Overpowered Metrics Eat Underspecified Goals
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Overpowered Metrics Eat Underspecified Goals
The problem (or at least one of the problems) is that the twin edicts to simultaneously optimize your team and life and to be flexible in light of an uncertain future are in opposition to each other. Optimization presumes a kind of certainty about the circumstances one is optimizing for, but that certainty is, more often than not, illusory.
Mandy Brown • Against Optimization
Keely Adler added
the goal is the direction-setter of the system, the definer of discrepancies that require action, the indicator of compliance, failure, or success toward which balancing feedback loops work. If the goal is defined badly, if it doesn’t measure what it’s supposed to measure, if it doesn’t reflect the real welfare of the system, then the system can’t
... See moreDonella H. Meadows • Thinking in Systems: International Bestseller
When the balance skews towards Compete , it is easy to lose sight of the big picture. The vision for the future devolves into questions like, "what if we had more users?" and "what if we just did more stuff?" This mindset drives products to become big, complex messes of features, leaving you wondering, "who asked for all this?" You end up wit
... See moreGeorge Kedenburg III • The Cost of Craft
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The main lesson we’ve learned is that you can almost never optimize directly for a goal—instead, you’re usually optimizing for something that looks like your goal but is slightly different. It’s a proxy.
Because you have to optimize for a proxy, when you optimize too much, you get too good at maximizing your proxy objective—which often takes you far... See more
Because you have to optimize for a proxy, when you optimize too much, you get too good at maximizing your proxy objective—which often takes you far... See more
Dan Shipper • The Optimal Level of Optimization
Britt Gage added
“I'm not striving towards some end state for Colossus. Big, hairy, audacious goals may work some of the time, I'm actually very suspicious of them. I actually think most of the time they're very bad.”
Frederik Gieschen • A Compulsive Search for the Most Interesting People with Patrick O'Shaughnessy - Compound Manual
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Yet what the book is about is that we have a tendency in our culture, a strong tendency, to basically design everything that we do around exactly that archetype, which is that let's set a goal, stay on our objective, and then let's set some metric so we can decide how close we're going to that goal, and then let's put all our effort into just movin... See more
Patrick O'Shaughnessy • Greatness Without Goals
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When people have conflicting priorities or unclear, meaningless, or arbitrarily shifting goals, they become frustrated, cynical, and demotivated.
John Doerr • Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs
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