Community

What is your evidence of performance success?

Published

6 years ago

6 minute read

A few months ago, I made a short essay on the value of understanding the results that mission-based organization has been producing. This is to support the thesis on building management’s capacity to manage their results effectively. What kind of results are your organization producing on a regular basis? Is this adding to your performance story? How can you solidify and have a firm grasp of your results from the interventions that you do with your communities, beneficiaries, and intended audience?

Regardless of the kind of performance the organization is bringing to the table, there is some sort of results/outcomes that get reported to donors, stakeholders, and funders. In this essay, I interchange results with outcomes and vice-versa. This could be:

project-based results – results from project interventions and activities ? strategic outcomes- which come from corporate strategies ? performance outcomes- results that come from the individual performance of employees, performance of departments, or performance on specific task or function ? development results- outcomes that come from identified broad strategic development goals that organizations have set from the beginning, usually aligned to sectoral or national benchmarks

These results form part of the narrative of how the organization has been effective in its mission, how it has articulated its reason for being and how it is using its resources effectively to optimize its relevance for its target audience. And lastly but not the least, how a results mindset increases success for the organization. Most non-profits and mission-based organizations these days have some sort of a results-based management system.

According to Treasury Board of Canada, results-based management is a comprehensive, lifecycle approach to management that integrates strategy, people, resources, processes and measurements to improve decision-making and drive change. The approach focuses on getting the right design early in a process, focussing on outcomes, implementing performance measurement, learning and changing, and reporting performance. Other organizations in a more regulated industry have come up with their own results-driven management systems in place. For small organizations with tiny budgets, few staff and programs running, or a volunteer-run board/committee working on specific activities only, what can the results-based management offer?

1. It offers a solid framework to wrap strategy, resources, people, processes and measurement together. While most RBMs have been used in program and project interventions, it can also be used at the organizational level where no resources, inputs, people can leave unintegrated or fall off the cracks of management.

For example, what can a group of volunteer moms supporting a local daycare or after-school programming think for results? Increased student engagement in after-school programs versus just counting the number of students that attend on a monthly basis.

2. It strengthens the performance story in a seemingly tightening regulatory and accountability demand from donors, funders, and the general public. The intensity, complexity, and stronger (sometimes irrational) demand for evidence puts organization under pressure- to perform, to evaluate their work with rigor, to engage and learn from their innovations. Without an RBM as a framework to set and start this process, organizations will be caught unprepared, ill-equipped and will be scrambling all the time for the next “shiny” object to understand and communicate their results.

No.1 and No.2 have clear implications for management to respond to the call for understanding and organizing their decisions based on results not on outputs. Number of trainings conducted, number of wells built, number of school nutrition program started, number of basketball coaching provided, etc. These are outputs from activities -the trees not the forest.

Are you seeing the forest from the trees? Is your performance story riddled with just stories or actual evidence?

Being mission-based doesn’t mean you do not have the budgets to invest in results-based management. It is just that you do not see it as a priority. This is where the successful organizations are different. They think competence and capacity-building as a priority not as competition to program needs.

If you want success, demonstrate success. And how do you demonstrate success- be results-based, be results-minded. It will save you lots of monies, time, and effort down the road.

Maiden Manzanal-Frank is the Founder, CEO, and President of GlobalStakes Consulting, a consulting organization that provides outstanding results in innovation, impact, and sustainability for companies, social enterprises, non-profits, and international organizations not just in Canada but internationally as well. GlobalStakes Consulting operates in Alberta and BC respectively. You can follow her blogs at www.globalstakesconsulting.com.

Follow Author

Coutts Three verdict: A warning to protestors who act as liaison with police

Brownstone Institute / 3 hours ago

Deborah Birx Gets Her Close-Up

armed forces / 3 hours ago

Canada’s first ‘transgender’ military chaplain suspended for alleged sexual harassment

Community

SPARC Red Deer – Caring Adult Nominations open now!

Published on March 10, 2024

SPARC Red Deer

Red Deer community let’s give a round of applause to the incredible adults shaping the future of our kids. Whether they’re a coach, neighbour, teacher, mentor, instructor, or someone special, we want to know about them!

Tell us the inspiring story of how your nominee is helping kids grow up great. We will honour the first 100 local nominees for their outstanding contributions to youth development. It’s time to highlight those who consistently go above and beyond!

