitable? How well can we measure the good they are doing?
These were some of the questions explored at a recent Wharton School Conference entitled Creating Lasting Change: From Social Entrepreneurship to Sustainability in Retail. I provide a brief recap of the event. Then I discuss why I believe program evaluators, program designers, and corporations have a great deal to learn from each other.
The Location
The conference took place at Wharton’s stunning new San Francisco campus. By stunning I mean drop-dead gorgeous. Here is one of its many views.
An Unusual and Effective Conference
The conference was jointly organized by three entities within the Wharton School—the Jay H. Baker Retailing Center, the Initiative for Global Environmental Leadership, and the Wharton Program for Social Impact.
When I first read this I scratched my head. A conference that combined the interests of any two made sense to me. Combining the interests of all three seemed like a stretch. I found—much to my delight—that the conference worked very well because of its two-panel structure.
Panel 1 addressed the social and environmental impact of new ventures; Panel 2 addressed the impact of large, established corporations. This offered an opportunity to compare and contrast new with old, small with large, and risk takers with the risk averse.
Fascinating and enlightening. I explain why after I describe the panels.
Panel 1: Social Entrepreneurship/Innovation
The first panel considered how entrepreneurs and venture capitalists can promote positive environmental and social change.
Panel 2: Sustainability/CSR in the Retail Industry
The second panel discussed how large, established companies impact society and the natural world, and what it means for a corporation to act responsibly.
Christy Consler, Vice President of Sustainability at Safeway Inc., made the case that the large grocer (roughly 1,700 stores and 180,000 employees) needs to focus on sustainable, socially responsible operations to ensure that it has dependable sources for its product—food—as the world population swells by 2 billion over the next 35 years.
Lori Duvall, Director of Operational Sustainability at eBay Inc., summarized eBay’s sustainability efforts, which include solar power installations, reusable packaging, and community engagement.
Paul Dillinger, Senior Director-Global Design at Levi Strauss & Co., made an excellent presentation on the social and environmental consequences—positive and negative—of the fashion industry, and how the company is working to make a positive impact.
Shauna Sadowski, Director of Sustainability at Annie’s (you know, the company that makes the cute organic, bunny-shaped mac and cheese), discussed how bringing natural foods to the marketplace motivates sustainable, community-centered operations.
Barbara Kahn moderated. She wins the prize for having the longest title—the Patty & Jay H. Baker Professor, Professor of Marketing; Director, Jay H. Baker Retailing Center—and from what I could tell, she deserves every bit of the title.
Measuring Social Impact
I was thrilled to find corporations, new and old, concerned with making the world a better place. Business in general, and Wharton in particular, have certainly changed in the 20 years since I earned my MBA.
The unifying theme of the panels was impact. Inevitably, that discussion turned from how corporations were working to make social and environmental impacts to how they were measuring impacts. When it did, the word evaluation was largely absent, being replaced by metrics, measures, assessments, and indicators. Evaluation, as a field and a discipline, appears to be largely unknown to the corporate world.
Echoing what I heard at the Harvard Social Enterprise Conference (day 1 and day 2), impact measurement was characterized as nascent, difficult, and elusive. Everyone wants to do it; no one knows how.
I find this perplexing. Is the innovation, operational efficiency, and entrepreneurial spirit of American corporations insufficient to crack the nut of impact measurement?
Without a doubt, measuring impact is difficult—but not for the reasons one might expect. Perhaps the greatest challenge is defining what one means by impact. This venerable concept has become a buzzword, signifying both more an less than it should for different people in different settings. Clarifying what we mean simplifies the task of measurement considerably. In this setting, two meanings dominated the discussion.
One was the intended benefit of a product or service. Top Hat Monocle’s products are intended to increase learning. Annie’s foods are intended to promote health. Evaluators are familiar with this type of impact and how to measure it. Difficult? Yes. It poses practical and technical challenges, to be sure. Nascent and elusive? No. Evaluators have a wide range of tools and techniques that we use regularly to estimate impacts of this type.
