Unpredictable Patterns #22: Against objectives
Why a single mental model may be holding us back, on thalassocracy and deep uncertainty as well as on leadership models
Dear reader,
This week’s note is an attempt to challenge a mental model that has almost become invisible to us, the idea that it is through objectives we change the world. I found the reading and research here fascinating, and I hope you do too! As always - if you like these notes please spread the word and send them around so we can grow the community and learn faster. I learn a lot from your comments, ideas and pushback so please keep that coming!
The tyranny of objectives
When I examine my own thinking about thinking, one of the things that stands out most clearly is that I believe in setting goals and defining objectives. This almost axiomatic belief in our ability to set a goal and then work hard to reach it is embedded not just in me, but in most of western civilization. The image that suggests itself is someone setting out to reach the top of a mountain, and persisting until they reach the peak.
Objectives organize the world in terms of mental and physical journeys, but there is something peculiar about that picture. They assume we know the terrain, that we really know that the peak is the peak and that we are able to see clearly how to get there from here (and back again).
So, when I stumbled on a recent book by Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman, two computer scientists, with the provocative title Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective I was immediately convinced I had to explore this idea further - what if the image of us scaling mountain sides is holding us hostage and stops us from thinking in different ways? What if our belief in objectives is excluding tactics and strategies that are much more powerful than those of goals and objectives?
After all, we should be most wary of the beliefs that we rarely examine, and as Stanley and Lehman point out:
”It’s interesting that we rarely talk about the dominance of objectives in our culture even though they impact us from the very beginning of life. It starts when we’re barely more than a toddler. That momentous first day that we enter kindergarten is the gateway to an endless cycle of assessment that will track us deep into adulthood. And all that assessment has a purpose—to measure our progress towards specific objectives set for us by society or by ourselves, such as mastering a subject and obtaining a job.”
Stanley, Kenneth O.; Lehman, Joel. Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned (p. 1). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Objectives are silent deities governing our lives, and we are not always that clear on who sets them for us - but we can be almost entirely sure that it is very rare that it is just ourselves; more often we are beholden to the objectives of parents, friends, expectations overall in society — and objectives distilled from thinkers and writers that have long since passed away.
The economist John Maynard Keynes made this point when he noted that
“Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some *defunct economist*. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”
But it is not only the objectives themselves, but the very idea of objectives that we risk ending up enslaved under - and the stories about success are a large part of why: never giving up, never wavering - those are the traits that we believe bring success, and if we /do/ give up the way we frame it is that we ”abandon” an objective - we leave it and in doing so we also fail ourselves.
At this point you may be rolling your eyes and wondering when these notes became pseudo-mystical hippy evangelism - and if you do that it is because you are asking a very good question: what is the alternative? Is it some kind of fatalism? Just accepting the stagnation we wrote about in the last letter?
If we agree that objectives and goal setting is problematic - what do we do instead?
Climbing mountains, searching the seas
Objectives organize ambition and creativity. One reason we like them is that they, as Stanley and Lehman says, ”create possibility” - they allow us to imagine something and then achieve it. This is incredibly valuable, and objectives play an important role in the way human imagination recreates the world - but there are other ways of organizing ambition and creativity.
If we return to the image we used for objectives - the mountaineer scaling the mountain - and ask what other images we could think about that are about ambition and creativity we find that ambition sometimes is directed not towards a goal as much as it is directed towards /discovery/. Stanley and Lehman again:
”It’s useful to think of achievement as a process of discovery. We can think of painting a masterpiece as essentially discovering it within the set of all possible images. It’s as if we are searching through all the possibilities for the one we want, which we call our objective. Of course, we’re not talking about search in the same casual sense in which you might search for a missing sock in the laundry machine. This type of search is more elevated, the kind an artist performs when exploring her creative whims. But the point is that the familiar concept of search can actually make sense of more lofty pursuits like art, science, or technology. All of these pursuits can be viewed as searches for something of value. It could be new art, theories, or inventions. Or, at a more personal level, it might be the search for the right career. Whatever you’re searching for, in the end it’s not so different from any other human process of discovery. Out of many possibilities, we want to find the one that’s right for us. So we can think of creativity as a kind of search. But the analogy doesn’t have to stop there. If we’re searching for our objective, then we must be searching through something. *We can call that something the search space—the set of all possible things*.”
Stanley, Kenneth O.; Lehman, Joel. Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned (pp. 5-6). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition.
The objective remains in play - as the thing we are looking for in this vast space, or room, of possibilities. But suddenly we see why the objective is limiting us: it attracts all our attention and does not allow us to discover other possibilities in the search space. And here is the kicker: the larger and more ambitious the objective, the more it excludes entire subsets of the search space that you will now never wander into.
