The Outcome Brief — No. 001 | August 2026
Leadership has afforded me the opportunity to see organizational performance differently.
Not because leadership provides all the answers. If anything, greater responsibility has taught me the importance of asking better questions.
Working across program portfolios means seeing how high-level organizational goals move from strategy into operations: through leaders who establish direction and create the conditions for the work; teams who translate that direction into daily practice; colleagues in data, research, and evaluation who help us understand the evidence; and, most importantly, the people our programs exist to support.
I’ve come to appreciate that none of these perspectives is sufficient on its own.
And that has changed one of the questions I ask about performance.
It is no longer simply:
Did we hit the target?
Increasingly, I find myself asking:
What were we trying to accomplish—and what tells us that we accomplished it?
When Performance Becomes the Outcome
Organizations need performance indicators.
We need to know whether programs are operating as intended, resources are being stewarded responsibly, commitments are being fulfilled, and people are receiving the services and supports we said we would provide.
The problem isn’t measurement.
The problem emerges when the measure quietly becomes the mission.
A dashboard can tell us that a target was achieved. It may tell us how many people were served, whether an activity occurred, whether a milestone was reached, or how performance changed over time.
Those things matter.
But imagine an organizational dashboard where every indicator is green.
Targets met. Activities completed. Reports submitted. Services delivered.
The natural conclusion is: we succeeded.
Perhaps we did.
But there is another question worth asking:
What changed because we did those things?
That question moves us from measuring activity toward understanding outcomes.
From Organizational Goals to Human Outcomes
One of the leadership lessons I continue to learn is that organizational goals must travel through multiple layers before they become meaningful.
A strategic priority informs a portfolio. A portfolio informs programs. Programs establish goals. Teams undertake activities. Activities produce outputs. Performance indicators help us understand what happened.
But somewhere along that chain must remain the outcome we originally hoped to achieve.
In human services, that distinction becomes especially important because the people represented by our data are not abstractions.
They are people.
Housing First for Youth offers a useful example. Housing stability matters enormously, but the model recognizes that housing alone does not capture the entirety of the work. Housing is paired with appropriate supports and a youth-centred approach that considers choice, development, well-being, community integration, and opportunities for young people to move toward the lives they want.
A number can therefore tell us something important without telling us everything important.
Who Gets to Tell Us Whether Something Is Working?
This is where organizational learning becomes collective.
Leadership creates the conditions.
Leaders establish direction, allocate resources, make choices about priorities, and create permission for organizations to examine performance honestly.
Teams make strategy real.
Staff translate organizational intentions into thousands of interactions, decisions, relationships, and interventions. Their proximity to the work gives them knowledge a dashboard may never capture.
Data, research, and evaluation help us understand.
Their role can extend beyond producing reports. They can help organizations ask better questions: What should we measure? What does the evidence tell us? What doesn’t it tell us? What assumptions are we making?
And then there are the people we support.
Their experiences matter.
If an organization says an intervention is working while the people experiencing that intervention consistently tell us otherwise, that tension deserves investigation.
This is one reason trauma-informed practice and psychological safety matter to performance.
People need sufficient safety to tell organizations what they actually see—not merely what they believe leadership wants to hear.
Psychological Safety Does Not Mean Avoiding Accountability
There is an important tension here.
A missed target cannot automatically become someone’s fault.
But neither should complexity become an explanation for avoiding accountability.
Sometimes a target was unrealistic. Sometimes implementation failed. Sometimes circumstances changed. Sometimes resources were insufficient. Sometimes the data reveal an assumption that was wrong.
And sometimes performance simply was not good enough.
The purpose of organizational learning is not to protect ourselves from that last conclusion.
It is to determine which conclusion the evidence supports.
Psychological safety should allow people to say:
Something isn’t working.
Accountability should allow the organization to respond:
Then we need to understand why—and determine what we will do about it.
Both matter.
Accountability without sufficient psychological safety can encourage silence and self-protection. Psychological safety without accountability risks allowing explanation to become excuse.
Leadership requires us to hold both.
From KPI to KPIO?
This thinking has led me to experiment with another question in my own practice.
I have begun using the term Key Performance Indicator Outcome—or KPIO—to remind myself that after looking at an indicator, I should ask:
What outcome is this indicator supposed to help us understand?
I am deliberately describing this as an idea I am exploring rather than presenting it as a finished framework.
There are already well-established approaches for connecting activities with outcomes: logic models, Theory of Change, outcome measurement, evaluation frameworks, OKRs, balanced scorecards, and others.
