DUMB goals

A few years ago I was working with a brand that had a goal to increase customer penetration — they wanted to sell their products to more of their potential customers. The brand leader saw this as an outcome of the brand achieving the media reach and messaging salience they desired. It made sense to me so I asked them how they measure it. “We don’t have a good way, but let’s put it down anyway.”

The smart answer to this is that it doesn’t qualify as a SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) goal: reject.

But we kept it because fighting to win in an uncertain future means looking beyond what we know today. The future has capabilities that have not yet been invented. (While measuring customer penetration isn’t impossible, for a sophisticated, marketing leading CPG to have trouble with it gives some indication of how tricky it is.)

Measurement, like language, helps us articulate what happened or what we want to happen. But as the artist John Berger says: “Much of what happens to us in life is nameless because our vocabulary is too poor.” Does a lack of articulation of the feeling we get from hearing a kid’s laugh or instrumental section (for me, the horns in “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes”) make those feelings invalid?

My friend Jon put me onto a philosophy professor-surf instructor in New York who writes a blog under the name Conatus Surf Club, a name is derived from a latin word for “the force within all things that endeavors to persevere.” It’s that steady effort that persists despite evidence we should quit. Or maybe a lack of evidence that we should keep striving.

When Peter Drucker said, “What gets measured gets managed,” it was more prescriptive than descriptive: Measure things so you can manage them. Zoom out on an organization that treats this as dogma and you see the problem. Hundreds of things being measured and managed in isolation, facts spewed like breaking news while we struggle to remember where we’re all going.

I’m not anti-measurement; I’m radically pro-measurement. Part of that is separating facts from intelligence, like separating words from feelings. Striving for intelligence takes facts and leaps into the lesser known.

SMART goals help us hit ORKs. DUMB goals are the ambitious ones we can’t measure yet. Healthy planning has just enough DUMB to keep us moving forward.

—

I write these posts, 3-MINUTE MONDAYS, every other week. My goal with them is to share a snippet of insight into how to do strategy, build teams, and grow. Comment here or message me on LinkedIn if you want to chat. — Ben