What do you think of targets? Do you have some that you’ve been set or have given to others?<\/p>\n
There is a broad school of thought which has grown up recently to criticise the use of targets.<\/p>\n
The line of argument goes something like this: Any sort of arbitrary measure like a target\u00a0results in people focusing only on\u00a0‘meeting the target’. This then\u00a0limits the methods they’ll\u00a0use to improve the organisation (as they’ll only try ones that seem to contribute to the target) and they’ll ignore signals from\u00a0other places (eg feedback from customers) which may actually be more important than achieving the target.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Based on this, the anti-target school claims that ALL targets will make the system you work\u00a0in worse as they direct attention and effort to the wrong things and result in\u00a0unintended bad consequences.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, it\u2019s hard to know what you\u2019re trying to achieve (and especially hard to have a\u00a0team share this view) without some sort of articulation of the goal, objective, etc and a way of measuring progress towards it. What will success look like?<\/p>\n
Moreover, clearly athletes benefit from having a target to aim for – “I want to knock 10 seconds off my personal best”.<\/p>\n
And the anti-target school seems happy with actions being steered by what customers define as success: things along the line of\u00a0“customers want their products to work first time or their appointments to be kept”. Is that some sort of target?<\/p>\n