How do you measure good?
Quantity vs Quality
Rabbit-Rabbit~!
(Are you not in New England? Read this.)
I’m spending the long weekend hanging out in a country estate watching the leaves turn on the Japanese Maples and eating copious amounts of brilliant food while playing extraordinarily complex board games with very smart people.
Feel dizzy? Imagine trying to strategize with all this glorious and distracting mess.
This is analogous to what I’ve been doing with the nonprofit I founded - writing grants is a lot like playing a complex strategy game. You hope you know what will happen, you plan out your organization’s future on many variable tracks, you have no idea what luck will bring, what money will come in, or even whether your contemporaries are collaborators or competitors, and you are aware that the slightest shift in the environment (entirely beyond your control) can change the outcomes….
Anyway, I’ve put aside grantwriting for the weekend and am just playing. A friend and I have planned a longed-for trip to Japan for next month!! I haven’t been this excited about anything since….well, frankly I get this excited a lot. (I was just thinking about how excited I got for the Faustian Sleep No More called “Life and Trust” which I recently saw and fell over myself loving, and then of course dropping kid at college, and seeing Fallingwater and a hell of a lot of other recent joys…)
(this is outrageously, stunningly good in real life and I HIGHLY recommend dinner afterward at Treetops at the nearby Polymath Park which also has Frank Lloyd Wright buildings nearby—that guy was the worst if you wanted to live in your house but the absolute BEST for making houses that you wish to be invited to a really fancy cocktail party in — wow, looks like cantilevered architecture inspires sentence-terminal prepositions, sorry Grammar Police.)
But no matter, I’m delighted to be planning something that is just for me and has no ulterior motive to make someone else happy or appease anyone or move the nonprofit forward or boost my career. My (undergrad) college roommate and her friends are Japanese and returned to their homes in Japan after graduation and I have wanted to visit them since the early 90s! So it’s a dream come true. Don’t worry, reader, you’re invited along on my crazy experiences in Japan end of next month!
Meanwhile, this morning, a top psych researcher/professor, a brilliant lawyer, a pharma executive and me had an hours-long conversation about quantifying quality. In all of our professions the fact is that quality is NOT rewarded. In nonprofits, you can’t quantify “a good project” —funders tend to look at your previous work to see if it was completed and served a certain number of people. There is no good way to turn "success” into numbers when you are defining success as “people are happier and feel good.” Think of your own actions on customer satisfaction surveys - you have to rate something a 1 to get attention to the fact that someone was rude. We are an amalgam of many many actions and no one has the patience to mete out ratings on the thousands of micro-tasks that make up “good” service: if someone was rude but they gave you a terrific upgrade, if they went above and beyond but they also made you profoundly uncomfortable, if they were slovenly and you feared for your health but they were as kind as anyone has ever been, how do you rate that service? Everything is so complex in the real world, and funding a project is no different.
And it turns out this problem also exists in academia: grants in Science are frequently given to the person with the most publications, not necessarily to the very worthy new research of someone with a great idea but no publications, or one publication that is absolutely groundbreaking—people writing grants in Science are doing the same thing as people writing grants to Philanthropy - we are trying to guess what the funder will value and ensure the grant contains these values. But the problem of quantifying goodness is even more insidious.
In Law, for example, the measurable value is “billable hours” — not necessarily how efficiently those hours were used, not how excellent the work was, but how many hours were billed. As a client, you might want a metric such as “how many billable hours did it take to achieve a lawsuit’s win” — but that’s not a metric the law firm can provide, I’ll bet!
Perhaps, now that everyone is collecting boatloads of data, there will be some kind of groundswelling and upsurge of customer-centric data charting: not just the legal one I mentioned, but let’s say in academia: how many of the tenured professors have many well received books and articles, high ratings on Rate My Professor, and ALSO do not work more than 50 hours per week—because in academia as in law and the arts, people are expected to devote themselves 24/7 to their careers and NOT to family or travel or playing with their pets, and the burnout rate is enormous and the tendency to ask 25-35 year old to work nights and weekends for minimum wage instead of having time for relationships is extraordinary.
In Nonprofit grantmaking, I’d love to see this metric: how many personally-written thank you notes (i.e. not survey results but actual thank you notes in email or calls or texts) has the CEO received in the last month?
Anyway, it’s a dilemma - the bigger a company grows, the farther away from “it’s good because people like it” and the closer to “it’s good because numbers are big” we get.
WRITING NEWS:
Moving forward on the novel edits!
This isn’t about my writing but it is what I’ve been working on: Pen Parentis started the Sandell Morse Author Ambassador Fund to help us spread the word of Pen Parentis to writer-parents. The fund serves as an endowment to maintain a voting Board Chair for a working writer who is also a parent. As far as my research shows, this is the only nonprofit that has thought to do this - most nonprofits allow their communities to participate only as advisors on their governing boards if they allow them to join at all. We take representation seriously.
Author Sandell Morse is currently matching all donations 2:1 so your $100 becomes $300! Please be generous - Pen Parentis (which I founded) is a 501c3 that helps writers stay on creative track after they have kids - your donation is tax-deductible.
(If you aren’t in NYC and don’t want to attend the party, just click the blue link that says “no thanks just make a donation” to access the 3x match). Here’s an article about Pen Parentis if you want to find out more about me and how I am intertwined with this nonprofit (it’s called “Audacious Impact” as a hint to how passionate I am about this subject.)
Haha - I was looking for that link and I found this one about the same thing in Forward Females! Archeologists of the future will enjoy unearthing all the interviews of people and amassing them into some kind of web-based biographies.
Random Final Thought:
I have never seen any sunflowers that looked more like Van Gogh’s paintings than these:
I think it is worth mentioning, that Van Gogh intended his Sunflowers to represent gratitude.
Happy Septembering.