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Beyond Busy: Proving Your Worth in an Evidence-Based World
When someone asks "What do you do?" do you describe your activities or the impact you create? In today's results-driven environment, simply being busy isn't enough-you need to demonstrate tangible value. "Show the Value of What You Do" offers a revolutionary framework that transforms how professionals prove their worth. Developed over decades by Patricia and Jack Phillips, the ROI Methodology has become one of the world's most widely implemented evaluation systems, used by over 6,000 organizations across 70 countries. From hospital chaplains reducing patient stays to police departments eliminating excessive force complaints, this approach has helped thousands demonstrate their true impact. While many professionals feel intimidated by data analysis and ROI calculations, this book distills complex concepts into an accessible process anyone can master. Whether you're trying to secure funding, advance your career, or simply understand if your work is making a difference, this methodology provides the credible, compelling evidence you need in today's evidence-based world.
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The Value Chain: Five Levels That Build Success
Success isn't a single measure-it's a progression of interconnected outcomes. The five levels of success framework provides a comprehensive approach to measuring any project's value, creating a logical chain where each level enables the next.
Level 1 begins with reaction and planned action-measuring whether participants view a project as relevant, important, and useful. Without this initial buy-in and interest, projects struggle to gain momentum. Consider how you respond to a new initiative: if you don't see its value, you're unlikely to commit fully to its success.
Level 2 focuses on learning-the acquisition of knowledge and skills needed to perform effectively. When people understand what they need to know, resistance decreases, motivation increases, and confidence grows. This connection between knowing and doing is essential for any successful implementation.
Level 3 examines application and implementation-moving beyond knowing to doing. This level measures how people apply new skills, test concepts, complete tasks, and explore possibilities. Application measures track progress, revealing what's working, what isn't, and what support might be needed to advance the project.
Level 4 connects actions to impact-improving output, quality, cost, and time. This represents the strategic and operational KPIs most important to sponsors and funders. Impact includes both tangible measures like revenue and productivity, and intangible measures such as customer satisfaction and reduced stress. Success at this level depends on achievements at all previous levels.
Level 5 answers the ultimate question: "Is it worth it?" This level measures financial efficacy through benefit-cost ratio (BCR) or return on investment percentage (ROI). BCR divides monetary benefits by project costs, while ROI expresses net benefits divided by costs, multiplied by 100. These measures demonstrate efficient use of funds.
Despite the logical progression of these levels-a classic model dating to the 1800s-many people fail to apply them systematically. Using leadership as an example, successful leaders should inspire positive reactions, facilitate learning, influence action, drive impact, and deliver value. Yet organizations often fixate on just one level, like seeking charismatic leaders without considering their ability to drive results. The interconnected nature of these levels makes comprehensive measurement essential.
Why don't we always follow this logical approach? Many professionals feel intimidated by data analysis or believe measuring impact is too complex. Others focus solely on activities rather than outcomes. But as we'll see, a structured approach makes measuring value at all levels both possible and powerful.
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Start with Why: Defining Your Impact
Every successful project begins with a clear understanding of the impact you want to create. This means starting with the end in mind-focusing on strategic or operational KPIs rather than activities or behaviors.
Consider Chip Huth's experience with the Kansas City SWAT team. When he took leadership, the team generated 30-40 citizen complaints annually, each costing $70,000 to investigate. Rather than focusing on activities like "improve training" or "enhance communication," Chip identified a specific impact measure: reducing costly complaints. This clarity gave him a concrete target and baseline for measuring success.
Impact measures can be both hard and soft. Hard data includes objective measures like output (units produced, graduation rates), quality (error rates, defects), time (cycle time, response time), and costs (operating costs, budget variances). These are typically found in operating reports, KPIs, and dashboards.
Soft data is more subjective, including measures of leadership, work climate, initiative/innovation, client service, employee development, and organizational image. While traditionally harder to convert to money, today's analytics make soft measures increasingly meaningful and sometimes convertible to monetary value.
