Hack the Scoreboard

We treat metrics like they’re sacred, as if they’ve been handed down from on high like the Ten Commandments or the laws of physics. But they weren’t. Somebody like you or me invented them — probably because the metrics served their interests at the time. And now, years later, the metrics have gained so much traction that they’ve become incontrovertible.

There’s nothing magical about ROI or EBITDA. There’s nothing inherently true about GPA or box office receipts on opening weekend. Sure, in sports, there are measurements like points or runs scored so we can figure out who wins. But in the rest of our lives, we just inherit performance indicators and somehow come to believe they’re right.

Consider the nation of Bhutan. Nestled in the Himalayas, this small country decided to buck the trend. Instead of chasing the all-important Gross Domestic Product like everyone else, the king there declared that Bhutan’s measure of success would be Gross Domestic Happiness. He just made it up. And frankly, it was brilliant. Of course, Bhutan and its population of just 700,000 can’t compete with other countries — much less its neighbors China and India — on economic output. But it can absolutely compete on how happy its citizens are.

Many colleges and universities did the same thing. What do you do if you can’t compete with the fancy schools on reputation, research funding, or high-profile faculty? You invent something called student-teacher ratio to appeal to students and parents who value individual attention and what the schools call a “personalized learning experience.” Candidly, I’m not even sure what that is.

My colleagues and I are doing something like that now. We want people to understand that the family’s struggle with pediatric cancer extends well beyond the clinic or the hospital. We want them to see that it’s a strain on virtually every part of the families’ lives: finances, jobs, marriages, friendships, and the other children. So we made up a metric to better tell our story: whole family impact.

You can do the same thing.