North Star of the United States

In product development a “North Star” metric connects a measurable value to accomplishing the vision of a company. For example, in its early days, Facebook famously used “# users adding 7 friends in the first 10 days” as the North Star key metric. This helped Facebook pick one metric and avoided a “metric soup”.

This metaphor of a guiding star is very helpful to define a stable reference point for orienting yourself and your team. It is easy to remember and aligns your team so that everyone is making decisions relative to this guiding metric. The idea is that as long as you know where the “North Star” is, you can at least figure out your direction.

What represents the North Star of the United States of America? What metric could we all watch that indicates we are moving in the right direction? I think the default metric has been the GDP, Gross Domestic Product, or the national debt. Perhaps for some it is social progress, or less taxes, or more security. I challenge you to have this conversation with your friends and family to see if you are aligned.

I propose that for the United States to fulfill its vision of the “Land of Opportunity” that Opportunity is the North Star of the US.

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” - US Constitution

Opportunity

Opportunity is at the heart of our country. It is the common pillar that we all stand on. It is the pin that the American Dream revolves around. It is the core of the Black Lives Matter movement, it is in the center of the White Privilege thesis, it was in the center of the jobs report, it is where all of us feel there has been unfairness. Through this lens I have felt so much more empathy when I read about how a town is slowly atrophying from an industry that has moved away. They feel ignored and forgotten because every day there is less opportunity for them.

When we want to bring jobs back from overseas or Make America Great Again, isn’t this a very human need to have a chance to have more opportunities for ourselves than we did yesterday?

We might argue about how it is dressed up, is it in new jobs created? Is it city vs country? Is it Red vs Blue? Is it liberty vs community? Is it government system vs business? I can go on but I think you can fill in the blanks with the latest most divisive headline and bumper sticker.

How do you measure Opportunity?

Opportunity is an abstract concept. That makes it hard to conceptualize. It also depends on how you see the world. If you are a “glass is half full” person you probably already see ideas and opportunities around you. But if you are a “glass is half empty” person you might not want to waste your time getting excited about things that are not really there. Maybe you have lived a life of disappointment and don’t want to be vulnerable to yet one more pipe dream.

I would argue that opportunities are not binary. They are not either there or not there but instead they are a chance that you have to take a risk and have some grit when it doesn’t work out to try again.

I believe that opportunities are all around you and you have to train your mind to see them. They come in the form of ideas and suggestions from friends. But you have to be willing to be a child again and let your mind play with the idea instead of seeing how fast you can extinguish it with your fears.

So this is a problem, if some people can see through this lens but for others the lens is cloudy it will be hard to agree that we are increasing the number of opportunities around us?

“What is the smallest thing that could possibly work?”

A wise friend of mine uses this question to help us find a starting point on projects. I will be the first to say I don’t have the perfect answer. But I know how to iterate and listen.

I’m going to put out 10 ideas for how this could be measured and I hope to have more conversations on this subject so that I can iterate in future posts.

Access to capital
Access to training
Hours per week for putting toward dreams
Number of failures allowed
Size of supportive community
Access to mentors
Access to counseling for matching ideas to markets
Number of ideas per week
Grit or perseverance
Ability to change locations

As I look at this list I can see that each one of these is another conversation in itself. However you could form an Opportunity Score for an individual that would be similar to a Credit Score which would at least help create a common footing between each individual.

It would then be a matter of viewing this population’s total Opportunity Score and looking at what policy changes will maximize improving this score for the most number of people.

In conclusion

Some of us want the old doors to be open again, some want to go through the doors we have seen others go through, and for a few of us we want doors unlocked for us because we have seen that only special people get through the doors.

I think there is a way to get rid of the doors and unlock what our country is capable of. Make Opportunity the North Star of the United States. Start with giving every citizen an Opportunity Score and then measure the number of opportunities that we are presented with. I believe it will bring about an alignment nationally that will unlock our businesses and citizens.