Strings Being Pulled and Other Challenges

My previous posts have talked about how different demographics seem to experience fairness and collaboration differently in their social-impact networks. According to my survey, network stakeholders in general do experience their networks as fair and collaborative spaces, but a few areas for improvement have emerged.

In my survey, I asked respondents to rate their level of agreement with various statements that have to do with whether processes for making decisions and allocating resources are fair. The tool I used for this is the Process Quality Scale, which has 15 such statements and a validated scoring method. Feel free to reach out for more information about my methods and interpretation, bu for the sake of this blog, I'll cut to the chase. One last word before I do: don't forget that most respondents actually do experience their networks as fair (at least as measured by the PQS), so what's written below is in the interest of continuous improvement, and not meant as an indictment.

Strings Pulled from the Outside and Decisions Made in Advance

About 35% of the 85 respondents had some level of agreement with the statement that "often decisions are made in advance and simply confirmed by the process."  Meanwhile, about 30% had some level of agreement that "strings are being pulled from the outside, which influence important decisions."

A large minority of respondents felt strings are often pulled from the outside.

Some People's Merits Are Taken for Granted

When presented with the statement that "some people’s “merits” are taken for granted while other people are asked to justify themselves," roughly 30% of respondents had some level of agreement, though only 10% stated they fully agreed.

The idea that some people's merits are taken for granted while others have to justify themselves reminded me of George Orwell's Animal Farm, where the animals overthrew their human overlords, only to have new inequalities emerge.

Gender Differences

As I mentioned in my posts with more detailed survey results on fairness, men tend to feel more strongly than women do that processes are fair in their networks. However, it's not clear that this difference strongly impacts on personal decisions to collaborate actively in a network. For example, 90% of the 41 women who responded to a question about whether they actively participate in their network said that they did. Only 78% of the 28 men who responded that question said the same.  More on this in future posts.

What to Do about It?

I recently had the opportunity to connect in-person with leaders and advisers for five different networks. We sat down together for a bit over an hour to talk about how to interpret these results and what might be done to improve things. Stay tuned for another blog post on this topic mid-week! 

Who feels the collaboration?

In my last post, I shared the subset of survey results concerning fairness in collaborative networks. In this post, I share some preliminary findings regarding collaboration: whether stakeholders feel its happening, whether they think it improves outcomes, whether they feel the network shares a common goal, and whether they themselves feel they participate in the network.

More good news

As with perceptions of fairness, the overwhelming majority of respondents to the survey feel their networks are collaborative spaces, that the collaboration makes them more effective, and that everyone is working toward a shared goal. The statements presented to respondents were adapted from ones administered to the RE-AMP Network by Peter Plastrik and Chinwe Onyeagoro as part of an outside evaluation a few years back. Because I wanted to be able to tie people's self-assessed level of participation to other aspects of the survey, I added a question asking people if they actively participate. Most respondents do see themselves as active participants in the network. 

The bar chart below shows the percent of respondents from each demographic that said they "strongly agree" with the statement about collaboration, later I'll show you a broader spectrum of data. 

Percent of respondents who strongly agree with statements about collaboration in their network.
*While we generally want a sample size of at least 30 for statistical significance, only 28 men responded to the bottom three statements, and only 27 responded to the top statement. The sample size for those in a racial minority is 12, and for men who are a gender minority, the sample size is 10.

As you can see (or maybe you can't if you are looking at this on a mobile device), about a third of all respondents strongly agree that the network collaboration helps them be more effective. Slightly more than that strongly agree that they have a shared purpose. More still strongly agree that they have a highly collaborative experience in the network, though some interesting differences between demographics appear.

A gender distinction

As with perceptions of fairness, the subgroups of respondents that seem to be the most different are men and women. I don't want to make too much of this, since we can see that both groups seem to view their networks as collaborative places, but the subtle difference is quite interesting. Take, for example, the statement about the network being a highly collaborative place. 

In the bar chart below, we see that nearly 60% of men strongly agree with the statement, compared to just under 40% of women. However, 100% of women at least agree more than disagree with the statement, whereas only about 85% of men have some level of agreement. Although this particular question is the one where this pattern shows up most strongly, it holds for all the responses: men are more likely than women to either strongly agree or to disagree with the statement.

This is where the small sample size really becomes a challenge. When we are talking about only 28 men altogether, then it's hard to say if this is just a data blip, or if it is pointing us toward something useful. In the coming weeks I will be hosting some group conversations with network practitioners to try to understand if it's productive to dig into these differences. I will also be looking at the open-ended responses from the survey for clues to the direction members want their networks to take. Do feel free to reach out to me with your own interpretation as well.