Beyond Measurement

For the past few years I have been leading worked aimed at changing the culture in organisations. Culture is notoriously difficult to change – the focus of our work has been on generating cultures that are responsive to research and innovation.

The tricky bit in all of this is figuring out how to measure culture change, how to come up with measures that give value without reducing everything to something that can be counted. Sure, it is important to take account of Return on Investment and there is a place for Cost Benefit Analysis. And we have done Health Economics analysis of our impact too.

But what about more subtle measures?

Over recent weeks I have been having some fascinating conversations with people – disciplines have included sociology, linguistics, psychology and anthropology. I have been searching for ways of determining shifts in culture brought about by work that we have been doing with people. There was a really interesting conference last year run by the Social Impact Analysts Association in Paris that looked beyond measurement. Fascinating ideas.

The ideas I am working on are still developing. I hope in the coming weeks to develop this into a complex set of measures and indicators that will demonstrate the value (or not) of our work. Above all, I am looking for ways to demonstrate the intrinsic value of things that are not reduced to crude measures. To coin a phrase, I want to get to the deep values of the things that we do, rather than just the cash value of it.

In conversation with someone involved in the arts recently, I pointed out that over the centuries when great works of art, great music and great works of architecture were being developed – we did not keep asking what the return on investment was. We were content to see the value of something as defined by its own instrinsic aesthetic.

So, learning from this – I am looking for a way to develop our set of values and indicators that are derived from what we are setting out to do, rather than from some arbitrary external measure. It’s proving to be an absorbing and fascinating journey.