The other dominant meaning was the consequences of operations. Evaluators are probably less familiar with this type of impact.
Consider Levi’s. In the past, 42 liters of fresh water were required to produce one pair of Levi’s jeans. According to Paul Dillinger, the company has since produced about 13 million pairs using a more water-efficient process, reducing the total water required for these jeans from roughly 546 million liters to 374 million liters—an estimated savings of 172 million liters.
Is that a lot? The Institute of Medicine estimates that one person requires about 1,000 liters of drinking water per year (2.2 to 3 liters per day making a variety of assumptions)—so Levi’s saved enough drinking water for about 172,000 people for one year. Not bad.
But operational impact is more complex than that. Levi’s still used the equivalent yearly drinking water for 374,000 people in places where potable water may be in short supply. The water that was saved cannot be easily moved where it may be needed more for drinking, irrigation, or sanitation. If the water that is used for the production of jeans is not handled properly, it may contaminate larger supplies of fresh water, resulting in a net loss of potable water. The availability of more fresh water in a region can change behavior in ways that negate the savings, such as attracting new industries that depend on water or inducing wasteful water consumption practices.
Is it difficult to measure operational impact? Yes. Even estimating something as tangible as water use is challenging. Elusive? No. We can produce impact estimates, although they may be rough. Nascent? Yes and no. Measuring operational impact depends on modeling systems, testing assumptions, and gauging human behavior. Evaluators have a long history of doing these things, although not in combination for the purpose of measuring operational impact.
It seems to me that evaluators and corporations could learn a great deal from each other. It is a shame these two worlds are so widely separated.
Designing Corporate Social Responsibility Programs
With all the attention given to estimating the value of corporate social responsibility programs, the values underlying them were not fully explored. Yet the varied and often conflicting values of shareholders and stakeholders pose the most significant challenge facing those designing these programs.
Why do I say that? Because it has been that way for over 100 years.
The concept of corporate social responsibility has deep roots. In 1909, William Tolman wrote about a trend he observed in manufacturing. Many industrialists, by his estimation, were taking steps to improve the working conditions, pay, health, and communities of their employees. He noted that these unprompted actions had various motives—a feeling that workers were owed the improvements, unqualified altruism, or the belief that the efforts would lead to greater profits.
Tolman placed a great deal of faith in the last motive. Too much faith. Twentieth-century industrial development was not characterized by rational, profit-maximizing companies competing to improve the lot of stakeholders in order to increase the wealth of shareholders. On the contrary, making the world a better place typically entailed tradeoffs that shareholders found unacceptable.
So these early efforts failed. The primary reason was that their designs did not align the values of shareholders and stakeholders.
Can the values of shareholders and stakeholders be more closely aligned today? I believe they can be. The founders of many new ventures, like Top Hat Monocle and Innova Dynamics, bring different values to their enterprises. For them, Tolman’s nobler motives—believing that people deserve a better life and a desire to do something decent in the world—are the cornerstones of their company cultures. Even in more established organizations—Safeway and Levi’s—there appears to be a cultural shift taking place. And many venture capital firms are willing to take a patient capital approach, waiting longer and accepting lower returns, if it means they can promote a greater social good.
This is change for the better. But I wonder if we, like Tolman, are putting too much faith in win-win scenarios in which we imagine shareholders profit and stakeholders benefit.
It is tempting to conclude that corporate social responsibility programs are win-win. The most visible examples, like those presented at this conference, are. What lies outside of our field of view, however, are the majority of rational, profit-seeking corporations that are not adopting similar programs. Are we to conclude that these enterprises are not as rational as they should be? Or have we yet to design corporate responsibility programs that resolve the shareholder-stakeholder tradeoffs that most companies face?
Again, there seems to be a great deal that program designers, who are experienced at balancing competing values, and corporations can learn from each other…if only the two worlds met.
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