Why countries should measure dreams and ambitions (just like GDP) | Lance Katigbak

0:00This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One.

0:36If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about. In a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. member FDIC.

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1:48Plus, your team gets access to features like Lens, which flags issues in real time, and Navigator, which figures out why those issues are happening and what to do next. It's secure, scalable, and built to serve the customer. When AI works well, it shouldn't feel like AI. Unhold your customers with Parloa. Learn more at parloa.com. That's P-A-R-L-O-A dot com. The other day, I was talking to one of my best friends. We've known each other for a long time, and we've seen each other through many stages of our careers. Over the years, we've talked about what we want from our professional lives, what kind of success would be meaningful to us, why we do what we do.

2:35And the beautiful thing is that we've seen how this idea of success has evolved across our lives. The last time we met up, she said to me, you know, when I think about my future, I don't really think of it in terms of my dreams anymore. I think about the dreams I have for my three kids, what I want for them. Those are the metrics that matter for her right now. And they're shared by a lot of people. Not a dream job necessarily, but the dream of paying for your parents' medical bills, or sending a kid off to college without too much debt, or spending time with the people you love. These are the big picture goals that fuel so many of us.

3:17But we don't always have the right metrics to track them. How do we measure a dream?

3:26I'm Madhupa Akinola. This is TED Business, a podcast from TED. Our speaker today, consumer researcher Lance Kodigbach, is here with a bold new proposal. Countries shouldn't just measure the GDP of their citizens. They should try to measure their dreams. Dreams are different from happiness and way different from profit and productivity. And they might show a more honest picture about what success looks like for most of us. The Department of Dreams might sound like something out of a sci-fi novel, but Lance says we can make it a reality if we know the right questions to ask. Then after the talk, how can you apply this logic to the workplace?

4:08But first, a quick break.

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5:48pre-approved for financing and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.

6:02And now, Lance Kottigbach takes the TED stage. What do you want to be when you grow up? At age four, I wanted to become a computer scientist. At five, a vacuum cleaner salesman. At six, a priest. At 17, an award-winning filmmaker. And at 22, when it was finally time to decide on my first job, I became a management consultant. What do you want to be when you grow up? I'm sure everyone here has been asked some version of that question, but perhaps not recently. Somehow, the questions have changed. What do you do for work? How much money do you make? Where are you going on your next vacation? We've become obsessed with asking these types of questions to measure even our nation's productivity.

6:54We track growth rates, remittances, and exports without really asking if these numbers reflect the lives that people are trying to live. I see the problems with this system at home in the Philippines. Our GDP is soaring, but we're doing it in a way that doesn't quite align with the kind of lives that people want to live. For one, we send millions of people abroad to take care of other people's parents and children, and we train millions more to stay awake while their families are asleep so they can be up all night answering phone calls from halfway across the world about how much money is in their bank account.

7:27And somehow we're rewarded for it. We're told that we're Southeast Asia's second fastest-growing economy, and in a few years, we'll be upgraded to an upper-middle-income country. As a nation, we've become really good at hitting metrics that were never ours to begin with, and climbing a ladder that was designed by those who were already sitting on top of it. But what would happen if you asked Filipinos what metrics mattered to them? What would happen if you tried to measure dreams? Last year, my colleagues and I at BCG ran a nationwide nationally representative survey to answer this very question.

8:07Now, look, no client had ever asked us about dreams. But if you look at the websites and mission statements of the country's largest businesses, all of them are trying to connect their work to national development in some way. And so we knew that even if nobody was asking the question, the answer was one that many people would be interested in. We discovered three things. First, we discovered what the Filipino dream was. The number one ranked dream across all socioeconomic segments was to achieve financial security to absorb health scares. Well, we learned more than that. We also heard stories.

8:41We heard stories like that of Tidri, 26-year-old preschool teacher who dreams of becoming a beauty queen, a host, a politician, opening a hair salon just like her grandmother. But right now, Tidri can't afford to do that because she still has to help pay for her grandfather's health care bills because he just had a stroke. Second, we learned who those dreams are for. Most Filipinos don't actually dream for themselves. They dream for their extended family. We met people like Joey, 56-year-old radio technician who works from 2 a.m. to 11 p.m. most nights. He lives in a boarding house close to the station, given the demands of his job, but still wants to be a farmer, a social worker, and a high school teacher.

9:27But he really wants to retire. but every time he asks his company, they say, eh, not yet. Right now, he doesn't really have a choice because he still has to finish paying for his daughter's education. And third, we learned how people perceived institutions as helping them achieve those dreams. We learned that most Filipinos actually didn't feel like public and private institutions were helping them achieve their dreams, and so they could only rely on themselves. We met people like Sweden, 35-year-old news reporter who spent years moving from one field assignment to another. When she had her first child, she decided to stay home and start a children's clothing business from her garage, believing that making and selling children's clothes online would be a better way of creating financial stability for her family.

