How the word ‘impact’ has adverse effects—and why honest language matters in the social sector
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.I have quarrels with many words. Some are intense, long-running disputes; others are milder irritations. The word ‘impact’—deployed relentlessly across the social sector—belongs firmly to the first category.To be sure, I have no complaint with the word in its original, physical sense.
The impact of an asteroid striking the Earth. The impact of a cricket bat meeting a ball. These usages are precise, literal and honest.
My quarrel is with the word as it has migrated to the vocabulary of development work and philanthropy: “Our work’s impact has transformed the lives of 10,000 women” or “the impact of our work now spans four states.” In these usages, a six-letter word carries such enormous weight that what is conveyed could be false, distorted or simply hubristic, even if that is not the user’s intention. This matters because words are not merely labels that we attach to reality after the fact. They shape how we think about reality, what we look for and what we ignore.
When a word embeds a false assumption, it quietly bends thinking in the wrong direction—and in the social sector, wrong thinking has consequences for real people. Consider what the word ‘impact’ implies. First, it conveys direct and unique causality.
That we did this work and therefore something changed. But that is almost never true in the social sector. Change in human systems is always a collective effort; it is often iterative; and most likely takes place over a period of time.
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