Part I of the 5-part DorseyReports series: Before the Numbers Change, Behavior Changes
Each part stands alone and contributes to a broader examination of how changing market conditions influence results across sectors. Additional articles in this series are available on our website.
Results improve. Investment increases. Effort expands.
These are often treated as cause and effect but, in many cases, they are not.
Even the most basic relationship between effort, response, and results is not always linear. When that relationship is not fully understood, what appears to be progress may rest on conditions that are already changing.¹
Organizations often attribute improved results to increased effort when those results may reflect something else: how well that effort aligns with the conditions it encounters, and how those conditions have shifted.
Those conditions are not static. They change over time, shaped by how people respond, what they expect, and the alternatives available to them. These changes often appear early in observable response but are not always recognized for what they represent.
In response, organizations often act in ways that appear logical, including making no changes at all. Effort may increase, resources may be applied, and activity may even expand. Results may hold or even improve for a time.
What is changing, however, is not always the level of effort. It is the conditions that effort encounters and the results those conditions produce.
A simple example: activity can increase even as the nature of response changes. More may be happening, but the response is no longer the same, and over time it does not produce the same results.
As this continues, a gap develops between what an organization is doing and what is required to produce the desired result. That gap does not appear all at once, and it is not always recognized when it begins.
Results are produced downstream. What determines them takes shape upstream, where conditions are changing and response is formed.
Understanding what drives results requires looking upstream: at the conditions effort encounters, how response is formed, and how it changes.
This is where advantage begins and can be exploited early… but also where it is often lost.
Advantage depends on early examination of upstream conditions while options for adjustment remain broad and before weakening alignment is absorbed into the results.
Footnote
¹ Hana Fehrenbach, Marlene Walk, and Itay Greenspan, “Organizational Change in Nonprofit Organizations,” VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations 35 (2024): 1041-1045; Werner J. Reinartz et al., “Customer Perceptions of Firm Innovativeness and Market Performance,” Journal of Service Research (2024).