Moneyball your organization
Originally posted on Issue №4 — July 2022
I love learning about other industries to find transferable insights — ideas we can bring back to the social impact sector. For instance, reading about baseball analytics caused me to ask: Are we measuring the right things?
In his thousand-page Historical Baseball Abstract, Bill James writes:
“Hitting home runs is part of a hitter’s job, hitting doubles is part of the job…stealing bases is part of the job — but what IS the job itself? The job itself is to create runs.”
We often get caught up in analyzing specific aspects of our programs, but is it advancing our mission?
Sticking with baseball a minute longer, I think a lot about a speech in Moneyball delivered by Brad Pitt (playing Oakland A’s manager, Billy Bean) to his scouts. They have the smallest budget in the league and are somehow supposed to compete with teams like the infinitely wealthy NY Yankees. They’d get crushed if they tried to play the game the same way as their competitors. To succeed, they have to play the game differently — they have to be strategic, creative, and data-informed. And it works!
I’m not going to pretend to have all the answers here. And I won’t pretend that complex systems work or resource-heavy human service delivery can be equated to scoring runs on a baseball field. But strategic and creative usage of data can get us further with less.
So, try these questions out, and let us know how you’re “moneyballing” your organization:
- Are we prioritizing our services where and to whom they’re needed most?
- Do our programs address the right problems? Or just symptoms of some deeper root cause?
- Are we maximizing our reach or impact or both?
- Which indicators even tell us about systemic impact anyway?
- Are we tracking outcomes or just outputs?
- If our strategies are addressing the right problems, do our tactics add up to the required scale?
- Can we build on existing assets, infrastructure, partnerships, and models to extend and/or speed up our impact?
