August 29th, 2022
By: Adam Luecking

Maintaining a healthy weight has been a challenge for most of my adult life. My scale was the “elephant in the bathroom.” Eventually, I realized data avoidance was making things worse, so I committed to paying attention to my weight and accepting it for what it was. This simple act unlocked my ability to engage in authentic analysis and make progress.

The first step in any journey is to be mindful of where you’re at and why. So, I started asking myself questions and giving honest answers in return (even if they were painful). Through this journaling exercise, I realized I wasn’t very conscious about what I was eating. I was exercising a lot, but it wasn’t making a difference. So I dug even deeper and examined what, how much, and when I ate. This helped me design weight-loss experiments with a higher likelihood of success. My plans became specifically tailored to my needs and challenges. And it worked; I’ve been able to maintain a weight that is healthier for me for three years now.

Like my health journey, if you want your strategies to have a higher likelihood of success, you and your grantees must “journal your journies” to impact. This involves continually engaging in effective analysis of the historical and current data, digging deep and asking questions, designing strategies to fit your discoveries, analyzing the impact of your actions, and then adjusting accordingly.

Besides creating better strategies, journaling grantee impact journies is essential for funders to make better funding decisions. Imagine your grantees sent you a bunch of performance numbers without any context. It would be like sending you their weight measurements without knowing if they were 5”3’ or 6”3’ tall. You would have no idea if they were at a healthy “weight” or not. This is because numbers are meaningless without context. On the other hand, being mindful of all the interconnected variables at play can unlock previously undiscovered, disregarded, or underappreciated pathways to progress.

Funders and grantees can save resources and reach their social sector destinies faster by prioritizing the development of their journey journals.

Develop Your Story Behind the Curve

Once you have the data, how can you start journaling your journey? Results-Based Accountability’s Turn the Curve Process offers a simple common-sense process to do this effectively. The first step of the process is developing the “Story Behind the Curve.”

Story Behind the Curve = a transparent analysis of the contributing and limiting factors that influence a data trendline.

The power of numbers is their contextual position in a grander narrative. As often as possible, make sure you have a “Story Behind the Curve” for each of your community indicators. A Story Behind the Curve explores contributing factors (reasons the data looks the way it does) and limiting factors (reasons preventing the data from getting better). Additionally, you should never ever ask your grantees to report on performance measures without the Stories Behind the Curve.

The Nuts and Bolts of a Good Story Behind the Curve

Any Effective Story Behind the Curve does the Following 4 Things:

  1. Lists and explains contributing factors
  2. Lists and explains limiting factors
  3. Pursues and proposes research on root causes where appropriate
  4. Surfaces and challenges assumptions

Step 1: Contributing Factors

Contributing factors explain why your data might be trending positively. If your data is trending in the wrong direction, contributing factors explain why the data isn’t as bad as it could’ve been (i.e., the data could’ve been worse if we hadn’t done X). Contributing factors focus on the positives or what’s going well. Why start here? I’ve found that most people tend to focus on fixing the negatives and forget about maximizing the positives. But in many cases, replicating positive factors creates a positive feedback loop of greater impact.

Step 2: Limiting Factors

Limiting factors are the negative factors holding your data trendline back. If your data is trending in the right direction, limiting factors are what are preventing the data from improving at an increased level of acceleration. When considering limiting factors, it’s prudent to disaggregate your data. Oftentimes, you won’t be able to figure out what’s holding the data back until you disaggregate by race or other systemic factors.

Step 3: Pursue and Propose Research on Root Causes

While exploring contributing and limiting factors, you may find that more research is needed to understand the story behind the data. There’s always going to be information you won’t have at a certain point in time. Come up with a list of the information you still need, as this will ultimately allow you to identify a research agenda — actions that people need to take to further develop the Story Behind the Curve.

Step 4: Surface and Challenge Assumptions

Wrong assumptions can be disastrous when they’re the basis for any decision-making process that influences a large number of people. We must risk feeling uncomfortable with new ideas in order to achieve progress. Try not to hold your assumptions too dear to your heart when developing your Story Behind the Curve. And use meetings with grantees to create healthy dialogue around surfacing and challenging assumptions.

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If you’d like to learn more about journaling your social impact journey (including examples and real-world case studies), check out chapter seven of my book Social Sector Hero – How Government and Philanthropy Can Fund for Impact. Journey journaling is just one of eight core strategies I’ve designed to help funders and grantees maximize the impact of their social investments.