Growing Communities Through Growing Sectors

Communities do well when their sectors do well.

Sectors are composed of organizations in domains like education, health care, business, non-profits, economic development, food systems, and public services. In any community, there could be any number and variety of organizations in these sectors.

For example, the education sector includes any organization delivering any kind of learning to people in the community. These could be schools, colleges, university, training and mentoring programs, non-profit teaching programs, sports development programs, gyms, and health care education programs.

Sectors and organizations could have two kinds of metrics: success and failure metrics. Success metrics measure percentages of things going right; failure metrics measure percentages of things going wrong.

In health care, infant mortality is a failure metric and healthy births is a success metric. In local businesses, staff layoffs is a failure metric and buy-local purchases is a success metric.

In struggling communities, organizations and sectors work from failure metrics. The logic flaw in this approach is that work on failure metrics doesn’t move the needle on success metrics.

In struggling communities, sectors do not have shared metrics. Each organization works on its own metrics, but there are no collective metrics everyone is working on together.

While a school success metric might be its own graduation rates, an education sector metric might be graduation rates across schools in the community. The advantage of sector success metrics is that it calls for collaborative improvements.

While a school could make progress on its own work on its own success metrics, to make more progress, it would need to collaborate with other sector organizations. This reflects the principle that we can be smart alone, and smarter together. It also reflects our experience that in struggling communities people do their individual best and in flourishing communities people do their best together.

People from any one or two organizations in a sector could host gatherings where sector organizations can work together on shared success metrics. Pathway Gatherings are one example of simple, scalable, affordable methodologies for making these gatherings productive.

The possibilities are unlimited. Organizations can achieve more impact on the community by working together in their sectors with shared metrics. Sectors can collaborate together to impact even more metrics in the community.

This is the power in the growth of communities through the growth of sectors.