Friday Notes, February 10, 2023
Dear Friends —
On my first day at IDinsight, I learned about the organization’s framework for figuring out whether a project was worth taking on. Anyone on the team proposing to provide research and evaluation services to an NGO or government partner has to estimate (a) the number of people who might eventually benefit from that partner’s improved interventions and operations; (b) the meaningfulness of the benefits to lives and livelihoods; and (c) the contribution that IDinsight’s data- and evidence-centric work would make to the partner’s work.
While there’s no mechanical formula or threshold, this is a way of picturing whether we’re likely to make a a big difference to an NGO reaching only a few communities but offering life-saving care, or a small difference to a giant government program touching people in more superficial ways, like job training. Understanding the breadth, depth, and contribution permits us to compare opportunities for impact — and consequently to make the best decisions about where to spend our time and organizational resources.
As it happens, this framework also has helped me recently choose among professional opportunities.
When your work is concentrated on one organization’s growth and impact, as mine has been at IDinsight for almost three years, you can make a big difference. In one place. You dig deep to understand and influence the organizational culture, its generation of ideas and ability to pursue the best opportunities, its resilience to shocks. You are helping the organization itself be as high-impact as possible and, in our case, that can have broad reach. But as a leader you become a little bit insular. You focus more on building relationships of trust with your team than on fostering collaboration with peers. At least that’s how I approached things, with the aim of making IDinsight as strong, innovative, and high-capacity as possible. Narrow breadth, great depth, and hopefully a big contribution.
But there are other ways to make a difference in the world. For example, you can take on a role that touches a lot of organizations or people but in a shallower way: from a distance, with a limited set of inputs and less personal investment in each. Vast breadth, less depth, limited contribution to each but, added up, a large potential impact. This type of work might include, for example, some forms of teaching, writing, consulting and, yes, grant making.
What do you do, then, if you are drawn equally to making as big a difference as possible, in the aggregate, to a lot of people and organizations and making as meaningful a difference as possible within one organization? That tension has been a theme in my professional life, and I've had the chance, pendulum-like, to swing from one to the other. I’ve sometimes been able to make a contribution across a field, and sometimes within an organization. I’m not claiming they have always been big contributions, but I’ve been aware of how different the mode of working is depending on whether your working on the dimension of breadth or depth. Now, thanks to some surprising developments, I will find both in one place.
Starting full-time in May, and ramping up slowly until then, I’ll be Vice President, Just Societies, and Chief Learning Officer at the Packard Foundation. In that role, I’ll have the chance to strengthen grant portfolios across vital — and vitally interdependent — domains: reproductive health and rights for women in the U.S. and internationally, U.S. democracy, justice and equity, and civil society and leadership. That is broad. I also will be helping to support the foundation’s own culture of measurement, reflection, and learning; in this way, I’ll be able (I hope) to bring value to my colleagues within the foundation, in a deep and meaningful way. While I was not looking to leave IDinsight, and it is hard to do so, I see such a convergence in this role that I could not let the opportunity go by. (A bit more here, if you’re interested.)
In a couple of months, I’ll spill more virtual ink on reflections from three years of CEO-ing. Until then, I offer the breadth, depth, and contribution framework as a pretty cool way to think about the dimensions of impact a person can have.
Ṣẹ̀yẹ Abímbọ́lá has given us yet another provocative essay, “When Dignity Meets Evidence.” In it, he argues that “epistemic dignity is a precondition for health justice.” Here an excerpt, but don’t stop there. The whole essay is worth reading and re-reading (even it means registering for the Lancet site):
Throughout its 40-year history, proponents of evidence-based practice, including people also advocating for dignity-based practice, have pointed at its blind spots. The research methods at the top of evidence-based practice's hierarchy—randomised controlled trials, systematic reviews, and meta-analyses—were designed to evaluate simple interventions such as the efficacy of drugs. The same methods and approaches are used by powerful and often distant actors (eg, clinicians, policy makers, and researchers) to evaluate complex multidimensional interventions, such as service organisation and social policies, in ways that inherently overlook the expertise of marginalised knowers and their needs, preferences, learning, or interpretations on complex interventions. The same concern applies to any method or approach to inquiry or use of knowledge that flattens complex realities or averages out nuances. They silence or leave out what matters most to marginalised knowers.
. . . . For all its claim to disruption, evidence-based practice preserved the eminence of clinicians, policy makers, and researchers in relation to much less powerful “others”. It did not disrupt the power status quo. Researchers carried on as if only distant people with power were credible knowers or interpreters of knowledge. But by treating people equally in their capacity as knowers, dignity-based practice challenges the status quo, a feature that also constitutes an important obstacle to its spread and adoption.
One of the aspects of Ṣẹ̀yẹ’s work that I appreciate most is that he doesn’t reject the potential value of conventionally-defined “evidence” as a contributor to good decision making, whether by individual physicians or public policy makers. But he sheds light on how the conceptualization of evidence — the control over what is seen as legitimate knowledge — is both a consequence and driver of structural exclusion and injustice. He pushes us to think about whether that has to be the case: what would our work look like if we were less confident and more curious, always aware that the limits of our own perspective can only be broken by deeply listening beyond our comfortable circles?
For a very good conversation about the paradoxical, government-clogging effects of liberals’ affection for procedures like environmental impact assessments and comment periods around regulations, and transparency initiatives, listen to “How Liberals — Yes, Liberals — Are Hobbling Government.” Really eye-opening.
Funny tweet of the week, not just for academics.
If you are looking for a way to donate to earthquake relief in Turkey and Syria, I recommend Global Giving. They will get the resources to affected communities faster than many other channels, and through trusted local partner organizations.
Have a good weekend — and, for those who observe, enjoy the Superbowl.
-Ruth