4YG Dashboard - beginnings

edited by Phil Henshaw July 2010

The Dashboard concept was floating around 4YG and at the moment it's not clear whose idea it was, but went along with the sense that the present moment is a critical time, when major shifts in direction are needed, and wanting to state them along with clear indicators to use to tell if they had or not.   Dick Hogan's discussion of it on the Outcomes and Metrics page is what Phil Henshaw started from.

The June 20, 2010 proposal by Phil (click here or the image below) was developed after discussion in the O & M group and used the metaphor of our needing to land an aircraft without a runway to symbolize our search for new purposes and critical accomplishments, with its control panel of indicators being the lists of critical tasks and indicators of achieving them, that mankind needs to accomplish in the next 4 years.   The present work is on beginning to fill in the blanks, and getting a usable simple product in circulation.   It would be good if others who know the story of the original 4YG concept of "making the shift" and the Dashboard idea were to recount it here in a simple way too.   

Please go to the Outcomes and Metrics Inbox to contribute your vision, in concise terms, of what has to happen in the next four years to change the course of events toward making the earth a good home for mankind.

This is the first graphic version,  starting from the idea of how to arrange several “buckets” of indicators and objectives with progress indicators on an orderly page, with a unifying concept.    I picked an image of aircraft pilots looking for a place to land, without an airport.   To me this growth experience we are having is just a larger scale version of the college grad having to find a place to land after suddenly being dumped in a new world full of unfamiliar rules and challenges, losing their support and having to give up a lot of their easy ways.  

As organisms we each graduated from being a cell in the womb with infinite resources to getting kicked out of there too, then just as we got the hang of infancy being pushed into the strange world of school, then graduating each level of school and maturity, each time having somewhat the same kind of “birthing” experience of completing one stage and being thrown into a confusing new environment.    So, that’s my concept, that we’re in a birthing experience, a “change of life” after being kicked out of the womb of limitless economic growth, and need to figure out how to land and fit in with the unfamiliar new world we find ourselves thrown into.

Below is a sample layout of one statement of objectives, one “rain drop” in the “Environmental Integrity” “bucket”.   I may show too many “Facets”, but the main elements are the “statement”, “descriptions” and  “the turning point indicator” achievable in the next 4 years.    The idea is that people would contribute to filling the buckets, and take comment from others.  The objectives that get stated on the “Dashboard” would be selected by the leaders of 4YG.  We might use it as an organizing tool too, and ask member organizations to describe their principle and secondary turning point indicators, for example, and generate a series of newsletter articles on them to cross fertilize the thinking on practical core values and strategies for fundamental change.  pfh ed 6/27/10