Sometimes impact measures are obvious, found in KPIs showing declining performance. Other times, they're less apparent, like corporate social responsibility initiatives where the specific measures of success require deeper exploration. When impact isn't clear, asking "What happens if we do nothing?" often reveals the measures that matter.
After defining your impact measures, establish baseline performance to evaluate progress. Baselines are typically found in the same records where you defined the impact measures. For less obvious measures, subjective techniques may be necessary. If no baseline exists, there are ways to create one, balancing accuracy and cost.
Converting impact measures to monetary values helps determine if a problem or opportunity is worth pursuing. The Kansas City SWAT team's 30-40 annual citizen complaints cost $70,000 each for investigations alone, totaling $2.1-2.8 million annually. Money serves as a universal medium of exchange that everyone understands and allows for mathematical analysis.
Remember Sarah Robertson's painful lesson: don't wait until someone requests value data-by then it's often too late. As a counselor for Catholic Family Services at Canadian food banks, she helped financially struggling individuals. When government representatives suddenly asked for ROI data on her program, she had nothing beyond basic service metrics. Though she realized she could collect meaningful impact data through client action plans, the government canceled her program before she could complete her study. Had she been reporting impressive impact data all along, her program might have been saved.
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Finding the Right Solution: Connecting Means to Ends
After identifying the impact you want to achieve, the next question is how to achieve it. Many projects begin because someone believes they have the right solution, but this assumption needs testing.
When Starbucks shut down 8,000 locations for racial-bias training following a discrimination incident, it cost $12-14 million in lost sales. While it sent a strong message, research suggests anti-bias training rarely works. Not all organizations can afford such expensive gambles with uncertain outcomes.
Finding the right solution requires careful consideration of various options rather than jumping to the most obvious or trendy approach. Organizations have many potential solutions available, from providing information and building skills to implementing new systems, changing policies, or adjusting job structures.
Performance gaps are the cause of problems or the avenue to addressing opportunities. Sometimes these gaps are easily recognizable through experience, as when Ginger Luttrell created "super users" to improve productivity during systems implementation. When experience doesn't provide answers, stakeholder input, case studies, or analytical tools become essential.
Rebecca Benson's approach to high turnover demonstrates this perfectly. Rather than assuming pay was the only issue, she used focus groups and nominal group technique to identify five distinct causes of turnover: low wages, poor management quality, insufficient training, job burnout, and scheduling problems. By addressing all five causes, she reduced turnover from 40% to 21%, creating significant cost savings.
Learning is essential to implementing any solution successfully. The key question is "What do people need to know to do what we want them to do?" This knowledge may include skills, information, or insights about others, oneself, people, places, events, or systems. The roundabout implementation example shows how overlooking learning needs can undermine otherwise sound solutions-when drivers didn't know how to navigate roundabouts, minor accidents increased even as serious ones decreased.
Stakeholder preferences also matter tremendously. If they don't see the value in a project, it will likely fail. The New Coke failure illustrates this perfectly-despite taste tests showing people preferred the new formula, the company failed to understand how consumers would react to replacing the beloved original product.
When all needs are addressed, the solution becomes feasible and properly aligned with the problem or opportunity. Linda Green's case with the Drug Court Program demonstrates this alignment perfectly. By connecting the state's "Why" (reducing recidivism of drug offenders) with the "How" (the Drug Court Program), she created a comprehensive solution addressing payoff needs ($17 million in housing costs), business needs (reducing recidivism), performance needs (lack of treatment programs), learning needs (offenders' understanding of consequences), and preference needs (participants seeing the program as crucial to their survival).
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Setting Clear Expectations: The Power of Objectives
Setting clear objectives is not just a formality but a powerful driver of success. Martin Burt's Poverty Stoplight program illustrates this perfectly. This revolutionary approach to eliminating poverty gives people clear pathways to improvement across 50 indicators using a three-phase stoplight system (red, yellow, green) with specific measures for each phase. Families can visualize their progress out of poverty through clear, measurable objectives.
