Quantity over quality part 4
As I conclude my reflections on quantity over quality, I’m thinking about the antidotes (see below) provided to think about this characteristic and my journey with these ideas. For the most part these antidotes have felt more natural to me then the quantity over quality. From my time in school, when I could care less about grades and more about learning and growing to my time at work as I embedded a focus on people, process, and performance into my leadership approach. However, I’ve struggled with prioritizing the antidotes because of the overwhelming nature of the normalcy of a deep focus on quantity and outcome only measuring. Sometimes, I’ve found it just easier to give in to the tide instead of fighting it on a daily basis.
Sadly, I fear, that is what happens to most of us. We go with the flow even if we know that flow has consequences that are destructive to each other. We get worn down by the constant fight to change the way that we typically do business despite it only having benefits for portions of society. We tend not to see hope for a different course of actions and outcomes. Progress is typically slow for social change and correcting mindsets.
There are tools and other resources to help. There are reasons to hope and ways to make that hope a reality. Here’s just a few resources and tools.
- SMARTIE Goals — SMARTIE stands for Strategic, Measurable, Ambitious, Realistic, Time-bound, Inclusive, and Equitable.
- Racial equity impact assessment — The Center for the Study of Social Policy
- Tool for Organizational Self Assessment Related to Racial Equity —Coalition of Communities of Color
- Accountability Principles —Race Forward
- Tracking community outcomes and outcome of change strategies — Racial Equity Tools
Antidotes include:
- honoring the ancient Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) philosophy that the decisions we make today should result in a sustainable world seven generations into the future
- insure that any cost/benefit analysis includes all the costs, not just the financial ones, for example the cost in morale, the cost in credibility, the cost in relationship to living beings, the cost in the use of resources
- include process goals in your planning, for example make sure that your goals speak to how you want to do your work, not just what you want to do
- ask those you work with and for to establish goals and evaluate performance holistically; for one example, set both content and process goals (what you do and how you do it) aligned with the values of the organization and/or community
- make sure you and/or your community or organization has a values statement that expresses the ways in which you want to do your work; create this as a living document that people use in their day to day work
- look for ways to measure process goals (for example if you have a goal of mutually respectful relationships, think about ways you can measure how you are living into that goal);
- learn to recognize those times when you need to go off the planned agenda in order to address people’s underlying concerns with the knowledge that doing so will result in a more solid product in the long term
- distinguish between growth, which is necessary and organic, and the conditioned desire for “more” — more stuff, more transactional power, more people, more … for its own sake
- consider adding measures that keep you grounded in what’s important — how many times did we laugh together today? how many times did we express gratitude? how many times did we allow silence? how many times did we allow dissent?
