According to Orson Scott Card, “Who but adolescents are free to have adventures?” Jack Doe at 43 was enmeshed in a great adventure or three, therefore he was still an adolescent at heart.

He was an unlikely recruit to the UN. He was poorly equipped to handle any significant work on behalf of developing countries. He had never been to any, and certainly never worked in any. He came from an all-Anglo country, and by 1993,  he had only ever met one African, no Arabs, and few Asians. He had no particular negotiation or fundraising skills. He was a terrible traveller – unable to sleep on planes, suffering from several forms of travel sickness and prone to getting lost and walking away from important documents once he became tired. He had never been in a slum, apart from Redfern where he was born. He could not really function emotionally if he was separated from his family.

As Sammy Lo said, “Doe does not know what he is doing.”

Standing in his favour however, he had a facility with numbers, an ability to “see how things worked”, an unshakeable desire to assist the unfortunate and disadvantaged, and a willingness to try unconventional approaches. He was unencumbered by prejudice, both in work and in person. He had no personal agenda, and was very ready to try whatever would work. 

Steve Mayo – poet, sea-kayaker, carpet connoisseur and flower arranger - was the first mentor Jack had ever known. When Jack saw Steve’s program, he knew this  was for him – and so did Steve. Jack had the bright idea to combine indicators with the facilitation techniques he had learned in Industrial Democracy. Like all committed researchers, Jack was prepared to sacrifice everything to try out his research on a broad scale – and the world was the broadest possible scale. 

Other things  were working toward a career change for Jack. Unlike most of his colleagues he had never seen the world. He was not happy in CSIRO nor with the way the organisation was progressing, and he feared his ten-year dream run would soon be over. After 20 years in the workforce he was still struggling financially. The situation with his wife Carmen had deteriorated and he felt a break would benefit them both. His boys Gabe and Rafe were enthusiastic about the prospect of having their education paid for while seeing the world.

Jack saw his dream bear fruit. His facilitation methods worked perfectly everywhere in the world to generate consensus strategies and measurement over a very wide range of topics and circumstances, and most of the indicators chosen were the same everywhere. He attracted more participants in the programme  than even he thought possible. And he discovered the City Development Index, which had real potential to change the way the world looked at cities.

However, it was all too easy. While Jack would have liked the success of the programme to be due to his brilliance, he just happened to be in the right place doing the right thing at the right time. Once he had gotten rid of Greta Gustin and the computer committee, and Madeline the intern had laid down the template for their newsletter, they had what they needed and it was plain sailing. ,  

At the time, the African nations were all being heavily pushed under structural adjustment to reduce expenditure on everything their people valued in favour of growing export crops. This was being done by the IMF without any real evidence it would work. 

Evidence was what the African countries needed, and when the Indicators Programme told them they already had this evidence and they could collect it, they jumped at the chance. They could not lose – if results were good, they could say their strategies were working. If results were bad, they could say they needed more help and less stringency.

Once the programme had the backing of G77 and had completed a few successful demonstrations in different parts of the world, it was just as Steve had said. The donors were all looking for something that would work, could be budgeted in advance and be non-controversial. Indicators met the bill. 

So Jack completed his impossible task quite easily, considerably exceeding even his own expectations of 100 cities in the programme. Except that the success was only temporary …