The Intangible Results

One day when I was walking through a marginalized community in Pune, I saw one lady asking his son to wash his hands and mentioning as “kal wo bhaiya kya keh rahe the ki khana khane se pehle haath jaroor dhone hain”. She was referring to what I told during an awareness session to always wash hands before eating. I was not aware how many people will follow those instructions and neither I was worried about it. But glad that it created an impact and changed the perception of few people.

In today’s world, numbers are very important. Everything is represented in numbers and data. With the advent of data analytics technique and tools, the love for numbers have increased exponentially. The success of any initiative, idea or thought is determined mainly by the tangible benefits. For e.g., scheme X of the government has directly impacted Y number of people or company’s profit has increased by 10% quarter to quarter.

Tangible results are crucial for government agencies as they need to showcase their success in terms of beneficiary count. These are also important for corporate as they need to estimate, plan, compare the numbers annually and strategize accordingly. Even social organizations would like to show the number of beneficiaries for each of the initiatives in annual reports. The love for tangible results is obvious and have been motivating individuals and organizations to work hard and strive for excellence. These results are widely appreciated and makes an important aspect to analyse the success of any idea or initiative. They also help organization to rate performances of their employees and plan for their career goals.

In addition to this, there are few results which are difficult to quantify but are equally important. These can be termed as intangible results. These results may have long lasting impact but are not discussed much as it is hard to predict and analyse them. It is said that if you educate a girl, you educate the entire family. It is a wonderful example of a long-lasting impact and an outcome which is hard to quantify. Consider a corporate who publishes the quarterly results in terms of profits. These results are totally tangible as they involve numbers, whereas it will be difficult for the company to showcase the changes in satisfaction level of its employees or motivation during the last quarter. It can still ask employees to fill a survey and then rate it based on some index but that will also not give the exact results. But it does not mean that employee satisfaction or motivation level is not an important parameter for a company’s success. Companies taking green initiatives to reduce their carbon or waste footprint is a wonderful example where the results will be difficult to analyse in terms of money.

The intangible results are an important aspect for social organizations because social changes may be difficult to quantify sometimes. Most of the NGOs consider social or behavioural changes in the beneficiaries as their SROI (social return on investments). These returns can be a clean community, a sustainable village capable of generating its own electricity, eradication of child marriages from a community, rehabilitating prostitutes, or their kids, ensuring safe drinking water for all, giving equal opportunity to people of all sex orientations etc. These returns are difficult to record in numbers but may have tremendous impact on the development of the society. These results change how society lives as a whole and not merely showing the performance in numbers.

Today companies are investing heavily in ideas of social change, biodiversity, climate change, alleviating poverty, resolving water scarcity, primary education, improving agricultural patterns etc. All these initiatives will make this world a better place to live, and it will be difficult to quantify the worth of results brought by these changes in financial terms. With CSR initiatives where companies are focusing on social awareness to bring sustainability, importance of intangible benefits are greatly realized. Most of the organizations do not want to build ponds for the community but to teach the people how to save and conserve water. It will be better to have a community which sustains itself through job opportunities rather than distributing money to people. Similarly, poverty alleviation requires a combination of both tangible and intangible benefits. On one hand, it is important that all people in community should have a minimum salary of Rs.10,000/- etc and also community becomes self-reliant and does not migrate to other areas. Holistic development of the communities is possible only when the government and social organizations consider both these benefits as crucial and plan an integrated approach.

Another aspect which comes with intangible benefits is the volunteering service for a cause. It will be very difficult to quantify a sense of satisfaction a volunteer will get after utilizing his or her skills for the betterment of the society. Efforts of a volunteer may bring long lasting changes in the community which will directly or indirectly help them to live a better life. A volunteer once told me that she was able to identify that the reason of adolescence girls dropping out of school was the absence of good quality toilets in government schools. Her efforts may bring a change in lives of hundreds of girls and the satisfaction of impacting their lives. Both results are intangible in nature.

Similarly there are also intangible impacts. We have been watching over the number of covid 19 cases and deaths since more than a year but the impact it had on psychology of the people, their mindset, plans, emotions cannot be quantified. It will be close to impossible to identify how many lives got impacted due to business shutdowns, impact it had on mental health of the children etc.

At the end, it can be concluded that intangible things are the ones which values more but they are directly or indirectly related to entities that are tangible in nature.
Satisfaction, motivation, content, love, affections are all intangible attributes.

We all witness some changes around us which are hard to quantify in our family or workplace. Please share your experience in comments about any story or incidence of intangible results or benefits.

Regards
Live For The Nation