When Outputs Start Pretending to Be Outcomes
Why busy organizations often mistake activity for progress, and what leaders can do about it.
Dave Reno
5/23/202610 min read
A recent Fast Company article on toxic work culture put fresh language around something I already think about pretty often: the difference between outputs and outcomes.
One of the article’s red flags is a culture that values busyness over effectiveness. Long hours, constant meetings, visible exhaustion, nonstop responsiveness, random metrics, and a packed calendar can all start to look like progress, commitment, and productivity. Most of the time, these things are outputs. They show that something happened, but they do not automatically prove that any progress was made.
That idea stuck with me because it connects directly to a planning and execution problem I see in many organizations, and not just in public service. We often get very good at tracking what we did, but we’re not so good at proving what changed because of it.
That is the difference between an output and an outcome. Outcomes can be thought of as goals. They describe the change you want to make. Outputs are the activities, products, deliverables, and metrics that are supposed to help you achieve the goal.
Let’s be clear: outputs still matter. Outcomes cannot be achieved without quality outputs. The work still has to happen. Problems start when organizations lose the connection between the work they do and the change they seek to create. Outputs are not inherently the enemy. Unfocused outputs are the enemy.
Without a clear outcome, there is no real reason for the output. How do you know what to do if you do not know where you are heading?
Many organizations do name outcomes. Some strategic plans are full of them. The problem is that naming an outcome is not the same as managing toward one. If the daily work, funding decisions, staff priorities, meetings, metrics, and reporting habits are not connected to that outcome, the outcome becomes decorative. It sounds good on paper, but it does not guide execution.
Organizations get off track when they start treating meetings, reports, updates, responsiveness, and workload as proof of success, even when those outputs are not clearly connected to a result. And in public works, where the mission is so closely tied to service, stewardship, infrastructure, and public trust, tying outputs to outcomes matters.
I was privileged to give a presentation on this topic at a strategic planning event last year. The point of that session was to help teams across multiple public works divisions connect their own plans to the department’s larger strategic direction. I was trying to help people think more clearly about outcomes and how specific activities should support achieving them.
In the slide deck from that session (which you can view or download), I described outcomes as what the organization achieves and outputs as the actions we take to achieve those outcomes. Having the outcome provides direction for the work. The outputs should move the organization in that direction. Without that connection, even useful activity can become noise. That sounds obvious until you work in an environment where motion gets praised more consistently than impact.[1]
Public Works Makes This Easy to See
Public works is actually a useful place to explain the difference because much of the work is so tangible.
Take streets, for example. If the desired outcome is that residents are satisfied with the condition of local streets, then the rest of the chain should support that result. That does not mean one crew, one project, or one budget cycle can magically produce perfect streets. It means the organization should be able to explain how its outputs are moving toward that outcome.
The outcome provides direction, and the outputs create movement.
This may include gathering pavement condition data, increasing street preservation funding, coordinating with budget staff, completing mill and overlay work, patching potholes, communicating with residents, and tracking progress over time. Those are all necessary pieces of the work. But they only matter strategically if they are connected to the larger result: better street conditions that residents can see, feel, and trust.
A department can hold meetings, gather data, produce slide decks, issue updates, and complete work orders, and still miss the larger point if the actual condition of the streets does not improve in a noticeable way. Make sure your outputs move your organization toward a goal.
The Appeal of Looking Busy
Looking busy is easy to reward because it is easy to see. Outputs are attractive because they are easier to count, present, and discuss. A full calendar looks committed. A long meeting looks important. A detailed report looks thorough. A fast response looks responsive. A long list of completed tasks looks productive.
Sometimes those things are exactly what they appear to be. Good work often creates visible outputs. The problem is that visible outputs are easier to notice than progress toward outcomes, so organizations can start rewarding the appearance of progress more than progress itself.
If you look at annual reports from many local governments, you will find output data all over the place. Lists of activities, events, announcements, meetings, projects launched, materials created, and other visible proof that work was happening. Some of that information has value. It can help show how outcomes are being obtained. But too often, it is presented as if activity alone proves effectiveness. It does not.
A long list of things an organization touched is not the same as evidence that it made a difference. Sometimes it is just a polished way of saying, “Look how busy we were.”
