How the word ‘impact’ has adverse effects—and why honest language matters in the social sector

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.

Take the Azim Premji Foundation’s work with government school teachers. When we provide teacher training and students subsequently learn better, there are many things at work simultaneously—the effort of the teacher, supportive colleagues at school, the principal’s attitude, family circumstances and government initiatives running in parallel.

To say that the “impact of our work” is that students are learning better is not just imprecise; it is reductive and actively diminishes everyone else’s contribution. At best, it reflects a narrow view of how change happens. At worst, it is hubris dressed up as shoddy evidence.

Second, ‘impact’ implies a direct, traceable relationship between cause and effect. If you are working to improve livelihoods or to advance gender rights or the safety of children, there is no such direct causal pathway.

The systems you are working within are human systems—adaptive, unpredictable, shaped by history, culture, power and dozens of other variables operating at once. The word ‘impact’ conjures the image of a mechanistic world where levers produce predictable outcomes. But social and human systems are not like this.

Third, ‘impact’ is tonally aggressive in a way that should give us pause. It suggests force applied to an object. When we apply that framing to our relationships with communities, teachers, farmers or women workers, something important is lost. The implied violence of the metaphor goes unnoticed because it has become so routine.

Fourth, ‘impact’ completely ignores unintended consequences. Every intervention in a complex human system produces effects that are not planned. Some are benign, some are not. The language of impact creates no conceptual space for these. It encourages organizations to count only what they intended to produce, which makes for flattering reports and poor learning.

My antipathy towards this word is not aesthetic. The real damage is that it shapes thinking. It creates pressure for simple attributions in contexts where attribution is genuinely impossible, unwarranted and counterproductive.

It makes funders ask the wrong questions and organizations provide false answers. It makes the entire enterprise more mechanistic, less honest and less effective. And it lends itself to significant exaggeration of what an organization has actually contributed.

I should be clear, I am not suggesting that every organization that uses the word ‘impact’ does so with any intention to mislead. Many use it simply because it has become part of the lexicon. Or because they are responding to the demands of their donors.

That is precisely the problem. The word has been used so often by donors, researchers and large institutions that it now travels on autopilot through the sector, shaping thinking and surviving without anyone pausing to ask whether it is honest, and no less importantly, whether it is useful.

The word I prefer is ‘effect.’ It is a more honest word. When you do something in a complex system, there are effects—some intended, some not. The word does not claim that you alone caused them; only that your work contributed to a field of change in which effects emerged. It preserves complexity. It creates room for the unintended. It does not erase everyone else’s contribution. It does not imply mechanistic certainty where none exists.

Does any of this matter? It does. It has long been acknowledged in academia that the words we habitually use shape the contours of our thought. In the social sector, where the stakes involve the lives and dignity of people with limited power, the least we owe them is honesty—including honesty in the words we choose to describe our own contributions.

The author is CEO of Azim Premji Foundation.