Optics vs. Impact

"You want it to be one way ... but its the other way” 

- Marlo Stanfield

In the last entry to my blog I explained that HBO’s TV show "The Wire" is a great show for development professionals to watch because the kinds of complex challenges that play out on the show are strikingly similar to the challenges that we confront these days working on USAID’s development programs. Today I’m going to explore one of these challenges; the challenge of Optics vs. Impact (OvI).

OvI is the key theme behind the first season’s principal story arc which involves the Baltimore Police Department's (BPD) efforts to take down the Barksdale family operation, the city's largest drug trafficking empire. In order to explore OvI in the context of the the BPD’s investigation/pursuit of Barksdale we need to start by defining Optics and Impact. Here’s how I define them:

Optics is defined by the extent to which the activities undertaken, and decisions made, by the BPD convince the citizens of Baltimore that the BPD is waging an effective war on drugs and violent crime, thereby perpetuating public support for the BPD and the city’s broader political administration. 

Impact is defined by the extent to which the activities undertaken, and decisions made, by the BPD enable it to actually put the highest levels of Barksdale in prison, thereby de-capacitating its drug trafficking operations and all of the associated violence.

OK. Here’s where you say, "wait ... aren’t these the same thing?" Isn’t the best way for the BPD to secure public support to shut down the drug gangs and put violent criminals behind bars?

Unfortunately they aren’t the same thing and this is one of the key messages that David Simon is trying to get across with The Wire. One of the main tools that Simon uses to portray contrast between Optics and Impact is character development of two of the BPD’s biggest egos; Detective Jimmy McNulty and Major William Rawls. Two guys that couldn’t be more different from one another.

Jimmy McNulty

McNulty (played by Dominic West) is the show's tragic hero. He is arguably the most skilled detective in the entire BPD. He’s also the most committed within the Department to doing the kind of real police work that needs to be done to put the criminals behind all of the violence in Baltimore behind bars. McNulty’s problem is that he’s so consumed with the mission of putting murderers behind bars that he’s got no respect for the ‘chain of command’ and very little patience for the politics of law enforcement.

In the context of this analysis McNulty personifies an impact-driven approach to law enforcement. He recognizes that putting kingpins behind bars requires slow and steady investigative techniques, the use of wire taps and surveillance, and a commitment to stealthy progress (i.e. the idea that key milestones in an investigation should not be public celebrations because too much publicity can undermine the longer run objectives.)

William Rawls

Rawls (played by John Doman) is the total opposite. He’s a devout bureaucrat that knows how to play the game. His M.O. is “Dope on the Table” which is shorthand for lazy investigating. i.e. make some quick arrests, seize some drugs and maybe some guns, toss them on a table, and hold a press conference.  Rawls’ problem is that he’s so wrapped up in managing his career that he’s unable to recognize or support the real police work that is going on in the Department.

Rawls personifies the optics-driven approach to law enforcement. He recognizes that it is much easier to cultivate a perception among the public that his police department is diligently fighting crime than it is to actually buckle down and fight it. The idea of a stealthy investigation makes absolutely no sense to Rawls; he would never miss an opportunity to persuade his audience that important work is being done even if the PR undermined the prospects of making a real dent in crime.

Confrontation between Rawls and McNulty is one of the main storylines in the first season of The Wire.  It starts with a frustrated McNulty going outside the BPD chain of command to a city judge to complain that nobody inside the BPD is serious about investigating the Barksdale operation, which includes most of the city's drug trade and a lot of its unsolved murders. The city judge then takes McNulty’s private complaint back to senior BPD officials, and the BPD is compelled to launch a real investigation into Barksdale.

Its clear from the beginning that BPD leadership has no appetite for the kind of sustained effort and sophisticated investigative approach that is necessary to bring down Barksdale. BPD leadership, which is exemplified by Rawls, spends the entire first season of the show looking for opportunities to make quick arrests of low-level figures in the Barksdale organization, hold press conferences, and get out. McNulty, however, continues to find creative ways of pushing back so that his unit can pursue the investigation of Barksdale to its conclusion.

Largely through the valiant - and arguably insubordinate - efforts of McNulty the Barksdale investigation is able to maintain enough of an impact-oriented focus to ultimately put the organization’s leader, Avon Barksdale, behind bars at the end of the first season. However, rather than being a celebration of investigative success, the message that Simon focuses on in wrapping up the first season is how their different approaches affect McNulty and Rawls in terms of their careers. McNulty, because of his blind, passionate focus on impact, ends up getting professionally sidelined out of Homocide and into a dead end job with the Marine Unit. Rawls, because of his obsessive focus on optics and the "chain of command” ends up getting promoted to Colonel.

What’s the parallel to USAID-funded development programs?

To answer that question we need to start the same way ... by defining optics and impact in the appropriate context. I'll define them in the context of a typical private sector development initiative:

Optics is defined by the extent to which activities undertaken, and decisions made, by USAID and/or its implementing partners convince the US Congress - and the American People - that the Agency is extending a useful helping hand to the developing world, thereby perpetuating public support for both the Agency and the broader political administration.   

Impact is defined by the extent to which activities undertaken, and decisions made, by USAID and/or its implementing partners actually enable or effect a sustainable increase in sales, employment, investment and/or exports, thereby positively influencing a country's trajectory of economic growth and its standard of living. 

As in the case of Baltimore law enforcement, these are unfortunately not the same thing for highly politicized international development activities ... at least not as often as we’d like.

I’m sure everyone can recall experiences where the conflict between optics and impact has manifest in your development work. And I’ll bet that in most of those cases there were folks like Rawls that pushed for a focus on optics, and in some of them there were folks like McNulty that pushed for a focus on impact. And I bet most of the time the folks like Rawls have fared better than the folks like McNulty.

I have a lot of great examples from my own experience that I would love to write about in order to advance our industry’s collective capacity to recognize and deal effectively with the OvI challenge in the context of international development programs. The problem is that our industry is in a situation where we really can’t write about a lot of our experiences, regardless of how constructive our intentions may be.  Our industry is under so much scrutiny these days that any effort to write about our experiences with the objective of learning and sharing knowledge can end up being counterproductive. In this kind of environment even the most well intentioned efforts to reflect and learn get turned into cannon fodder for the folks that want to cut AID funding.  So, in terms of really learning and growing as an industry, we’ve often got our hands tied behind our backs ... we’ve got to be creative.

One of the ways that I’ve tried to deal with this in past blog posts is by abstracting some of my real experiences into hypothetical situations. And in fact two of my previous hypothetical examples were focused largely on how I’ve experienced the challenge of OvI in the private sector development context. In the post Get Naked I wrote about it in the context of a hypothetical rehabilitation grant program for farmers in Africa that gets pressured to unwisely accelerate spending in order to get the optics right. And, in the post Unplug The Blender I wrote about it in the context of a hypothetical value chain R&D activity that succumbs to pressure to scale up too quickly in order to get the optics right.  One of the key points in both of these hypothetical scenarios was to show how development impact can suffer when we’re too focused on the optics.

If anyone hasn’t realized this already, I’ve got a lot more in common with McNulty than Rawls.  That is one of the main reasons that I started writing this blog ... trying to figure out how we as practitioners can get more latitude and support to focus on real development impact. There have been more occasions in my career than I care to remember where my approach has been so blindly impact-oriented that I've ended up in situations like those that McNulty experiences on The Wire. In fact, my friends have joked that a lot of the wisdom that I’ve managed to extract from The Wire was enabled by my own experience as the Jimmy McNulty of International Development.

So what wisdom do I have to share with you?  Stay tuned.

- DS