The Stand Together Podcast is a podcast for people who care about tackling the biggest challenges facing our country, exploring the origins of philanthropy, the challenges and opportunities facing community organizations, and the experiences of nonprofit leaders across the country. Click here to learn more and subscribe on your platform of choice.
The host for this episode is Evan Feinberg, executive director of Stand Together Foundation. His guest is Todd Rose, president of Populace, a former professor and director of the Laboratory for the Science of Individuality at Harvard, bestselling author of Collective Illusions, The End of Average, and Dark Horse, and a member of Stand Together's board of directors.
This episode and the following transcript were originally published by Stand Together Foundation.
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Evan Feinberg
Hey, listeners. My name is Evan Feinberg, executive director of Stand Together Foundation, and one of your hosts for the Stand Together Podcast. Every time you hear my voice in the show, we’ll either be talking about the history of the social sector or paradigms that are shifting within it.
In this episode type, Paradigms, we’ll be unpacking some of the broken paradigms that exist in philanthropy and exploring some necessary shifts in that vision. I’ll be joined by some of my friends, esteemed colleagues, and brilliant thought leaders in the sector.
[Short Break]
Hey there, this is Evan Feinberg, the executive director of Stand Together Foundation. I am pumped to welcome you to another episode of our series on paradigms as part of the Stand Together Podcast. Today I have one of the most interesting people and one of the most important thinkers on the whole concept of paradigms. His name is Dr. Todd Rose. Todd, thank you so much for joining the podcast.
Todd Rose
Hey. Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.
Evan Feinberg
Alright. A little bit of background on Todd. He is the co-founder and president of Populace, an incredible think tank that is doing some of the most interesting work to understand not just the opinions of individuals, but their deeply held private beliefs that are guiding their behavior. He’s going to say a whole lot more about that work. He’s also the author of three incredible books, each of which is helping us to shift paradigms on important topics: the first, End of Average, the second, Dark Horse, and the third, Collective Illusions. We’re going to talk about each one. Perhaps, today on the podcast, I will convince him to write a fourth book to change paradigms on social sector measurement. We’ll get there in a second. Todd, let’s start with Populace. Tell us a little bit more about the think tank that you founded.
Todd Rose
Yeah. The think tank came out of… I used to be a professor at Harvard, and with my co-founder Parisa Rouhani, we spun that out of Harvard so we could do interesting things that we wanted to do. The focus is about creating the mindset, culture, and institutional conditions that are required for everybody to live fulfilling lives and have that ladder up to a thriving society.
Evan Feinberg
That’s amazing. I would love for you to even back up a step. Tell us a little bit more about your personal background that led you into that work.
Todd Rose
Yeah. Right. I’m proud of the academic work that I’ve done, the public intellectual work I’ve done, but a lot of that was informed by just my lived experience, which is that I was born and raised in rural America. School didn’t really work very well for me, weirdly, early on, to the point I failed out of high school with a 0.9 GPA—which I do think you have to work really hard to do that poorly, not even get socially promoted. The short version is having done a string of minimum wage jobs… My girlfriend, a couple months after I failed out of high school, found out she was pregnant. She’s still my wife today. We start life with minimum wage jobs, ended up on welfare. Just life wasn’t what it could be.
Through the process of turning my life around, which involved getting a GED and going to college at night, I learned a lot about myself. But what I really learned, and we can circle back to some stories if you want, but I realized pretty fundamentally how important it was to have good fit between who you are as an individual and the environment you’re in. When you get that fit, it’s amazing what you can accomplish. When you don’t, it almost doesn’t matter how hard you work.
I thought that was just a personal anecdote, but as I got to Harvard to do my doctorate, I was fortunate to be part of this brand new science called the “science of individuality”, where it turned out this is just a fundamental truth about human beings. I’ve dedicated the rest of my life to realizing so many of the assumptions we’ve made about human potential and about the zero sum nature of society are just wrong, and that we can do so much more. I believe this is the future of free society.
Evan Feinberg
There’s so much to unpack, even in your story. As we think about that as a framing for our episode today, the science of individuality, this paradigm shift you’re driving, I just don’t want to gloss over the fact that it’s a really exciting opportunity to talk to somebody who has the lived experience of growing up in poverty, dropping out of high school. There are so many things that people might be thinking about, the stereotypes and the average individual—we’ll get there in a second—that’s coming out of those circumstances. But then to become a neuroscientist and to have the sort of incredible accomplishments of your career really show… Your personal story gives us an example that should be breaking our paradigms and helping us to shift how we think. Then you’re helping us do it by building a science of individuality.
Maybe let’s start with this first paradigm. What do you mean by the science of individuality? Then we can begin moving into your first book.
Todd Rose
Here’s what’s really interesting. In science and in society, for the last couple of hundred years, we have made this assumption that there is such a thing called an average person. We know it’s not perfect, not everyone’s exactly average, but we assume that the average is a real thing that represents most people. Probably in your head you’re thinking, “Yeah. There’s like a bell curve. It’s not everybody. The extremes, they don’t fit, but most everybody else. It’s close enough.”
That’s the assumption we’ve made for how we do research on human beings. It’s the assumption we’ve made in our systems. In education, we design and teach to an average student. About 20 years ago, we started getting access to bigger data sets on individuals. Some of my colleagues who were the founders of this field just started asking really basic questions. “Okay, this assumption we made that averages work, is that true?”
It was pretty shocking. Really shocking. I actually think that it’s a New York Times exposé away from just being like, “What are we paying for in most sciences?” I’ll give you a one concrete example, and then something really applied that mattered to me.
When I first learned about this, I was being trained in brain imaging at Mass General Hospital. The way it works, every time you read findings on Time Magazine or something, this is the brain area for love or whatever, and they show you a beautiful picture of a brain where there’s certain areas lit up. Turns out that is always just the average of a bunch of people’s brains that were in that study. Now, again, if you were in the study, we’d take you in, give you some task and scan your brain. We actually have your individual data. Then just reflexively, we average it together, and then we produce this average brain map and we publish it, and then we hope we get tenure.