Now, imagine that instead of a yearly plan with objectives and key results you set out to search for solutions to your problems. The task assigned to the teams working on a problem is to explore the search space thoroughly and look not for the solution you think is the right one, but look for as many different solutions as possible - to employ something sometimes called ”novelty search” where what you look for is something new, a new mountain or even a valley in the landscape of the possible.
So far Stanley and Lehman - their answer to what should replace objectives is, if I am allowed to simplify, novelty search across the search space, looking for what they call stepping stones that allow us to solve or reformulate the problem we are working on.
Let’s say you are a tech company and you want to improve your reputation and build credibility and legitimacy in the public sphere. Rather than set an objective to hold X events, reach Y key decision makers or publish Z opens on the subject you could formulate a search for credibility-improving tasks - and then start looking at the entire search space, exploring it and working through to find things that you can try.
In a sense this is about the size of your objectives — as you search through the space of possible solutions to your problem you find simple things to try, and these things are essentially experiments, and then your objective, if you reconstruct it, is to search through the space of possible solutions consciously focusing on new solutions and seeking novelty.
The alternative to scaling the mountain is the explorer venturing out unto an unknown sea, looking for new and exciting discoveries. The opposite to objectives is not aimlessness, but exploration and discovery. Not climbing mountains, but searching the seas.
But is it all…science? Experiments?
We recognize this idea from other fields where objectives play a smaller role or are used in different ways - most directly science. The scientific method is about formulating a hypothesis, testing it and then using the test outcomes to continue exploring. Science is a surprisingly efficient method for exploring vast areas of possibility, and even if this model of science is grossly oversimplified (there is a lot more complexity to science with emotions, ideologies and substructures than the simplified model here allows for) it does give us a starting point for thinking about objectives in a different way.
Science is also our chosen method when we try to understand very complex systems, and there is an important observation here: when we deal with complex systems objectives can be positively damaging since they assume linearity where there is no linearity and articulated causality where there is no such thing.
In fact, really complex systems present an even more wicked problem: often we find that we cannot even decide on which model best represents them. Not only, then, do we not know how these systems will evolve, we also do not agree on how they can be best modeled or simplified. We suffer, then, from two kinds of uncertainty here - unpredictability and unknowability.
Or simpler: we do not know what will happen and do not agree on what it is we are observing. This state of being is much more common than we would like to admit, and researchers have suggested that we call it ”deep uncertainty”.
Researchers Henrik Berglund, Marouane Bousfiha and Yashar Mansoori have suggested, building on Herbert Simon, that we can think about the world as ontologically uncertain or epistemically uncertain - and that our response to these uncertainties varies: when it comes to ontological uncertainty, uncertainty about how the world is, we negotiate and make the world up as we believe it should be. When we are dealing with epistemic uncertainty we adapt and overcome challenges through information gathering. Berglund et al are discussing entrepreneurship and opportunities-as-artifacts, but their framework can be generalized into a broader discussion about objectives.
After all: adapting and negotiating - that is what organization really do all the time! Adapting by information gathering and negotiating by creating new opportunities, institutions and alliances.
Navigation, leadership and the difference between accountability and authority
Now, let’s bring this back to how we plan and what we do day to day. What if an organization decided to describe the key challenges it is facing in its environment - a really robust description of what is going on here - and then set out to find adaptations and negotiations that could help deal with the challenges in the environment. Would such an organization be less successful than one with clear objectives and key results? Or would it have found a better way to address the deep uncertainty that most organizations face?
In deep uncertainty research a key insight is that if we are dealing with deep uncertainty our best bet is to interact with the system and see what it produces in terms of responses. We set up a dialogue between ourselves and the environment, probing and testing - and, yes, experimenting all the time. These experiments allow us to find out more about behavioral patterns and tendencies and so allow us to find ways of adapting and negotiating.
Again, we are back to our experiments - we set out to experiment and think through the results of the experiments as we explore the overall search space for organizational success.
Sounds exhausting, doesn’t it? Much easier to just set objectives — right?
Well, maybe. But the objectives often become stunted and artificial and do they really inspire people to do their best work? What would you prefer? To come into work in an organization that is actively exploring novelty, experimenting and looking for negotiations and adaptations - or to come in and deal with a set of objectives that have been established a few months ago and either have been designed to be so abstract as to survive the complexity your organization works in (and hence feel fuzzy and less meaningful) or start to feel more and more obsolete as the environment changes?
And this leads us to another interesting insight - and that is that without clear objectives we need much better management and different organization models.
