In Two Concepts of Liberty (1958), Isaiah Berlin makes a helpful distinction between technical and political matters. "Where ends are agreed", he says, "the only questions left are those of means, and these are not political but technical, that is to say, capable of being settled by experts or machines, like arguments between engineers or doctors". Technical problems, he appears to be saying, are to be settled through objectivity and rational debate. Political problems, however, are creatures of the far murkier land of Value, Ethics, Aesthetics and Subjectivity.
This I thought about while reading Radical Focus, a 2016 book by Christina Wodtke, in which she advertises the many benefits of running your business by using Objectives and Key Results. Give your team inspiring Objectives, say the proponents of OKRs, and quantify progress using meaningful metrics and that will put you on the clear blue flightpath to entrepreneurial success.
"Inspiring" is about the only insight given here into exactly what makes something a good Objective. "Qualitative". Something that will "make people excited about getting out of bed", she further adds, just in case by this point you had any lingering uncertainty. And achievable in 3 to 6 months.
Some further clues emerge when she mentions that Objectives should align with your overall Mission, where Mission is a sort of philosophical lattice for your more pedestrian Objectives to hang off of. She recommends the formula: "We [reduce pain] in [market] by [value proposition]". Now this seemed a bit more promising. Reduced pain does sound, if not exactly inspiring, at least marginally preferable, most of the time.
And finally we get some hints as to what makes Objectives bad. Unexciting. Uninspiring. Drab. "Hit revenue target of $10m", to approximate one of her examples. Who cares? Normal people don't get excited about making (usually someone else) big piles of cash.
At this point, Ms Wodtke posits that this is a bad Objective because it fails to be an Objective at all, being instead just a lowly metric with zero to none inspirational umph. But I think there is a deeper reason why a revenue target doesn't quite work. Making money is a boring goal not just because it's quantitative, but also because it's selfish. It's all about you. "Be a writer". Same problem. Being a writer is an exciting vision for the starry-eyed aspiring writer and literally nobody else.
Think of it this way. Reality is a multiverse. You and I are here, in boring Universe A, and over there is better and much more exciting glorious Universe B: all we need to do is put the effort in to travel over. Our objective is a feature of the Target Universe, a sort of North Pole to help orient our journey. But there's a catch: we can't go there alone. A Target Universe doesn't become a Real Universe until we manage to convince enough people to travel there with us. Like Moses. So now you can see why "hit revenue target of £10m" or "be a writer" are bad objectives. Nobody wants to go there other than ourselves, who covet something in that universe. And why would they?
This is where the Promised Land idea comes in. A good objective is transcendental. Unselfish. Grand. It belongs to a Target Universe in which everyone's life is better. That's what it means to be inspiring. "Solve problem X" rather than "hit target revenue of £10m". People will travel to a world in which problem X is no longer a problem. The money will follow. Don't just be a writer, be someone who can analyse a phenomenon, articulate a vision, entertain, explain, reassure. Make the Target Universe better in some way and people will follow. Is the theory.
But it's hard gig being Moses. The distance between Universes A and B is a wide and perilous desert. The empty space of mutinies, nostalgia, confusion. People lose faith in this desert. They riot and jump ship.
Besides which, who knows what constitutes a Promised Land, exactly? What do people want. Besides bread and circus, that is, and triumphs and romance; and handy tech for continually proving to themselves their own lack of significance and personal glamour. Hard to tell. More money, less hassle, dignity, respect. Most of the stuff in the lower half of Maslow's pyramid and one or two things from the summit.
Besides which, who knows what constitutes a Promised Land, exactly? What do people want. Besides bread and circus, that is, and triumphs and romance; and handy tech for continually proving to themselves their own lack of significance and personal glamour. Hard to tell. More money, less hassle, dignity, respect. Most of the stuff in the lower half of Maslow's pyramid and one or two things from the summit.
And in the light of this it doesn't surprise me at all that the tech world has a hard time telling you exactly what makes a good Objective. That is, beyond the hand-wavy notions that they should be "qualitative", "inspiring" and able to wake people out of their AM slumber like a large dose of pharma-grade class A amphetamines. The tech world is exactly that: technical. And I'd posit a little more philosophy amid its people wouldn't entirely go amiss.
