When a selection system repeatedly misses valuable organizations, the natural response is to add another corrective.
Look beyond the usual networks.
Account for smaller organizations.
Be careful about pedigree.
Watch for category bias.
Consider unconventional evidence.
Eventually the list becomes very long.
That should make us suspicious.
Astronomers once explained every unexpected planetary movement by adding another adjustment to a model that placed Earth at the center of the universe. The observations weren’t wrong. The organizing model was.
The same possibility exists in philanthropy.
Perhaps many of the Recognition and Identification Gaps we observe are not separate failures at all. Perhaps they arise from a common assumption: that valuable organizations will reliably display the characteristics our selection systems have learned to recognize.
They won’t.
The breakthrough is not to eliminate judgment or proxies. No selector has unlimited time or perfect information.
It is to stop confusing the model with reality.
The most dangerous blind spot in a recognition system may be the belief that what it knows how to recognize is the same thing as what is valuable.