That does not mean the work was necessarily pointless. It means the work still needs to be connected to a result. A better question than “what did we do?” is “what changed because we did it?” To quote one of the greatest rock bands in modern history, Tenacious D, “And it's not just a list of bullshit that we’ve done in the past. It's a chronicling of our rise to power!” How do your outputs connect to and support your outcome?
That is where part of an organization’s culture starts to reveal itself. If the organization mostly rewards motion, people will produce motion. If it rewards outcomes, people will get better at connecting their work to results.
Soon, long meetings begin to feel productive just because they are long. Big slide decks begin to feel strategic just because they are big. Fast responses begin to feel helpful even when they create confusion, rework, or noise. People start putting on an appearance of effort rather than pursuing the impact of effort.
That is how a workplace becomes performative. The change is almost never malicious, intentional, or quick. Confusing output with outcomes is a slow, steady, and self-reinforcing process that becomes visible when the work starts getting more praise than the actual impact. Did your team write and deploy 14 press releases this month? That’s roughly 3 to 4 per week! Sounds like quite a bit of work. But to what end? What outcome did all of that effort serve?
Why This Hurts More Than Productivity
This is not just an internal efficiency problem. It affects the people the organization exists to serve.
Residents do not care how many internal huddles happened before a decision was made. They do not care how many drafts a team produced unless those drafts led to something useful. They do not experience government as a spreadsheet of internal outputs.
They experience results. Their street is in better shape, the message made sense, the service improved, the process felt clearer, or public trust increased.
The connection between outputs and outcomes matters because every piece of work should be able to point back to a result. A meeting may be necessary. A report may be useful. A dashboard may help track progress. A communication plan may improve coordination. But each one should be able to answer the same basic question: how does this help create the change our residents said they wanted?
When that question is skipped, organizations can spend tons of energy producing work that feels important internally but changes little externally. The public does not care how complicated the internal process was unless the process produced something useful, fair, timely, or understandable. They care whether the service worked. They care whether the decision made sense. They care whether the organization followed through.
Outcome thinking forces an organization to keep returning to the core point: what changed for the people we serve? This question exposes weak habits. It also tends to make some organizations uncomfortable, because outcomes are harder to hide behind. You cannot camouflage a weak result with a hundred low-value deliverables forever.
Communications Has This Problem Too
Communications teams know this tension well. A flyer is not success. A webpage is not success. A social post is not success. A press release is not success. These are outputs.
Clear, timely, well-designed communication can absolutely help an organization move toward an outcome. Sometimes the flyer matters. Sometimes the webpage matters. Sometimes, the post, press release, public notice, or presentation is exactly what the situation requires.
Success is whether the public understood, showed up, changed behavior, trusted the information, or made better decisions because the communication did its job.
That sounds obvious, but many organizations still evaluate communications mostly by volume or visibility. They count the things produced rather than asking whether they changed anything.
How many posts did we publish?
How many flyers did we make?
How many meetings did we promote?
How many press releases did we send?
Those numbers matter, but they do not answer the harder question about outcomes. Better questions that do:
Did residents understand what changed?
Did they know what action to take?
Did confusion decrease?
Did participation increase?
Did trust improve?
Did the communication reduce avoidable calls, complaints, or missed expectations?
That is the difference between producing communication and communicating effectively. Once that distinction disappears, teams can get buried in reactive work that creates the feeling of momentum without much evidence of progress.
Outputs Burn People Out
Rewarding outputs over outcomes has another impact that is not discussed enough: doing so can burn out your best people.
High performers are not usually motivated by busyness for its own sake. They want purpose. They want to make a difference. They want to solve, improve, fix, or build something that matters.
That does not mean they dislike hard work. Often, it means the opposite. Strong employees will carry heavy workloads when they believe the work is connected to an outcome. When organizations reward outputs without tying them to outcomes, they create a deadening work environment. More meetings, more reports, more updates, more revisions, more responsibilities, more internal artifacts, more proof that people are busy.
All the while, there is not enough evidence that the work is changing anything or moving toward a result. This kind of environment drains people twice. First, it overloads them, and then it denies them meaning.
