Goals, Measures & Behaviours
Goals are essential in complex environments where things are uncertain and subject to change. Goals can ensure people know what they need to achieve, even as things around them change. Without goals, people may be unsure what is important or what they should be focussed on. Goals can encourage focus, increase collaboration, and aid prioritisation.
To be effective, goals need to be made clear and explicit. Otherwise, people may interpret them differently based on their context and bias. This creates the potential for waste and frustration.
Traditionally, management has been taught to create activity-based plans and measure whether those activities have been performed. This means that measures are usually related to behaviours and activities rather than goals.
Measures & Behaviours
Measures help you know that a goal has been achieved. Measures affect what people perceive as their goal and may cause a misalignment of goals. Measures will drive people’s behaviours. Measures affect what people perceive as their goal. People will focus on the measures and do what they can to ensure the desired results are achieved, even if the consequence is that the original goal is not achieved.
A goal without a measure is an unclear goal. People may have different views on what is required to achieve it, leading to a lack of alignment and wasted effort.
The Law of Unintended Consequences
The term “cobra effect” was coined based on an anecdote of an occurrence in India during British rule. The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this appeared to be a successful strategy, and many snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was stopped. When cobra breeders freed their now-worthless snakes, the wild cobra population increased.
This story exemplifies Goodhart’s Law – the law of unintended consequences.
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”
Measures drive behaviours, but these behaviours may not lead to the intended goal being achieved. When the measure becomes the target, it loses its ability to provide insight into progress towards a goal. People will focus on the measure and may consciously or unconsciously game the system to achieve the desired result regardless of whether it contributes to the goal.
This is commonly seen in organisations starting to adopt Scrum and moving from a predictive to an empirical approach to managing work. Such organisations are typically used to measure predictability and volume of work completed and set goals and measures around this. When they adopt Scrum, they hear about the complementary practice of measuring a Scrum Team’s velocity. Velocity measures how much work a Scrum Team gets Done in a Sprint. It can be helpful as an aid to Sprint Planning and release planning. Knowing how much a team has delivered in past Sprints can help set expectations about how long things may take to be delivered in the future. So, measuring velocity can be a “good” practice.
However, many more traditional organisations subvert the use of velocity measure and use it as a way to monitor a Scrum Team’s output. It is often used to motivate the team to deliver more. A Scrum Team that has 20 “points” of work in a Sprint will be encouraged to increase this number so that they provide more. The number of points is used by management to judge how effective the team is. The score may be compared to other Scrum Teams in the organisation, and further targets may be set. Bonuses and promotion opportunities may be tied to the measure. Unsurprisingly, this will lead to certain negative behaviours in the Scrum Team as people focus on the velocity measure.
Increased focus will be placed on accurate estimation. As a result, it will require more time and effort to “get it right”. Developers will fear giving an incorrect estimate and being judged on it or having it affect their velocity target. In the extreme, vast amounts of time and resources can be spent on estimation that could be better spent on developing the product and adding value. Some estimation is usually necessary, but the time spent on this in pursuit of the perfect answer can become hugely wasteful. In complex environments, we need to learn to live with unpredictability and create plans that are good enough despite incomplete information.
To achieve a higher velocity, Scrum Teams will inflate their estimates. More story points will be assigned to work to give the impression of greater productivity by the team. The exact amount of work will be delivered, but it will look better to management due to the perceived higher velocity. This makes the estimates provided far less helpful for product and release planning as the numbers change and become less meaningful due to inflation.
At the end of a Sprint, Developers will present partially complete work as being Done to get the credit for points delivered towards their velocity. This, in turn, misleads Product Owners and stakeholders regarding the proper level of progress made. Transparency is reduced, and predictability will decline. The real progress will be unknown, and plans will be made based on false information. Stakeholders will feel they have been misled, and trust will be reduced. Empiricism requires trust, so this may undermine the whole shift towards Scrum.
So, measures are essential. However, placing too much emphasis on them and using them to motivate people risks unwanted severe side effects that can limit progress and make achieving goals less likely or more expensive. We have to walk a tightrope when we use them. We need them in place but must ensure they do not become the focus.
Alignment
Maintaining alignment between goals, measures, and behaviours can be challenging in complex environments where things are unpredictable and subject to frequent change. We cannot always fully predict the behaviours that goals and measures will produce. We cannot fully predict how behaviours affect our progress toward our goals. Our measures and behaviours may not change as our goals change, leading to wasted effort. If goals and measures change too frequently, people may not keep up with the changes and may get stuck focusing on old and out-of-date activities. Maintaining alignment and understanding goals, measures, and desired activities is critical. Effective leadership is required to support this.