I have to admit, I had had a twinge of trepidation when the signs first went up. Truly, elections bring out the silly season. There was an edge of only slightly veiled intolerance this time around, fanned by the various candidates themselves. “Not good,” I thought to myself. “It’s not wise to fan the flames of wackiness. We’ve got too much of it.”

Relatively rural, there is little around me to temper such flames. I lack the protection of a crowd, wise or otherwise. And, I didn’t want to end up with a cross — or a ying-yang symbol for that matter — scorched into my front lawn. Shaking my head, I shrugged off the trepidation. If one can’t put up a campaign sign without fear of retribution, then it’s too late. Up went the signs.

The first night, it was just two signs, ripped up and left on the ground. When I discovered them in the morning, I was saddened. Staring down at the shreds and tatters of cardboard, I considered revenge. Perhaps I could booby trap the two they left intact. Perhaps I might douse them with skunk scent or cover them with non-drying spray adhesive or both! Perhaps I might just encircle them with deadly doggy doo-doo. (I own a small factory named Tanzy.) A lady at the campaign office suggested honey — apparently this sort of thing is not uncommon around here — but I worried about attracting other critters. Instead, we decided on defiance.

Defiant Signage – Four (of eight) Presidential Placards (and a couple of locals)

Instead, we doubled the signage — the miscreants had ripped up two signs, we taped them back together, and put up another two. Now there were four. Two nights later, the four were gone without a trace. Defiant, we upped the bet and put up more. Now there were six signs. By Election Day we were up to eight, with several held in reserve — just in case.

I had to wonder if they — whoever they were — knew, or even considered, the consequences of their minor acts. I had to chuckle. Did they know that they had taken my single donation and doubled it, and then quadrupled it?

It’s a living lesson in unintended consequences. For with every sign destroyed, I doubled the bet, and as a result, I increased my contribution to the candidate whose signs they had taken hostage — an anti-totalitarian geometric progression. First, it was only two, and then it was four, then eight, and then we bought back-ups too, a total of around twenty signs in all. Each one accompanied another small donation to the candidate of my choice.

I am only glad that Election Day rolled around. Another sixteen signs would have set me back a bit, and then another thirty-two would have had me nudging up against campaign limits. I chuckled to myself. Sometimes unintended consequences are not so bad. I voted. I am defiant. I am a geometric progression. I am the power of one. I have a lot of left-over signs.

Here are the facts. The original source of those numbers is a 1994 report by the Standish Group called the CHAOS REPORT. The report said this about IT projects (and I’m paraphrasing not plagiarizing):

• 31% of [IT] projects are cancelled before completion,
  
• 88% are over deadline or over budget or both,
  
• The costs of such overruns are usually (at least) double original estimates
  

If you think those numbers are sort of long in the tooth, how about these from 2004.

• 18 percent of all IT project out and out fail,
  
• 53 percent are “challenged” (in other words went awry in some way),
  
• Only 29 percent actually “succeed.”
  

These were updated in 2004. Unfortunately, the damn researchers rearranged the categories, so it’s actually impossible to compare the numbers.

Pie Charts are Fun

Taken another way, 70 percent or all projects go at least slightly pear-shaped. That’s abysmal. It’s no wonder nonprofits are technologically gun-shy. Seventy percent of the time they feel royally screwed. I’d be gun-shy too. The fact is, looking at those numbers, a good E.D. should look upon all IT projects with some degree of skepticism. Imagine if 70 percent of your dates never showed up, or if 70 percent of your email went unnoticed or unanswered, or if 70 percent of the time you ordered dinner in a restaurant you didn’t get what you ordered. It would be enough to give a guy a complex.

“Hey, who ordered the Kansas City rib-eye,” says the waiter. “I did,” you reply. “Sorry,” says the waiter,” we don’t have steak. Here’s some fried city pigeon.” “But, I wanted steak…,” you mumble. “It’s almost the same thing, just as good,” says the waiter. “Besides, it’s local,” he adds, a marketer’s grin plastered ear-to-ear. “You know, it’s slow food, at least this one was slow. That’ll be ten bucks more.”

Why do good projects go bad, and what does that mean?

Usually, the answer is simple — lack of clarity about the goals. People mix up the ends with the means. They garble their goals. They lose sight of the purpose, the raison d’être. They mistake the means for the ends, or they really didn’t have any clear goals in the first place. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.  Let me give you an example, mixing up the means and the ends is deadly.

Recently, a friend of mine recounted a story over dinner. He had been at a meeting of international grant makers, funders, and other philanthropic types. Good people all, I am sure. Nevertheless, at this meeting, these folks were busy patting themselves on the back about their successes with Darfur. The successes, it seems, were many — increased public awareness, social networking sites, widgets and mashups, letters to Congress, web site visitors, etc, etc. All their outcomes were terrific; all the measures spelled success, with a capital “S.”

I looked at my friend and said “But…” “Exactly,” he said. “There is still a war. People are still dying. This is not success.”

Writ large, this is also one of my overarching philanthropic fears. I fear the tyranny of false outcomes. I fear an overemphasis on “outcome measurement,” an emphasis that forces the philanthropic world to think and act solely in terms of all things measurable, thus missing the forest for the trees and mistaking the measures or the outcome for the true goals.

I fear this will, in fact, drive us to a place where success is only something that is measurable, that is quantifiable. I fear that it will drive us to tiny measures, to secondary goals, easily measured, and easily met, and that will drive us to tunnel vision, all the while ignoring the true goals, the real ends — declaring the success of a fund-raising campaign and forgetting why we were raising the money in the first place.

If you mix up the means — things like memberships, activists, letters to Congress, and the like — with the ends — people die and freedoms are lost while we count page hits.

