Black Box Thinking: Growth Mindset and the Secrets of High Performance

by Matthew Syed

One of the ironies of charitable spending is that the one statistic many donors do tend to look at can actually undermine the pursuit of evidence. The so-called overhead ratio measures the amount of money spent on administration compared with the front line. Most donors are keen for charities to keep this ratio low: they want money to go to those who really need it rather than office staff. But given that evidence-gathering counts as an administrative cost rather than treatment, this makes it even more difficult for charities to conduct tests. As Ord puts it: ‘You might think that organizations would know the most effective treatment. But often they don’t and one of the reasons for that is because they don’t do as much program evaluation as we would like because they’re trying to keep the overhead ratio low. Also, they just generally aren’t aware of these figures.’