When Watching Becomes a Spectator Sport—Reflections on Ranking the Unrankable

Something delightfully peculiar happened this week that sent me spiraling down a methodological rabbit hole, cappuccino in hand and spreadsheets multiplying like rabbits across my desktop. The On Think Tanks organization—those lovely souls who spend their days contemplating the contemplators—has unveiled their "100 Think Tanks to Watch 2025." Not a ranking, they insist with the diplomatic firmness of someone explaining that sparkling wine is definitely not champagne. Just recognition. Just peer appreciation. Just 100 organizations singled out from the global constellation of 11,175 think tanks for the honor of being, well, watched.

As someone who harbors ambitions of creating indexes myself (yes, I confess this publicly, may the methodology gods forgive me), I found myself both enchanted and troubled by this initiative. It's rather like watching someone attempt to solve the exact puzzle that's been vexing you, using many of the same pieces, only to realize halfway through that you're both missing something fundamental about the picture you're trying to create.

The Seductive Tyranny of Lists

Let's begin with a confession that every policy wonk, academic, and organizational leader knows but rarely admits at cocktail parties: we are deliriously, embarrassingly, almost erotically drawn to rankings. Show us a list with our organization's name on it, and we'll experience a dopamine rush rivaling that of teenagers getting Instagram likes. Our press releases practically write themselves. Our donors nod approvingly. Our competitors gnash their teeth in the shadows.

The University of Pennsylvania's Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program understood this intoxicating dynamic better than most. From 1989 to 2021, they produced the Global Go To Think Tank Index, a magnificent edifice of recognition that involved nearly 4,000 individuals ranking thousands of institutions across dozens of categories. The United States emerged as the undisputed heavyweight champion with 1,871 think tanks, followed by India's respectable showing of 509 and China's 507. These weren't just numbers; they were scorecards in the global gladiatorial arena of ideas.

But here's the delicious irony that makes my index-creating heart simultaneously soar and sink: rankings designed to celebrate excellence often end up creating the very pathologies they seek to avoid. The On Think Tanks folks know this intimately. They've written eloquently about how traditional rankings encourage "boards chasing places on a list rather than pursuing the harder work of getting things right" and how organizations end up "trading favors and votes" in what becomes less a celebration of merit and more a sophisticated exercise in professional networking arbitrage.

The Peer-Driven Paradox

So On Think Tanks, bless their earnest hearts, decided to try something different. Instead of quantitative metrics—those cold, hard numbers that can be gamed six ways from Sunday—they've opted for peer nomination. Think tanks nominating other think tanks. Sector professionals recognizing sector professionals. The community celebrating the community.

It's rather like asking a room full of poets to determine which among them writes the most transcendent verse, or requesting that chefs judge each other's soufflés. There's wisdom in that approach, certainly. Who better to recognize excellence than those who understand the craft intimately? Who better to appreciate the subtle artistry of translating complex research into policy influence than those who've spent careers attempting the same Sisyphean task?

And yet—and here's where my spreadsheet-loving soul starts twitching—peer nomination doesn't escape the fundamental problem it seeks to solve. It simply relocates the battlefield from quantitative metrics to social capital. Instead of gaming citation counts or media mentions, organizations can now optimize for network visibility, conference attendance, and membership in the right professional circles. The currency changes from numbers to relationships, but the economy of recognition remains stubbornly transactional.

Consider the mathematics of inclusion for a moment. With 11,175 think tanks globally, the "100 to Watch" represents approximately 0.89% of the global population. That means 99.11% of think tanks—many doing extraordinary, contextually vital, deeply impactful work—are implicitly relegated to the "not worth watching right now" category. The semantic gymnastics of insisting this isn't a ranking feels somewhat like declaring that an exclusive party with a velvet rope and bouncer is merely a "curated gathering" rather than an exercise in social hierarchy.

The Geography of Being Watched

On Think Tanks deserves genuine credit for attempting to address one of the most pernicious problems in global rankings: the tyranny of context-blind comparison. They've organized their list by subregion, acknowledging that judging "a team in Tanzania alongside one in Indonesia and another in the United States, without deep knowledge of each context, simply isn't fair or meaningful." This is progress. This is thoughtful. This shows genuine reflection on the limitations that have plagued previous ranking attempts.

But—and there's always a but when humans try to fairly distribute recognition—the peer nomination system may inadvertently privilege certain types of visibility over others. Think tanks that publish in English, that attend international conferences, that have the resources to maintain active presence in the On Think Tanks community network, that can afford to send staff to connect with potential nominators—these organizations have structural advantages in a peer-driven system that have nothing to do with the quality or impact of their work.

