Objections to an impact management approach
Impact – as Tractuum conceptualises – really denotes the ultimate benefit your organisation, team, or project aims to provide to relevant stakeholders. Everyone will be on board with an approach that aims to identify or document what that impact is and the pathway to its delivery, right?
Unfortunately, not. Throughout the years I’ve been conducting impact planning workshops, I have encountered a range of objections to the approach – so much so, that I now include a slide in my presentation which pre-empts these objections. I also throw out a challenge to see if anyone has one I haven’t heard yet!
Some of these are specifically related to a research context – e.g., “It is an affront to scientific integrity & independence”; “It negatively affects the quality of scientific outputs”; “It is not applicable to ‘blue sky’ science”. While these are not true, I want to focus here on the common objections I’ve come across that are relevant beyond the world of research:
1. Time to impact – it is too long to effectively track/measure:
The system level impact effects that an organisation aims to deliver may, indeed, be long term, perhaps 5-25 years into the future. However, this realisation simply highlights the importance of impact pathway development and monitoring, which are key elements of an impact management approach. We certainly can’t wait 5, 10, 15+ years to see if we’ve been successful in retrospect. So, we need to have a process in place at the outset to articulate the pathway to impact and then track along it effectively. Doing so gives us the opportunity to demonstrate with relevant evidence that we are heading in the right direction towards our targeted impact. This approach also enables more effective pivoting if we discover through ongoing monitoring that things are not progressing as we’d anticipated. Importantly, this process must be resourced appropriately to be effective.
2. ‘We can’t be expected to be held responsible for impact!’:
I’ve dealt with this objection in a previous post. The system level perspective Tractuum adopts shows that an individual, team, or organisation cannot be responsible in isolation for the delivery of impact; this is because they do not control the system in which they are one of many players. Rather, they must understand the nature of that system and the key players within it to the best of their ability. Once they have that understanding, they can work with others within the system to achieve the desired impacts.
3. ‘Who is going to pay for ongoing monitoring?’:
I don’t shy away from this in workshops – resource requirements for monitoring impact pathways is an important issue, whether they be financial, human, or time. The best advice I can provide is to have open and honest conversations with key stakeholders about monitoring requirements at the outset. If they are serious about being able to demonstrate that impact has been achieved – or is, at least, clearly on the way to being achieved – then monitoring must be properly resourced. At Tractuum, we encourage a highly pragmatic approach to monitoring, one that provides effective evidence of progress towards impact without unnecessarily tying up limited resources.
4. Increased workloads for staff:
This is often a key concern for workshop participants. Understandably, people who already feel extreme time pressures in their roles tend to see monitoring of impact pathway progress as yet another impost on their limited time. For me, this becomes another topic to be dealt with in the resourcing conversation with key stakeholders. Effective ongoing monitoring requires the specific allocation of time for data collection, analysis, and reporting, either by existing or additional staff. One way Tractuum proposes dealing with this issue is to explore how monitoring can either be effectively incorporated into, or draw upon, existing processes to avoid adding extra activities.
5. Loss of opportunity for ‘serendipity’:
This objection emerges frequently in workshops and presentations. This is especially so when people find out I worked for CSIRO, based on the spurious claim that the level of planning advocated for in our impact management approach would have stifled the development of Wi-Fi, which, according to urban legend was a serendipitous discovery (Spoiler: it wasn’t). Every impact pathway is a point-in-time document. It represents your current thinking about the process required for the delivery of your targeted impacts. As your understanding and/or the context evolves, the pathway needs to be updated to reflect your current reality. At no time should an impact pathway planning process be considered a one-off, ‘set-and-forget’ approach. Developing an impact pathway does not stop a team or organisation from pursuing any interesting or unexpected opportunities which may emerge. Rather, having clarity around a point-in-time pathway and tracking along it may actually reveal the unusual and/or interesting more effectively than not having it. It will also enable effective decision-making about how and if such potential opportunities may be pursued.
6. ‘We already do this’ – confusion between impact planning & project management:
Impact management is not project management. Project management essentially deals with the ‘front end’ of an impact pathway – the inputs, activities, and outputs – and is, therefore, only part of an impact management approach. Especially at the planning stage, impact management involves deriving a strategic level summary of the proposed pathway to the delivery of impact. Project management involves planning for, and facilitating, the delivery of key outputs, which then drive the necessary outcomes required for targeted impacts to be realised. As such, project management is a tactical activity leading to outputs, rather than a strategic approach as advocated here.
People will often object to processes which challenge their prevailing viewpoint, or which take them out of their comfort zone. While some objections to impact management may raise pertinent issues to be addressed, at Tractuum, we argue that the benefits from adopting the approach make it worth pursuing.
Is your organisation ready to adopt an impact management approach? Do our ‘impact health check’ to find out.