Beyond outcomes and impact – The need to relook at failure in the social sector

P. S. Narayan is the Global Head of Sustainability at Wipro Ltd., and the Managing Trustee at Wipro Foundation, the social initiatives arm of Wipro. He has been instrumental in the creation of Wipro’s sustainability charter and has stewarded it since its inception in early 2008.

Samuhik Pahal: In the social sector, somehow failure now has become a completely negative thing. So, in this issue of Samuhik Pahal, we are trying to understand failure, what it means to people and how they experience it.

We plan to do this by making sense of the ways in which our whole self at work interfaces with failure. This includes the interfaces between the self and the world, and those between our personal journeys and the work we do. In doing so, we want to go beyond the ‘learning from failure’ frame.

Narayan P. S.: These are very important points, as they pertain to the meaning and definitions of success and failure in the social sector. One of the reasons why organizations like ours are flat is not just to do with the fact that we have fewer people compared to businesses. It is also about how we frame our work and its related milestones of achievement and success.

In many fields, such as the corporate sector and academia, success and failure are quite clearly defined. In the social sector, the nature of issues, and the ways in which these can be addressed, cannot always be defined in a cut and dried manner. Often, there is no easy way of defining progress, especially over the short-term.

The case of natural sciences is similar. In the sciences, failure (as seen with a conventional lens) is a part of the whole disciplinary architecture. You may spend years pursuing something and yet have nothing spectacular to show.

Some time back, the economist Daniel Kahneman, one of the founding fathers of behavioural economics, passed away. Although a Nobel laureate, he was quite unlike mainstream economists. He was fascinated with the idea of human frailty and vulnerability. In the many laudatory obituary pieces written about him, what came out interestingly was that he used to be the happiest when proven wrong. For him, you might be progressing in very real and authentic ways, and then unexpectedly be proven wrong, generating new and sometimes important learning in the process.

Now coming back to the social sector, let us take a few concrete examples. We work in primary healthcare. One of the areas we focus on is maternal health and childcare. So, let’s say you are working in a slum in Delhi with women in the reproductive age. Young women from vulnerable communities cannot often access facilities and services that middleclass people take for granted. These include the right kind of nutrition during pregnancy, regular health checkups, medication, and institutional deliveries, etc.

If the IMR and MMR rates in the communities we work with are decreasing, if the number of institutional deliveries is increasing, if the proportion of newborns who are underweight is going down, then these are good yardsticks for measuring and assessing success in this space.

However, let us say, you expand the circle longitudinally in time. For example, it is well known that the first five years of a child’s life are critical. So, while a safe delivery is a great milestone where the child has normal weight and is otherwise healthy, the acid test is for the next five years during when a close watch needs to be kept on the child’s nutrition levels, regular immunization, etc.

Please keep in mind that in these communities, the mothers cannot afford not to work. Do the infants and toddlers have access to good childcare facilities and creches? So, you need to focus on all of these, and more, for the next five years. And then comes early child education and then primary education for the next five years, and after that secondary education… So, it goes all the way. The point is that, depending on your definitions and framing, the boundaries of what you consider to be successful outcomes could keep changing.

A program may seem successful when seen from a proximate, short-term time horizon. You may say, “This is good; this is a great milestone.” However, if we really want to make a difference to this community, not only must we increase the number and the proportion of safe deliveries, healthy babies, etc., but we must also contribute substantially to the longitudinal trajectory of the children’s and the mothers’ life journeys. The time horizons then widen to, say, at least a couple of decades.

If one must do justice to any of the SDG goals, we have to reasonably align with and meet the sub-objectives and targets. We are, therefore, talking about decades of sustained engagement. What this essentially means is that if you are a committed and genuine practitioner of social development, you are never going to be able to say to yourself, “I am now done.” That is the nature of the space in that there can never be closure.

Seen from this point of view, the way you frame and look at success and failure in the social sector is very different. Our perspective should be longitudinally expansive. Outcomes are typically interlinked with many other issues, often crossing domain boundaries. This is the reason why you often see social sector organizations start out on a specific domain like education or livelihoods. After a while, they realize that focusing on education alone is not going to produce results. There is a need to look at other things, like nutrition, water, etc. Many organizations at that point face the dilemma of whether to continue to focus on a specific domain or to expand the boundaries of what they have been doing.

Samuhik Pahal: So, what you are saying is this – “If we are doing something that may seem to be a success within the limited parameters set up for a project or a program, and we expand the frame and include other things that are important for the work in that space, then it doesn’t look like a success anymore.” Right? And then you need to put in more work. However, what does failure look like to you, in the specific contexts of work that you have been involved in?