In IT, the demons entrance the audience with the shiny and new — we’re distracted, fascinated by the glitter and gleam, and lose sight of the goals. In my mind, any project that begins with a list of gadgets, software, hardware, or more trained monkeys, is the problem.

I blame lack of leadership. Moreover, I blame the IT directors and CIO’s, the project managers, and IT consultants, and, since I’m blaming people, the ED’s too. If a project goes bad, the odds are someone has mixed up goals, and scrambled the ends. I dare say somebody probably over-sold the whole thing too. Beware the marketer; else you’re likely to be eating pigeon.

In a nutshell, this is the reason a lot of nonprofit IT directors or CIOs or the like feel misunderstood, underappreciated, or downright alienated. They talk about the shiny, the new, the means, and forget about the goal, the purpose, the end. Do that and you’ll end up in that 70 percent.

I fault two specific things: dashed expectations and lack of vision. Setting goals, and setting expectations about those goals, is the key to a long life, whiter teeth, and a better love life. Ah, well, maybe I’m exaggerating. But understanding goals and setting expectations is the key to happy — successful — IT projects. White teeth are just a bonus.

It’s pathological, you techies: you over-promise and under-deliver. For many a geek, technology is an end, gadget as goal. If you lose the goal, lose clarity of purpose, your good projects will go bad.

It starts with a project divorced from vision — the vision of the organization — tacked instead to some secondary, usually measurable but secondary, outcome. It ends with what I call the “expectations gap” — the difference between what is promised, what is really possible, and the eventual, actual results.

• The “promised” — this is what the market usually over promises, whiter teeth, bigger naughty bits of all variety, better, faster, and, of course, you’ll have more friends. Usually it’s absolute hogwash.
• The “possible” — this is what could occur, if absolutely everything goes swimmingly, and all the stars align just right. This is what should be your goal.
• The “actual” — this is what gets delivered.

The trick here is to know the goal, keep the vision clear, and to simply not over promise. Success here is to make the “actual” equal the “possible.” But, if you promised too much, you’ve already failed. Be clear — even painfully honest — about what’s possible, and communicate so often that it hurts. Set expectations wisely. Mind the gap.

By my figuring, though, the founder’s of the United States thought this pretty important. Important enough that they wrote it into the First Amendment:

“Congress shall make no law … abridging … the right of the people … to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

(Just FYI: I removed the other extraneous stuff about establishment of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right of the people peaceably to assemble. Don’t need to clutter things up with those pesky rights too!)

I also, by the way, would argue that this implies that congress must also listen. That, I feel, is the bigger problem here. It’s not the medium, it’s the message.

As I said previously, we may be petitioning for redress – via email, fax, postcard and letter – but it doesn’t matter if no one is listening. That is the crux of the problem, and the heart of the issue.

Now, mind you, I know that it’s bad social research to gather conclusions from a sample of one; nevertheless I am going to do it. I think what I learned is instructive of something.

I decided to ask. I called Congressman SoAndSo (U.S. House). I first spoke to the legislative assistant that handles mail. His response:

“…every piece of mail is read and processed, regardless of the medium by which it arrives. We respond to every constituent letter.”

However, he did note that “we only have five or six permanent staff in the office, so we “prefer written [meaning physical] communications.” He also suggested that “faxes were the best way” to get in touch. The reason, they arrive as hardcopy and are easy to pass around.

Then I talked to the fellow in charge of their Web site. First off, he confirmed that they currently have a Web-form for email. “You have to go through our web site.” He also noted that they “filter out non-constituent email.” According to him, they prefer email because the constituents have to fill out an online form that provides all the contact info. More importantly, the constituents are writing about their own concerns and are sending their own “personal messages.”

All in all, he implied that there was no way to send them email except via their online form and that using some form of logic puzzle would only improve the process. When I mentioned that his colleague said that faxes were the best, his immediate response was: “I bet if you called 100 offices you’d get 100 different answers.”

I should note that – at least to me – their web site is already a logic puzzle. It took me quite some time to figure out that I had to navigate through half-a-dozen pages and menus to get to the form; worse than the State Department’s voicemail system. The sample logic puzzle system that is being talked about would be an improvement!

Anyway – just to be difficult — I asked about the several pieces of (unanswered) email that I sent through his Web site last year. (I hate unanswered email. GRRR.) He was embarrassed.

To add insult to injury, I followed this up by mentioning that I actually asked Congressman SoAndSo about it –- point blank — when I met him at a dinner several weeks ago. I asked why I never got responses to my email. That’s when the apology really started. Why was I having dinner with a congressman? – as I said before, money doesn’t talk, it swears.

So, in retrospect, here is what I learned from this little exercise and some other follow-up research:

1. If you want your voice heard in Congress, hardcopy works better than email. They seem to prefer either Fax or Post card. More on post cards below.
2. Post cards seem to be the really preferred choice, at least according to a couple of other calls I made. You can count them and pass them around. Moreover, unlike regular letters (and email for that matter), there are fewer security issues (no anthrax, no viruses, very little spam, etc).
3. Email, if it’s “real,” might have some impact. By real, I mean from a person, not a robot, and not boilerplate. But, I’m not convinced.
4. In the end, a phone call seemed to actually accomplish something. I at least got an apology.
5. Finally, the real secret was to somehow end up at a fancy dinner where you get to try to shove 105 issues into a 45 second handshake. It’s all about the access and while money might not buy you love, or an item on the agenda, it does get you access.

All in all, I still think the debate is a bit of a red herring. We’re busy fighting the good fight to ensure we can easily send email to congress, while the real problem is – regardless of the medium – no one is hearing the message.

Gavin Clabaugh – June 2006