At a time when the world is changing faster than ever before, the United States needs a government that can create policy that is more responsive and more flexible than ever before. But instead of that, our prime legislative body – the US Congress, is less responsive and more inflexible than it has been in at least the last hundred years.

If you recall, that is the problem statement presented here in the first part of a look at the concept of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results.) All good goal-setting exercises have to begin with an understanding of what the context of the goal is. But this is the problem, not the goal.

In essence the goal is for voters to be able to choose candidates for Congress the way they would hire a financial adviser. Who would hire someone who spent the entire interview telling you what they are not going to do or criticizing every financial adviser you’ve ever worked with before? Presumably all the applicants would start off with a pitch about how they are going to make you wealthy and your retirement years golden but those who didn’t get into the specifics about how they are going to do that and the tradeoffs that will be required probably wouldn’t get a call back. Why should we expect anything less from the people that are making the most important decisions about our nation’s future?

That has to begin with getting candidates to answer two simple but elegant questions:

1. What, specifically, are the three most important things you propose to do in Washington in 2020 and 2021?
2. What measure could we be looking at to see if your efforts, independent of other (external) factors, are successful?

Seriously, …I’m not kidding. Why shouldn’t we expect politicians to be able to answer these questions? In fact, given the recently difficulty that members of Congress have had in being able to collaborate to produce progress for the country I think it would be reasonable to expect an answer to a third question too:

How and Why do you think you will be able to work more successfully with your colleagues in Congress that have different ideas than yours than other recent members have?

But getting answers to these questions requires that someone asks them and then disseminates the answers and pretty obviously the most likely group to do that are the reporters that cover the candidates on a daily basis.

3 Objectives (through April 2020)

1. Research and report on the answers (or lack thereof) that have been given to the first two questions from each candidate for the first 125 seats in Congress to be decided this year (of the 436 in the House of Representatives and 35 in the Senate) in advance of their party’s primary if applicable, or the general election if not.
2. Research and report on the answers (or lack thereof) to the third question in advance of their party’s primary if applicable, or the general election if not.
3. Get the answers (or lack thereof) to all three questions reported on in local media at least once before the primary and again before the general election in each of those 125 races

3 Key Results: (through April 2020)

Objective 1: Research and Report on the Answers to the Two Key Questions

• Produce a Ten Links in Ten Minutes video showing the coverage that is available to answer these questions in advance of the primary or general election for each of the 125 House or Senate seats
• Follow up the video one week later with an episode of the 435 Voices podcast with members of the local media or others following the race to fill in the gaps on the questions
• Send in a note to the campaign website for each candidate with the first two questions and report on any answers in the 435 Voices podcast.

Objective 2: Research and Report on the Answers to the Third question

• Highlight any of the rare answers that have been given or comments about this question by any of the candidates in the Ten Links to Ten Minutes video above.
• Ask local journalists, even if they are not on the podcast, if they have heard an answer to this question and report on these answers on the 435 Voices podcast above
• Send in a note to the campaign website for each candidate with the third question and report on any answers in the 435 Voices podcast.

Objective 3: Get the answers to all three questions reported on in local media

• Follow up on the episode of the 435 Voices podcast with a note to each of the journalists covering that race with a link to the podcast and ask them to report on the answers or ask the questions themselves and report on the answers they get
• Distribute the podcast and video links to local community-based organizations (chambers, community hubs, etc) after each podcast runs
• Build awareness of the PFA mission by doubling subscriptions to the 435 Voices Podcast and PFA YouTube Channel each month

So these are the first quarter OKRs for the Project to Find America. They look daunting written out this way but I can at least imagine what these outcomes look like. What is more difficult to guess at is what, if any, impact they will have on how people actually vote. I can’t answer that. For reasons covered extensively here we are all hardwired to throw rational thought out the window just before we step into the voting booth. But if we (and I mean you gentle reader) can get the word out about these answers, if you will help by subscribing to the podcast and video channel and passing it along to just a couple of other people a week we might end up with a 117th Congress that is more ready to take on the challenges of the 2020s.