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!