Going Nowhere, Fast: Why Objectivity and Efficiency are Not Enough
We live in a world that values optimization. We prioritize efficiency because it lets us do more with less, and we rely on objectivity to tell us whether we’re succeeding at whatever that might be. But neither of these things can tell us what it should be. On their own, objectivity and efficiency can miss what matters most—something many of our clients in the social sector have experienced firsthand.
The impulse toward “efficiency above all” has been permeating society for quite some time now, but it has reached new heights in business, politics, and even the social sector. In such a world, the supposed objectivity of things like “big data” and efficiency of “startup methodologies” have become so ubiquitous they are the assumed answer to virtually every social problem. They are not.
The goal of this article is not to minimize the importance of either objectivity or efficiency as tools for achieving social good, but rather to address a critical flaw in treating them as ends unto themselves. While it can be incredibly appealing to approach complex societal problems with an orientation toward these things, doing so can leave little room for the messy, subjective work of defining what society should look like. We can value efficiency too much, rely on objective measures too heavily, and turn the means of social good into the ends themselves, leading us down undesirable, and even dangerous, roads.
My goal, above everything else, is to articulate why the work of nonprofits, educators, and social innovators is increasingly under threat, and why protecting that work is more important than we may realize.
The Rational Fallacy
It may seem strange to question objectivity or criticize the pursuit of efficiency. Both have produced immeasurable good in the world. I believe this is in large part because societies have historically engaged in the difficult and messy work of defining what “good in the world” might look like, and then used objectivity and efficiency as means of achieving it. Therefore, it's important to recognize when we might be treating objectivity and efficiency as ends unto themselves, asking them to do hard, human work of “meaning-making” that they were never equipped to do. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in how we address social challenges.
“The most stalwart defender of efficiency is still guided by subjective preferences, priorities, and perspectives.”
Part of the broad appeal of objectivity and efficiency is that they promise control and predictability in a world that often feels chaotic, even broken at times. They give the illusion that complex social problems can be treated like engineering problems—divided into component parts and solved through optimization, sterile data, and centralized decision-making. The idea that everything can be quantified and optimized is seductive, especially for policymakers and funders who engage social problems and want to see immediate, measurable results. In truth, performance metrics and ROI are crucial factors to consider, as long as we know what we’re optimizing for and, more importantly, why.
The rational fallacy I hope to illuminate is this: that the appearance of objectivity often obscures more than it illuminates. The most stalwart defender of efficiency is still guided by subjective preferences, priorities, and perspectives in ways that even they may not realize—it is, in fact, a subjective notion that all the elements of a “great society” are things that can be measured quantitatively. Therefore the trouble with veiling subjective assumptions behind objective metrics is that doing so removes the public’s opportunity to agree or disagree with the direction those metrics lead us, or to engage confidently in important activities that fall outside an efficiency logic.
The Rational Needs the Relational
Social good is fundamentally relational, context-dependent, and messy—qualities that don’t lend themselves very well to centralized, efficiency-based decision-making. There is no single, objective rationality that can define objectively what would be “good” for society. The messy, inefficient work of participating in society is inherently subjective—how we define our values and attempt to coexist with those who see things differently shapes our culture, and our culture, in turn, shapes us.
“For our clients and partners in the social sector, the tension between objective efficiency and subjective social good is felt every time they’re asked to calculate the ROI of a person no longer sleeping in the cold or the economic impact of community solidarity. It’s not that such returns don’t exist, it’s that they fail to capture virtually any of what actually makes such work important.”
The proper role of objective metrics in all of this is to measure our progress toward the goals we have defined. Efficiency may be a worthy metric that moves us toward a desirable goal, but that can by no means be assumed outright. For our clients and partners in the social sector, the tension between objective efficiency and subjective social good is felt every time they’re asked to calculate the ROI of a person no longer sleeping in the cold or the economic impact of community solidarity. It’s not that such returns don’t exist, it’s that they fail to capture virtually any of what actually makes such work important. Because of this, the organizations we work with often find themselves dividing their efforts between “doing the work” and “justifying the work.”
4 Ways The Efficiency Model Fails Nonprofits and Social Impact Work
1. Efficiency ≠ Effectiveness in Social Change
An approach that focuses primarily on efficiency may work in fields where all important variables are predictable and measurable, such as optimizing the design of a machine, but such an approach often fails in human systems. This is because social systems are deeply steeped in meaning, and meaning is inherently subjective.
