Guiding Principles

When making a decision with the TBL, use these guiding principles:

1. Serve the needs of decision-makers, stakeholders, and the general public:
   • A successful TBL approach should provide decision-makers with information that will help them make decisions—and help them explain and justify these decisions to stakeholders and the general public. A TBL should keep their needs in mind throughout the process.
2. Reflect values, goals and objectives:
   • Start with the community's values, goals and objectives. Identify these in relevant plans and policies. For example, the Eugene-Springfield Metropolitan Area General Plan (Metro Plan) and the Central Lane Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) articulate values, goals and objectives related to economic development, housing, transportation, and environmental protection. Then consider whether other values, goals and objectives apply to the specific decision at hand. Consider using (values) laddering to determine what people care most about—and how to talk about it. Identified goals can be arranged as sub-goals of the "three P's/E's" of the triple bottom line.
3. Quantify direct costs and benefits:
   • At a minimum, quantify the direct public costs and primary benefits for a proposed action to determine a narrow "single bottom line." For example, if the purpose of a proposed action is to reduce traffic congestion or improve traffic safety, quantify (and ideally monetize) the expected benefits to traffic flow and safety to get a sense of the return on investment (i.e., a return on the direct monetary outlay of the public sector).
4. Identify other major costs and benefits:
   • Identify and, when possible, quantify other major direct and indirect costs and benefits: ones that could sway decision-makers one way or another. Although there could be dozens or even hundreds of potential costs and benefits to measure, focus attention on just a handful of the most significant ones that the professional literature or local opinion deems most significant, with at least one addressing each of the three elements of the triple bottom line. Special-purpose TBL tools, even if fully used, can still suggest important costs and benefits to look at.
5. Who benefits and who pays?
   • For TBL and all good evaluation of public policy, showing that an investment has a positive TBL in the aggregate is not enough: decision-makers want and have a right to want to know how those benefits and costs are distributed among different interest groups. Make explicit who benefits and who pays. Analysts can provide information about the distribution of impacts (across TBL categories and sub-categories, and by location or group). They cannot (and should not) make the final normative judgment about the value of different distributions: that is a task for decision-makers.
6. Develop rough estimates, but highlight uncertainties:
   • Because the future is uncertain, it may be difficult and expensive—and ultimately not worthwhile— to try to develop precise estimates of costs and benefits. Rough ("back of the envelope") estimates may be sufficient for making decisions. This point is consistent with points 3 and 4 above: focus on identifying the big costs and benefits and getting their estimates approximately right. But it is important to highlight uncertainties and risks. For example, the Sustainable Action Map from the City of Olympia, and its variants, explicitly call for a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis aimed at highlighting the upside and downside risks.
7. Express costs and benefits in meaningful units:
   • When possible, quantify costs and benefits using tangible and comparable units: for example, not total costs and benefits, but costs per payer or user (per unit of time). To get a handle on less tangible costs and benefits, look at opportunities costs: What might be done instead?
8. Help decision-makers balance priorities:
   • Often no one option will be clearly superior to all others. Rather one option will be better in one respect and a different option will be better in another. Which is the better option overall is ultimately a policy (value) judgment. A TBL approach should provide decision-makers with solid information for making choices, but not dictate the "right" answer. Just as people can balance the price, taste, convenience, and nutritional values of different food choices to decide what to have to eat, so too can (and must) decision-makers balance multiple measures of public investments. Staff would do well to provide a Consumer Reports-style summary of the key pros and cons of different alternatives. Those needing more information should be referred to more detailed data. The key pros and cons—those coming out of points 3 and 4 above —will likely be determined, in part, a priori based on ideas of what are key values, goals and objectives. But the list of key pros and cons should be revised a posteriori as analysis shows little difference between alternatives for some evaluation measures. Typically, only a handful of 50 or more evaluation measures will be "heavy lifters," i.e., ones that clearly distinguish between different alternatives.
9. Integrate TBL methods into all phases of decision-making:
   • Applying a TBL analysis should not be some kind of optional effort, applied separately at the end of the regular process. Rather TBL methods should be incorporated into all phases of decision-making: identifying values, determining goals and objectives, selecting evaluation measures, making plans, setting policies, allocating funding to projects, and developing projects. That is what it means for TBL to be a framework for decision-making. In general, TBL methods are more helpful when applied earlier.
10. Monitor outcomes:
    • After a decision is made, the outcomes of an action should be monitored to ensure these are in line with what was expected—and to inform and improve future decision-making efforts.

Most of these guiding principles are ones that would be prudent for anyone responsible for managing and investing someone else's assets.