Targets, not results yet

Every quarter we sit down and measure our own circles against a set of standards we published in advance, and every quarter some of those numbers come back short. We publish them anyway, labeled plainly as targets, not results yet. More than one advisor has told me this is a strange way to build trust. Wouldn’t it be simpler to talk about what is working and let the rest wait until it is finished?

It would be simpler. It would also mean a parent has no way to check whether we are telling the truth about ourselves, because everything they would see is a story we already know ends well. A goal you have not yet reached is still useful information. A silence is not information at all: it just looks like one.

A promise you cannot yet prove is still a promise. A silence is not.

Why the easy version would be worse

We could run this the way most programs do: highlight the student who thrived, let him stand in for the cohort, and quietly let the rest fall out of the frame. It would look better in a single photograph and be worse in every way that matters. A parent deciding whether to trust us with a son is not comparing our best story to someone else’s best story. He is trying to find out what actually happens on an ordinary week, and the only way to show him that is to publish the ordinary numbers, not just the extraordinary ones.

What this costs, and what it buys back

It costs us the easier pitch. A page that says “12-month targets, not results yet” is a harder sell than one that says everything is already working. What it buys back is the only kind of trust that survives a hard year: the kind built on being told the truth before you had to ask for it. It is the same reasoning behind saying plainly that we do not yet run criminal background checks on every mentor, rather than letting a parent assume we do and find out otherwise later. The uncomfortable sentence, said early, is worth more than the comfortable one that turns out to have been incomplete.

If you are a parent or a board member reading one of our pages and something in it sounds too settled, too finished, ask us what we have not gotten right yet. We would rather answer that question than have you find the answer some other way.