Imagine an extraordinarily effective think tank in rural Niger that shapes regional agricultural policy through patient relationship-building with local government officials. They publish primarily in French and local languages. They don't attend global conferences because their entire budget goes toward the actual work rather than professional networking. They're having precisely the kind of contextually appropriate impact that should be celebrated. But will they be nominated by peers in the global On Think Tanks network? The system isn't designed to exclude them intentionally, but the architectural realities of peer networks mean that visibility breeds visibility, and invisibility compounds itself.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Impact

Here's where my nascent index-creating ambitions collide headfirst with methodological reality: what exactly are we trying to measure, recognize, or celebrate? The On Think Tanks initiative explicitly states that "no technical performance metrics or output-based criteria were used in the selection process." This is both refreshing and deeply frustrating in equal measure.

Refreshing because anyone who has spent five minutes with impact metrics knows they're simultaneously essential and catastrophically inadequate. How do you quantify the value of a think tank that prevented a disastrous policy decision through private counsel to a minister? How do you compare the impact of one organization that shapes ten national policies with another that influences one regional policy that affects millions? How do you weigh public visibility against behind-the-scenes effectiveness?

Frustrating because the absence of explicit criteria doesn't mean the absence of implicit criteria. It simply means those criteria remain opaque, unarticulated, and immune to systematic examination or improvement. When peers nominate based on their "appreciation of good practice" and "collective knowledge," what specific practices are they appreciating? What knowledge are they drawing upon? Without articulating this, we can't learn from it, refine it, or challenge our own biases within it.

The Winners, The Losers, and The 99%

Let's address the elephant doing a victory lap around the room: rankings create winners and losers, and we all care desperately about which category we inhabit. This is not a character flaw or a professional weakness. It's human nature colliding with organizational survival in a resource-constrained environment where reputation translates directly into funding, influence, and the ability to continue existing.

Being named to the "100 to Watch" list will open doors. Donors will pay attention. Journalists will return calls faster. Collaboration opportunities will materialize. These are not trivial benefits. They're the currency of organizational sustainability in the competitive marketplace of policy ideas. And this is precisely why the stakes of recognition systems matter so profoundly.

The 100 organizations included will update their websites, refresh their press kits, and casually mention their inclusion in funding proposals. This is both completely understandable and somewhat uncomfortable to acknowledge. Meanwhile, the 11,075 organizations not included will do what excluded entities always do: rationalize the exclusion, question the methodology, redouble their efforts for next year, or—most tragically—begin to internalize the implicit message that their work isn't worth watching.

The downstream consequences cascade in predictable patterns. Funders, overwhelmed by the cacophony of worthy causes and limited by finite resources, use recognition systems as heuristic shortcuts. "They're on the list" becomes a proxy for due diligence. Board members advocate for partnerships with "prestigious" organizations. The gaps between the recognized and unrecognized widen not because the quality of work diverges but because recognition itself becomes self-reinforcing.

A Modest Proposal (Or Several)

So what's an aspiring index-creator to do with all this troublesome reality? Abandon the enterprise entirely and resign ourselves to a recognition-free existence where good work happens in silence and mediocrity flourishes in the absence of peer accountability? Hardly. But we might consider some alternative architectures that address the structural limitations while preserving the genuine value of collective recognition.

First, what if we shifted from recognizing organizations to recognizing practices? Instead of anointing 100 think tanks, curate 100 methodological innovations, communication strategies, governance structures, or collaborative approaches. Describe what made them effective in their specific contexts. Allow multiple organizations to learn from and adapt these practices without creating organizational hierarchies. This transforms recognition from a competitive commodity into a collaborative learning resource.

Second, what if recognition required rotation? Any organization included in one year becomes ineligible for the next two or three years. This forces the community to continually discover and elevate different voices, preventing the calcification of prestige hierarchies and ensuring that emerging organizations have pathways to visibility. It acknowledges that excellence isn't static and that who deserves attention this year might be different from who deserved it last year.

Third, what if we made the criteria explicit, transparent, and debatable? Publish not just the list but the rubric. Show us what "good practice" means in operational terms. Allow the community to examine, challenge, and refine those criteria over time. Make the methodology itself a collaborative project rather than a proprietary formula. The messiness of public deliberation is a feature, not a bug. It ensures that recognition systems evolve as our understanding of impact evolves.

Fourth, what if we expanded the voices involved in recognition? Peer nomination is valuable, but peers represent only one perspective. What if community organizations that think tanks claim to serve had formal roles in the nomination process? What if the populations affected by policy changes had structured input? What if journalists who cover policy debates, government officials who implement policies, and civil society activists who advocate for change all contributed their perspectives? This wouldn't simplify the process—quite the opposite—but it might create recognition that reflects actual impact rather than professional popularity.

