Management By Conjury: The Persistent Mystery of High-Impact Nonprofits

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1.  An Hypothesis

Those who study and teach management often attempt to make a science out of pure theatre: the partly inspired, mostly mundane spectacle of people doing things and trying to get other people to pay for them.

2.  Prologue

In a recent Stanford Social Innovation Review article, Heather Grant and Leslie Crutchfield outline six practices of high-performing nonprofits.  They do this because they believe that

without more nonprofits, businesses, and government agencies following these six practices to achieve maximum impact, we are doomed to plod along with slow, incremental change ...

Their hearts are clearly in the right place, and who am I to judge?  Nevertheless, I’m not convinced by the primary thesis of the article.

3.  Ain’t Nuthin’ But a Practice Thang

According to Grant and Crutchfield, high-impact nonprofits (1) serve and advocate, (2) make markets work, (3) inspire evangelists, (4) nurture nonprofit networks, (5) master the art of adaptation, and (6) share leadership.

I refer the reader to their article for details.

4.   Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew’d

There’s a French management saying: “It’s all very well in practice, but it will never work in theory.”

I’ll put aside the methodological challenges in selecting the twelve “high-impact” organizations that became the focus of their study.*  I’ll also put aside the objectivity of observation implied by the use of phrases like “we discovered …” and “we found …,” as if the authors had observed something with heft or corporeality.  Grant and Crutchfield certainly aren’t trying to mislead readers by using these expressions—they’re unavoidable—but one is given the impression the authors saw something change color in a test tube and then dutifully recorded it in their notebooks.

There’s one thing I can’t let go of as easily.  It’s the claim that

When a nonprofit applies all these forces simultaneously—the six high-impact practices coupled with basic management skills—it creates momentum that fuels further success.

This is what is technically known as “a howler of the first water.”  It reduces good management to an incantation, a checklist of practices to be put into place at the next gibbous moon.

There’s nothing amiss about the authors’ list of good practices—how can it hurt any organization to “master the art of adaptation,” for example?  But isn’t it also clear that a different set of researchers, looking at a different set of nonprofits, would likely produce a different list of spells?  How are we to generalize from twelve nonprofits that were not randomly selected?  Don’t all nonprofits beyond a certain size exhibit these characteristics to some degree?  (The smallest organization in the sample has a budget of $13 million!)

5.  Why the Right Things Get Done

The article by Grant and Crutchfield opens with the story of Teach for America.  They describe how it was launched by Wendy Kopp in 1989 on a shoestring budget in a borrowed office but now has an annual budget of over $70 million.  What’s extraordinary is that the authors are able to attribute this success to their six principles and not to Wendy Kopp.  Of course the authors would argue that it’s ultimately what Wendy does that makes or breaks the organization.  This is true to some extent, but it’s like examining the individual strokes on a beautiful canvas to understand the principles that gave rise to its creation.

Great man theories might have been discredited in the study of history, but they seem to me essential to understanding the growth trajectories of many nonprofit organizations.  (At least up to a certain point.  Beyond that point there are other issues to consider—among them, the reinforcing effect of spin; the fact that we’ll readily open our purses to the American Red Cross, for example, even though we know not the slightest thing about its effectiveness.)

My suspicion is that the six practices adduced by the study’s authors are epiphenomena with little predictive power when compared with the qualities of a nonprofit’s leadership.  How committed is an executive director to delivering social value?  How likely is she to make sound programmatic and financial decisions?  How well does she understand her organization’s finances?  How good is she at raising money?  What role do powerful board members play in opening doors to new sources of financial support?  How talented and how empowered are the members of the organization’s management team?

The authors do mention that high-impact nonprofits “share leadership.”  The importance to nonprofit success** of strong leadership goes far beyond this, I believe.

6.  Epilogue

Cog’s Ladder, TQM, From Good to Great.  We too often convince ourselves that we can manage by bromide.  Foolishly we trust the power of insubstantial words to alter the behavior of substantial things.

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* Part popularity contest, part something else.  The authors describe their selection methodology on p. 40 of the article: “Because there is no objective measurement of impact (such as ‘total return to shareholders’), we had to use more subjective criteria for evaluating these nonprofits. So we borrowed methods used in management books such as Built to Last ....”  At the heart of these methods is the surveying of executive directors and other experts for lists of high-impact nonprofits.  Each of these individuals, presumably, has his or her own definition of “high-impact” in mind.

** As the authors appear to define it.

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Image sources: The Nature, Wildlife and Pet Photography Forum, North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences

Comments

[The Nonprofiteer]

Albert, Bless you for calling this pseudo-science by its name. The only thing we really know about nonprofit successes is that they're infuriatingly hard to scale up: once the original inspired person is removed from the equation, the naked idea proves to have relatively little staying power or transferability. That doesn't mean we shouldn't go on trying to figure out what IS transferable, but it does mean we shouldn't take assertions of duplicability without several tons of salt.

[Tidy Sum]

Reminds me of a classic Monte Python sketch:

How to Tell a Witch...

Villager: We have found a witch, may we burn her?

Crowd: BURN!! BUUUURN HER!

Bedevere: But how do you *know* she is a witch?

Villager: She looks like one!

Other Villagers: Yeah! She looks like one!!!

Bedevere: Bring her forward...

Read the entire script at: http://wuzzle.org/cave/mpwit.html

"Nothing like a little medieval logic lesson". --Zaratyst

[i.a.t.]

nothing like indulging our size (a.k.a. scalability) fetish.

[Angie L.]

A great read, thanks.

[Witt]

What a terrific essay.

In my experience there are often two underlying assumptions that are not explicitly stated: 1) The ideal size for a nonprofit is "bigger"; and 2) it is possible to distill and standardize complex aspects of human nature so that they can be replicated.

It's hard to talk about well-managed organizations without making a list, but I wish our sector handled it more like nutrition. It's not that that there is a perfect diet of 6 items that everyone should eat in identical amounts. It's watching a group of monkeys play, socialize, fight, eat, sleep, and defecate to figure out whether they're generally healthy or not.

[Albert]

I think you're on to something. If we really want to understand what makes nonprofit organizations successful, we would do better to hire a multidisciplinary team of researchers headed by a cultural anthropologist. Let them watch staff and board meetings through a two-way mirror.

The scalability thing is also tiresome. Those who are lucky enough to have the means often choose to attend small liberal arts colleges instead of large state universities. We prefer intimate restaurants over sprawling, noisy cafeterias. Why are we so eager to subject poor people to scaled organizations?

[Alan]

“Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.”