In my December 2025 article for Social Value Aotearoa ‘The Future of Social Value Depends on What We Do Next’, I challenged the rise of “drive-through SROI” analyses that promise compelling returns without meaningful stakeholder involvement or transparency. More recently, in my SVA article, Measurement is not the point: better decisions are, I argued that the purpose of measurement is not to produce more sophisticated reports, but to make better decisions.

These arguments point to a deeper question: are we becoming better at measuring value while losing sight of what value actually means?

Socrates is famously attributed with the observation that “the unexamined life is not worth living”. The same challenge applies to our professional lives. What is the point of producing analysis if we do not interrogate it, question its assumptions or allow it to change our thinking?

The word ‘social’ matters. Social value is about people, relationships, communities and society: whose lives improve, whose deteriorate, whose voices count and who bears the costs of decisions. It cannot be understood solely through organisational performance indicators, financial returns or neatly packaged accounts of impact.

Yet we are surrounded by content, analysis and metrics, while I worry that we are giving less attention to the substance beneath them. Reports are produced at speed and executive summaries replace engagement with evidence. Impressive numbers travel further than the assumptions behind them. Analysis becomes something to consume rather than interrogate.

AI is accelerating this trend. We can generate fluent, plausible analysis in seconds. But fluency is not insight. A compelling narrative is not evidence. And a sophisticated calculation does not demonstrate that we understand the lives our decisions affect.

We can measure people with increasing precision while understanding them less.

This is not an argument against quantification or monetary valuation. These can make invisible value visible and challenge decisions that privilege financial returns over wider social outcomes. And I have built a career out of this! But numbers require interpretation, and interpretation requires judgement, context and engagement with the people behind them.

The True & Fair Project, hosted by Social Value International, addresses a related problem in mainstream accounting: the costs businesses impose on society can remain invisible in financial statements, even when other people bear the consequences. Its work challenges us to account for these costs rather than allow them to disappear from the picture of business performance. Learn more about the True & Fair Project.

The same principle applies to social impact measurement and valuation. What we choose to count, what we leave out and whose perspectives inform our analysis are not merely technical decisions. They reflect judgements about what matters. When stakeholder involvement is absent, assumptions are opaque or uncertainty is concealed, we risk producing numbers that serve the needs of the analyst rather than the people whose lives are being assessed.

Our responsibility is to bring technical rigour and human understanding together. That means reading carefully, questioning confidently, acknowledging uncertainty and listening to experiences that challenge our assumptions. It means treating the people whose lives we measure as participants in defining value, not simply as sources of data.

Ultimately, social value is not about how much analysis we can produce. It is about whether that analysis helps us understand what matters to people and make decisions that reflect it.

If the people whose lives we measure have less influence over our decisions than the numbers we produce about them, we have not advanced social value. We are simply getting better at counting.