Common language, common sense and common ground

Common language is not about English versus other language. Its about the fundamental need we have
to understand what a people mean when they say something. There is currently an appalling lack of
discipline in how we use language when we work together on community well-being and program
performance. The usual state of affairs is a tower of babel where no one really understands what is
being said, but everyone politely pretends that they do. You wouldn’t get on an airplane or submit
yourself to surgery if the pilots and surgeons routinely used jargon they didn’t understand. It would be
dangerous. The community and program work we do together is every bit as complicated as flying an
airplane. But confusing jargon is the norm, and this sometimes makes us dangerous. Words like
“result”, “Indikacator”, and “performance measure” have many possible meanings. Unless we agree on
the meaning of ther word we use, it is imposible to make progress. So, we will spend some time
developing a common language.

Common sense is about the way the rest of theworld works. Any successful human enterprise starts
with ends and works backward to means. In business, the end are profit, return on investment and
growth in equity, and we have many sophisticated of measuring the success of companies. But look at
any successful enterprise: business, the military, the sports worid, the faith community. They all work
backward from ends to means. In fact, everyone does this except those of us in the public and non-profit
sectors. We get so tied up in the means, the particular program, project or initiative, that we lose sight
of the ends that we are trying to accomplish. Result accountability is build on the simple notion that in
all of our work it is possible to articulate ends in plain English, in term that taxpayers and voters can
understand, and use the ends as the starting point to work backwards to means.

Common ground is about the political nature of this work. Everything in this book, from the first word to
the last, is political. This is not necessarily bad. Politics is how we make decisions in our society. Look at
the political system at the federal, state, and local levels, and you see people fighting with each other.
Most often they are fighting about means and not ends. There is remarkable agreement in our country
that teen pregnancy is bad for our young people. We fight about whether to hand out condoms or
preach abstinence. This is a debate about means. The agreement about teen pregnancy is remarkably
broad based. When we articulate what we want in plain language, for example children ready for school,
safe communities and a clean environment, it turns out that these kind of statements are not republican
versus democrat. They do not belong to the excecutive branch versus the legislative branch. They are
not owned by a particular level of government. They represent of a kind of common ground where
people can come together and say, “Yes, those are the conditions we want here in our community, city,
county, state, or nation.” Now, let’s see if we can have a healthy debate about the means to get there.

The language of accountability

The jargon construction kit shows the word that are the most commonly used in work on population
and performance accountability. If you want to make yourself sound superior, pick three or four of these
words at random and string them together.

 Urgent measurable strategic indicators

  Targeted priority incremental goals
 Core qualitative systemic result
 (insert your own example here)

I guarantee if you combine words in this way you will get away with it because people will be too
embrassed to ask you what you mean. I have a rule about language: if anyone uses three or more of
these words in the same sentence, they don’t know that what they’re talking about.

It is quite common to find two people in the same meeting using the same word, “result” for example,
with two entirely different ideas of what that words means. They end up talking right past each other.
Have you had this experience? Almost every has.

It is possible to use language in a clear and disciplined way. This requires that we agree on definitions
that start with ideas and not words. Words are just labels for ideas, and the same idea can have many
different labels. The language of results accountability starts with the following four ideas. The first word
listed is the one used in this book, with some alternatives shown in parentheses.

A result (or Outcome or goal) is a population condition of well-being for children, adults, families, and
communities, stated in plain language. Results are conditions that voters and taxpayers can understand.
They are about well-being of people in a community, city, county, state or nation. Result include:
healthy children, children ready for school, children succeeding in school, strong families, elders living in
the community with dignity, a safe community, a clean environment.

An indicator (or benchmark) is a measures that helps quantify the achievement of a result. Indicators
answer the question “how would we recognize this result if we fell over itu?” for example, the rate of
low-birthweight babies help quantify healthy births. Third grade reading scores help quantify whether
children are succeeding in school today, and whether they were ready for school three years ago. The
crime rate helps quantify whether we are living in a safe community.

A strategy is a coherent collection of actions that has a reasoned chance of improving results. Strategies
are made up of our best thinking about what works, and include the contributions of many partners.
Strategies operate at both th population and performance levels.

A performance measure is a measure of how well a program, agency or system is working. The most
important performance measures tell us whether program costumers are better of. We refer to these
measures as customer result to distinguish the from population result. Results accountability uses three
types of performance measures : how much did we do? How well did we do it? Is anyone better off?

The principal distriction is these definitions is between ends and means. Result and indicatiors are about
the end conditions we want for children, adults, families and communities. Strategies and performance
measures are about the means to get there,
 Results
Population
Indicators

Strategies

Performance
Performance
measures