Conventional goal-setting sucks because it overlooks the actually important part of agreeing on goals collectively, which is to also agree on what you’re willing (and unwilling) to give up to achieve those shared goals. By not paying attention to what tradeoffs stakeholders believe are (or aren’t) acceptable, conventional goal-setting makes conflic... See more

The reason I’ve just made you read a thousand words about trees (bet you didn’t think you were going to do that today) is that it illustrates the problems of taking a complex system and applying a simple process to it in order to optimize a single metric.

Which brings us back to business: there are a huge number of complex systems in a business, wh... See more