Delusional Altruism: Why Philanthropists Fail To Achieve Change and What They Can Do To Transform Giving
Kris Putnam-Walkerly
256 pages, Wiley, 2020
The world has a lot of philanthropists. Delusional Altruism is for all of them—but especially for those who aren’t quite achieving the impact they seek. They come in many forms: ultra-high-net-worth donors, wealthy families, foundations, Fortune 500 companies, donor-advised funds, celebrity activists, professional athletes, family offices, giving circles—individuals and organizations large and small.
Just like you, they want to change the world.
What’s more, they aren’t looking for bandage solutions. Like you, they want transformational change. Lasting change.
So, what is the big secret to this transformational change? It’s this: How we give is as important as how much we give, or which causes we support.
Let me make it as clear as I can: The key word here is how. How. How we give matters. How we give allows us to be transformational.
So, when it comes to giving that matters, what stands in our way? The thing between us and that type of transformational giving is something I call delusional altruism. Now, by “delusional,” I don’t mean we’re stupid or crazy. I mean we’re hindering our impact unnecessarily, because of a handful of deceptive and illogical thoughts we choose to hold dear. These illogical thoughts are making us get in our own way, and we don’t even realize it.
Delusional altruism shows up in our lives in different ways. For some of us, it’s a scarcity mentality. For others, it's fear. Many of us ask the wrong questions, which send us down the wrong paths. Or we let ourselves be fooled by our own efforts.
Delusional Altruism provides funders with real-world advice and practical guidance for avoiding mistakes that hamstring impact—and creating truly transformational change.—Kris Putnam-Walkerly
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Over the past 20 years, I’ve spoken with thousands of philanthropists and haven’t found a single slacker. Just the opposite. They put in lots of effort. But many confuse effort with impact.
Many well-intentioned philanthropists are fooled by their own efforts. They grit their teeth and take action, but it doesn’t result in much. That’s because that grit and action aren’t aligned toward a common goal. Donors are under the delusion that their vast efforts will change the world simply because they’re busy.
Just peek into the calendars and to-do lists of any philanthropist. Board meetings, staff meetings, and meetings to plan meetings. Business travel, webinars, and back-to-back calls. Conferences to plan. New initiatives to launch. Grants management software to install. Reports to write. Fundraising events to attend. Proposals to review. Emails to catch up on.
Those can seem like important things. After all, you need to convene your board members and respond to email. All that effort on such important stuff must result in something, right?
Not really.
I recently spoke to a foundation CEO who lamented that she and her team would be devoting the next six weeks to preparing for a board meeting. They would have to drop everything they were working on to get ready. The board meeting amounted to a dog and pony show. The board expected them to find and prepare outside experts to speak at the meeting, organize fancy dinners, and graphically design presentation materials. Each program team was to give multi-hour updates on progress since the last time the board met six months ago.
The trouble is, none of it mattered. All this effort was preventing them from doing their important work.
In the six months since the last board meeting, the foundation’s previous CEO had resigned, the board undertook a national executive search, and the foundation’s strategic planning efforts were put on hold. The new CEO began just two weeks before our conversation.
The important work of the foundation was to allow the new CEO time and space to develop her vision for the foundation, finalize the strategic plan, and lead her team to implement the strategy. Instead, she was leading her team to create PowerPoint presentations. But the board liked seeing all these signs of a busy organization.
Why do we confuse busyness with productivity and results? Philanthropists find themselves busy working on the wrong stuff for three main reasons: They don’t have a clear strategy. They aren’t implementing that strategy. And, as a result, they get distracted by the latest trends and go off course.
You Don’t Know Where You Want to Go
As obvious as it may seem, first you need to know what you are trying to accomplish. If you don’t know what you want to do, it’s unlikely you will do it. American baseball legend Yogi Berra summed it up best: “If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.”
The best way to know what you want to accomplish is to formulate a clear strategy. Let’s define what we mean.
Strategy is a framework within which decisions are made that influence the nature and direction of the enterprise. In this case, the “enterprise” is you. You as an individual or you as an organization. Strategy is a tool for making decisions and choices that are congruent with where you want your philanthropy to go.
It’s helpful to divide strategy into two components: strategy formulation and strategy implementation. Formulating your strategy means identifying your desired future state. What is the change you want to see in the world or in your community? What charitable impact do you want your company to be known for? What kind of philanthropist do you want to become? Implementing your strategy means moving from your current state (where you are today) to your desired future state, ideally as quickly as possible.
Too often, philanthropists don’t have a strategy. They haven’t identified their desired future state, so it’s hard for them to find the best path to where they want to go. In fact, it’s darned near impossible.
If they don’t have a strategy and don’t know where they’re going, what are philanthropists doing? Sitting still? Meditating? Napping?
Nope. They are very, very busy. Doing lots and lots of stuff.
They are attending conferences, reviewing proposals, designing new community initiatives, going to meetings, speaking with legislators, filling vacant positions, conducting site visits, hiring consultants, scanning the field, and preparing their taxes.
They are doing lots and lots of stuff. None of it is “bad” stuff. I’m sure it’s interesting stuff. And the grants they make along the way are likely helping people. But they’re focused on the wrong stuff. They are busy with a lot of activity, but the activity is not aligned toward a single goal. They have no strategy. They lack a framework within which to make decisions that affect the nature and direction of their philanthropy—decisions like “What’s the most important use of my time?” and “Which nonprofits are best equipped to accomplish our goals?” Without this decision-making framework called a strategy, many funders are flailing in the wind.
But they sure are keeping themselves busy.
You Don’t Know How to Get There
Once philanthropists have formulated their strategy and understand their desired future state, it should be easy to achieve it, right? Wrong.