10:13Today, she dreams of opening up a flagship store in a mall for her business and of buying a second home in the mountains for her family. tidri joey sweden and a thousand five hundred other filipinos who interviewed all still want to be something when they grow up and their dreams seem so achievable but somehow to them they still feel out of reach we shared this report with clients the business community media even government officials and every single time they asked the question why hasn't this been done before? Why haven't we tried to measure dreams? Look, there are many reasons, but I think it's because those who have the power to ask the question think they already know the answer.

10:57In every single forum where I've asked the question, what do you think is the number one Filipino dream? I've never seen the most senior person in the room answer it correctly. They usually guess something safe, like to buy a house, or something generic, like to have a happy family. Less than about 5 % of people guess it, and it's usually somebody more junior, somebody who grew up in a lower-income family and worked their way up the ladder. And I wonder, in how many other countries in the world is this actually happening, where what we call development is really just watching some numbers somewhere going up and to the right, but people on the ground feel nowhere closer to where they're actually trying to go than they were yesterday, where the only way up is out.

11:37But wait, we already have something better than GDP, right? Doesn't gross national happiness measure the same thing? Look, Bhutan's GNH, I think, has really redefined development for them. It's asked whether people are happy, whether their culture is thriving, and whether they feel spiritually fulfilled. But being happy today is very different from feeling like you're coming closer to your dreams. Bhutan might be one of the most obsessed countries in the world with measuring happiness, but about 10 % of their skilled and educated population emigrated in 2022. Maybe that's the problem with measuring happiness.

12:11I could be happy today because I've got everything I need and things are going well, but I might not actually be closer to where I'm trying to go. And I think that's what measuring dreams can do for us. Look not only at how we feel today, but at the vector of that progress over time. And I don't think what I'm suggesting is too far off. After all, most of us here already work for companies that have HR departments that measure the progression of our employees. So why couldn't our countries have HR departments that measure the personal ambition and fulfillment of its citizens? If every country has a Department of Defense, why couldn't we have a Department of Dreams?

12:48Imagine this, the annual aspiration of the Nation Report presented by the Secretary of Dreams. It looks at what people dream of by age, by income group, by geography. It looks at how people came up with their dreams, how they graduate to bigger ones, and when they decide to give up on old dreams. Imagine national dream centers where you could attend trainings on making personal progress, or social workers trained as life coaches who can help keep you on track. Imagine the Department of Dreams could work with the Department of Health to measure how healthcare emergencies affect ambition. Could we not improve healthcare outcomes if you took a lens at how these emergencies affect ambition and motivation?

13:27The Department of Dreams could work with the Department of Trade and Industry to ensure that when people say they have these dream businesses, they actually get the tools to create them. Or with the Department of Labor to ensure that the jobs that people say they want are the same jobs that are being created. Or with the Department of Education to train future students for those dream jobs. Look, I understand that there are free markets, but could we not imagine a world where people said, I want to become a writer or a historian or an astronaut or a psychiatrist, and government said, sure, we'll find a way to make that happen.

14:00Imagine how much better the world would be if everyone was obsessed with helping each other achieve their dreams, and somehow there was a government official somewhere accountable for making that happen. There's so much more we still want to do in our work in measuring dreams, and we're really just getting started. For one, we hope to run this survey every few years to see how these dreams change over time. We also want to run the survey in other markets to see how the Filipino dream might be different from the Malaysian dream or the Emirati dream and encourage governments and companies around the world to begin taking dreams more seriously.

14:38And so let's measure dreams. Let's measure what people dream of and how the content of those dreams changes over time. Let's measure how much progress people feel like they made versus last year and how much more progress they think they'll make looking into next year. And then let's measure whether people perceive institutions as helping them or holding them back from achieving those dreams. Then let's create the conditions that allow people to truly live their dreams. After all, we all still want to be something when we grow up. Thank you.

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15:58Get ahead of the curve with an LA28 hospitality package. Discover more at hospitality.la28.org slash TEDBusiness. This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.

16:41With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, It's no wonder the Capital One bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about. In a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC.

17:17That was Lance Kottonbach at TED at BCG. Sure, Lance's vision is something that's meant to be implemented on a national scale. But I think seated in this talk is an important idea that we can all learn from. Do our metrics and numbers actually reflect the lives people are trying to live? And do people feel like the institutions around them are actively supporting them in that mission? Lance is challenging us to take dreams more seriously. And for those of us working inside an organization, that means asking the people we work with what their dreams are. But that can be a big overarching question, one that people haven't heard since they were children, and one that they might feel a little shy or unsure answering.

18:06So here's a suggestion. Is there a way to break this question up into smaller bite-sized questions that help get at the same idea? What would that look like in your organization? Do you feel like you know what people's dreams really are? And what are the right prompts you can give people to get closer to the truth of what they're yearning for? It's not enough to ask people to dream big. We also have to listen and pay attention to what those dreams are. That's it for today. TED Business is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced by Hannah Kingsley-Ma, edited by Alejandra Salazar, and fact-checked by Julia Dickerson.

18:48Special thanks to Maria Ladez, Farah DeGrange, Daniela Ballarezzo, Tansika Sangmanivon, and Roxanne Heilash. I'm Madupa Akinola. Thanks for listening.

19:09This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they sack. That's technology at Capital One. With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One.

19:45If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about. In a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC. With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs.

20:25Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC.