Boris, a tradeoff-oriented goal-setting process

I like any article that asks business people to put more emphasis on the ...in exchange for what? part of decision-making. That's something I have to repeat often. "I get that you want us to pursue this new thing, but what would you like to sacrifice to reclaim resources for it? My recommendation would be this, but I want us to agree before proceeding."

This article tangents another huge problem with goal-setting, though: they focus on outcome, not behaviour.

- You can control behaviour, but outcome is often to a large extent determined by external factors. You cannot will external forces into your bidding by setting a goal.

- If you just miss a goal, you've still done an amazing job -- but you're still considered to have failed to accomplish what you set out to. Goals promote a binary view of success that has little connection to reality.

- If you meet a goal, you have succeeded and can only harm yourself by doing more work. Exceeding your goals lead to even more unrealistic goals in the future.

- If you know ahead of time it will be impossible to meet a goal, you have little reason to continue because you will fail anyway. The two last points mean goals are effectively an excuse to stop doing the right thing.

- Outcomes (and therefore goals) are often lagging indicators. Even though you've made great progress in shifting course, your past momentum in the wrong direction carrying over can make it look like outcomes are still getting worse.

- In trying to satisfy goal-setters, when outcomes aren't directly controllable, people find the other thing that can be controlled: the measurement process. There are a million subtle ways for someone under a goal to put a thumb on the scale to meet the goal although nothing material has changed.

Edit: I forgot: goals are almost always focused on the short term. You can meet them by trading off long term success for short term success and indeed this is what people do.

The example argument is very weak, the fictional organization has a goal of "increasing revenues and profitability", isn't that a tautology? I mean are there any firms where that would not be the goal. Any reasonably competent leadership will go atleast a few levels deeper and have goals that have demonstrable product outcomes, which translate to increased profit or sales. At least that has been my experience. I'd like to understand if there are any orgs out there with such simplistic goals as stated in the article.

Nice article. With a different name this might catch on.

Even without the association with a disorganised useless twat it doesn't even flow in ordinary conversation. "We're going to do a Boris today". What does that mean, fuck up the future of the company?

I'm kind of confused by why and how trade-off alignment can be a goal setting exercise. Isn't this something that changes as the year progresses? Aren't project managers constantly negotiating these changes?

Is this the kind of solution a consultant comes up with because "teams actually communicating effectively outside a managed workshop" isn't a marketable silver bullet?

I guess the key take away is it's an easy pitfall to make team OKRs that ignore cross team dependencies. If your team expects deliverables from another team, it can be useful to get that reflected in OKRs. To that end... actually talk to teams your team depends on and figure out if your dependencies are a priority!

Seems like basic stuff though.

But what if the "C-suite" and other upper management doesn't get it?

Ironically, I work for a large "PrintCo" on a smaller, more obscure product line. I'm the only software developer. The managers are all people coming from the ME side, and are all so focused on how to make money from their hardware perspective, they don't see that software can add value too. For them, it's a necessary evil, where things like "technical debt" are just me complaining.

My point being, people at certain levels are just clueless and I don't really trust their goals at all. Sure, they can say "make more money!" or "sell more!" but they don't always see at all the core reasons why maybe they can't make more money, or sell more. Or the things that might let them do that.

"Boris is a one-day small-group workshop for all key decisionmaking stakeholders in an organization. "

Devs: Oh god... they are workshopping again.. what overpaid consultant they brought this time? SaFE? Sigma Six? ... Boris? wtf is that? nvm, we'll need to build it just the same.

Understanding tradeoffs is very important. I've seen driving hard on OKR's that seem to make sense from a business perspective not take into account the level of support we need to give existing products.

It makes me happy to know others are thinking in terms of trade-offs as goals.

I wrote an article about this from the perspective of avoiding software technical debt, but I have to admit, this article does a better job on explaining why it works than my own article (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

https://connected.io/post/how-to-avoid-technical-debt/ tldr: You can find overlap or convergence by applying PCA on a trade-off matrix.

Its not very clear what a non goal is supposed to be

This needs a tldr...