When the immune system goes to war against a pathogen, the body engages in an arms race of mutations, deploying a diversity of approaches and constant iteration, communication, and coordination. The strongest systems are highly diverse and iterate quickly. We know from ecology and biology, for instance, that monocultures and simple approaches tend to be weak and fragile.
Maybe there is something to learn from biologists and ecologists-the people who study the complex and messy real world of nature-when philanthropists are thinking about how to save the planet. Instead of relying on aggregate numbers and formulae, they use network models of nodes and links to ponder dynamics among connections in the system, rather than stocks and flows of economies. Scientists have tried to apply these models to non-biological systems like the internet and ask questions, such as " How many and which nodes can you remove from the internet before it stops functioning?" These models are different from the mathematics economists use.
Scholars in ecology and biology have tried to model the robustness and resilience of systems in an effort to understand how to build and maintain such systems. They can tolerate reductions in certain species populations. There is more to assessing a complex system than looking at its growth, efficiency, and the handful of other qualities that can be quantified and thus measured.Īs biologists know, healthy ecosystems are robust and resilient. If we examine a complex system like the environment, for instance, we can see that healthy rainforests don't grow in overall size but rather are extremely resilient, always changing and adapting. Because of our belief in markets, we tend to accept that an economy has to be growing for society to be healthy-but this notion is misguided, particularly when it comes to things we consider social goods. In fact, many things that grow quickly and without constraints are far from healthy-consider cancer. Unfortunately, efficiency and scalability are not the same as a healthy system. One of the reasons philanthropists sometimes fail to measure what really matters is that the global political economy primarily seeks what is efficient and scalable. Similarly, while I believe rigor and best practices are important and support the innovation and thinking going into these metrics when it comes to all types of philanthropy, I think we risk oversimplifying problems and thus having the false sense of clarity that quantitative metrics tend to create. Being happy is even more complicated it involves health but also more abstract things such as feelings of purpose, belonging to a community, security, and many other things. Iron levels may be a proxy for this, but they aren't the proxy. Being healthy is about being nourished and thus resilient so that when something does happen, we recover quickly. When it comes to health, for example, iron levels might be important, but anemia isn't the only metric we care about. They typically are easier to measure, and they're not unimportant. My own research interest in the begun to analyse the ways in which people are currently measuring impact and perhaps find methods to better measure the impact of these investments.Īs we see in the library example, simple metrics often aren't enough when it comes to quantifying success. All of us have struggled to measure the effectiveness of grants and investments that seek to benefit the community, the environment, and so forth.
I've also worked over the years with dozens of philanthropists and investors-those who put money into ventures that promise environmental and public health benefits in addition to financial returns. I serve on the boards of the MacArthur Foundation and the Knight Foundation, which have made grants that helped transform our libraries. If we had focused our funding to increase just the number of books people were borrowing, we would have missed the opportunity to fund and witness these positive changes. Much of the successful funding encouraged creative librarians to experiment and scale when successful, iterating and sharing their learnings with others. They've taken advantage of grants to become makerspaces, classrooms, research labs for kids, and trusted public spaces in every way possible.
But if you only looked at that figure, you'd miss the fascinating transformation public libraries have undergone in recent years. Circulation, an obvious measure of success for an institution established to lend books to people, is down. If you looked at how many people check books out of libraries these days, you would see failure.