When Too Much Rigor Leads to Rigor Mortis: Valuing Experience, Judgment and Intuition in Nonprofit Management

Several powerful donors have concluded that nonprofits make inadequate use of impact assessment tools. They are backing up their arguments with an implicit threat: measure in particular ways or you don’t get the money. Wise nonprofit leaders know that the problems they work on are not susceptible to simple measurement. They know that the kind of formal impact measures some donors expect and management consulting firms prescribe are hard to come by honestly. They collect various data all the time to inform their judgment and decision-making and to spur learning. Now, data collection (to donor-specified standards) is increasingly used for accountability purposes.

This may have the effect of reducing the degrees of freedom nonprofit leaders have to innovate and to pursue promising but risky ideas (without the fear that failure to prove one idea will poison their chances to learn from that failure and try something else another day). As former Ford Foundation President Susan Berresford argues, insisting that grantees demonstrate measurable, short-term impact can have the effect of “miniaturizing ambition” for doing risky but potentially break-through work.

People who impose these restrictions confuse use of prescribed tools or achievement of certain outcomes as evidence of good management. Sometimes they are. But, in and of themselves, they hardly constitute an impressive tool kit of good management practice.

The good judgment of experienced managers, deeply immersed in the complex social dynamics of the communities in which they work, is a formidable and essential resource in assessing impacts. Experience and tested judgment also come into play in shaping a picture of the complex variety of social factors that might explain, for instance, why some poor children and not others attend school, or what mix of interventions are most likely to keep kids out of trouble with the police.

Effective nonprofit managers get information from a variety of sources: formal studies, observation of trends in behavior, feedback from partners and clients. They also draw on deep reserves of knowledge of the local social context, of cultural norms and values, and on the ability to empathize, to look at the world through the eyes of others.