Tag Archives: targets

Why outcome-based performance management doesn’t work: podcast with Dr Toby Lowe

Last week we published the 7th episode of the Systemic Insight podcast (get it from Libsyn or Apple Podcast or you can also find it on Spotify). It features Dr Toby Lowe of Northumbria University and his work on why outcome-based performance management doesn’t work – and what to do instead. In this blog post, I’m sharing some quotes from Toby and some insights I took from the conversation.

The discussion in the podcast touches upon why outcome targets distort rather than enhance performance, why they lead to gaming becoming a rational strategy, and what the alternatives are for people who work in complex contexts. As outcome-based performance management is still the prevalent method to manage the performance in many fields, this discussion is highly relevant and pertinent.

This episode is packed with ideas and quite challenging thoughts! In this blog post I am bringing together a number of quotes from Toby and some comments from my side.

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A bottom up perspective on results measurement

Thanks to my engagement in the ‘Systemic M&E’ initiative of the SEEP Network (where M&E stands for monitoring and evaluation but we really have been mainly looking into monitoring), I have been  discussing quite a bit with practitioners on monitoring and results measurement and how to make monitoring systems more systemic. For me this bottom up perspective is extremely revealing in how conscious these practitioners are about the complexities of the systems they work in and how they intuitively come up with solutions that are in line with what we could propose based on complexity theory and systems thinking. Nevertheless, practitioners are often still strongly entangled in the overly formalistic and data-driven mindset of the results agenda. This mindset is based on a mechanistic view of systems with clear cause-and-effect relationships and a bias for objectively obtained data that is stripped from its context and by that rendered largely meaningless for improving implementation. Continue reading