After aligning your solution with a problem and defining impact measures, you must set clear expectations through objectives. These objectives serve as your roadmap, providing direction, guidance, and motivation for all stakeholders. Without clear objectives, your project is like a rudderless ship-you'll have no way to know if you're on course or when you've reached your destination.
Projects without objectives deliver questionable performance at best. Vague objectives like "increased productivity" help somewhat but lack definition-how much increase is enough and by when? Research shows that specific objectives drive the best results. When working with teams, consider setting stretch objectives beyond the minimum acceptable performance to leverage motivation and achievement.
Effective objectives follow the SMART framework (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) with additional practical rules. These include ensuring objectives represent minimum acceptable performance, keeping them few in number, involving subject matter experts in their creation, maintaining relevance, creating achievable stretch targets, allowing flexibility, accepting failure as part of improvement, using objectives as progress tools rather than performance weapons, making them time-bound, and using them to focus design through evaluation.
The power of objectives comes from sharing them with everyone involved in the project, from team members to funders. Objectives serve as the architectural blueprint for your project design, guiding designers on what needs to happen, showing facilitators where to direct conversations, demonstrating to stakeholders that their concerns are being addressed, and providing evaluators with clear success metrics.
Lydia Johnson's experience at Global Finance Organization demonstrates the consequences of not setting clear objectives. When the new president requested an ROI evaluation of their expensive coaching program involving 440 managers and 85 external coaches, Lydia discovered they had no business objectives for the program. Without objectives connecting coaching to business outcomes, the program couldn't demonstrate tangible value. Though participants found the coaching helpful for career issues, nothing specific tied to key performance indicators. The program was ultimately put "on pause"-a fate that could have been avoided with clear impact objectives from the start.
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Collecting Data That Tells the Story
Many professionals believe data collection to demonstrate project success is nearly impossible. In reality, proper planning makes it feasible. Suzette Haywood's case illustrates this-when directing a redesigned leadership development program for state government, she faced the challenge of proving its increased value to justify higher costs. By implementing 15 response rate improvement techniques, she achieved nearly 50% response from both associates and supervisors, demonstrating a 37% ROI that impressed senior leadership.
Data collection begins with knowing what measures to take, which come directly from your project objectives. The better your objectives, the easier it becomes to determine what measures to take, how to collect them, from whom, and when. A critical warning: only collect what's needed to determine if objectives are being achieved. Success requires determining appropriate collection methods, identifying data sources, minimizing bias, and setting proper timing.
Modern data collection has evolved with technology making it easier than ever, from polling features in video conferencing to fitness trackers and network analysis tools. While fundamental techniques remain the same, implementation has become more efficient.
Surveys and questionnaires are the dominant data collection methods. Surveys collect attitudinal measures including beliefs or opinions, typically using yes-no formats or agreement scales. Questionnaires are more versatile, including short-answer responses, ranked items, and numerical data. Success with these self-administered instruments depends on designing them for maximum respondent convenience and objectivity.
Observation is the most accurate method for Level 3 Application data when implemented correctly, as it captures behavior in real time. For effectiveness, observers must be either invisible or unnoticeable, prepared to observe, and knowledgeable about rating and recording behaviors properly.
One-on-one interviews are powerful but expensive data collection methods. They provide opportunities to probe for details, ask for clarification and examples, or identify compelling stories. Interviews often complement other data collection methods rather than standing alone.
Focus groups offer more efficiency than individual interviews, typically comprising 8-12 individuals following a specific agenda. This method is valuable when you want participants to hear others' perspectives, which can shape perceptions or improve data precision.
Tests range from simple self-assessments to complex multiple-choice questions, problems, or simulations. For many projects, simple self-assessments may suffice to ensure participants are learning what they need.
