Measuring without execution and goals without measuring break in two different, predictable places

The division of labour between these two frameworks is drawn sharply in this conversation. Measuring value tells you what the goal should be. Working with objectives tells you how to achieve it and how we will know we have got there. That gives the order of steps in an implementation, and the first of them is surprisingly unlike what people expect. You don't start by setting a goal. You start by naming the problem you want to solve, because having something implemented and having it in use are two different things. Then you check whether your existing goals are measurable at all and whether they are a vision in disguise. Only then do you look at which value area is not covered in your company, because the uncovered one is the source of goals. In more than ninety per cent of cases unrealised potential is not measured: companies measure what they already deliver, so they know how they are doing and don't know where to go. It happens that after this kind of scan the strategic goal changes, because it turns out to be inadequate to the market situation, and that is the proper result of the work, not an accident along the way.

Each of these methods, implemented on its own, breaks at a point you can name in advance. Measurement breaks on operations, because it doesn't define roles, cadence or how teams work. It silently assumes the rhythm familiar from software development, and sales, marketing and customer service have no such rhythm: they don't work in iterations, and often don't even work in the same tools. Drawing them into a cycle of review and correction is the real implementation problem, not the measurement itself. Working with objectives breaks on the other side. Without measurement, an organisational goal is often a financial wish with no hypothesis behind it. Separately, it breaks on reach: objectives implemented only at team level most often don't translate into the strategic goal and degenerate into delivering features, after which nobody can say what they were for. Growing revenue by twenty per cent is not a bad goal, by the way. It is an unfinished goal until we name what has to happen for that revenue to grow, because it doesn't happen by magic.

The blockers to implementation are named in this conversation without beating about the bush, and none of them is technical. The first is fear of being measured. It grows with the size of the company, because the information about why we measure simply doesn't reach everyone, and with more than ten thousand people it is guaranteed. You have to say plainly and many times over that measurement serves better decisions, not control of people. The second is half a framework: the implementation runs only from the delivery side and has no access to business data, or the other way round, and then the information the whole method rests on is missing. The cause is a lack of cooperation between departments, not the method itself. The third is a pilot that succeeded and went no further: in one bank it proved itself in three products and stopped exactly there, because in the rest of the organisation there was neither interest nor backing from decision-makers. On top of that comes measurement without an agreed review cadence, meaning areas that were mapped and then abandoned for several months, and decisions made on stale data. And one thing we have to watch ourselves, because it is easy to overdo: we tell clients that goals aren't rigid and that a hypothesis may be dropped once it has stopped making sense. The other extreme is just as harmful. Goals reshuffled every other moment because the business is shifting rob teams of a sense of purpose just as effectively as a goal kept for a year out of inertia.