Mike Miller, one of my colleagues, he was doing a similar study like this on how your brain retrieves memory. He happened to be in one of the sessions where he saw an individual pattern that looked kind of weird. He just thought, “What’s going on here?” He went and looked at every single person in the study and then compared it to the average of those people. This is the same people we got an average off of. He said, “How many people’s individual brains look like the average from them?” It turned out, zero. Not at all. We’re like, “Okay. Well, this is a problem, because we basically have a science of averages.”
If you’re listening to this, you can think, “Oh yeah, but if everyone’s a snowflake, this is just chaos.” But it turns out the good news is once you get away from this assumption and you accept that there just isn’t an average person, it turns out individuality isn’t noise, it isn’t chaos, it’s the information. We’ve been able to start building a science based on individuality that is getting to incredibly general insights about human beings. I’ll give you one example, which for me was really important just to express the practical nature of this.
In nutrition, in the US, metabolic disorders, diabetes, prediabetes, that kind of thing, are just so costly. It is the biggest problem we face as a society. If you think about how we think about blood sugar issues, we have a thing called the glycemic index. Most people are familiar with that. It tells you, “This food will elevate your blood sugar this much.” Well, that glycemic index is, not surprisingly, based on averages of a bunch of people. My colleagues in Israel asked a similar question about this, as Mike Miller did about brains. How many people around the world respond the way the glycemic index says they should? Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people they studied. Answer’s the same. Zero.
Evan Feinberg
Zero. Wow.
Todd Rose
Nobody. Now, here’s what’s cool, rather than just saying, “Well, there’s no average, we’re done, it’s chaos,” they used some machine learning and other things and they were able to optimize nutritional predictions for every individual. It’s actually a company now. I wish I had stock in it. I actually did it. I was worried about prediabetes, it runs in my family. Since I was a young adult I had a nutritionist say, “Hey, listen, the thing that is magical for regulating blood sugar is grapefruit,” which turns out to be true on average. I was having a half a grapefruit almost every morning of my adult life.
I do this test through their company. It’s like gut biome, deep blood work, all this great stuff. They send back an app that has for me, “Okay, here’s what you got to eat, here’s what you can’t eat.” It turns out grapefruit is the single worst food that I can eat. It actually elevates my blood sugar more than chocolate cake.
Evan Feinberg
What?
Todd Rose
Now, for my wife, not true. What’s so cool about it is I can make decisions with an app on my phone that optimizes my metabolic health in real time. It’s powerful, but it’s also empowering. What’s really cool about this is once you realize by believing in averages, you basically have condemned most people to suboptimal health, and that if you understand individuality, with our technologies, we can actually scale population health this way. We can actually have a healthy society by focusing on individuals.
Evan Feinberg
This is incredible. I would highly recommend your book, End of Average, for folks that want to dive deeper on these topics. This is what we are talking about when we talk about paradigm shifts. I hope that our listeners can immediately understand why we’re talking about these topics on this show, because we’re trying to think differently about working communities, transforming lives in the social sector. If I look at today, everything that’s being done in the nonprofit world, it’s based on random control studies that average out the average outcome of a nonprofit organization. It means we’re delivering predictably bad results, because that average intervention, so to speak, probably has very few and maybe close to zero individuals that it actually helps to transform their life. You’ve explained why we spend trillions of dollars and then see very few indicators of progress, as a society, on driving change in people’s lives and communities.
Todd Rose
Well, that’s right, because if you think about it, just like every individual has unique characteristics, every community has unique characteristics. It doesn’t mean there aren’t principles that matter, when you understand the mechanisms of change, but the idea that you’re just going to transplant some intervention that works in one context with the right circumstances and think it’s just going to replicate, it’s just not true. Most randomized control trials make some pretty fundamental assumptions that individual variation is just error, it’s random. The science of individuality will show you, in fact, it’s not random. You’re making a huge mistake. There are better ways to do this and better ways to understand effectiveness.
Evan Feinberg
All right. I want to get back into a deep dive on how we might rethink measurement in the social sector. I think that’s a key paradigm that we could apply some of the ideas from your books and that you’ve pioneered and really apply them to the space. But I think we’ve got to get to your other books first, because they also offer important context for this conversation. After End of Average, you began studying how individuals find meaning and purpose and you wrote a book, Dark Horse, as a result of that. Can you share more about that book?
Todd Rose
Yeah. It was funny, it came after End of Average became a best seller. I was excited and I was still at Harvard and my dean said, “Well, what do you want to do next? We’ve got some extra money.” I had profiled companies in End of Average that had done a great job, from my perspective, dealing with individuality. What was fascinating is when I visited those companies, without fail, I had met individuals who were doing unbelievably cool things but had really different backgrounds. I’m like, “How did you end up here?” I thought, what about those people? What could we learn from people who were wildly successful that nobody saw coming? They didn’t play the sort of one size fits all. I said, “Okay, it may be nothing, but here we go.”
We did the largest study ever on dark horses and studied people from as many walks life as we could get and just figured out what they have in common. I have to say, I was completely wrong up front. I actually assumed that the only thing they’d have in common was a personality trait. I think of somebody like a Richard Branson who just loves bucking the system. I thought if you were going to go off the beaten path, you’d kind of have to not mind having people look at you weird. Turned out that just wasn’t true. Personality had nothing to do with it. I wanted to know, how did you get good at stuff? How did you get good at this? Early on in these interviews, they all wanted to talk about how they figured out who they were and what really motivated them and what they cared about. They started using words like fulfillment and contribution and passion. I didn’t want that to be true because, fulfillment, what do I do with that? This is so squishy. I don’t know.
We dug in and what it turned out they had in common was they just had a very, very different view of what a successful life is. It was about really pursuing fulfillment and becoming excellent as a result. Whereas, the sort of standardized model we have is follow this path of excellence as we’ve defined it and you will find fulfillment on the back end. But we all know that’s not true. We know plenty of people who are objectively successful, by society standards, and absolutely miserable. What was interesting is we learned a lot about how they made that a reliable path. Not just follow your bliss off a cliff. It was just so fascinating that I thought it was worthy of a book, because along that same time we had been studying the same question in the American public.
