Not every organization is capable of demonstrating results, a nonprofit CEO complained.

James Q. Wilson noted to important variables about service organizations: whether their input could be easily tracked (or not) and whether their output could be easily tracked.

An example of both being easy is the Social Security administration (payments to the elderly). The amount of each check is easily verified as correct, as is the number of checks cashed by recipients. An example of both being difficult is restaurant health inspection. The number of violations found or businesses checked is difficult to relate to the desired goals. Likewise, the level of sickness in the population is difficult to correlate with the cleanliness of the food industry (at least, at the levels of food inspection that are politically feasible).

One path to Lost Purpose is to use a bad measure what quantifying input or output is hard - and not realize that you are using a bad measure.