To nominate, visit Events (sparcreddeer.ca)

Addictions

‘Harm Reduction’ is killing B.C.’s addicts. There’s got to be a better way

Published on January 28, 2024

Todayville

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Susan Martinuk

B.C. recently decriminalized the possession of small amounts of illicit drugs. The resulting explosion of addicts using drugs in public spaces, including parks and playgrounds, recently led the province’s NDP government to attempt to backtrack on this policy

Since 2016, more than 40,000 Canadians have died from opioid drug overdoses — almost as many as died during the Second World War.

Governments, health care professionals and addiction experts all acknowledge that widespread use of opioids has created a public health crisis in Canada. Yet they agree on virtually nothing else about this crisis, including its causes, possible remedies and whether addicts should be regarded as passive victims or accountable moral agents.

Fuelled by the deadly manufactured opioid fentanyl, Canada’s national drug overdose rate stood at 19.3 people per 100,000 in 2022, a shockingly high number when compared to the European Union’s rate of just 1.8. But national statistics hide considerable geographic variation. British Columbia and Alberta together account for only a quarter of Canada’s population yet nearly half of all opioid deaths. B.C.’s 2022 death rate of 45.2/100,000 is more than double the national average, with Alberta close behind at 33.3/100,00.

In response to the drug crisis, Canada’s two western-most provinces have taken markedly divergent approaches, and in doing so have created a natural experiment with national implications.

B.C. has emphasized harm reduction, which seeks to eliminate the damaging effects of illicit drugs without actually removing them from the equation. The strategy focuses on creating access to clean drugs and includes such measures as “safe” injection sites, needle exchange programs, crack-pipe giveaways and even drug-dispensing vending machines. The approach goes so far as to distribute drugs like heroin and cocaine free of charge in the hope addicts will no longer be tempted by potentially tainted street drugs and may eventually seek help.

But safe-supply policies create many unexpected consequences. A National Post investigation found, for example, that government-supplied hydromorphone pills handed out to addicts in Vancouver are often re-sold on the street to other addicts. The sellers then use the money to purchase a street drug that provides a better high — namely, fentanyl.

Doubling down on safe supply, B.C. recently decriminalized the possession of small amounts of illicit drugs. The resulting explosion of addicts using drugs in public spaces, including parks and playgrounds, recently led the province’s NDP government to attempt to backtrack on this policy — though for now that effort has been stymied by the courts.

According to Vancouver city councillor Brian Montague, “The stats tell us that harm reduction isn’t working.” In an interview, he calls decriminalization “a disaster” and proposes a policy shift that recognizes the connection between mental illness and addiction. The province, he says, needs “massive numbers of beds in treatment facilities that deal with both addictions and long-term mental health problems (plus) access to free counselling and housing.”

In fact, Montague’s wish is coming true — one province east, in Alberta. Since the United Conservative Party was elected in 2019, Alberta has been transforming its drug addiction policy away from harm reduction and towards publicly-funded treatment and recovery efforts.

Instead of offering safe-injection sites and free drugs, Alberta is building a network of 10 therapeutic communities across the province where patients can stay for up to a year, receiving therapy and medical treatment and developing skills that will enable them to build a life outside the drug culture. All for free. The province’s first two new recovery centres opened last year in Lethbridge and Red Deer. There are currently over 29,000 addiction treatment spaces in the province.

This treatment-based strategy is in large part the work of Marshall Smith, current chief of staff to Alberta’s premier and a former addict himself, whose life story is a testament to the importance of treatment and recovery.

The sharply contrasting policies of B.C. and Alberta allow a comparison of what works and what doesn’t. A first, tentative report card on this natural experiment was produced last year in a study from Stanford University’s network on addiction policy (SNAP). Noting “a lack of policy innovation in B.C.,” where harm reduction has become the dominant policy approach, the report argues that in fact “Alberta is currently experiencing a reduction in key addiction-related harms.” But it concludes that “Canada overall, and B.C. in particular, is not yet showing the progress that the public and those impacted by drug addiction deserve.”

The report is admittedly an early analysis of these two contrasting approaches. Most of Alberta’s recovery homes are still under construction, and B.C.’s decriminalization policy is only a year old. And since the report was published, opioid death rates have inched higher in both provinces.

Still, the early returns do seem to favour Alberta’s approach. That should be regarded as good news. Society certainly has an obligation to try to help drug users. But that duty must involve more than offering addicts free drugs. Addicted people need treatment so they can kick their potentially deadly habit and go on to live healthy, meaningful lives. Dignity comes from a life of purpose and self-control, not a government-funded fix.

Susan Martinuk is a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and author of the 2021 book Patients at Risk: Exposing Canada’s Health Care Crisis. A longer version of this article recently appeared at C2CJournal.ca.