I agree, but only to a point. At the consultancy I used to work for, we were all about quantifying goals and plans and measuing our performance. Those are sometimes useful techniques, particularly when you have a large, complex project and don’t trust the people doing the work to tell you the truth.
But that method also comes with its own weaknesses. By establishing measurement criteria, you make achieving the criteria the goal, which can distract you from your true goal. Sometimes you can meet your criteria for success, but fail to actually achieve the objective that it was meant to accomplish. Other times you accomplish the goal, but fall short of the measurement criteria. You’ve accomplished a significant weight loss, but (if I remember right) you fell a pound or two short of your end of year goal; does that mean you failed, or succeeded?
I find setting up measurement criteria is usually too binary for me. In the real world, there’s often no single inflection point between success and failure. There is a huge, broad spectrum between abject failure and complete success, and I trust myself to have the integrity to know where on that spectrum my performance lies. And I usually find it preferable to focus on my real goal than on some arbitrary number that may poorly model my goal.
Of course, some goals lend themselves to measurement, and in many cases it’s important to have a reference point you can manage to and talk about, but I generally find that’s a more artificial setup than simply accepting that there are relative degrees of success.
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Date: 2003-12-28 08:48 am (UTC)But that method also comes with its own weaknesses. By establishing measurement criteria, you make achieving the criteria the goal, which can distract you from your true goal. Sometimes you can meet your criteria for success, but fail to actually achieve the objective that it was meant to accomplish. Other times you accomplish the goal, but fall short of the measurement criteria. You’ve accomplished a significant weight loss, but (if I remember right) you fell a pound or two short of your end of year goal; does that mean you failed, or succeeded?
I find setting up measurement criteria is usually too binary for me. In the real world, there’s often no single inflection point between success and failure. There is a huge, broad spectrum between abject failure and complete success, and I trust myself to have the integrity to know where on that spectrum my performance lies. And I usually find it preferable to focus on my real goal than on some arbitrary number that may poorly model my goal.
Of course, some goals lend themselves to measurement, and in many cases it’s important to have a reference point you can manage to and talk about, but I generally find that’s a more artificial setup than simply accepting that there are relative degrees of success.