Narayan P. S.: Conceptually, we cannot think of success and failure as binaries, or polar opposites in the sector. There are varying shades of success and failure that play out. Let us take a very commonplace example from ecology – of planting trees, which is a very popular activity. There are so many individuals, communities and NGOs doing this. A bunch of people go, prepare the ground/soil, plant saplings, water them, and come out with the feeling of fulfilment and a sense that you have done something very useful and constructive. It also has clear metrics associated with it, in terms of so many saplings planted, so many people involved, etc.

Anecdotally though, we know that the survival rates of tree plantations is very low. So, as an activity, tree planting in the first one month or maybe the first six months of the program, can perhaps be classified as a success. However, the same activity, after three or five years, may be classified as a failure.

Then, there are other cases in point. The outcome of some intervention or public policy measure may be prima facie (and by all means) good and beneficial. However, as things start unravelling in time, the cascading impacts may not turn out to be truly sustainable or equitable, and may end up being something completely unexpected.

The classic case is that of the agricultural stubble burning that happens in Punjab and Haryana in winter and its contributions to the worsening of air quality in Delhi. The genesis of the problem goes back to the otherwise well-intentioned Punjab Preservation of Subsoil Water Act, 2009. This law seeks to preserve groundwater by prohibiting the summer kharif crop before the monsoon lands in India. Its measures mandate the sowing of the kharif crop in mid-June, so that the crops are primarily watered by the monsoon rains. In the process, the harvesting cycle has been pushed out by a few weeks, compared to the earlier practices.

This has generated cascading downstream effects. One of these is the shortening of the time window between the harvesting of the monsoonal kharif crop and the sowing of the winter rabi crop. This, in turn, does not allow sufficient time for clearing the fields of crop stubble, etc. Because of this, farmers have just started burning the stubble. This is the easiest thing for them to do. The extensive stubble burning, all at once, abetted by westerly winds, contribute to Delhi’s plummeting air quality in November and December.

How would you classify this entire scenario then? As a success or a failure? Let us hypothesize that some NGOs would have supported water conservation efforts and done advocacy work for the related policy architecture to come into being, that eventually led to stubble burning. How would they assess the impact of their interventions? The answer would be very ambivalent, as it’s a mixed story. There are many other examples of such unintended consequences.

Samuhik Pahal: Two things stand out from this. The first is about the unintended effects of our actions in the social sector. The second is something that you have highlighted earlier – the longitudinal nature of the work involved. This raises the question of the timeframe within which we measure impact and outcomes. It perhaps points to a more fundamental question. To be able to discuss impact and outcomes meaningfully, we need to have a shared understanding about what are the desirable outcomes in the sector. Does this shared understanding exist? What are your views on this?

Narayan P. S.: People in the social sector do understand the complexities involved in this issue. That is the reason why probably some have settled for more tactical, near-term metrices that are really outputs, or at best, outcomes.

For example, these may be about the number of schools or children an organization works with, or the number of teachers and primary healthcare paramedics being trained. One could of course argue that these are useful proxies for the actual impact being created. At a practical level, they help you avoid philosophical debates and complex arguments.

It is only if you want to continue peeling the next layer of the onion, that you come face to face with the larger systemic issues and the philosophical arguments about what constitutes success in a social project.

Samuhik Pahal: In the broader framework within which the social sector functions in India, that of a constitutional democracy (and the transformational agenda that the Constitution of India has set for Indian society) how would you see and locate our discussion on failure and success?

Narayan P. S.: The nature of this domain, and the kind of issues involved, are such that it is difficult, if not downright impossible, to quantify the work that you are doing beyond a certain point. However, there is also a certain value in communicating progress about the work that one is doing in concrete terms. The stakeholders involved may be varied. And you may need to communicate to your own company’s employees and leadership… or perhaps to your customers and investors.

In such a scenario, it may make more sense to keep it simple. Instead of talking about longterm impact (and success and failure), there may be value in saying that, “I am working with my partners, reaching out to X million children spread across Y states in India…” The right thing to do however, from the angle of transparency and honesty, is to qualify this by saying that despite the scale of the work, there are many caveats, assumptions and uncertainties.

The classic example in this regard is perhaps climate change. Companies like us, and at a larger scale even countries, now have climate change targets, net zero targets, with underlying action plans. It is quite easy for us to define milestones of progress in climate change, because these things are reasonably easy to measure.

What was your carbon footprint 10 years back? What is it today? Where do you want to go? Ten years from now, how are you going to achieve it? These are questions companies today are quite adept at answering. The confluence of technology, policies and available funding has ensured that some of the solutions are quite easy to implement today. For example, renewable energy currently is cheaper than regular electricity. It is a no brainer, therefore, for a company to invest in renewable energy, and to concomitantly bring down its carbon footprint.

