The Bull’s Eye Works in Many Endeavors

The concentric rings that work backward from a bull’s eye of goals for enduring understanding can also work as a pyramid.  From the top down, one must delineate overarching objectives that translate into well-defined goals and fan out into linked activities and criteria for measuring their success.  This is a useful intellectual construct and guide to action that applies to many endeavors.  Our U.S. embassies abroad in more than 160 countries undertake such an annual design process to ensure that their activities fulfill our national objectives.  Otherwise, these myriad efforts might be scattershot and we would risk misusing public resources, that is, your money.  Ditto for designing activities in a classroom, where teachers too are managers of resources, negotiators and shepherds of human potential.  

In every U.S. embassy, preparation of the Mission Performance Plan (MPP) is a major annual undertaking.  Consider Mexico City, where dozens of U.S. Government agencies operate under one roof.  Section chiefs come together to articulate Mission Objectives (the bull’s eye or the peak of the pyramid), which must be linked to strategic goals of the White House and State Department.  For example, one objective would probably be to strengthen U.S.-Mexican border security.  Among the goals that emanate from this bull’s eye might be an aim to reduce cocaine trafficking across the border.  “To Do” this goal will require training of an additional 300 Mexican border police and enhanced data sharing.  Activities and indicators of success will take into account the number of police who receive training in the U.S. and in Mexico, with an expectation of a 20% reduction in trans-border trafficking in 2014.  Responsibilities are assigned, with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) taking the lead in coordination with the FBI, DHS and the consular section.

Without such a goal-centric plan, which flows from the abstract to the concrete, we lack intellectual coherence, focus and ballast.  We flounder and we may fail our customers, who are the American public or our students.  We miss the opportunity to pool our efforts and learn from others’ expertise and our interactive engagement.  Whether the design is a circle or a pyramid, it must have enough flexibility to incorporate variables that arise spontaneously, including in the give-and-take of a classroom.  I thus think of the Teacher as a Manager, a Diplomat, Designer and Coach who plans and orchestrates, starting with the bull’s eye, or the peak of that Aztec pyramid, and then never loses sight of it.