Why social value strategies fail
All organisations have developed and implemented strategies that have failed to live up to early expectations. While failure can be challenging, it plays a crucial role in driving growth, learning, and long-term success in organisations. Here are four common reasons for failure in social value delivery and how to avoid them.
Problem 1: A disconnect from reality
Winning that future tender is exciting and the rush to put the perfect bid together can lead to unrealistic consequences. Many organisations make the mistake of committing to social value interventions without fully exploring:
- The impact customers and stakeholders want to have
- The challenges local areas are facing
- Their capabilities as an organisation to deliver social value
Solution: Understand your context
Start by thinking about your organisation as part of the wider economic, social, and environmental systems in which it operates. From there, assess the social value priorities that are most relevant to your customers and communities, and consider the levers you can pull to address them.
Problem 2: Not understanding the problem
Many social value strategies fail because they don’t recognise the real factors holding the organisation back from consistently creating measurable impact. These might be challenges around measuring social value, internal knowledge of creating social value, gaining buy-in from leadership, as well as many other considerations.
Solution: Be honest about the real challenges
This means being curious about how your colleagues across the organisation understand and interact with social value. What's getting in the way for them, and what's working? Use ‘gap analysis’ to identify and understand potential blockers. For instance, if you want to spend more with local businesses, are you able to measure your current local spend as a baseline? If not, that’s a gap to fill.
Problem 3: Change is hard
There are volumes of research showing how difficult change management is. Social value often represents change for your employees and your supply chain as well.
Solution: Build shared ownership
Bring colleagues together to agree which issues the organisation must address as a part of its social value strategy. Maybe it’s not clear who owns social value; perhaps there are too many initiatives, or insufficient coordination between them. The important thing is to open the door for a constructive conversation to generate ideas.
Problem 4: Trying to boil the ocean
We’ve often seen ‘wish list’ social value strategies, with unrealistic targets and too much to do. This leads to frustration, inefficiency, and few meaningful outcomes.
Solution: Be bold about prioritisation
If you have an exciting set of ideas, great. The next step is to be ambitious but realistic about which you can achieve and when. Start by identifying low-effort/high-impact actions to get the ball rolling.