This echoed ideas I’ve been turning over, which were brought into sharper focus recently by a Harvard Business Review article in the March 2009 edition.

The article “When Should a Process Be Art, Not Science?” posits that many critical processes should be treated as arts not sciences, leading to many differences in how they are managed. A useful point was that many of these art processes can be supported by well-controlled ‘science’ processes.

We should think about which processes in philanthropy are arts, and which are sciences.

It should be noted that in medicine, like philanthropy, you are making interventions, prescriptions that hopefully have positive but can also have disastrously negative consequences, if they’re the wrong ones. A dissonant chord is much less dangerous than a grant strategy or healing protocol gone awry. Lives are literally at stake sometimes. We downplay too often the potentially harmful effects of our interventions.

I have always considered the successful practice of philanthropy ultimately to be an art. Good philanthropy is grounded in science, yes, but requires proper application of that science for a particular context – which ultimately requires sound human judgment. To my mind, that’s where the focus on metrics and principles of “effectiveness” becomes limiting (Jeff Trexler’s post on your recap of CEP’s principles articulates this well); the dialogue has become imbalanced in favor of science, and indeed sometimes is dismissive of this artistic side – with potentially grave consequences.