The Subversive Potential of Defining 'Good'
Without clearly establishing what we're really trying to do, we end up relying on assumptions of what's good—assumptions that rarely align with our values & priorities.
What we intend to do determines how we define words like good and bad.
— Abby Covert, How to Make Sense of Any Mess
We have a myriad of ways to measure the results of our work.
Unfortunately, the vast majority have nothing to do with what we actually want to accomplish with our work.
That’s why one of the very first things I ask a new podcast host (or really anyone I'm working with closely) is how they define good.
Not explicitly, but indirectly: What would success look like to you? What are your goals for this project? What are you hoping to accomplish?
No one answers with a number of downloads and very few answer with the name of a blockbuster guest. Most describe a mix of emotions, creative challenges, and the odd business goal or two.
I need to know how they define good so that I can both steer them in that direction and remind them of what good means to them when they (almost) inevitably start to worry about the guests they're booking, the number of listeners they have, or the messages they haven't received from fans.
Because podcasting is built on old technology (RSS), we don't have access to the metrics we've become familiar with thanks to website analytics, video metrics, social media stats, etc. What metrics we have are unreliable at best. Defining what's good outside of seemingly clear-cut metrics is critical to understanding the performance of any given show as producers. It’s also essential to a host’s confidence and sense of self-efficacy.
I learned the importance of defining good from Abby Covert's How to Make Sense of Any Mess. It's a book about information architecture and sensemaking—which means it's really a book about how to approach anything and everything with intention.
Defining good allows us to collaborate better. When I know what good means to you, I can support you in a way that aims to make good a reality, which might be different from the way I support someone else who has their own definition of good.
Defining good gives us a handy framework for decision-making. While the best choice might appear unclear on the surface, our definition of good can help us choose the option that's a clear winner for us.
Defining good helps us rule out otherwise attractive possibilities. Saying 'yes' is often much easier than saying 'no.' And that means we can end up stretched thin and overcommitted. By defining good, we also define bad or not important when it comes to a particular project or even our work overall.
But I think the real magic of defining good comes in its ability to subvert assumptions. When we define good for ourselves, we don't need to rely on what's considered good in dominant ideology.
Dominant ideology becomes dominant by influencing what we perceive as good and bad.
And often by imposing definitions of good and bad on groups of people that a dominant group wants to subjugate.
Productivity culture—an offshoot of managerialism—influences how we perceive what constitutes a good day's work. A good day's work is one that produces as much as possible. Therefore, a day spent coaching an employee or thoughtfully updating an online course likely registers as unproductive—or bad.
Neoliberal ideology influences how we perceive the role of higher education. It's good if it helps young adults get jobs, but it's bad if it empowers them to contextualize current events and protest injustice.
Supremacy culture influences how we perceive the moral value of certain types of behavior. We learn that disagreements are bad while appeasing the higher-ups is good. We learn that objectivity is good and relativity is bad.
How we define good as a society is a critical political question—perhaps, the critical political question.
How we define good as business owners, independent workers, and working people generally is critical to subverting business-as-usual practices. If we don't define good as constant growth, we can choose practices that prioritize maintenance and sustainability. If we don't define good as soaring profit margins, we can make organizational choices that care for team members and customers alike.
Or, to return to the podcasting example, if I don't define good as a number of downloads or a blockbuster guest, I'm free to define good as consistency, quality, or intellectual rigor.
"The words we choose matter," writes Covert, "They represent the ideas we want to bring into the world."If we're not careful about the words we choose, we reinforce preexisting ideas about the world. But when we're clear about our intent and make our definition of good explicit, we can bring ideas into the world that subvert the status quo.
And while our individual definitions of what's good won't shift ideology at a societal level, taking care to define what's good for ourselves helps us see ways we can redefine what's good with others at scale. It's a small and doable step that's critical to introducing more sustainable, compassionate, and human-centered modes of exchange into our communities.
Last call!
If you’d like to work with me to define what’s good for your business, check out this week’s workshop, World-Building for Business Owners. Not only will we define what’s good and your top priorities, but we’ll examine how they allow you to structure your business in a more sustainable way—from offers to business models to operations and systems.