Over the years, as a facilitator of collaboration to management teams and startups, I have been recurrently surprised that our everyday societal functions actually are quite bad at giving us what we really want. Things like energy, public transport and education seem to get away with delivering half way. I mean, they are clever at finding out new ways to give us value that we find cool or even addictive to some degree, at providing what we didn’t know we wanted, but the core offerings actually often miss the point by a margin.

Let me give you an example. Public transportation is a great idea and everyone knows that in order to ride, you need a ticket. We therefore appreciate well-designed ticket systems that make it easy and affordable to buy tickets. But, are smart ticket systems really what we want? The ticket confirms  your right as a traveller to depart from the station on  a bus or train. Very few that I know are mostly interested in departing. Almost everyone I know is, however, interested in arriving at their destination. Preferably on time. So how come public transportation operators across the world insist on selling “approvals to depart” when instead they could sell “arrivals on time”?

Since I began to think about it, it increasingly became the kind of thought that seems to stick and start spinning around in your head. In fact, the experience of not being satisfied became more annoying every time I reflected on it. It came to a point where I was so frequently disappointed with my everyday interactions that I couldn’t rule out that I had finally debuted as a bitter old man just looking for things to complain about, a character I have felt must emerge from me sooner or later.

I also came to the conclusion that these discrepancies between what we buy and what we actually want to buy, are not necessarily because existing services can’t give us better value propositions or because they are the closest approximation to what we actually want. In most cases, it would be fairly easy to develop products that better served our needs. This left me thinking that perhaps we have gotten so used to buying what is available, that we have stopped reflecting over what it is that we actually want.

Is this really a problem then, you might ask? If people are happy buying what is available, why try to sell them anything else? Why fix what is already working? The fast answer to that is of course that if we don’t explore what the customer actually wants, someone else will.

But really, is it a problem? If it works it works. Sometimes it is better to not overthink things. The quest for the best can become an enemy of the good, and all that.

No, it is actually a huge problem. Firstly, there are too many things not working properly in the world today, to not look for better ways to go about them. Climate, poverty, health, democracy, food, water and education, are all societal functions (and services) that affect our daily and future lives. The mere thought of making them work even the tiniest bit better, is therefore a potential game changer. Secondly, if we don’t question today’s systems, there is a clear chance that we are actually creating side effects that lead to more problems than are fixed by our solutions. Thirdly, we have neither time nor the resources to waste on products that miss the target. We simply can’t afford it.

The last point alone is reason enough to rethink these metrics. We need to collaborate to solve big problems. To collaborate we need to define common goals. If we spend a lot of effort on defining mutual goals for our collaboration projects and then spend even more resources on the actual collaborations themselves, we should at least make sure that we are spending it on something that we all actually care about. That we all really want to achieve. And before we develop the bureaucracy to monitor our existing metrics to the point where we soon run the risk of being dismissed as NPM (New Public Management), should we not at least question if these old metrics are good enough or if there might be better ones. Shouldn’t we be confident in saying that we are not spending these resources, debates and execution on inefficiencies and pointless side effects?

I believe we owe it to ourselves and our extraordinary human superpower – collaboration – to really look for the essence of what is valuable in life and relentlessly capture this value when we define new, creative metrics, instead of continuing to measure what we already have metrics for. You might have heard the argument that, “everything valuable in life can be translated into money”. Although this might be true, it is an unnecessary simplification. An equally valid proverb is that, “money can’t buy you everything” and it is not, therefore, the ultimate metric we might be looking for. A truer hard currency of life would be trust. Trust in your fellow humans, trust in your society and ultimately, trust in tomorrow. Regardless of how long a future horizon you can afford, your actions today will always be shaped by the efforts you need to spend to be prepared for tomorrow. Money can’t buy you trust, but trust can save you loads of money, ultimately expanding your freedom to operate.

Simply put, I believe that there are better ways to define our societal metrics and I have only started this journey of exploring how understanding human needs may lead us to better goals, metrics and commons. 

I would be eager to learn what metrics or societal functions you have reflected on as flawed, obsolete or missing the point completely.