Measuring soft factors differently: through capacity building and collective intelligence

Re-enchanting the creativity of mission-driven companies

When finance began trying to make the world of impact viable and help it grow, the first instinct was to turn every human intuition into a numerical indicator, every quality into a KPI, and every human dynamic into an Excel spreadsheet. This logic is naturally inherited from the world of hard factors, where one can indeed measure temperature, speed, or performance with precision — and where two observers will invariably obtain the same value.

But soft factors — intention, alignment, living governance, authentic leadership, impact potential, cultural coherence — cannot be broken down into decimals or mechanical sub-indicators. As this other article reminds us "The silent trap of criteria turning into objectives: a challenge for impact finance" and the web page "The AGILE tool explained like I’m five", trying to atomize these dimensions into mini-KPIs leads to heaviness, superficiality, and paradoxically, less comparability, even creating distance that distorts the measurement.

In response to this dead end, another path is proposed: strengthen people rather than multiply metrics. The world of training faces the same challenges, for example, in avoiding the overload and dilution of training on behavioral skills. In most cases, the ideal solution comes from a mix of hard measurement (KPIs) and the ability to measure the unmeasurable (soft), often taking a different shape in each use case.

Let’s take a closer look at how soft factors can be measured in real time.

1. Measuring soft factors through capacity building

Measuring the human requires… developing the human.

Instead of adding intermediate methodological layers, which make everything more expensive, more complex, longer, and heavier, the approach rather consists of:

• Training evaluators to recognize impact patterns.
• Giving them a simple, stable, and shared common language.
• Creating regular learning loops where everyone compares, refines, and aligns their observations, peer-to-peer.
• Evolving the collective understanding of a criterion as real projects enrich the knowledge base.

Over time, this capacity building reduces the grey area:

"More feedback → more convergence → more reliability."

It is ultimately the opposite of a frozen KPI: it is a living, sensitive and robust measure, rooted in practice, that is documented, sourced, and shared.

2. Collective intelligence: a powerful sensor

In impact work, a single perspective is never enough.
The solution is often to cross-check observers.

When a sector expert, an entrepreneur, an investor, and a citizen answer the same question, their perceptions add up, correct, and complement one another. This process is called in the English-speaking world:

• Collective intelligence,
• Multi-stakeholder sensemaking,
• Peer review meets outsider insight,
• Reality triangulation...

In other words:
we don’t measure the project — we measure what the ecosystem sees of the project.

And since each angle covers the blind spot of another, the resulting convergence is more reliable than an isolated indicator.

3. Re-enchanting the spontaneity of mission-driven creativity

The risk of trying too hard to quantify soft factors is that it extinguishes the spark.

Mission-driven innovation often comes from:

• a right intention,
• a strong intuition,
• a rare human alignment,
• a humble and determined leadership.

These elements should not be broken down into ten mini-measures, but rather captured, listened to, interpreted.

By valuing a simple, subjective but structured reading — such as level 1 of the AGILE tool — an environment is created where intuition and vision are taken seriously, without being crushed by technicality.

Creativity then finds a space for expression:

"Entrepreneurial drive is no longer stifled under a battery of KPIs; it is supported, highlighted, and given points of reference."

This re-enchants the dynamic of mission-driven companies: they feel understood, not “measured”.

4. A new philosophy of measurement: human, progressive, living

The AGILE approach proposed on this portal assumes one essential idea:
it is possible to achieve reliability without losing sensitivity.

The method therefore combines:

• a first spontaneous reading (first-impression assessment or sketch);
• a second documented reading (evidence-based assessment);
• a third action-oriented reading (impact roadmap or project governance).

It’s not a mechanism, it’s a shared learning journey.

Measurement becomes:

• progressive (not everything is applied to everyone),
• contextualized (peer + third party),
• incremental (real data → increasingly refined grid),
• compatible with existing methods (ESG, SDG, IRIS+, Impact Management Norms).

It is a deeply contemporary philosophy, aligned with international trends:

"Measure less harshly, train more, and understand better, while ultimately providing the data needed to track the project."

Conclusion: measuring soft factors is about learning together

Soft factors become reliable only when we stop trying to reduce them to numbers, and start to orchestrate collective intelligence around them.

This approach thus aims to:

• protect creativity,
• respect human complexity and work with it,
• facilitate comparability over time,
• enable the emergence of projects truly ready for impact finance.

In fact, it aims to reconcile two worlds:
the rigor expected by funders,
the freedom essential to mission-driven companies.

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