What’s more, social impact is nonlinear—the most transformative changes aren’t easily measured in quarterly reports. For example, civil rights struggles, grassroots organizing, and cultural shifts unfold over timelines that often elude an efficiency-based orientation, and their complexity makes them nearly impossible to predict with precision.
2. The Myth of the All-Knowing Technocrat
Objectivity-oriented and efficiency-oriented approaches often rest on the assumption that a small group of experts can analyze data, model scenarios, and ultimately optimize complex systems from the top down. This technocratic mindset ignores the lived experiences and contextual intelligence of frontline workers and community members, whose knowledge is essential for adaptive, sustainable change.
In the social sector, effective solutions rarely emerge from isolated executive decisions—they are built through relationships, local insight, and ongoing learning. This is why distributed decision-making and community-led approaches are not only more democratic but more effective. For instance, models like participatory grantmaking frequently outperform traditional, top-down philanthropy because they empower those closest to the problems to guide the solutions.
3. The Dangers of Dehumanizing Metrics
When efficiency becomes an end in itself, it tends to reduce people to numbers, stripping away the nuance, dignity, and complexity that socially-minded organizations exist to uphold. Philanthropy’s fixation on cost-per-impact calculations often distorts incentives, prioritizing measurable outputs—like meals served or test scores improved—over more transformative and less quantifiable forms of change. The aspects of life most valued by beneficiaries, such as cultural identity, personal agency, and community connection, often fall outside the frame of standard metrics. Worse, these deeper values can be actively undermined by programs that optimize for numbers rather than meaning. Some well-intentioned international aid efforts have, for example, disregarded traditional ways of life, undermining local communities rather than empowering them.
4. Mission Drift: When Nonprofits Become Corporate Clones
In pursuit of funding, many nonprofits have gradually absorbed the language and logic of corporate efficiency, resulting in mission drift. Rather than challenging systemic injustices, they become service vendors chasing grants, reshaping their goals and structures to appeal to funder expectations. This shift often sidelines advocacy and grassroots organizing—work that is inherently messier, slower, and harder to quantify but frequently more impactful in the long run. As a result, the sector risks losing its transformative edge, trading bold change for safe deliverables. Advocacy organizations, in particular, face funding challenges precisely because their outcomes are harder to measure. Yet without them, the broader push for justice and equity falters.
A Challenge and an Opportunity
The organizations we work with are especially interesting in part because they embrace what sociologists call “institutional complexity”—the idea that some organizations have to respond to multiple, often conflicting, “logics”, such as a market logic and a social good logic. While this can present real challenges, it can also produce unique innovations, as has been the case with Social Impact Bonds, public/private partnerships, and impact investment. In these cases, tools, resources, and frameworks from each sector are brought together to enhance and constrain each other. Importantly, these only work if market efficiency is balanced with non-market values like community trust, advocacy, and human dignity. Because these factors are so difficult to capture quantitatively, practitioners and advocates of the social sector bear the burden of articulating the value of things that can’t necessarily be included in an ROI model. And it is the responsibility of society to listen when they do so.
What to Do
From a purely rational perspective, it’s hard to see the value of “social enterprises” at all. They can’t necessarily justify themselves on rational, economic terms because they were never meant to. The idea that they would have to at all is a relatively recent idea, the result of society’s drift away from meaning-making toward rational optimization—we appear to be losing our ability to engage in subjectivity, and maybe even to recognize its value.
To some extent, just being aware of these issues can help—we can question whether numbers tell the whole story, and we can face messy, subjective challenges with curiosity rather than retreating into false certainty of objective metrics. More specifically, philanthropists can prioritize long-term impacts over quarterly reports. Socially-minded organizations can and should involve beneficiaries and other stakeholders in decision-making, and must develop a tolerance for non-quantifiable factors like culture and meaning. We can all seek to better understand context and to think critically about the subjective preferences that hide behind objective metrics, because they are always there, whether articulated or not. And we should reacquaint ourselves with the messy but crucial push-and-pull of discussing subjective perspectives openly in society so that we know what our objectivity and efficiency should be optimizing for. If efficiency alone solved social problems, we would have eradicated poverty, inequality, and systemic injustice a long time ago. The real work is harder—and worth defending.