Eventually, talented people start doing the math. If their energy is going to be consumed either way, they would rather spend it somewhere that produces real impact. If an organization cannot offer that, it should not be surprised when strong employees either burn out or start looking for the exit. Connecting outputs clearly to outcomes does not protect people from work, but it does protect work from becoming pointless.
A Better Question for Leaders
A healthier organization still values outputs. It has to. Work must get done. Documents must be drafted. Projects must be managed. Meetings sometimes need to happen. But healthy organizations do not stop there. Healthy organizations ask:
What was this work for?
What changed because of it?
What outcome was it meant to support?
What evidence do we have that it made a difference?
Those questions are simple, but they can have a huge impact. They make it easier to cut low-value meetings. They make it easier to shorten slide decks. They make it easier to say no to work that exists only to reinforce internal dysfunction. They make it easier to protect staff time for work that actually moves the needle.
Most importantly, they help organizations remember that the point of all this activity is not the activity itself. It’s progress.
A team can be busy and still be unfocused. A department can produce a lot and still fail to achieve the outcome. An organization can appear highly responsive while still avoiding the harder work of deciding what progress should actually look like.
Leaders have to be careful about what they reward. If they reward motion, they will get more motion. If they reward alignment, clarity, and results, the work starts to point toward an outcome.
A Planning Approach that Can Help
Okay. So how does one reduce the likelihood of generating outputs that aren’t connected to outcomes? One practical way to avoid this is to use a planning model that forces alignment. That is one reason I like RPIE: Research, Planning, Implementation, and Evaluation. It will not fix a culture that does not want to be honest about results. But it does create discipline.
RPIE is a nationally recognized approach advocated by the Public Relations Society of America, and when used correctly, it can help teams stay focused on what matters: the outcome!
Research asks: What is the actual challenge?
Planning asks: What outcome are we trying to achieve, and how will we measure progress?
Implementation asks: What strategies, tactics, and outputs will help us get there?
Evaluation asks: Did anything change?
Many output-heavy organizations skip straight to implementation. They start making things before they are fully clear on the outcome. They hold the meeting, build the deck, publish the update, create the report, launch the program, or send the message before they have clearly answered what the work is supposed to change. Once that happens, teams can become very productive in the wrong direction.
A good planning framework does not eliminate busyness or output worship on its own, but it can help leaders ask better questions and keep work tied to purpose. If you are serious about outcomes, you need some kind of structure that forces the work to connect back to the goal. RPIE does that well.
For a brief overview of this approach, view or download Seton Hall University’s RPIE Model Outline PDF.
The Problem
Not every busy organization is broken or toxic. Sometimes people are just overloaded. Sometimes systems are clunky. Sometimes leaders inherit a culture they did not create, but once an organization starts rewarding outputs as if they are outcomes, it creates a real risk. People learn to perform work instead of advancing it. They get good at generating signs of commitment but get less practice connecting work to results.
That trade is bad anywhere. In public service, it’s worse because the cost eventually falls on the public. So, when organizations look very busy, very stressed, very booked, very responsive, and very proud of how much they are producing, it’s worth asking one uncomfortable question: Are we producing work, or are we producing change?
The answer is rarely simple. Outputs matter. Outcomes depend on them. But if the work is not clearly connected to the change the organization says it wants, then the organization may not have a workload problem. It may have an alignment problem.
Leadership Takeaway
If you lead a team, do not reward activity alone. Outputs matter. Meetings, reports, data, communication, projects, and follow-through are how work gets done. But they should always be clearly connected to the outcome they are supposed to support.
Reward clarity, prioritization, and work that moves an organization toward an outcome. Ask people how their task connects to a larger result. Ask whether the meeting, memo, slide deck, or update helped move anything that matters. The more your organization praises outputs without testing for impact, the more likely it is that you’re building a culture that burns out staff, frustrates residents, and isn’t focused on outcomes.
And remember this, too: your strongest people are usually not looking for more activity. They are looking for meaning. If your culture keeps rewarding outputs without connecting them to outcomes, you will eventually exhaust the very people most capable of producing real results. The goal is not to produce less work; it is to make sure the work supports the difference you want to make.
[1] The slide deck referenced here was created for a public works strategic planning discussion, not a formal communications planning training. As a result, some planning terms are adapted for a broader operational audience.