Not just dark horses. These are just people who had done it, who had jumped and decided they were going to vote with their feet, if you will. I wondered, “Are they just weird? They’re just this small fringe of people and the rest of us…”
So we did the largest ever private opinion study of what everyday Americans think about a successful life. What do we find? Same exact things. They just don’t care about chasing fame and wealth and the stuff. They want to live fulfilling lives, they want to make a contribution, and they, for the life of them, don’t understand why someone has to lose for them to succeed. They don’t really think everybody else is with them. So I now see dark horses, rather than anomalies, as just a blueprint for a lot of the rest of us who haven’t been willing to make the jump.
Evan Feinberg
I love the idea of thinking about dark horse as a blueprint for both individuals and organizations, and as a way to rethink the work that we’re doing in the social sector. In the nonprofit world, essentially compliance to the—we mentioned those random control studies, et cetera. Compliance to something that on average has theoretically worked is the name of the game. Everyone’s talking about evidence-based philanthropy and evidence-based policymaking. Essentially, you have to prove that the thing that you’re going to do has worked, like it’s a drug, a pharmaceutical that has a clinical trial and then you can deliver that pharmaceutical. But there are a ton of problems with that. I think our listeners can probably guess where I’m going based on what you’ve said. Just a couple of data points.
Of those random control studies, less than 1% of all nonprofit organizations that have done a random control study have shown any statistically significant positive outcome on those random control studies. We’re trying to replicate a very small number of interventions. Then, close to zero have ever shown a second random control study of the replication that has led to any outcomes. When we’re trying to comply with something else that’s being done, we’re essentially chasing our tail trying to figure out things that work in the sector. We need a blueprint of what are those things that people should be trying. How should they be thinking about the space? I think Dark Horse gives us the idea that we need to start thinking about what enables people to find meaning and purpose and fulfillment in their lives and what organizations are trying new and different things to enable people to do that.
Todd Rose
Yeah. I think you’re exactly right because, look, there’s a whole bunch of problems with this sort of… It’s a classic top down approach to philanthropy. Nevermind the fact that we have real issues with the methodologies. There’s a bunch of assumptions built there that they just are not caught up on the science, frankly. We’re all condemned to have to basically play that game just because they’re the ones that get to hand out the money. So they need to catch up on the science. But there’s a bigger problem here, which is, in top down philanthropy, we’re essentially saying, “We want you to live the life that we want you to live. We’ve got a plan for your life and if you just do what we say, you’ll be so grateful.” But if you look at the kind of lives people want to live, it just doesn’t square with that. It’s so personal.
I mean this is the overarching shift in the American public is they really want to pursue fulfilling lives. They know it’s personal, they know it’s relational, they know it’s anchored in their communities. They want to be decent people, they want to live fulfilling lives, they want to make a contribution. That’s not how we think about the outcomes of most of what we do in philanthropy. You take something as specific as people facing poverty, you think, “Well our objective is to increase…” Okay. Now you’re raised in the percentile of how much money, whatever, fine. But really that’s supposed to be in service of something else.
Evan Feinberg
That’s right.
Todd Rose
If philanthropy is going to play a positive force in society, it’s got to be about enabling people to live the kind of lives they want to live. I mean, because if you do that, now look where we’re at. Right now, it’s, “Listen, I’m going to do something to you or for you because you’re not capable of doing it for yourself,” which I believe is one of the animating assumptions in most of philanthropy and I think it’s dead wrong.
Evan Feinberg
Yeah. Well, that takes us to your most recent book on collective illusions. But I want to start here. I’ve been working in this philanthropic sector now for a number of years. As I’ve met and seen so many of the efforts, now, none of them would think of themselves this way, but I would say almost all of the philanthropic efforts in America today have the fundamental assumption that people experiencing poverty are not capable of transforming their lives and escaping poverty. The best that we can do is make their poverty more comfortable, to address the symptoms. Now, nobody would say that that’s what they’re doing, but their efforts undermine any belief in people’s ability to escape their circumstances. It’s a lot of covering the symptoms and celebrating when individuals are more comfortable in their circumstances.
I think there may be a collective illusion here, so let’s talk about what a collective illusion is and then we can apply it to this space in social sector work and poverty. Then maybe that’ll lead us to some really exciting ideas for this space.
Todd Rose
Yeah. For sure. Let’s spend just a second here. A collective illusion is simply a social phenomenon where most people in a group end up going along with an idea that they don’t privately agree with, only because they incorrectly think that most other people in their group agree with it. As a result, entire groups end up doing things that almost nobody really wants. Now, what’s crazy about that is we’ve known about these collective illusions for about a hundred years. You would imagine, “How does a whole group end up caught up in something that almost nobody really believes?” It’s pretty surprising.
The first 80 years or so of this, they were pretty infrequent, but that’s in part because of the rise of social media, and we can talk about that. We’re just swimming in them now. I’m telling you, we have more private opinion data on the American public than probably any other organization. We look for these collective illusions, because they’re so damaging to society.
I’ll say, name anything that matters to you right now, and it’s a coin toss, whether you’re even right about what your group thinks. The reason this is a problem—and just to quickly say, illusions come from and also end up weaponizing the way our brains operate. I consider myself fiercely independent, but even I have a conformity bias. We all do. We would prefer to be with our groups, not against them.
In the book, I lay out, it’s crazy… All the way down to who you think is good looking, you’ll still bias to want to say the things that your group thinks. We just want to be with our groups. But it turns out our brains are really bad at estimating what the group consensus is, because it uses a shortcut. Your brain assumes the loudest voices, repeated the most, are the majority. Now, maybe that shortcut worked, it must have worked enough to… This is the way we do it.
But think about, real quick, on Twitter alone, 80% of all content is generated by 10% of the users. It turns out that 10% isn’t remotely representative of the American public, but you can see the problem. If 10% of people hold a belief, but you think it’s 80%, then unless you’re willing to stand up to your group, you end up saying nothing or you go along and that results in collective illusion. This is where we’re at now. We’re all sort of following things, doing what we think our groups want. It turns out we’re actually destroying the very groups that we care about.
