I must confess that I like more. More Gummi Bears, more chocolate, more wine, and more money. Temptation lurks behind everything. And regularly my defenses are too weak. One more glass cannot hurt that much. One more sweet will not make me fat. Perhaps that’s the reason why I was attracted to Performance Improvement. PI can be seen as a more philosophy too: more performance, ever more performance.
This more idea is obviously tempting for many people. We easily can see it in sports. It’s all about higher, faster, farther. It is not quite clear why it is so important and fascinating to swim one hundredth of a second faster or to jump one quarter of an inch higher. But it is. It makes hundreds of millions of people stay up late at night to watch, when the world championships or the Olympics take place on another continent.
Sport has been fascinating through the centuries. Still there is an important difference. The ancient Olympic Games were to honor the gods, and the trophy was a laurel wreath. Today the purpose is to make money. Honi soit qui mal y pense. Extraterrestrial empirical research on the gods of us strange inhabitants of earth just might show astonishing insights.
Perhaps the most important incarnation of this more idea is our conviction that the economy has to grow. We create debt to invest in a better future. Then we need growth to pay back our debt plus interest. The better future will have arrived when we can pay for our debt. Economic growth becomes synonymous with our better future.
And since the 1940s we have a measure that allows us to see when we arrive: the Gross Domestic Product or GDP. It allows us to measure economic growth. While there is much debate about the appropriateness of the GDP, it has served us well for many decades. The goal of growth helped us to fight hunger and poverty and it helped us to improve the livelihood of billions of people. Growth seemed to be the solution for everything, and when you look at the promises of politicians in almost any country, economic growth seems to be an almost religious belief.
But the world is changing and developing and the GDP might have outlived the context it was developed for. Larry Summers, one of the most influential economists, believes that the GDP will not grow much in future. This really would be a game changer. We wouldn’t be able to project our present problems into the future and promise that growth, more money, more goods, and more services will finally solve them. A check written on the future would not pay. Then the question of who the winners and losers will be will hit us much harder.
Back in the 1970s, another economist, Fred Hirsch, wrote about the social limits of growth and predicted fights over the distribution of wealth. If one cannot promise people that they will be better off in the future, they will demand a solution for their present problems now.
How is this connected to our beloved Performance Improvement? In my first blog post I asked why do we do Performance Improvement? Do we do it because we simply give in to the more idea I described earlier? Most probably not. People wrote me that they do it to make the world a better place. But what is a better place? GDP is not the answer. Growth could reach its limits. GDP tells us about the price of everything but it doesn’t tell us anything about the value.
We have Roger Kaufman’s Ideal Vision. I like the Ideal Vision. It is well thought through and an abstract guiding star that ensures the right direction. But this does not prevent me from seeing that it might be too abstract, that it might not invite people to take action. Ideas have to be more concrete to drive action. For a long time I had no solution until Roger Addison pointed me to the Global Goals.
www.globalgoals.org
You might remember the Millennium Goals established to fight the most pressing problems in developing countries like poverty, infant mortality, etc. Although the Millennium Goals are not achieved yet we have made huge progress. Still the Millennium Goals don’t generate action for most of us. We might donate to a noble cause but most people are not personally engaged. Development work is simply too far removed from our daily lives.
The Global Goals are different. These goals do not only aim at developing countries. They are for all countries and for all people. They provide a framework to define in more concrete terms what a better world might be. They talk about values and not about prices. And all of a sudden the things we can do are just around the corner. Perhaps it is of more value to live in a secure neighborhood than to have more money. Perhaps it is of more value to have quality education in a country than to accumulate 50% of the wealth in the hands of one percent of the people. Although the Global Goals also include economic growth, which might be an outdated approach, I think they are a good framework in which to discuss and shape what a better world could be.
Makes me go back to more. I’ll only add education to chocolate and wine.
You might take a closer look at the Global Goals.
Share your ideas and stay tuned. More will come.
Klaus, For the most part, I agree. Although I don’t forsee an end to (or even tapering of) economic growth with all the human potential that remains untapped, economic growth isn’t and end in itself; nor is it enough. Like you, I subscribe to Roger’s model; like you, I also believe the next stage of its development requires operationalizing it in more detail. Roger and I–along with Stephanie Moore–have done a bit in our 2013 “Visions and Missions” article in PI Journal, and I’m going to be doing some more–integrating it with a planning model–in an article I’m working on now. The Global Goals approach is important; thanks for calling attention to it. I also think the Social Progress Index (see http://www.socialprogressimperative.org) is worth looking at in this regard.
Thank you for the link to the Social Progress Index, Jim. I added Michael Green’s TED talk on the index to the ressources. There is an obvious link to community work. Looking forward to your upcoming article
Thanks for noting the Ideal Vision. Actually, i have published criteria for it if one is interested in the litersture.
Thank you, Klaus, for creating MORE interest in the future of ISPI. I certainly will read as you continue this thread. Many of us who are blessed to have what we need (and to recognize that) are looking for meaning.
I enjoyed the thinking in the message and the integration of economics and global goals. What I wonder about is all of the undiscovered country in this concept. A program for leaders of quality at a company, asked them to use new principles they learned to make a complex process more efficient, done in less time. The baseline for first time operating the process was about 12 hours for most groups with a spread of 2 hours. After applying the new thinking, the current world record for operating the new process is 9.5 seconds. This is for a group of 16 in a process with over 100 variables.
Much progress, growth or performance improvement is incremental. I wonder if we tire of serial increments in performance as a species. I also wonder if it is time for research and experiment on the really big changes that move society forward in both thinking and performance.