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Emergent impact
The housing sector would be better off replacing ‘social impact’ with ‘emergent impact’, says Matthew Taylor
Most, if not all, housing associations seek to generate benign social impacts over and above providing homes. These goals range from improving employment prospects to reducing crime or preventing ill health. There has been much focus on social impact in recent years, but perhaps it is time for a new model.
Over the last decade, the measurement of impact has become a core competency for third-sector organisations, including social housing providers. This was a response to the growth of service contracting, to tightening budgets and to a sense that many programmes had failed to deliver on their objectives. Moving from measuring inputs and outputs to impact would, it was argued, drive value for money, system learning and the incentives to innovate.
It is hard to argue against any of this. If an organisation doesn’t know how productive its interventions are, how can it improve or even be properly accountable? The growth of fast, cheap data is also a boon for impact measurement.
Better impact data was also seen to be a key success factor for the promised growth of social investment; ethically inclined funders would know where to put their money to generate both social and economic returns.
Simple clarity
And yet, I sense a growing weariness and even scepticism about impact measurement.
A number of factors have contributed to this disillusionment. With the able assistance of evaluators keen to earn a fee, it turns out that just about any organisation can find someone ‘independent’ ready to ‘prove’ the efficacy of their intervention (as did Kids Company, for example). The impact evaluation industry is particularly fond of generally unverifiable claims in the form of ‘£1 spent generates £x savings’.
Sadly for those who invested in the alchemy of evaluation, hopes that this evidence would secure extra funding have largely foundered in the sea of austerity. Furthermore, the social investment movement – based on the unlikely idea that there was a huge untapped market of ethical investors who could both secure a worthwhile return and provide funds to inherently risky charitable projects at sub-market rates – has so far turned into the dampest of squibs.
None of this is to suggest we should abandon a focus on impact, much less return to the good old days when charities relied on blind faith in their good works. Instead we need an approach to impact which better reflects the inherent complexity and changeability of the modern world, as well as the intractability of some of our toughest social problems.
An ‘emergent impact’ approach starts from simple clarity; an account of the goals we are trying to meet alongside an analysis of the system we are trying to influence, plus a broad theory of change. But from there the approach emphasises real-time learning, adaptiveness and opportunism.
An emergent impact approach might start with any number of interventions; a service innovation, publicising new research, some form of advocacy, network or capacity building. As this intervention unfolds alongside other external changes, such as new government policy, aspects of the system will alter.
As we observe he intervention path, we can identify new opportunities and also understand the barriers better, too. As well as signs of incremental progress, we are on the lookout for small openings or convergences which can be exploited to accelerate change in the system. We are as much interested in unpredictable one-off opportunities as predictable replication.
Emergent impact suits today’s world: one in which paradoxically the more data we have, the more uncertain about the future we seem to become. This is also a world where many systemic problems – think of educational disadvantage or improving the health and social care interface – have resisted multiple attempts at reform.
Often emergence will fail (although this will at least be spotted quickly), but when it succeeds it can produce effects way out of proportion to the inputs.
Some will be uncomfortable with its unpredictability. Others will be concerned at mixing the calm objectivity of research and experimentation with the volatility of advocacy and coalition building. For funders it means focusing on the outcome, not the process, and working closely with partners as strategies unfold and adapt.
And, of course, it is an approach that favours organisations with a varied toolkit of interventions – mass communication, desk-based research, on-the-ground innovation and civic mobilisation – which may be why it excites us at the RSA.
Matthew Taylor, chief executive, RSA