Return on Intention

There is no shortage of stories about the tension between short term and long term goals. There is a constant struggle in organizations to try and balance the two. For profit and public corporations seem the worst hit by this dilemma due to pressures to constantly grow and produce ever more profits, but non-profits and social organizations have the same issues. The bulk of the major mistakes that companies run into is by optimizing for one of these goals, and ignoring the other. As Jim Collins and Jerry Porras pointed out in Built To Last, the right answer in this situation is never thinking about the OR, but taking the time to figure out the AND. Instead of deciding what is the best set of goals to deliver on are short term OR long term, the right answer is the one that can accomplish the short term AND long term goals.

The tragedy in Haiti is a great example of this problem. The Red Cross has done some really amazing things to mobilize a mass of people to raise funds for this problem. In a catastrophe like this, the short term goals have to be the major focus, after all, lives at stake. There was also plenty of media coverage about the use of social media and mobile technologies to raise an incredible amount of money for the relief efforts, but what doesn’t get much attention is that the amount of money raised, while impressive, is no where near the amount of money needed to create a good long term solution for Haiti.

This is not a criticism of the Red Cross or their efforts, the money that was raised so quickly (from what I have heard) has brought in enough food and clean water to provide for the victims. The next faze of this recovery is the hard part, and the really expensive part. The infrastructure that needs to be rebuilt (or built at all) will cost billions, not millions of dollars. Raising that much money is going to take more than can be raised through text messaging in a a month. The real problem is that there is no way that a plan can be put in place that can take into account everything needed for a crisis like this. Its impossible to know when something like this will happen, but it is known that something like this WILL happen again. The fund raising efforts for catastrophes of this scale have to be in place for years, not to mention a plan to help mobilize and coordinate the various agencies required to deliver aid in these situations.

The need for the AND solution for long and short term results seems clear for organizations of all sizes to deliver on the value they add to the world. It takes a lot more work, and some creativity, but the payoffs are worth it in the end.