In my experience most funders^⁠1 want to invest in something new and innovative as opposed to the tried and tested. They want to feel that they are at the cutting edge of something, not investing in what works. Perhaps this is fair, in the sense that it leaves more stable, lower risk funders to support the mainstreaming of new activities that are proven to work, including the public sector. However, in a world with very little funding being passed down to local government and other institutions, this is more unlikely than ever. Funders continue then, look to new ideas to be the recipient of their funding. This poses a broad challenge for both supply and demand side. 

First, the fundee has to make what they do sound like its new and exciting, or else they have to invent something that meets that criteria, in order to benefit from the contribution to overheads from the funding. This latter strategy means that they don’t focus on serving a specific need; rather, their niche becomes chasing funding and perpetuating the existence of the organisation. This may of course be completely valid, if the organisation’s mission is to maximise income into a particular community, say. This is exacerbated if there is minimal contribution to overheads in the fund. If, however, the organisation’s expertise lays in a specific area such as supporting the needs of young people from disadvantaged communities, the danger is that to survive the organisation has to find creative ways of knitting the new funding stream back to that purpose, however tenuous.  

Second, the funder is caught in a dilemma in which they need to invest in innovations – new ideas with the promise of scale – while at the same time buying in to certainty of impact. They know this is a double bind from which there is no escape. If it was a sure thing, someone else would have already invested in the idea and taken it to scale. If it was truly innovative the anticipation has to be that the idea will either not work, or will work in unpredictable and unforeseeable ways. This doesn’t sit easily within our current economic growth paradigm that prioritises scale, impact, value for money and clearly demonstrable outcomes, all defined in advance with neat logic models or log-frames. 

By definition, new and innovative is not tried and tested and yet this is what the funder asks for and the recipient promises. Funder and fundee therefore play the same unacknowledged game; both know the other is playing it, yet neither will mention it. For to do so is for the funder to say out loud that they can’t invest in certainty and for the fundee to state plainly they can’t deliver certainty. Yet we all know certainty is an illusion, masked only by the world-view that sees mankind separate from nature and able to control all it surveys. 

For those whose instinctive reaction is that this is a niche topic, I want to suggest this is a leverage issue. It illustrates in a nutshell much of what is wrong with our current westernised, extractive, socio-economic growth paradigm, and it is this which drives so much of what is wrong with the world. Here’s how it often works. 

The organisations and individuals that hold funding also hold power. Their questions are around how to ensure they can prove – to themselves and their stakeholders – that they have put the funding to good use. To do this, it is necessary to leverage the usual value for money metrics that characterise the western economic mindset. In other words, we are taught that we should specify what it is we are buying, usually in some detail, to leave the fundee in little doubt about what it is we are after. If we are buying X number of wells, or after-school activities to serve Y people now and Z people by the end of the grant, we are winning on two levels. We can divide our total investment by these metrics to arrive at a assessment of value for money and the return on our investment. We can also prove to ourselves and our own investors/stakeholders that we have made good investment choices and delivered outcomes as a result. The same is true, incidentally, for recruitment. We believe by adding a new team member X, we can achieve Y number of specific activities and that completing these tasks will help us achieve greater impact, Z. Thus we can evaluate and evidence the additional value the investment brings.   

The unspoken game requires the recipient of the funding/investment to provide the information the funder, donor employer or investor needs to prove to their own backers/seniors that the whole system is working. We ‘prove’ that we’ve achieved the desired impact, that our logic held, and people benefitted. If we’re building something it’s more obvious; if we’re investing in social change – improved life chances, diversion away from criminality, lowering risk of obesity.  it is of course harder. Proof of a causal link between your intervention and its impact on outcomes in a complex system is impossible. More on this here. 

In recruitment this is often (especially in areas of work where performance metrics aren’t easily attributable or even available) through approaches to performance management. The inconvenient truth is that it doesn’t really matter how those numbers are arrived at, so long as they prove the efficiency and effectiveness of the investment. Inevitably, this places the recipients of the funding in a subservient power relationship, perpetuating the parent/child, teacher/pupil, manager/employee relationships that characterise our western world view. 

The emphasis here is on the ‘we’. It’s all too easily an ego trip for the investor; we are not only proving that the selection process and funding worked, we are proving that it was largely down to our own individual judgement. And so we are rewarded with promotions, bonuses or profile. In a individualistic world that rewards winners, we are winning. If, on the other hand, we’ve invested in higher risk, more ‘out there’ innovations that don’t have the desired impact, the opposite holds true. We’re seen as in some way deficient, in need of training or other such support. All of this is to say nothing of our inherent biases in who we might recommend investing in or the reasons that we are in these kind of roles in the first place, or what Teju Cole^⁠2 calls out as the white saviour industrial complex. 

This game plays out, therefore, across multiple levels and is, at best, a heroic waste of both time and money. 

In part two I’ll explore what we might we do to change the rules of the game.

---

¹ By funder, of course, I am referring to any organisation or individual who is seeking to use the funding at their disposal for the benefit of others; this could be government departments and agencies procuring services, trusts and foundations giving grants to charities, philanthropists investing in social tech or communities, organiastions recruiting new members of staff, and so on.

² https://twitter.com/tejucole/status/177809396070498304?s=61&t=bgEbnbsdWHTUroDLFxKAaQ