Action planning involves participants mapping out how they'll apply what they've learned to achieve impact. When action plans include pre-program commitments involving a significant other (typically a manager in organizational settings), they become performance contracts.
Performance monitoring leverages existing records or databases, making it particularly valuable for collecting Level 4 Impact data with minimal additional effort.
When collecting data, always go to the most credible sources-the people or systems closest to the measures you plan to take. Always ask yourself, "Who can answer this question most accurately?"
The timing for data collection is guided by your objectives. Level 1 Reaction and Level 2 Learning data are collected during project implementation. Level 3 Application data collection occurs when participants are routinely using what they've learned. Level 4 Impact data requires waiting until consequences of application are visible, typically ranging from one to six months after implementation.
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Analyzing Data: What's Your Project Really Worth?
To demonstrate the true value of your project, you must analyze data by isolating your project's effects from other influences, convert impact data to monetary values, identify intangible benefits, calculate total costs, and determine ROI.
When claiming improvements in business measures, stakeholders inevitably ask how you know your project caused these results. Since outcomes typically result from multiple factors, you must isolate your project's specific contribution using either research-based methods or estimation techniques.
Experimental versus control group comparison offers the most credible isolation technique, as demonstrated by a Canadian anesthesiologist who tested a new colon cancer surgery process with 16 patients against a matched control group. Despite the small sample size, results were dramatic-zero complications, infections, or readmissions in the experimental group versus 5-20% in the control group.
When research methods aren't feasible, use estimation by asking your most credible sources three key questions: What caused the improvement? What percentage is due to the project? How confident are you in your estimate? This approach, while not as rigorous as experimental design, provides conservative estimates that have been validated against more formal methods.
After isolating your project's impact, convert results to monetary value. Many measures already have established monetary values-you just need to find them. Methods range from using standard values already calculated within the organization to consulting experts, researching external databases, or linking with other measures.
Some impact measures cannot credibly be converted to money within reasonable time constraints-these remain intangibles. This doesn't diminish their importance, as intangibles like employee engagement, brand image, and organizational culture often carry significant value.
Employee engagement typically remains an intangible despite our ability to convert many soft measures to money. This is because executives often fund engagement projects based on intuition that high engagement yields positive outcomes, macro-level studies already show significant relationships between engagement and key operational measures, engagement is measurable and meaningful despite different measurement approaches, and there's been little pressure to monetize engagement improvements.
Project investments extend beyond contractor payments or development time. A credible ROI calculation requires tabulating all direct and indirect costs. This includes initial analysis, solution development, acquisition, implementation, salaries and benefits for project team and participants, materials, hardware/software, travel expenses, facilities, capital expenditures, maintenance, administrative support, and evaluation costs.
With monetary benefits and fully loaded costs established, ROI calculation uses two common measures. The benefit-cost ratio (BCR) divides total benefits by costs. The ROI calculation uses the formula: (Net Benefits / Costs) x 100%. For example, a BCR of 2.18 means every dollar invested yields $2.18 in benefits, while an ROI of 118% means every dollar invested returns the original dollar plus $1.18.
When calculating BCR and ROI, follow these guiding principles: tell the complete story of success; use only the most credible sources; choose conservative calculation alternatives; give credit where due by isolating project effects; make no assumptions for non-respondents; adjust estimates for potential error; omit extreme data items and unsupported claims; and account for all project costs.
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Leveraging Results: Making Success Work for You
Communicating results is essential-evaluation without action is useless. Six types of data should be included: reaction, learning, application, impact, ROI, and intangibles. For effective communication, you must identify your target audiences (clients, managers, participants, executives, etc.), understand your purpose for communicating with each group, and select appropriate communication methods ranging from meetings and detailed reports to brief summaries and electronic formats.