Evan Feinberg
We could spend the rest of our time on the collective illusions that are driving so much of the behavior in our country right now and in our personal lives. I would love to do that and we’ve talked at length about this, personally, but I want to take us to the direction of talking about poverty in America. I think there is a collective illusion here, that most people know that what we’re doing is not making a difference. That, today there are more Americans than ever at, or near, the poverty line. It’s one in three Americans. Social mobility’s going the wrong direction in a country that… social mobility is the American dream. We just sort keep doing more of the same.
I think everybody knows that what we’re doing is not working and getting more and more frustrated. But I think nobody is saying that we can or should change the way that we’re doing it, because it sounds like you are criticizing government programs that are helping those that are in poverty, or you’re criticizing the well intentioned work of houses of worship or nonprofit organizations that they’re doing to serve their community. Everyone’s kind of hanging back and not critiquing the status quo that I think we all privately know is broken, because it’s not helping people thrive.
Todd Rose
That’s for sure. You look across almost every aspect of society where we are facing problems, the private opinions of the American public are that the status quo is unacceptable now. It just doesn’t work. It’s happening across multiple institutions, simultaneously. We’ve never had anything like this. But without exception, what we see is that the super majority of Americans across all demographics will say, “This doesn’t work,” including the way we deal with poverty. Our traditional welfare system does not work. Then you think, “So why aren’t we agitating to fundamentally transform those systems?” One of the barriers is that they are under these massive collective illusions, which is, “I know it doesn’t work, but I’m pretty sure most other people think it’s okay.”
Okay. If that’s true, if you’re under this illusion, one of the big problems is most of the social sector problems are collective problems. I can’t solve poverty by myself. We have to make a decision together. But if I think that most everybody else is okay with the status quo, it’s pointless to agitate. Nothing’s going to happen. I’ll dedicate my time somewhere else. We’re facing that kind of problem.
For me, as we already talked about in the opening, as someone who faced poverty myself, this is a particularly important one to me, because I think the biggest collective illusion around people facing poverty is that we have this public narrative that they are incapable of making choices in their own life. Not just getting comfortable with what I’d call frictionless inequality. We’re just going to make it comfortable enough for you in poverty. It’s just frictionless inequality. “You can actually not only get out of poverty, but you can go on to do great things. You’ve got a lot to contribute to society.”
Just look at the behavior of the public system. Of course, we don’t believe that in public. Of course, we don’t. These people need to be managed. Any chance I get to tell the story I always do. For me, this is where I get passionate about it is, when I was on welfare, it was pretty embarrassing, frankly. I didn’t want to be. My dad told me not to think it was a handout, but that it was tax money coming from our neighbors. That’s how you have to think about it. They’re making an investment in you and you have a responsibility to make that investment pay off. I was serious about that. Yet, the way you’re humiliated and treated in that system …
I remember we were buying groceries at a grocery store and you have your little card. My son, who was two and a half at the time, loved chunky peanut butter. Loved it. We get chunky peanut butter. I’m sitting there checking out. It’s a long line and scan the chunky peanut butter. The cashier says, “Sir, you can’t buy chunky peanut butter with food stamps.” It was so humiliating. Turns out the reason why is the company negotiated with the government chunky was their premium thing. It didn’t really cost more. They just didn’t want the brand dilution. I’m just like humiliated. I just was so angry. Because I’m like, “Listen, I am trying. You don’t even think I’m capable of deciding whether chunky or smooth peanut butter is okay.”
Okay, that’s the public narrative. Obviously, we don’t trust people to make choices for themselves or else there’s a whole different way we would think about people facing poverty. What do people think in private? Well, it turns out the overwhelming majority of Americans privately think people facing poverty are capable—but, here again, the collective illusion, they don’t believe anybody else is with them.
Here’s what’s really sad, that extends to people facing poverty themselves. When we ask them, “Let’s say instead of having food stamps, we did some cash transfer or whatever that allowed you to make some choices and gave you some strategies, whatever. Would you be able to make good decisions? Would you make better decisions?” 92% of them, of course. Of course. What about other people facing poverty? Oh, no, no, no, no. They can’t be trusted. We’re all under this illusion. I think that just keeps us stuck in a status quo system that nobody’s happy with, but we don’t move forward, because we think that we’re alone in our convictions.
Evan Feinberg
I’m mind blown. That is such a profound way to think about the challenges in transforming the social sector, is that we’ve got to shift this paradigm, first of all, away from thinking about individuals in poverty, thinking about them as an average. Instead, thinking about them as individual people who have unique needs, wants and desires and hopes and dreams and aspirations. That will change the way we serve those individuals. Then, when we think about those individuals, we have to burst the collective illusion that those individuals, when invested in, can not only overcome their circumstances, but be the next Todd Rose and transform the way our country thinks about problems. While you are a great person, it’s not just sort of a great man theory, that your story can be the story for so many individuals experiencing poverty. If we can change paradigms in those areas, we would really have a different country.
Todd Rose
Absolutely. To me, this is the next iteration in the American experiment. You think about the paradigm of government, what a crazy idea that we could govern ourselves. It had been tried once and we killed Socrates. That was a leap of faith that just is unbelievable. And we did it. Here we are.
The idea that economies didn’t have to be zero sum, that you could cooperate and trade and generate abundance, the likes of which humanity’s never seen before, here we are. There’s this next frontier about the way we think about each other, about what people are capable of and the kind of lives that they can live and the kind of contributions they can make. We still exist in a society that thinks that human flourishing is zero sum, weirdly. Somebody’s got to lose for you to succeed. It’s not true, and it’s holding us back. If we get back to these first principles around the dignity and worth of individuals, respecting their individuality, believing in their capabilities, we can get to a place of not just material abundance, but psychological abundance, that only a free society can deliver on.
Let’s get back to the paradigm thing because as you said earlier on, that’s part of my background, is I study paradigm change and how that happens. I’ll tell you, if you’re trying to drive a paradigm change that people don’t really want, it’s just really hard. Really hard. You might as well buckle in because this is going to be multi-generational. It’s like changing someone’s religion. You’re going to do it one person at a time.
Here’s the shortcut though: when the paradigm is sitting around a collective illusion where the private assumptions of the public have already changed, you can drive paradigm shifts in a hurry and in ways that will just look unimaginable without it. I think this is where we’re sitting, whether it’s that people know people’s individuality matters, people know that everybody’s capable of incredible contribution, and they know that they’re better off if everyone is enabled to be empowered to live their lives, make their best contribution. Shatter the illusions.
