Goals May Damage Your Health!

I’m going to offer a controversial opinion.

The goal part of a key result is often misused and is sometimes damaging.

Unless your key result represents a well understood threshold it is most likely a guess. It’s a guess about what is achievable.

What really matters is the connection to your strategy and your conviction to do your best.

If you underestimate the goal you risk diminishing the aspiration of the team. If you overestimate the goal you risk demoralising the team.

When you think about the goal there is a lens I recommend you use. Look at the metric through the lens of the evidence you are looking for. What do you need to attain for an hypothesis to remain valid?

Let's look at an example. Imagine our on-line learning portal wants to improve the quality of their lessons. The outcome they hope to drive is the number of people passing tests after a lesson.

What's the goal for that? It's probably quite tricky to set a target. Who knows what improvement we can make?

Let's get more specific. We have a hypothesis that says providing higher quality video lessons will improve the pass rate. Straight away we have something we can work with.

This working out is simplified here, but it serves our purpose. We decide that to make higher quality videos worth producing we need to increase pass rates by 25%. This gives us a goal to work towards which isn't entirely arbitrary and we can test with A/B tests.

If we're just generally testing ideas to improve pass rates, we may still set a goal. Perhaps we need to match a competitors outcomes, or maintain a lead. Still fine, there is something underpinning the target.

A well considered goal can assist your analysis. If you are failing to move the needle or running out of ideas, the hypothesis might be invalid. Step back and take a broader look.

When’s the best time to have that conversation?

When you have the insight. Talking about your learning as it emerges will accelerate your team. Leaving discussions to cycle ends can waste time. Discuss as you learn, not when an artificial milestone tells you to.

If your goal is to move a well established metric, where there isn’t a hypothesis to test, stop and think. Could we identify a more leading metric? Is there an earlier assumption we can test?

If you are not testing a hypothesis treat the goal more casually. It represents a direction of travel. It's a finger in the air attempt to see where you can get to.

Making this explicit helps free the team to focus on results, not management judgement.