When briefing sponsors or executives, follow a structured presentation sequence that builds from project description through evaluation process, data presentation, ROI calculation, and recommendations. Consider the case of an anesthesiologist in Canada who implemented a new colon cancer surgery process that reduced complications and showed a 118% ROI, leading to nationwide adoption.
Optimization is about applying "black box thinking" from aviation to your projects-analyzing what happened to prevent future problems. By examining successful projects to make them more successful and improving those that fail to deliver, you increase value through adjustments to current or future initiatives. This approach helps secure project funding and positions you favorably for future budget allocations.
Optimization transforms cost perceptions into investment perceptions-when executives see positive ROI, they're more likely to maintain, allocate resources to, and protect your projects rather than control, freeze, reduce or eliminate them. This shift creates partnerships, improves client relationships, and ultimately secures you "a seat at the table."
Leveraging results means exploiting your outcomes to create even greater awareness, change, and value beyond the immediate project. Chip Huth's success reducing citizen complaints to zero led to awards, speaking engagements, a viral TEDx talk, and career advancement. Juan Pablo from Bimbo Bakery used conference learning to implement social media advertising with measurable ROI. Kaycee Buckley's negative ROI findings on coaching actually prompted positive change when managers realized their shortcomings.
Even negative findings can create positive change. When Ben Wagner automated monotonous software testing, freeing up 32 team members for more engaging work, he demonstrated value beyond simple cost savings. Kitana Kanaan's automobile loan automation pilot created a compelling case for system-wide implementation. Haifa Al Lawati's education evaluation work in Oman spread to other government agencies.
The key insight: rather than viewing showing value as a burden, see it as an opportunity to spotlight what works and what doesn't, driving lasting change beyond a single project.
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Putting It All Together: The Show the Value Process
The Show the Value Process provides a six-step roadmap for designing, delivering, and evaluating successful projects. This structured approach ensures you can plan for, deliver, and capture all five levels of success while maintaining credibility in your reporting.
Step 1 (Why? Start with Impact) begins by clarifying the impact you want from your project-focusing on strategic or operational KPIs rather than activities or behaviors. This step requires identifying whether a problem is worth solving or an opportunity worth pursuing, then describing it precisely in terms of business measures.
Step 2 (How? Select the Right Solution) answers whether your proposed solution will influence the impact measure. Finding the right solution may require interviews, focus groups, analytics, or simply reviewing records and benchmarking. Consider what's working, what needs to change, and what people need to know to implement the solution effectively.
Step 3 (What? Expect Success with Objectives) sets expectations by establishing objectives at all levels. This includes defining success (recognizing it only occurs when impact happens), creating objectives for reaction, learning, application, and impact, and sharing these objectives with everyone involved.
Step 4 (How Much? Collect Data along the Way) involves gathering data at multiple levels: journaling observations of reactions and learning, documenting application through formal records of interventions, and monitoring your impact measures. This multi-level data collection approach helps track progress toward successful outcomes.
Step 5 (What's It Worth? Analyze the Data) focuses on credibility. This step involves comparing results between experimental and control groups when possible, verifying no other factors could explain the difference, and calculating the ROI by comparing monetary benefits to costs.
Step 6 (So What? Leverage the Results) is about presenting findings to demonstrate value. The critical issue in this step is leveraging results for maximum benefit-making successful projects more successful or adjusting unsuccessful ones-while using the data to gain support, commitment, influence, and funding.
Adopting the Show the Value Process transforms your approach to projects. This mindset includes: taking action before results are requested, respecting the five-level value chain, prioritizing impact as the most important measure, starting with the end in mind, designing for needed results, using ROI analysis selectively, and finding positive insights even in negative ROI.
When it comes to delivering results, hope is not a strategy, luck is not a factor, doing nothing is not an option. Change is inevitable; progress is optional. It's all up to you. By implementing this process, you'll not only demonstrate your value but also maximize your impact, secure needed resources, and advance your career. The question isn't whether you can afford to show your value-it's whether you can afford not to.
