#13: On goals and destinations
Doing strategy amidst complexity.
I’m Luke Craven; this is another of my weekly explorations of how systems thinking and complexity can be used to drive real, transformative change in the public sector and beyond. The first issue explains what the newsletter is about; you can see all the issues here.
Hello, dear reader,
tl;dr: Goal-setting can play an important role in strategic planning amidst complexity, despite its limitations in certain contexts. Doing away with goals altogether risks doing more harm than good.I’ve been on long-overdue leave the past week visiting my partner’s family in Melbourne. The week involved, among other things, a lot of time on the road. I find long drives quietly meditative, even more so with the modern wonders of GPS navigation and adaptive cruise control. This trip, I found myself chewing over the concept of car travel as a metaphor how we ought to do strategy in complex environments—yes, my meditation is always this thrilling!
In most cases, people set out on a drive with a destination in mind. That destination can typically be reached via different routes. Choosing a initial route involves making trade-offs between often competing objectives like desired arrival time, road quality, likely traffic flows, presence of tolls, and availability of suitable rest areas, just to name a few! Different maps will reveal different aspects of the territory and enable different kinds of decision-making. Despite all our best intentions, very few journeys go precisely to plan. It’s common to make adjustments, which are usually guided by the destination that is being sought.
At face value, none of this feels controversial. It’s how I manage my car travel. It’s how I imagine you manage yours. But it is deeply at odds with contemporary thinking about the role that goals and destinations should play in how we should manage complexity. Most famously, David Snowden has suggested that we should abandon the concept of goals in strategic planning altogether. In their place, he suggests a complexity-informed approach strategy that works with the “evolutionary potential of the present”. This approach places emphasis on mapping the current environment to find out what can be changed—in a measurable way—so that small evolutionary steps can be in a more positive direction without any assumption of the end destination. Dave argues that we can sustain novel practice (and adaptation) by using vector targets to measure direction and speed of travel against intensity of effort, which can help potentially avoid some of the common pitfalls of destination- and outcome-based targets.
Now, I know my car travel metaphor can only be pushed so far, but it has countless analogues in our daily lives and in the natural world. Destinations (and fixed destinations!) seem to help us manage the complexity of our surroundings. That doesn’t mean that destinations are a necessary feature of strategic planning—all contexts are different—but it does suggest that we should not be so quick to do away with them altogether. There are a number of reasons they remain useful.
It is possible to be responsive to complexity in how a journey is managed, even if the destination if fixed. This is as true of car travel, as it is of meal preparation, as it is of a bird attempting to land safely on a tree amidst rapidly changing weather conditions. Some journeys require a destination to be meaningful. Others benefit from more open exploration and adaptation. When we do strategy amidst complexity, the first question we should ask ourselves is which of these two categories the specific journey falls into. The answer to that question will inform the kind of strategic planning that the particular context requires. Whatever answer, it remains possible conduct that planning in a complexity-informed way.
Without a clear destination, it is easy to confuse motion with progress. The nature of the modern organisation is that it tends to encourage a lot of busy work. People are incentivised to look busy, to be seen to “innovate” and to deliver “stuff” to support the success of their particular organisational unit and for the individual career progression. But, just because a lot is happening doesn’t mean a lot is getting done. People commonly drive around in circles. Particularly in large organisations, clearly articulated goals help to align and galvanise disparate groups toward shared priorities and mitigate the risk of work emerging that looks snazzy, but does not actually move the system in the right direction.
If speed and direction of travel are our only metrics, we risk deprioritising change that requires slow, subtractive change. In some systems, vector targets may have perverse, unintended consequences. Despite people’s best intentions for change, vector targets could feasibly lead people ignore changes that require movement at a slower pace than the desired speed of travel. Couple this with the fact that, at least in my experience, subtractive change is often slower (and harder!) than additive change and it is easy to see how vector targets could create undesirable behaviour amongst actors in the system. Despite their benefits for some forms of strategic planning, we should not be blind to their potential harms.
Of course, none of this means that outcome- or destination- based targets are without their flaws. They too have their place and their limits. But different contexts and different types of complexity will likely require different forms of strategic planning. There is no one-sized-fits-all complexity toolkit. Let’s stop pretending there is.
By the way: This newsletter is hard to categorise and probably not for everyone—but if you know unconventional thinkers who might enjoy it, please share it with them.
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Bravo for mentioning the value of subtraction. I remember the engineering manager for Outlook once telling his engineers, “For every line of code you write, you have to find another to delete.” Parsimony!
I like sailing as a metaphor for what your describing. ‘it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey.’ And sometimes, every step made toward a destination, another may soon be subtracted. Also, sailing embraces environmental complexity by harnessing turbulence for controlled progress toward a goal.