Impact. Did you achieve your intended outcome? Did you anticipate and leverage unintended outcomes? Did your work make a difference? Did it move the needle, change the narrative, transform a situation? How do you know? Before jumping in to measures, indicators and logic models, before efficiency rubrics, effort calculations, inputs and outputs, before outcomes and aims, anyone interested in impact must decide which layer of impact most hinders or enhances their work. In this post, I will outline five layers of impact: 1- Personal, 2 – Social, 3 -Professional, 4 – Organizational, and 5 – Contextual. Ignoring one layer or over attention to another might undermine your own best efforts. In later posts I will dive deeper into each layer- the how, when, where and why to measure and focus on each. Read on.
I recall a meeting where a new leader of an organization announced that he was going to demonstrate his impact on the world. It was a sales pitch. He wanted to convince us, prospective board members, that the organization was solving poverty. Really? Solving poverty? Yep. He also wanted to convince himself. That’s the rub. Impact usually is about convincing someone that what we do works. However, most people try to prove their impact one dimensionally. Thus, the more they strive to convince others, the weaker the case becomes.
Here are the five layers of impact. When each layer is assessed, the difference your efforts make or don’t make become clear.
1 – Personal impact. It is not all about you, but then again, it is. How we go about our day, what we choose to do, what we think, barriers we face and how we act creates our personal world. Tired and hungry, anxious and unorganized, or supported, affirmed, balanced? Your work reflects your world.
2 – Social impact follows personal impact. When the world we create for ourselves is effective, powerful, kind, and inclusive, our relationships reflect these qualities. Do your relationships with others suffer because of your personal life? Do you work in a toxic social ecology? Social impact means developing a strong affirming balanced posture toward your engagement with others no matter the context.
3 – Our professional impact is enhanced or hindered by our personal and social impact. Technical, managerial, artistic or social skills we use in our professional life are most effective when they align with personal and social worlds that are supportive, effective, and affirming. Sound too touchy feely? What profit is there in high professional performance from a place of personal, social or professional misery?
4 – Organizational impact refers to the routines and practices that create the life of your organization, department or business unit. Decision making, collaboration, equity, work flow and divisions of labor all impact the experience of you and your team. Unfortunately, most impact assessments begin and end here thus ignoring the three foundational layers. People know when you have skipped a layer. When personal, social or professional impact are ignored, it makes assessing organizational impact almost worthless. Buy in is low because the blind spots in the assessment prevent genuine examination. Even worse, attempts to improve organizational impact in order to improve personal, social or professional performance is like trying to make meetings run better by improving the agenda. Agenda’s are important, but they don’t run meetings. People do.
5 – Contextual impact refers to the way the world transforms because of our work. It is hard to measure because many variables contribute to any given situation. Still, by understanding your organizational theory of change and choosing indicators that are robust and reliable to measure it, it is possible to assess whether or not your hard work is having its intended impact.
The five layers all work together. Course corrections can be targeted to a specific impact layer. Interactions between layers can become ideal intervention points. Imagine for a moment work where personal, social, professional, organizational, and contextual layers are aligned. Where each person is supported in their development layer by layer. Leadership supports and is supported in their development too. Now that’s impact.