[Short Break]
Evan Feinberg
I think that’s a great framing for the rest of our conversation now, because I want to talk about some of the exciting measurement work that we’re doing at Stand Together Foundation, that you’ve consulted on, that I think can actually help us make real progress here. As you know, we now have, at Stand Together Foundation, what we believe to be the largest privately administered panel survey on how Americans are doing.
We have a nationally representative sample, in 20 different cities, we had about 30,000 individuals. We asked them over a hundred questions about how they’re doing, and about meaning and purpose and contribution. We’re learning all kinds of things about the differentiation, based on specific organizations that are, in your language, positive deviance in this space, groups that are having an exceptional impact where others are really struggling. We have all kinds of information about how individuals find more value from certain types of nonprofits or when they turn to different types of organizations or faith communities in times of need.
We have incredibly diverse, individualized data, because of this panel survey to understand things that matter more than what the IRS collects on income data. I want to get more into some of the data, but help us think about this broad problem. Why is it so important that we rethink measurement in the social sector with the paradigms that we’ve been talking about in mind?
Todd Rose
Well, there’s two reasons, under paradigm shift. Measurement isn’t innocuous, it plays two roles. It essentially helps determine the ultimate goals, because you’re measuring those things. Everyone starts to aim toward the thing you’re measuring, and then it actually serves as an incentive. I do run a 501(c)(3), and as much as I’d like to pretend that philanthropic interests don’t affect what you do, you try to stay true to your mission, but you have no resources to do anything. If basically everybody’s telling you, “Yeah. You go do your thing and then I’m going to measure X, Y, and Z.” Okay, well now whether that’s good or bad, that’s what we play by now. Everybody optimizes on the measurements.
It’s insanity, in the sense that we measure outcomes that people don’t really care about. We measure outputs that have no real theory of change into why those things would actually ladder up to the outcomes that we still don’t want. Everyone’s chasing their tail this way. Then we hold up things that, on average, seem to have some effect with no regard for the contextualized nature of those findings, the distinctiveness of different communities and individuals, and then strong arm other folks into spending their precious time and resources trying to replicate something that was never going to be replicated, rather than thinking about from a bottom up perspective. Because by the way, when you accept the science of individuality and you accept the idea that everyone has something to contribute and they are capable of making choices in their own life, there’s no such thing as a top down solution, they don’t work. You’re just stuck with, you’ve got to figure out how to make bottom up work. That’s the good news. It feels scary, because we spent as a hundred years of society being taught that only top down works.
Evan Feinberg
Yeah. There’s a mini collective illusion, maybe not mini, a major collective illusion, but I’ll give you some examples of the nonprofits we support. After reading your book and talking about these things for a number of years now, I started asking questions to nonprofit leaders. You publish your relapse rates on addiction recovery or recidivism rates coming back from prison, whether people go back to prison. I asked the nonprofit leaders, “Do you manage your organization to these metrics that you’re reporting?” Nope, not at all. “It’s what we have to do to get funding. We have to tell addiction funders about our relapse rates, that’s what they care about. Yes, we do really well on those measures, but we used a study from multiple years ago that gave us one data point, and we’ve been just trading on that data point. It doesn’t matter at all to our work.”
Then you go to some funders and you say, “Would you be excited about an organization that didn’t use relapse rates, they told you about the wellbeing of the individuals they’re working with, their transformation. They were able to show you that that individual believes they’re getting superior service and help from the organization compared to anyone else that they’ve worked with.” They’re like, “Oh, yeah. I would love all that information. That sounds way more interesting than just whether they relapsed. I might care about the relapse rate, it’d be interesting, but it’s not what I really care about.” The whole sector is spending billions of dollars on high stakes studies to deliver on a metric that everyone’s saying, “Okay. I guess if that’s the only thing that I can look at.”
Todd Rose
This is where we’re at. Under paradigm shifts especially, where you’ve got collective illusions, people’s private values and aspirations have already changed. But think about it: there was a time when I thought maybe chasing wealth and fame and all that, maybe that is success. No, that’s not really what I want. I want to be a husband, a father. I want to make a contribution. That’s a private shift. I know I’ve made that shift, but how would I know that other people have made that same shift? It’s very hard to tell. Here we are, we’re all playing the same game in the nonprofit space. In part, look here, here’s the challenge, measurement does not and should not lead. Measurement is a tool to convert our values into outcomes at best. Under transformation, the values shift. Then you’ve got to realize we now need to move the measurement. The measurement needs to reflect those values and those aspirations.
The worst thing you could possibly do is to continue with measurements that are related to the old paradigm, thinking that they don’t do any harm. They do massive harm. In fact, this will sound a little extreme, but I would argue under transformation, you’re better off to have no measurement than you are to apply the old measurements, because they will bring you back to the old goal. Incentive structures are so powerful.
Look, what’s called for here, these two things. The first is you shatter collective illusions by creating circumstances for people to reveal their shared values. It’s actually not rocket science. We’ve known throughout history how you do this. You don’t persuade, you reveal, Okay. Great. We can do that. We can do that on all these issues including people facing poverty. But then you’ve got to show them a better way forward. You have to. This is where, I do believe, being willing to invest the time and energy in transformative measurement is going to be so critical, because until we get there… That’s how this scales. Most philanthropic organizations, even if they believe in it, aren’t willing to put their money where their mouth is.
Evan Feinberg
I told you a stat this morning that when I told it to you, you literally spit your coffee back out into your cup as you heard the stat. I want to share it now. We can brainstorm a little bit about how we can really apply these ideas we’ve been talking about.
We did a deep dive in the state of Michigan on nonprofits there. We asked a bunch of questions to attribute transformation and whatnot. But we used a pretty simple and pretty common customer service metric. Really, nonprofits are just human service organizations. They’re essentially customer service organizations.
It’s a pretty simple customer service metric. It’s called net promoter score. A lot of folks may have heard of it. You ask, on a scale of zero to 10, “How likely would you be to recommend this organization?” We ask it, “How likely would you be to recommend this organization to a friend experiencing similar circumstances?” The average nonprofit scores—raw score, not net, for those listeners that know what net promoter score is, how it’s calculated—but the raw score is a two out of 10.
