It is time to make the measures matter*
Last week I was part of a really fun panel on measurement. Yes really!
Organised by the lovely folk at SIMNA, it was about the role of measurement and evaluation in building a wellbeing economy. We talked about how far the journey in Australia has come, and what more needs to be done – inside and outside government.
During the Q&A someone asked a question that’s been on my mind for some time, not least seeing the plethora of dashboards on offer at the recent wellbeing into practice conference in Canberra.
The question was along the lines of “are measures enough?”
And the answer has to be along the lines of “nope, they ain’t”
Measures are a necessary, but not sufficient ingredient in the task of system change. They can inform, awaken, and focus attention (Oxfam’s yearly update on the state of economic inequality are an example of this). But on their own, they don’t do the work of transformation (on many fronts, economic inequality has gotten worse since Oxfam’s first ‘Davos’ report in 2014).
Measures need to be accompanied by big visioning exercises, by better analysis of root causes of problems, and by ways of working inside government that enable long term and bold policy making (see Wales’s efforts and ideas for changes to budget rules).
It is not enough to rely on the assumption that “What gets measured gets managed?” Yet this is a phrase I have heard a lot at conferences over the years.
The statement hinges on the assumption that we live in a word of evidence-based policy. It underpins the work of a swathe of people who are advocating for better measures of progress, more robust indicator dashboards, and more data collection. That work is critically important, but let’s not kid ourselves that it is enough.
There’s been great progress on broadening the lens of what is measured in recent decades. Almost two thirds of OECD governments have multidimensional measurement frameworks…but they clearly aren’t on their way to building wellbeing economies. There are plenty of examples of where data shows the extent of a problem, but which there is not nearly enough action being taken to address it.
For a range of reasons, knowing the extent of a problem doesn’t automatically lead to policy action to change things for the better.
So what needs to be done, beyond rolling out better measures and hoping that’ll be enough to lead to changed policy?
What is needed is to make the measures matter:
- By ensuring they reflect the views and visions of everyday people and communities to build engagement, momentum, political agitation, and legitimacy
- Not stopping at the description of the state of play, but taking the time to understand why things are the way they are (root cause analysis)
- Undertaking the shifts in ways of working and design of policy to transform the rules of the game in order to generate different outcomes. This will invariably be a question of power and distribution of resources – system change, not just symptom-level solutions.
For more, see https://cpd.org.au/work/the-wellbeing-economy-in-brief-7-getting-the-component-parts-in-order/
* With huge thanks to my pal and colleague Cressida Gaukroger for many-a great discussion that fed into this little post