The objective and key result model risks becoming a bad prosthesis for good management - it provides clarity at the cost of flexibility, but at least you have clarity. The role of a manager in an organization organized around novelty search, interactions, negotiations and adaptations becomes much more complex; the manager needs to coordinate, sift through searches and proposals, figure out how to decide better on experiments and interactions - he or she needs to manage risk in a much more fluid way.
The objectives and key results model distributes accountability across an organization — it is the employee’s problem if they cannot reach the objectives, the manager can stand clear from the mess that ensues, and the model of performance that it encourages is individualistic; you are responsible for reaching your OKRs and it is your fault if you do not succeed.
I think we all know that this is not always true. Performance is a network concept and we perform both better and worse depending on the contexts, capabilities and networks that we have access to in an organization.
Here is an analogy - modern organizations are a lot more like ships than they are like Tayloristic factories with individuals as atomistic components of a machine. The ship depends on centralized authority, the factory on distributed accountability. This, again, is an uncomfortable conclusion for us - because it seems to suggest that we need strong leadership in our organizations, when we have been taught to think that modern leadership delegates, includes and defers to the views of the many. Strong leaders sounds almost atavistic, even if we have accepted strong-willed entrepreneurs as a part of the Silicon Valley narrative.
But I think we get this wrong: the ship’s captain also delegates, defers and includes - but with a presence and a command of the ships overall fate that clearly requires him or her to navigate the sea, and this is the key challenge in a complex environment - this navigation of the sea. And navigation requires that the leader synthesizes the whole situation and reacts to it - and ultimately the fate of the ship, the accountability, lies with the leader.
That is why they leave a sinking ship last, and not in order of the last performance review.
In her beautiful book introducing the ancient Greeks, Edith Hall suggests that Ancient Greece was a thalassocracy - it was governed by the sea, on the sea, and the Greeks themselves thought not of themselves as distinct cities (as we are often taught), but, as Homer suggests, a set of ships. The Greeks set out to discover the sea, to explore it and master it - driven by a sense of adventure and expansionism that is not unlike that of today’s entrepreneurs.
The modern organization could find no better model than this, I think, and in a thalassocracy we search and navigate choppy waters, we interact with the sea and we seek adaptations in better ships and negotiations with other ships - we experiment and learn.
So what…abandon all objectives?
Now, we will not abandon the objectives-model - and we probably shouldn’t. The value in challenging a mental model lies not in replacing it as much as it does in challenging its hegemony and allowing for us to introduce other models as well. I still like objective thinking, and I think that the core take aways from this examination for me are the following.
In addition to objectives, we need to ensure that we also set out to search for novelty, design experiments and find adaptations and negotiations. When we plan we need to complement objectives we key searches that we want to make to explore the set of possible futures. This is essentially unpacking what we sometimes call ”incoming” and thinking about how we deal with the whims of the sea.
Our ambitious objectives should be decomposable into existing capabilities. This is an important point about moonshots - Stanley and Lehman point out that the moon landing was ambitious, but based on technologies that were well within reach. The temptation in setting ambitious objectives is to instead set objectives that have no grounding in actual near term capabilities - and then we limit the search space in ways that are sure to be harmful.
Learn and practice goal revision. The objectives that we do set often need to change, but most organizations lack good ways of revising their goals and so pursue these goals even when they no longer should be the key priorities.
Learn experimentation. An organization that does not experiment is not learning, and sometimes experimentation can as simple as looking at a meeting as a way to test a message or an idea, and then diligently evaluating it. It is not that we do not try things in organizations, it is that we often do not spend the time to learn and document what we learned. This feels ”bureaucratic” and ”administrative” - when in fact it is the core of what a learning organization should be engaged in. If you do not believe me, believe Jeff Bezos: ”Our success at Amazon is a function of how many experiments we do per year, per month, per week, per day”. Now, the pithy CEO quote is not a favorite genre of mine, but here I think he is absolutely right. A good place to start is Stefan H Tomke’s Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments.
Chart and re-focus on capabilities. This is an old pet peeve of mine, and I aim to return to it, but organizations would benefit from distilling from their diagnosis of the environment a set of capabilities that they need to have - things they need to be able to do routinely and well - and then set out to build and maintain those capabilities. It is clear for anyone who studies the most action-focused organizations of all - the military - that their relentless focus on their capabilities and those of the enemy is key to their success.
If we do this AND think through achievable objectives that build on near-term capabilities we will be more successful than if we end up a single-mental-model pony with OKRs as our only tool. And it also makes work a lot more interesting!
Thank you for reading, and as always let me know if there are any ideas or thoughts you want to share. Finally a plug for Richard Allan’s podcast Regulate Tech, that discusses the new communication around the European Commissions Code of Practice for misinformation (I get to ask questions of Richard as we mull over where the tech policy world is going).
Nicklas