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

Modupe Akinola (0:00)

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. And 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, but we don't always have the right metrics to track them. How do we measure a dream?

I'm Modupe Akinola. This is TED Business, a podcast from TED. Our speaker today, consumer researcher Lance Katigbak, 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?

But first, a quick break.

And now, Lance Katigbak takes the TED stage.

Lance Katigbak (2:04)

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 become obsessed with asking these types of questions to measure even our nation's productivity. We 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 the 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. And 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 ask Filipinos what metrics matter 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. Now, 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 social economic segments was to achieve financial security to absorb health scares. Well, we learned more than that. We also heard stories. We heard stories like that of Tidri, 26-year-old preschool teacher who dreams of becoming a beauty queen, a host, a politician, and opening a hair salon just like her grandmother.