Our team at Mission Measurement recently took a field trip to Loyola University to view the documentary Race to Nowhere.  The film was provocative for a number of reasons, but particularly from the perspective of outcomes-based thinking.

The film’s premise is that society is simply demanding too much of our youth – too much homework, too many AP classes, too many extracurricular activities – mostly in the name of getting in an elite college or university.  Students across America end up overscheduled and stressed out to the point that their health and well-being suffers.  Such a condition, the film argues, is both cruel and unsustainable.

No doubt, the students highlighted in the film had busy lives and met challenging circumstances.  But the film only started to address the larger question: why?  To what end?  The students themselves consistently articulated an understanding that happiness requires money, money requires a good job and that a good job required graduation from a great university, which required great grades, test scores and social resumes.  They took this logic model for granted.

It made me wonder, who constructed this model?  Did anybody?  Who owns it?  I don’t have to look hard to see that graduating from an Ivy League school does not guarantee of a life of happiness and fulfillment.  Neither does the lack of a degree from a prestigious institution preclude it – not in the least.  Our complex society ends up producing these simple narratives about how the world works, narratives which create all sorts of unintended incentive structures.  And from my work with not-profit organizations across the country, the same process occurs for them as well.  We find ourselves with a goal nobody owns and a system nobody wants.

We need to break away from this.  We need to race to somewhere.  We need to more purposefully articulate our goals, both as individuals and collectively, and we need to build the habits and processes to do so on an ongoing basis.  As esteemed education Dr. Laurence Peter famously said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you will probably end up somewhere else.”