Ready, aim...fail: Why setting goals can backfire
“Although simple numerical goals can lead to bursts of intense effort in the short term, they can also subvert the longer-term interests of a person or a company – whether it’s a pharmaceutical firm that overlooks safety in the rush to get a drug approved, or a dieter who resumes smoking to help lose 20 pounds. In work requiring a certain amount of creativity and judgment, the greatest risk appears to lie in overly simplified goals. Reducing complex activities to a bundle of numbers can end up rewarding the wrong behavior.”
The big problem with plans and goals: They lock you in. You put on blinders. You stop improvising. You don’t change direction. That’s bad, especially if you’re a company that needs to improvise and change with the times.
Eric Filson
on 24 Apr 09I think the terminology should be changed, you’re merging goals with deadlines…
Every project has to have goals otherwise you’d develop aimlessly. What you’re referring to is deadlines. It’s setting the deadlines on those goals that bring out the blinders.
Ben Brooks
on 24 Apr 09Great article, thanks for sharing. Very interesting insight into learning goals versus performance goals.
Pierre
on 24 Apr 09If you’re easily distracted, sometimes blinders aren’t a bad thing. Maybe the key is to make your goals consistent with your values.
BS
on 24 Apr 09@Eric…
I agree with you on the terminology.
Goals are necessary as it is just as hard to get to a place that you don’t know your going as it is to a place that you’ve never been.
Daniel
on 24 Apr 09@Eric & @BS: I agree that goals and dealines are different things, but in this case, I’m pretty sure that Matt doesn mean goals. Regardless of deadline, a goal can lose its relevance to whatever it is you’re doing. For instance, fighting to implement feature X when it no longer matters (maybe demand is non-existant, maybe other features have proven to be sufficient, maybe the features is simply obsolete), is obviously not useful no matter what deadline it’s on.
Daniel
on 24 Apr 09Whoops, I meant to write “I’m pretty sure that Matt does mean goals” – it was pretty ambiguous with that typo there
Wellington Grey
on 24 Apr 09This is why revising goals is vital. If the environment changes or you realize that your goal was overly (or underly) ambitious you must modify your target. If you don’t you face needless feelings of failure or you waste time working on the impossible.
Eric Filson
on 24 Apr 09@Daniel
I see what you mean and I do concur if the assumption is made that you never reassess your goals and that, in itself, is fail. Goals for any project should always be reassessed on a continual basis. Personally, I’ve never set a goal on a project and then not reassessed that goal throughout its development cycle.
However, when a time frame is imposed on a goal very rarely do you have time to reassess what you’re building as it becomes crunch time. Crunch time, in my opinion, is the antithesis of good development.
JK Wen
on 24 Apr 09I think many large corporations mixed up the goals and the performance indicators. Some are so convoluted that they loose track of the real goals, and instead make some key performance indicators (KPI) to be the goal.
For example, the rate of sales growth is an indicator, but the goal is to be profitable within a defined period. And most goals are supported by an interwoven complex of KPIs. To continue the example, just because a company can hit a given sales growth rate does not necessarily mean it will be profitable, if other things are not performing well.
I called this confusion the KPI conundrum.
pwb
on 24 Apr 09I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that goals are pretty much always beneficial.
Daniel
on 25 Apr 09@Eric Filson: You’re absolutely right; the assumption I was making is that goals become counter-productive when they’re not reassessed often. Or reassessed well; I think a problem too many companies have, is hesitance to really change a goal or scrap it completely. The scope may change – which often helps a great deal. But sometimes the goal has to be scrapped entirely – back to the drawing board. Trouble is of course, that significant time and money may already have been spent chasing that goal, and then the reluctance comes in.
Also, goals are always part of some larger goal, but those larger goals may not be reassessed because they seem too abstract or too “holy”. For instance, some part of a user interface isn’t working well, and so the goals (or specs) for that part are reassessed or scrapped in favour of “better” ones. But perhaps the entire user interface “paradigm” is what’s at fault, except that’s not being reassessed because it’s much more abstract, and it would mean also reworking the parts of it that are finalized and are OK. I know of a company trying to build something that’s pretty cool, but the interface has a lot of problems. From my point of view, the interface should be radically different, but instead the individual parts of it are being examined, even though the flaws run deeper than that. This is something that became evident as they “got real” so it isn’t just dodgy planning.
As for the reluctance to scrap or significantly change current goals, the time and money aspect is doubly true, when (bad) goals are used as performance indicators, like JK Wen mentioned. Scrapping or changing a goal even just a little late in the game, means that some “project completion percentage” will drop. And if managers see their projects as simply something that need to get to “100%” then drops like that are bad, bad, bad.
I’m not saying that’s how all managers see their projects, but checking off boxes or looking at percentages is a seductively easy way of validating and documenting progress and defending it for higher-ups (or yourself). Yet it’s probably not the best way for most projects.
Anecdote: I spoke to the guy who created the entire project management process for Bang & Olufsen (luxury AV equipment makers). He also implemented the entire thing as an in-house web-app, and at one point he got a request from a manager to make the software show “completion percentages” for the stages in their stage-gate process. He did that in no time flat, and the managers were happy – with him, at least. Meanwhile, lowly employees were being grilled on why they were only “73.342% done” with their tasks – and most had excellent reasons but they didn’t show up in the percentages. It over-simplified things so much, that he quickly removed the feature, forcing (now disgruntled) managers to actually figure out how things were going, instead of looking at percentages.
Furthermore, the stage-gate model described hundreds of goals to be reached within the different stages. They were all meant to be product-independent, as the stage-gate process should be used as much as possible. Still, some goals simply didn’t make sense for some development efforts, leading to great difficulty; managers couldn’t understand why stages seemingly weren’t completed before moving on, or why this that and the other. They were used to the usual model, period, and didn’t want to reasssess all those goals. The well-meaning guy who created the system didn’t intend for it to be used for absolutely everything, but to others the system was a hammer, and every project was a nail.
Matt
on 26 Apr 09Goals are good but you need to have values that are always more important than your goals. They will help you make the right decision instead of the decision that will just help you reach the number.
sensei
on 26 Apr 09This post seems like it’s designed to purposefully get people talking by being “misinformed” – I think this is called trolling, is it not? ;-) Perhaps inverse-trolling.
Small enough goals are good. Saying “all goals are bad” is just as retarded as saying “never sway from your specific plans if circumstances change” which seems to be what you’re rallying against.
If you don’t have a goal, then you’re simply controlled by your environment, don’t you think? Perhaps you can’t articulate your goal, but it’s there nonetheless. Perhaps it’s more meta than specifics, but it’s still a goal.
For example, you may have a general goal to have more time, and a specific “try” of getting to that point. Perhaps this “try” you’re trying at the moment isn’t appropriate, so you need to re-think what’s appropriate. That doesn’t mean your goal has failed, simply that your immediate plans required re-thinking.
Sensei.
Nic
on 27 Apr 09On a related note, Joel Sposky’s article at Inc.com on incentives makes interesting reading.
He quotes Robert Austin:
ahmet kekilli
on 27 Apr 09If you’re easily distracted, sometimes blinders aren’t a bad thing. Maybe the key is to make your goals consistent with your values.
CJ Curtis
on 01 May 09To quote John Lennon…”Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans…”
Plans and goals don’t “lock you in.” That’s silly. The more free thinking you are, you more plans and goals you tend to have, although they might change from day to day.
The important part is looking back every once in a while and making sure you’re accomplishing something.
The story itself makes good points, but I think they’re speaking to very different “goals” held by very different people.
This discussion is closed.