One of the organizations that we work with, an incredible organization in Detroit, it’s called Downtown Boxing Gym. They score a 9.5 out of 10. 9.5 versus two. Their net promoter score is essentially one hundred. They have 98% promoters. We’re seeing this huge discrepancy happening in the social sector. I want to make one more point on this, because Downtown Boxing Gym, the group that I mentioned, they’re focused on after school education. It’s a boxing gym and an after school education program. It’s so much more than that. It’s deep and meaningful relationships and helping young men and women and young kids to discover themselves and their hopes and dreams and aspirations with role models. It’s just an incredible experience.
If you were to take the prevailing top down approaches to education in this country—and education is an area of passion and expertise for you, so we can talk a little bit more about that if you’re interested. If you were take the prevailing top down approaches, they look at third grade literacy rates. Third grade literacy rates are pretty predictive of a lot of things. If you look at the average third grade literacy rate, it leads to a higher average graduation rate. A higher average graduation rate leads to higher average job outcomes and so on and so forth. You get this proliferation, millions of dollars to teach kids to read. Never mind you that almost none of those groups are successful at teaching kids to read. Very few, if any of these have any evidence that they actually teach kids to read.
But importantly, even if there were those, what we know is that they’re just trying to move the proxy, the indicator. The reason why third grade literacy rates are predictive of those other things is because when a kid is on track in school and in his life in third grade that he’s reading, it’s because of all kinds of other things.
Todd Rose
There’s all kinds other things going on. Yeah.
Evan Feinberg
I think this gets at your point, that if you take the difference between Downtown Boxing Gym and the average sort of YMCA, United Way literacy program out there, it’s night and day in what the customer would say they need for their life. I think that’s a pretty powerful place to start if we’re going to transform measurement.
Todd Rose
Absolutely. Just to be wonky here for a bit, when you get over your skis on the one indicator… First of all, we want all kids to read. Let’s just be clear.
Evan Feinberg
Absolutely. Of course. Of course.
Todd Rose
But here’s what’s funny, all those things about the future is that third grade literacy is correlated. Differences in third grade literacy are correlated with differences in outcomes down the road. Just thinking about this though: if everyone read it the same exact level the correlation goes away. So it’s no longer related to the… It’s not about the literacy itself, it’s about, as you said, that’s part of a package of things that are going on in the kids’ life for which getting to literacy is one of the outcomes that’s the result of that. I think you’re a hundred percent correct that this is where we start, which is…
There’s an approach that I wrote about in Collective Illusions that’s, I think, the best way to think about social sector change, which is positive deviance, which again has these assumptions behind it, which is about individuals and their capabilities and communities and their capabilities. The underlying assumption is that the solution to the problem actually does reside in the community facing that problem, whether they realize it or not. You go there and you try to understand, you look for these bright spots of people under the exact same circumstances. How are you getting this net promoter score? How are you actually doing this? Then right now we’d say, “Okay. Well, let’s replicate that.” No, no, no, no, no. What I want to know is why are you so effective? Let’s understand what is it that’s going on?
One of my colleagues in the science of individuality, Yuichi Shoda, at the University of Washington, he talks about what’s called active ingredients. In anything that works, there’s a bunch of inactive ingredients and then there’s a handful of active things.
Evan Feinberg
I love that.
Todd Rose
Trying to figure those out is not easy sometimes. It can turn out they’re very non obvious. Very non obvious. It can turn out that this is driving a relational thing that is the active ingredient. We don’t know. Let’s find that out, because what’s critical there is… Whereas whole programs do not transplant, it just does not work that way because things are too contextualized, they’re too relational. Those active ingredients do. The power of say filling meaning in your life, the power of having someone who believes in you, all these things, those things travel really well. Those are just human needs. Figuring out the combination of active ingredients and then learning how to take those ingredients and make them contextually relevant in another place, that’s the game now.
Evan Feinberg
Yeah. I want to take this metaphor of cooking and inactive and active ingredients a little bit further, because the proof then is in the pudding, so to speak. The proof is in the taste test of whether or not the food tastes as good as it did when the master chef made it, and you’re trying to replicate what they’re doing.
I’m often very negative about replication in the nonprofit space, because most folks that are trying to replicate are trying to, as I mentioned before, take that sort of clinical treatment of a pharmaceutical and say, “We’ve got the compound now we just deliver that compound.” None of it works because they haven’t really understood the mix of active and inactive ingredients. They have to essentially recreate it. You used a word with me one time where you said you often have to reanimate that thing. I think it’s a great mental model.
I’ll give you a couple of examples. One of our partners is a group called Cafe Momentum in Dallas. I swear, it has nothing to do with the fact that they are a restaurant that I brought up this example. Cafe Momentum is a restaurant staffed almost entirely by kids coming out of the juvenile detention center in Dallas, Texas. They run the third ranked restaurant, by one measure, in all of Dallas. I’ve been there dozens of times. It is a phenomenal restaurant, a great experience, and super inspiring. The program itself is a 12 month internship. It has all kinds of wraparound services, mental health and education, and all kinds of mentorship type opportunities for these young men and women. You could look at that and you could say, “Well, what we need to do is build a bunch of 12 month internships with this mix of wraparound services and maybe with a social enterprise.”
You could replicate the program of Cafe Momentum, but if you ask Chad and you ask, more importantly, those young men and women, they’ll tell you the active ingredients of Cafe Momentum are, “I feel loved and supported. It’s a familial environment. I’m proud of the restaurant that we run, that people come in here and they have a great experience. Those things have given me a commitment to wanting to live a life of meaning and purpose, whether or not it’s in the restaurant industry.” I worked restaurant jobs when I was young.
Todd Rose
Me too.
Evan Feinberg
My career wasn’t in restaurants, but it gave me meaning and purpose and a belief in myself and social skills that I use to this day. I think that this is an example of what you’re describing of active and inactive ingredients. To “replicate” Cafe Momentum you don’t need all the services they provide.