However, what is the actual effect of many companies like us progressing toward, and eventually achieving, net zero carbon emissions? It may not add up to what is required from the point of view of avoiding climate disaster. This is because India’s electricity system is still predominantly (60 to 70 percent) based on coal-powered thermal stations. As we try to grow and develop our economy, we need significantly more energy and electricity. The fact of the matter is that India is not going to be able to do this by shutting down any of the existing coal power stations for at least the next two decades.

So, as a company, our investing in renewable energy, and becoming 100% renewable by 2030 (which is our target, and many companies are doing something similar), is a worthwhile goal. What it will eventually add up to though is that it may help us avoid or prevent future capacity additions of coal power at an aggregate level. It could therefore prevent the problem from worsening.

But for the next several years, renewable energy is not going to help us bring down the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And, therefore, it is not going to help us solve the climate change problem within the next five to seven years, which is what is needed in order to contain the severity of the challenge.

I am going to close this example with what is happening at the global and country levels since 1992. That was the year when the “Earth Summit” (formally called “The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development” – UNCED) was held in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Is it that nothing has happened, and countries are not doing anything since then?

The answers are clear. Many countries have joined this journey and have committed significant monetary, people and institutional resources. There’s a lot of good work that has happened over the years… with a lot of action happening on the ground. Yet, after 32 years, we are saying that we are nowhere near solving the problem. In fact, things are only getting worse. And, that climate catastrophe is just around the corner….and so on.

Complex issues, such as climate change or matters related to social development, are embedded in systems where the boundaries between the known and the unknown keep shifting. What we knew about climate change 30 years back was much less compared to what we know today. As we know more and more, we discover that we know less and less. That is the reason why despite making so much progress on the one hand, we don’t seem to be making much headway.

So, it is important for a company like us to be honest about this larger picture and qualify the narratives of our achievements and successes from that perspective. It is a little difficult for corporations to do that, as in the regular business world success and failure are much more ‘black and white’ and short-term. They are easier to define, and relate, for example, to the number of new customers acquired, gains in market share, and meeting revenue targets, etc. There are no debates about these metrices or goals. When you look at social issues though, things become fuzzier.

A company like ours takes prides in its values. It has the basic responsibility of communicating honestly. And that translates to communicating both the good and the bad. In the larger narrative, the short-term, the medium-term, and the long-term time horizons are all interconnected. Against such expanded scales of time, space and demographics, there is only so much a company can do. It might still seem like a lot to others and impressive in its own right. However, it is best to qualify this honestly.

Samuhik Pahal: And it is OK to fail?

Narayan P. S.: Semantics make a big difference. For example, it is not correct for any organization to say that it is making the world more sustainable by doing a bunch of things. The honest thing to say is that it is taking a few steps that will make the world a little less unsustainable. There is a big difference there – between moving from minus five to minus four where you progress by a measure of +1. When moving from +4 to +5, you also progress by a measure of +1. The absolute values are the same. But they mean very different things.

Samuhik Pahal: It has been quite an interesting conversation. In some sense, it is also connected to an earlier conversation that we had on impact assessment.

Narayan P. S.: Yes. It seems to be coincidental. What is clearly emerging is that the way you look at impact is closely linked to the way you look at success and failure in the social sector. And that in turn is closely linked to how you see yourself individually, and to what success and failure mean for you.

Other aspects of failure in the social sector relate to governance and the ways in which we run things. Not all CSR entities are the same. These often seem to be doing similar kinds of work. However, one factor that differentiates one from the other, is the means deployed to achieve the ends, the processes used, and the underlying values and principles.

I would qualify success and failure in the social sector from this perspective of the means. The means you employ includes your sources of funding, your governance systems, the processes you use for due diligence, etc. These things are critical, because when it comes to outcomes and impact, an organization’s value added may just be a blip.

Beyond the question of making big, visible progress, it’s important to recognize that just by chipping away at issues little by little by little, we are doing something of great value. Ultimately, it is your value system and perspective, which must constitute the anchor point to calibrate yourself.

On August 15, 1947, when the entire country was celebrating our independence, Mahatma Gandhi was in Kolkata, trying to heal the wounds of the violent run-up to the partition of India. He was in distress, as he thought he had failed to prevent the country’s partition.

Other leaders, though perhaps equally anguished, let the glory of newly found independence override whatever remorse they might have had. For the majority, it was a long-awaited milestone, a stellar achievement.

So, while most saw successful fruition of a long-drawn struggle, Gandhi saw darkness all around. Therefore, it really boils down to these subtle differences and nuances in how you see things.