Breaking the Outcomes Trap: How Creative Impact Management Enables Bold Risk-Taking
Talking about an outcomes “trap” might sound strange for an impact consultant, when understanding outcomes (and how they differ from outputs for example) and how to work towards better ones, is so much of the work.
But I think we've developed an uncomfortable relationship with risk, across multiple sectors.
The instant kickback on social media, the savage anger we can spark in our audiences when we get something wrong, means that a lot of organisations shrink their ideas, their messages and ultimately what they can achieve to avoid it.
In the world of social impact and organisational change, too often, impact management has become synonymous with playing it safe; chasing predictable outcomes, scaling proven interventions, and avoiding the messy uncertainty that comes with transformative work. This outcomes-obsessed approach starts off by looking appealing because it looks strategic, focused and clean. But it’s also what can hold us back from achieving the bold, systemic change our challenges demand.
Impact management when done right, shouldn’t be stifling creativity, successful impact practice should become the foundation that enables us to take bigger risks, think more creatively, and therefore achieve greater results.
The Growth Trap: When More Becomes the Enemy of Better
One of the most pervasive misconceptions in impact work is equating growth with progress. Organisations fall into what I call the "growth trap", the relentless pursuit of bigger numbers, larger budgets, expanded programs, and increased reach. On the surface, it’s an entirely logical approach. More beneficiaries reached means more impact.
Except that it might not. This growth-focused mindset often becomes a sophisticated form of impact theatre, where we mistake activity for achievement and confuse expansion with effectiveness. When we chase outcomes purely for their numerical value, we risk creating a hamster wheel of busyness that leaves teams burned out, resources stretched thin, and ironically, delivering less impact.
The growth mindset, when misapplied, encourages us to just want more, to replicate what we know works rather than exploring what might work better. And crucially, why something else might work better. It rewards playing it safe over scrutinising what we’re doing, who for and why. It stops us planning for risks, or taking bolder steps. It can end up valuing the certainty of incremental (and measurable – everybody loves something measurable!) progress over the uncertainty and potential of innovation.
Reframing Impact Management as Creative Infrastructure
The antidote to outcome-chasing should absolutely not be to abandon all of your measurement altogether (my face is contorting at the very idea). That measurement builds your understanding of what is working and shows you’re on track with your strategy. The antidote is to connect impact management with creativity, curiosity and playfulness; to use it as part of your creative infrastructure. An innovative writer will understand grammar rules in order to break them, a jazz musician masters scales and rhythm before improvising well, and organisations need robust impact frameworks to enable bold experimentation.
Well-designed impact practice creates the conditions for creativity by providing structure within which innovation can flourish. It asks the questions that every creative endeavour requires:
· What are we really trying to achieve?
· What assumptions are we making?
· What might go wrong?
· How will we know if we're on the right track?
Impact management should not be a reporting burden, rather it’s your thinking tool; the framework that holds your hand and makes you think far harder about your plans that you would do on your own. We don’t wait til after the fact to measure impact,, we use impact thinking to design better projects and plans from the start. We become more practiced at planning for success precisely because we're thinking more creatively about what success might look like.
The Power of Creative Risk-Taking
When impact management serves creativity rather than constraining it, something magic happens: we become more willing and crucially, more able to take meaningful risks. This isn't reckless gambling with resources and reputations, it’s not even well-intentioned risk-taking with gut instinct born of experience, but intelligent risk-taking grounded in deep understanding of our intended impact.
Creative impact management gives us permission to play with ideas, to test assumptions, and to explore the edges of possibility. We can identify the specific assumptions that, if wrong, would undermine our entire approach. And it provides the safety net of learning that makes failure productive rather than devastating.
The Confidence to Think Bigger
Perhaps the most powerful outcome of creative impact management is the confidence it builds to think bigger. When we have robust systems for testing ideas, learning from results, and adapting our approach, we naturally become more ambitious in our vision and more strategic in our execution.
This confidence comes from knowing that we can navigate uncertainty intelligently. We're not shooting in the dark or hoping for the best, we’re skilled at making good decisions even when the path forward isn't clear, or we don’t have all the information we’d like.
Moving Beyond the False Choice
The choice between creativity and rigour, between innovation and accountability, is a false one. The organisations achieving the most significant impact today are those that have learned to use both creative thinking and systematic impact management in the delivery of their aims.
Building the Creative Capacity for Impact
Creative impact management doesn't eliminate uncertainty or guarantee success, but it gives us a way to manage and test our ideas, plan the actions we need to take to make them a reality and measure our success.