Todd Rose
Here’s what’s great about that is, okay, because first of all, I love Cafe Momentum. What an amazing thing. Okay. If you don’t understand what we’re talking about and you get excited about it and think, “Well, we’ve got to replicate this.” Okay, fine. What are you replicating? What you look at is the superficial things. Is it the restaurant aspect of it? No, it’s not. This is the good news about that: is that the things that are actually driving the outcomes… it doesn’t have to be a restaurant. You can now think really creatively about how you drive the active ingredients in any number of contexts.
My friend Diane Tavenner, who founded Summit Schools, which was pretty innovative, personalized learning stuff, she used to tell me people would come from all around the world to spend a day there, because they want to see the outcomes, they want these differences. They would look and they would say, “Okay.” They’d even sketch out, “Oh, look how they arrange the desks.” She said, “None of this matters.” She’s like, “It’s a paradigm shift. There’s a different assumption about kids and their capabilities and our responsibility.” That’s the active ingredient. And they don’t want to get there. They just don’t want to give up their mental model and so they think the secret is in the fact that desks are structured a certain way. None of that matters.
Evan Feinberg
Yeah. I think we’re really onto something here. When we talk about active and inactive ingredients, and I made the analogy to the proof is in the pudding and you need to taste it, this is where I think the measurement being customer-first really makes a difference. Because the only way you would know whether you have recreated that magic is whether the customer would say that, “Oh, my goodness. This is the most transformative organization. I would recommend this to others.” One of the questions that we use, that I’d love you to respond to, is we just asked a simple question. “On a scale of zero to 10, I feel empowered to overcome barriers in my life.” What a powerful question, right?
Todd Rose
Think about it. Even if you look at the study of happiness or something like this, what drives me nuts is when you look at all the world happiness stuff, the thing they never actually ask people is, are you happy? Seriously. “We know the five things that go into happiness, we’re not even going to bother to trust you to tell me whether you’re happy, because I don’t believe you. I don’t think you know.”
How crazy is that? Recognizing that as we’ve shifted into this new paradigm, and if you’re listening and thinking, “Look, I believe these assumptions,” we have to overcome some old habits. The first thing is you have to trust people that they can, at a bare minimum, tell you honestly how they’re feeling, That they have some sense for… Same way we ask you, how are you feeling about your life? Okay, you said a seven, but are you sure? Because looking at it from my perspective, it’s a four. No, they know. The idea that they’re going to lie to you about feeling empowered, is just silly.
The idea is having a north star that takes people seriously to understand their lives, their aspirations and how they’re doing and then measures of things that we know drive that like empowerment and getting good at saying, “This is the stuff we want to hold nonprofits accountable for. How they do that, that’s up to them. Letting that vary and letting people innovate there, so we discover new active ingredients and can recombine them in really cool ways.” But at the end of the day, we can’t lose sight of what it is we’re doing this for.
Evan Feinberg
Well, we are in the middle of an incredible conversation with a true thought leader in Dr. Todd Rose. We are going to keep going deeper into this conversation, but now let’s take a quick break.
[Short Break]
Evan Feinberg
Todd, if we are successful in shaping the paradigms of nonprofit organizations, of philanthropists and funders, maybe even government bureaucrats and policy makers, if everyone were to rethink our approach to helping individuals overcome social barriers and realize their full potential through this customer first, individualized lens, and measurement approaches that capture that individual meaning and purpose and flourishing and empowerment, what would it mean? What would it mean for philanthropy, for the social sector? What would be different?
Todd Rose
First of all, let’s think about what it means for society, because this is where the win is. We have put an artificial lid on what free societies can do and where we can go, where everybody is actually living fulfilled lives, they’re making their best contribution and that is actually creating positive outcomes. That is right in front of us. That is completely possible. It seems like a fairytale. It’s not it. It’s right there.
Evan Feinberg
It’s great.
Todd Rose
I believe that it is philanthropy that will drive that change. It’s going to have implications for the rest of our institutions, but right now, philanthropy deals with the folks for whom the existing system has been suboptimal, at best, and has been a net negative at worst to them. When we bring this new paradigm in, what better place to bring it, because there’s just massive upside. We are not getting nearly what these folks can contribute. I mean, that’s the upside.
Now, think about what happens as a secondary effect there. I’m facing poverty, for example. I feel like society’s unfair. I don’t trust people. These are all natural things. By the way, if you’re facing poverty or if you’re in a needs deficit, it triggers, by necessity, zero sum thinking. Of course. Somebody’s got to lose and it’s me right now. We actually help to shift people’s mindsets into more cooperation, contribution. I would predict you’ll get a rise in social trust. These kind of things and increase in perceived fairness. Then it becomes a virtuous cycle. Right now it’s just a downward spiral.
To me, this is really important. This isn’t Pollyannaish, this is right in front of us. It’s practical. This is the kind of thing that really can change. Yes, it’s going to be hard. Paradigm shifts are hard. But once you realize that the status quo isn’t neutral, it is doing great damage to individuals, communities, and the country. Once you realize that, then it makes it a lot easier. We’ve got to go. I honestly believe that in another 50 years, historians will write back on this moment, just like self-governance, just like free trade, this moment where we realized that our assumptions about human potential and human nature were just flat wrong.
Evan Feinberg
Yeah. I love that. I think about the size and scope of the social economy of people helping people, neighbors helping neighbors, faith communities that are serving their broader community, and certainly the 1.7 million human service nonprofits that are out there in the country today. I think, wow, there’s so many people that are leveraging what we talked about in a previous episode, their service motive. The mutual benefit of being a human being that serves and supports each other is this powerful motivating force. The problem today is that that service motive is allocated poorly, that it’s paternalistic, it believes that we know what’s best for other individuals, focused only on good intentions, often.
Todd Rose
It’s like the equivalent of, we’ve taken all these amazing people with different ideas, how to help different people and we’ve… It’s the social equivalent of, “No, no, no, no. You’ve just got to get everyone to eat grapefruit. Whoever can figure out how to get people to eat grapefruit the best, we’re going to give them more money.” I’m like, “I don’t really think grapefruit matters.” It’s like, “It doesn’t matter. You’re going to do this.”