As hard as it might have been to develop a strategy, the harder part is implementing it! Strategy most often fails in its implementation, not its formulation.
Why? Because instead of implementing the strategy, everyone starts doing stuff. But not the right stuff. They start working on the same old stuff they were working on before their strategy changed. There are four mistakes funders make that lead to this implementation implosion.
The first mistake is that the leader—the donor, CEO, or board chair—assumes that everyone knows how to implement the new strategy. “Everyone” might mean you and your spouse, your board, your corporate giving department, or your staff of 300 employees. They were all involved in the planning process, so they should know their next steps, right? Wrong. They don’t. I know this because every time I advise philanthropists on strategy implementation, I interview everyone involved. I ask them, “What are the top three priorities for implementing your new strategic plan?” Without failure they identify several dozen “top” priorities!
This leads us to our second mistake. Those involved don’t know their next step because they have not determined the top implementation priorities. In the decades I’ve spent advising funders to formulate and implement their strategies, the biggest problem with implementation (and the easiest one to fix) is they have not determined the three or four most important things that need to happen next to implement the strategy. If they don’t know top priorities, it’s impossible to know who is accountable for them, and what their own role is in addressing them. I’m talking about the top priorities for your entire operation, whether you are a single-family office, a foundation, a donor-advised fund, or a corporate giving program. Everyone needs to know what these are, who is accountable for them, and what their own role is in addressing that priority.
The third mistake is not reallocating your time to align with your implementation priorities. If your top priorities are to identify best practices in ending homelessness and find potential nonprofits to support, then guess what? You should be spending your time identifying best practices and finding grantees! Makes complete sense, right? But many philanthropists forget to apply common sense. They literally don’t look ahead in their calendars and reallocate how they spend their time. Instead, they make a fourth mistake.
The fourth mistake is they keep on doing all stuff they were doing before they set their strategy. They literally walk out of the strategic planning retreat, go back to their offices, open their busy calendars, look at all the stuff that’s already scheduled, and continue doing it. For example, let’s say you previously made a lot of small grants out of your donor-advised fund to support a wide range of causes in your community. Your calendar was probably filled with activities such as notifying potential nonprofits about funding opportunities, reviewing proposals, attending events, participating in a local education initiative.
But now you’ve decided you want to pick one issue and really make a difference. You are doubling down on ending homelessness (your new strategy). You’ll notice that none of the activities I just mentioned will help you with your top priorities to learn about best practices in ending homelessness or find potential grantees. Yet most funders ignore this reality. All that old stuff is scheduled out on their calendars, perhaps for a year, and so they keep doing it. Perhaps out of obligation. Perhaps out of guilt. But usually it’s because they made the first three mistakes: They assumed everyone knew how to implement the strategy, they never identified their priorities, and they never reallocated their time to align with their priorities. No wonder they keep doing the same old stuff!
They might do this for weeks, months, or a year. One foundation leader told me she anticipated it would take their staff an entire year before they could stop doing all the old stuff and shift to the actions required to implement their new strategic plan. She justified this by calling it the Strategy Transition Year!
Let me make this clear: You don’t need a year to change gears. You need to stop doing the things that no longer help you achieve your goals and start doing the things that do.
You Suffer From Donor Distraction Disorder
Why is it a problem that funders don’t have clear strategies and a plan to implement them? Not only do they end up busying themselves by working on the wrong stuff but sometimes they head off course in the entirely wrong direction.
Ideally, strategy is a funder’s North Star. It should be the tool they use to determine their top priorities and their path forward. As new opportunities appear on their doorstep, they can compare them against their strategy to determine whether the opportunity will help them achieve their goals or take them off course.
Without a strategy and a plan to achieve it, two bad things can happen to good philanthropists: They inadvertently pursue new directions based on whatever threats or opportunities present themselves, and their organizations can get pulled apart by diverse internal activities. Let’s examine these further.
1. Chasing shiny philanthropic squirrels. Without thinking, and absent a strategy, you inadvertently set a reactive direction—reacting to other people’s ideas, to trends, or to threats in the environment. Some- times this is as simple as “going along to get along.” You conform to what’s expected of you to maintain acceptance. Everyone else seems to be doing it, and you don’t want to be criticized for not participating.
A surprise candidate is elected prime minister. You decide this changes everything you’ve worked on in the past few years, and instead you should invest all your time and resources into “movement building.” You just returned from a global conference where the buzz was about the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and you decide you should reorganize your philanthropy around these goals.
Now, chances are there is nothing wrong with the new approach itself. Movements need building, and who can argue with global goals such as “gender equality” and “clean water and sanitation”? The problem occurs when you don’t already know what you want to accomplish with your philanthropy, and you don’t have a plan to get there. When you lack clarity, it’s easy to get pulled into the latest compelling idea or trend.
2. Getting pulled apart from within. In addition to being distracted by external changes and opportunities, your strategic vacuum results in your philanthropy being pulled apart internally. Why? Because you have talented people on your team. And in this vacuum, they take initiative to propose and try new endeavors. While their initiative is commendable (you didn’t hire slackers!), their disparate activities have the potential to derail the direction of your philanthropy. For example, while on vacation your trustee learns about an innovative approach to youth development and he urges you to explore it (even though you don’t fund youth development). Your vice president of programs decides policy advocacy is important and begins requiring all program officers to ask applicants to incorporate policy advocacy into grant requests.
The good news is that formulating and implementing your strategy is easier than you might think. It will bring you clarity, guide your decision-making, save you time, help you take risks, and increase your impact. Guess what else? It’s your secret weapon for demolishing delusional altruism.