Perhaps we don’t need another acronym.
That criticism is fair.
The test for KPIO should therefore be its usefulness.
Does explicitly connecting a performance indicator to an intended outcome help leaders and teams make better decisions? Does it help distinguish activity from change? Does it encourage better conversations between operations and data, research, and evaluation? Does it help us remain accountable to the people our organizations exist to support?
If existing approaches already accomplish those things effectively, we should use them.
A framework should earn its usefulness.
Contribution Is Not Necessarily Attribution
Even when an intended outcome occurs, organizations should be careful about claiming complete credit.
There is an important difference between contribution and attribution: both seek to understand the relationship between our work and an outcome, but contribution asks how our efforts helped produce the change, while attribution asks how much of that change can reasonably be credited to our efforts.
People live within complex systems.
A positive outcome may reflect the contribution of a program, the choices and agency of the participant, family and community relationships, other services, economic conditions, public policy, timing, or some combination of these factors.
Our work may therefore contribute meaningfully to an outcome without being its sole cause.
For organizations committed to evidence-informed practice, that humility matters.
The Counterargument
There is a legitimate challenge to everything I have argued here.
Organizations cannot contextualize performance indefinitely.
Resources are finite. Funders, boards, governments, communities, staff, and program participants deserve accountability. If every missed outcome can be explained by complexity, context, or circumstances outside an organization’s control, measurement risks becoming meaningless.
Likewise, organizations already have sophisticated approaches for connecting activities to outcomes. Adding more frameworks and terminology can create complexity rather than clarity.
Both criticisms deserve serious consideration.
My argument is therefore not that outcomes should replace performance indicators, nor that context should replace accountability.
It is that performance information becomes more useful when it helps us learn, decide, and act.
If a measure cannot help us understand the work, improve it, or determine whether we are moving toward the outcome we intended, we should be willing to ask what purpose that measure is serving.
So What Does the Green Dashboard Mean?
It means we should pay attention.
It means something happened that we decided was important enough to measure.
But perhaps the green indicator should not always end the conversation.
Sometimes it should begin one.
What did this performance produce?
For whom?
How do we know?
What are staff observing?
What are program participants experiencing?
What does the evidence support us concluding?
What might we be missing?
And what should we continue, stop, or change?
I am increasingly convinced that meaningful organizational performance is not demonstrated by hitting targets alone.
It emerges when strategy, leadership, practice, lived experience, and evidence remain connected—and when people have sufficient psychological safety to examine honestly what is working, what isn’t, and what needs to change.
That does not diminish accountability.
It makes accountability more meaningful.
The goal isn’t simply to make every dashboard green.
The goal is to understand whether our collective work is making a meaningful difference for the people who trusted us to do it.
The question isn’t only whether we performed.
The question is whether something meaningful changed.
Research Informing This Brief
This essay draws on research and practice literature concerning program evaluation, psychological safety, performance measurement, trauma-informed approaches, and Housing First for Youth.
- Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2024). CDC Program Evaluation Framework, 2024.
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2024). Step 2: Describe the Program. Guidance concerning logic models and relationships among activities, indicators, and intended outcomes.
- Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Trauma-Informed Approaches and Programs.
- Gaetz, S., Walter, H., & Story, C. (2021). THIS is Housing First for Youth: Part 1 — Program Model Guide. Canadian Observatory on Homelessness Press.
- Mansueto, M., & Hermans, K. (2026). Housing First for Youth: A Scoping Review of Facilitators, Barriers, and Outcomes in International Contexts. International Journal on Homelessness.
- Mannion, R., & Braithwaite, J. (2012). Unintended consequences of performance measurement in healthcare: 20 salutary lessons from the English National Health Service. Internal Medicine Journal, 42(5), 569–574.
- Fernández, V., Gausereide-Corral, M., Valiente, C., & Sánchez-Iglesias, I. (2023). Effectiveness of trauma-informed care interventions at the organizational level: A systematic review. Psychological Services, 20(4), 849–862.
These sources informed this Brief but do not necessarily support every argument or conclusion presented. The interpretations, questions, and developing propositions are my own.
About The Outcome Brief
The Outcome Brief is a 52-week exploration of strategy, leadership, transformation, outcomes, and technology through the lenses of practice, evidence, and continued learning.
Each week, I will examine an idea, test it against experience and research, consider the counterargument, and leave room for the thinking to evolve.
For leaders, practitioners, researchers, and people with lived experience:
What might this argument be missing?
I welcome the discourse.