I think what’s going to be fascinating, because I hear a lot of complaints sometimes, “There’s too many nonprofits, too many this.” That’s only true in some ways because we’re playing this game of averages, where scale means, “Can we literally drop the thing you are doing in every single city the exact same way, and it’s going to work for everyone magically?” And it doesn’t. It looks pretty ineffective. It’s like, “Well, do we need all these people?”
But what you’re going to see is what you’ll see in other places where we’ve gone to this individual approach, which is, yeah, they’re all going to be needed because the truth is they’re going to serve, they’re going to figure out really quickly what their active ingredients are. Those active ingredients will not be as effective for every human being on the planet. You also start getting good about understanding the customers you’re serving and that’s it’s okay. Since there will be no scale through average, what you really want to be funding are organizations that know really, really well what their active ingredients are, and for whom that actually works.
Evan Feinberg
I think that’s a brilliant idea and a brilliant way to understand that, the common way of thinking about those 1.7 million nonprofits is, “Oh, they must all be duplicative. There’s too many. There’s five organizations all serving the same purpose.” But if we thought about it in this way, we’d say, “Actually, those five organizations might have five very different active ingredients. Those active ingredients might be really great for different people in that community. Maybe one of the five isn’t effective and should go away, but maybe the other four then get much more disciplined about who they can serve best, in what ways, and discover new and better ways of serving.”
Todd Rose
It’s essentially the long tail of social service.
Evan Feinberg
Yeah, exactly.
Todd Rose
We don’t have to play this game of averages anymore. I think that’s going to unlock the creativity and innovation of the social sector. I will say, one of the things I think we just have to be mindful of is, under paradigm shifts like this. Look, there’s a lot of work to do. It’s sort of easy to think that what we do is just pass the buck to the actual folks doing the hard work on the ground. I don’t think that’s right. I think that, for this to really succeed and succeed in a hurry, the burden needs to be placed on the philanthropic organizations themselves, the people leading the change, because it’s a big undertaking. Folks stand together. They say, “Look, we believe in this.” Okay? “I know for a fact that you’re putting your money where your mouth is.” We need more of that because in the end, what we want to do is make life easier for the folks doing the hard work on the ground, not harder. That’s the promise here. That’s why I’m so excited about the work you’re doing.
Evan Feinberg
Well, we often talk about, at Stand Together Foundation, that we should act as an investor in nonprofit social entrepreneurs that are discovering new and better ways to meet the unique needs, wants, and desires and hopes and aspirations of the people that they serve. If we align those incentives, that we are an investor in what works best for their customers, then it is a huge win-win all around. Today, without the measures to understand whether they’re creating value for the people they serve, it’s very hard to be that investor. We are pioneering these measurement approaches that our nonprofit partners say, “Oh my goodness. That would be amazing to run my business around the degree of transformation I deliver and how much empowerment I deliver, and meaning and purpose metrics that I can deliver.” They love that idea. And we would be thrilled to invest based on how much more of those metrics they can deliver. It really aligns incentives in a exciting way.
Todd Rose
It becomes win-win in a way that just philanthropy is not right now. I will say, what I’m excited about as a scientist in this space, I’m going to tell you, let me predict what I think is going to be the frontier here which will make this so much more effective. It turns out, in the science of individuality, it’s not just that people are distinct, but we have a thing called the pathways principle, which is: for any outcome, there are always multiple paths to the exact same outcome. But in our standardized world, we think there’s one path, one way to get somewhere. Why this matters is, we know, in every other sector that’s applied this science, we find these different pathways. Let me give you an example and then apply it to the future of the social sector work.
In treating depression, when you average someone’s response curve to, say, cognitive therapy, on average, there’s a curve that looks like, over sessions you take, about a dozen sessions, you get this, nothing happens, nothing happens and then it starts to drop pretty quick after about three sessions. Then it levels off and it kind of increases. Okay. That’s on average. That’s true. Insurance companies say, “Okay. Well look, we’ll pay for your therapy. But if you’re not showing that kind of response pattern, then therapy isn’t working and we’re not going to pay for it.” Okay.
Then you apply this individual level stuff. Turns out there are three stable pathways to complete remediation. The average one only covered 20% of people.
Evan Feinberg
Wow.
Todd Rose
What was happening is these curves looked different and so we were actually stopping therapy, that was actually working, because it didn’t conform to the average. Think about transforming people’s lives, empowering them. If we’re not careful, if we apply the average based thinking, we’re going to say, “Okay, well there’s one way to know. Oh, you didn’t make progress.” It’s like, “No. We’re going to model this. We’re going to find those curves. You’re going to realize that there are an incredible number of nonprofits doing amazing work that we stopped funding because they didn’t conform to the one right path.” And a lot of people’s lives are harmed as a result. I think that’s the frontier, and it’s going to be so cool.
Evan Feinberg
I think that is so exciting and exactly the way we’re thinking about it at Stand Together Foundation. I hope it’s really thought provoking for our listeners. Next week we’re going to get to continue to go deeper into this conversation. I mentioned that organization in Detroit, Downtown Boxing Gym, that isn’t just a boxing gym, it’s this incredible experience that has so many of the active ingredients that we were talking about. It’s an organization that both understands its active ingredients and is measuring to make sure that, as they deliver it, they continue to get those phenomenal results with the people that they serve. It’s going to be an exciting conversation with my good friend, Khali Sweeney. I can’t wait for our listeners to get to continue down this topic that we’re on.
Todd, I am just blown away by your thought leadership, your passion, your commitment. I can tell it’s just so much more than a study for you, it’s your life’s work and your life’s passion. It’s inspirational to me. I hope it’s inspirational to our listeners. I just can’t thank you enough for joining me today.
Todd Rose
Thanks for having me.
—
Host for this Episode: Evan Feinberg
Guest: Todd Rose, President of Populace. Former professor and director of the Laboratory for the Science of Individuality at Harvard. Author of Collective Illusions, The End of Average, and Dark Horse.
Produced by Stand Together and BitterSweet Creative
Executive Producers: Obiekwe “Obi” Okolo and Robert Winship
Editing, Engineering, and Sound Design: Robert Winship
Special Thanks to Producers: Molly Ringel and Elgin Cato
