…They Have More in Common With Each Other Than You Think

As I watched runners stumble (or splash, in many cases) across the finish line of this year’s Boston Marathon, seeing their faces transform from abject pain to blank disbelief to overwhelming glee made me nostalgic for my own marathon training and race experiences.  While I was wistfully reflecting back on waking up before 4 a.m. to fit in my long runs and having a metabolism like the engine of a Porsche, I was also working on a deliverable for one of my current client engagements, in which our team is working with the client to decide how it might approach measuring the impact of one of its grant programs. As my training nostalgia and work research collided in my brain, I was struck by how similar some of the core tenets of marathon training and measurement frameworks can be.

  1. Defining what success looks like is key to building a framework for measuring your program’s impact. Many of our clients have struggled with deciding on the success, or intended impact, that they are working toward because it can vary a great deal across organizations and social issues. This is similar to how, for some runners, simply dragging themselves across the marathon finish line is a glorious victory while, for others, that victory is achieved through shaving minutes and even hours off their finish time.
  2. Having a clear reason for why you’re measuring what you’re measuring is not only essential for a cohesive measurement framework but also for ensuring that you’re not expending your organization’s or your grantee’s capacity on useless data collection efforts. In the running world, you’ll find countless people adopting training practices or acquiring gadgets without a clear reason why, such as purchasing $40 running socks that have no identifiable difference from the $3 socks at CVS.
  3. Developing a framework requires trial and error to figure out which processes work for your organization and which indicators will get you the information you need to understand your impact. Chances are, it won’t be the perfect approach, but the process of both developing your framework and testing it out will set you on a path to finding the best method. Similarly, runners test out which of the energy supplements on the market are the most tolerable to them during training before using one during a race. For example, I used a GU energy gel during a long run and discovered that the cement-like effect it had on my mouth and throat wasn’t a good match for my running style, so I tried a different method.
  4. It’s a team effort: Both marathon training and building a measurement framework can be psychologically—and physically—taxing! It’s easier to train with a running partner, and it’s easier to build a measurement plan with a team. This is why we have found so much value in taking a team-based and collaborative approach to building performance measurement systems. We work off each other’s ideas and involve the client at every step of the way to ensure that our work meets their needs.