Fifth, what if we embraced radical transparency about limitations? Lead with what the recognition system cannot capture, who it systematically excludes, what biases it embodies, and what alternative perspectives it misses. Not buried in methodology footnotes but front and center. This doesn't solve the problems, but it prevents the dangerous illusion that recognition equals comprehensive assessment of worth.

The View from the Spreadsheet

As someone who dreams in columns and rows, who sees patterns in data and meaning in metrics, I'm genuinely sympathetic to the challenge On Think Tanks has undertaken. Creating any recognition system involves navigating impossible tradeoffs. Be too quantitative, and you encourage gaming while missing contextual nuance. Be too qualitative, and you introduce opacity while privileging insider knowledge. Cast a wide net, and you dilute meaningful differentiation. Be selective, and you create painful exclusions. There are no solutions here, only choices about which problems you're willing to tolerate in service of which values you're trying to advance.

The "100 Think Tanks to Watch" initiative represents a genuine attempt to do better than traditional rankings. It acknowledges limitations, seeks peer wisdom, and explicitly rejects the "best" terminology that has caused so much damage. These are not trivial improvements. They reflect serious thought about the pathologies of recognition systems and earnest efforts to construct alternatives.

But perhaps the deeper question isn't whether this particular list is good or bad, rigorous or flawed, inclusive or exclusive. Perhaps the question is whether the sector's obsessive focus on recognition and ranking diverts energy from the harder, less glamorous work of actually improving practice. Do we need better ways to recognize good work, or do we need better ways to share learning, transfer methodologies, build capacity, and collaborate across contexts without the status conferral that recognition lists inevitably create?

The Bottom Line (Because Every Daily Pulse Needs One)

If I were advising On Think Tanks (and to be clear, nobody asked, but we index-dreamers are generous with unsolicited feedback), I'd suggest this: make the "100 to Watch" list the beginning of a conversation rather than the culmination of one. Use it as a prompt for deeper investigation. For each organization included, commission detailed case studies of their approaches. Interview their teams, their partners, their critics. Document what worked, what failed, what surprised them, what they'd do differently. Create a genuine learning resource that transcends the list itself.

Make the methodology radically transparent and collaboratively improvable. Publish the nomination data. Show us the patterns. Let the community examine where the peer networks are strong and where they're weak. Invite organizations to self-nominate with specific practice examples. Build systems that surface excellence from unexpected places rather than confirming existing hierarchies.

And perhaps most importantly, create recognition pathways that don't require choosing 100 winners from 11,175 worthy organizations. Find ways to celebrate the long tail of good work happening in contexts that global networks rarely illuminate. Resistance to rankingification doesn't require abandoning recognition entirely. It requires reimagining what recognition could be if we designed it to foster learning rather than status competition.

For those of us harboring index-creating ambitions, this initiative offers both cautionary tale and inspiration. It reminds us that good intentions don't automatically generate good outcomes, that transparency matters more than sophistication, and that the hardest challenge isn't collecting data or calculating scores. The hardest challenge is designing recognition systems that strengthen rather than stratify, that celebrate without excluding, and that advance collective learning rather than individual prestige.

The On Think Tanks team deserves credit for trying, for reflecting on past failures, and for iterating toward something better. My spreadsheet-laden critique comes from a place of genuine respect for the difficulty of the task they've undertaken. But respect and critique are not mutually exclusive. They're complementary tools for pushing the sector toward practices that serve the ultimate goal: not creating perfect lists of excellent think tanks, but creating conditions where more think tanks can do excellent work that actually solves the problems our world desperately needs solved.

So yes, congratulations to the 100 organizations being watched this year. May your phones ring with opportunity and your inboxes overflow with collaboration proposals. But perhaps an even bigger congratulations to the 11,075 organizations doing the daily, grinding, essential work of bridging research and policy in contexts large and small, recognized and unrecognized, watched and unwatched.

After all, the most important question isn't who made the list. It's whether the existence of the list makes the world materially better at translating knowledge into action, evidence into policy, and research into human flourishing. That's a metric worth optimizing for, even if it's maddeningly difficult to measure.

What recognition systems have you found genuinely useful in your work? What alternatives to traditional rankings might better serve the policy research sector? And most importantly, what think tank practices have you learned from that deserve wider attention, regardless of whether they appear on anyone's list? Let's continue this conversation in the comments, where the real learning happens.

About the Author

Dr. Julius Kirimi Sindi is a global expert in research funding, policy impact, and donor relations. With extensive experience in analyzing philanthropy, business, and science funding, Dr. Sindi fosters sustainable and inclusive research ecosystems. He has facilitated international business relationships across Africa, Europe, and Asia. His upcoming book, "The Blueprint of Life Well Lived," explores successful strategies for navigating complex business environments while achieving sustainable growth.