Objective-focused thinking

Imagine the following. It occurs countless times a day in offices all over the world. A person walks into his manager’s office. He describes a problem and proposes a way to solve it, or he describes an opportunity and proposes a way to exploit it. For example, “Our Widget subsidiary is losing money. I think we should sell it.” Or, “I heard the Acme Company is for sale. I think we should buy it.” Or, “Joe is a problem. I think we should fire him.” Or, “Joan is available. I think we should hire her.” The specifics differ, but the pattern is the same. The person describes a problem or opportunity and then issues a call to action in the form of a claim. In other words, the person calls the decision maker to act on an issue by claiming that a particular action should be taken.  

Now imagine that you are the manager. How would you respond to the person’s call to action? If you’re like most managers, you would ask him for more information and then decide whether or not to act on his claim. And with that move, you’ve made a fundamental cognitive mistake, a mistake that systems management professor Ralph Keeney calls alternative-focused thinking. Rather than first stepping back to consider what you want to achieve or accomplish in the situation, you focused on the alternatives presented to you—sell or don’t sell, buy or don’t buy, fire or don’t fire, and hire or don’t hire.  But don’t feel bad. You’re not alone. As Keeney explains, “The same narrowly focused thinking occurs in the offices of physicians and lawyers, in the boardrooms of multinational organizations, the chambers of regulatory agencies and legislative bodies, and routinely in our homes and schools.” 

So, what’s the alternative to alternative-focused thinking? The alternative is a method that Keeney calls value-focused thinking, though I prefer to call it objective-focused thinking. Objective-focused thinking involves responding to a call to action by first stepping back to consider your objectives and then building a mechanism to accomplish them. In this article we will discuss a method for implementing objective-focused thinking. 

To start, let’s define the term objective. An objective pertains to some object or, more generally, to some thing. Some sources define an objective as something aimed at or striven for or something that is to be reached, achieved, or accomplished. These definitions leave ‘thing’ undefined and implicitly focus on the idea that there is a person or organization with a desire to reach, achieve, or accomplish the thing. Other sources elaborate on the notion of thing by saying that it is a projected state of affairs, or more simply, some state of the thing, or even more simply, some result. A definition that combines all these meanings is this: An objective is a description of a desired state (of some thing). An equivalent, though less formal, way of putting this is to say that an objective is a description of a desired result.  

There are two kinds of objectives—end objectives and means objectives. An end objective describes a desired end result. A means objective describes a result that is desired in order to accomplish some other objective, either an end objective or another means objective. A measure of achievement quantifies an end objective and a goal sets the value of the measure. Developing a measure of achievement and establishing a goal enables one to determine the degree to which the end objective is achieved.   

Most problems and opportunities involve multiple ends and means objectives. In the balance of this post, I’ll explain some methods for identifying and organizing objectives and for creating measures of achievement.   

The essential first step of objective-focused thinking is to define the issue by asking if the issue presented to you, or that you present to yourself, would be better defined in terms of some larger issue. For example, consider again the manager who is told that Joe is a problem and should be fired. The savvy manager, rather than limiting the decision to ‘firing Joe,’ would first step back and ask if the decision is really about the broader issue of ‘managing Joe’ or the even-broader issue of ‘managing working conditions in Joe’s department.’ Similarly, the manager who is called to act on ‘hiring Joan’ should first consider whether the issue should be reframed as ‘hiring the best person for the job’ or ‘whether to hire anyone at all. A third example is shown below. Imagine that you are a city mayor and that you are called to act on the wood smoke problem. Your first step should be to ask yourself if the issue is about ‘managing wood smoke’ or the larger issue of ‘managing the effects of air pollution.’

The next step is to rephrase the issue in terms of an overall end objective by saying what it is that you want to achieve or accomplish with respect to the issue. Sometimes this is as simple as converting one form of a word into another. For example, the issue of ‘firing Joe’ is converted to the objective ‘fire Joe’ and ‘hiring the best person for the job’ becomes ‘hire the best person for the job.’ In other circumstances, the conversion is made by identifying a direction of preference for the focal object or thing, such as maximize the thing or minimize the thing. In the foregoing illustration, the issue of ‘managing the effects of air pollution’ can be converted to the overall end objective ‘minimize the effects of air pollution.’ 

Once you’ve defined the overall end objective, the next step is to make it more specific, i.e., to say precisely what you mean by the objective. This is done by creating a top-down hierarchy of end objectives in which the end objective is parsed into a set of progressively more-specific objectives. There are various methods that can be used to make the overall objective more specific. The best approach, I think, is to simply ask, “What do we mean by this objective?” For example, asking “What do we mean by ‘minimize the effects of air pollution’?” would yield more specific objectives like ‘minimize effects on health’ and ‘minimize effects on vegetation.’ The same question is asked of each of the answers. Asking, for example, “What do we mean by ‘minimize effects on vegetation’?” would generate yet-more-specific objectives like ‘minimize crop damage’ and ‘minimize forest damage.’ The process is repeated until you judge that you have identified a suitable set of bottom-row end objectives. The ideal is to identify a set of objectives that is mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive, or MECE, for short. In other words, you want to have a set of bottom-row objectives that are separate and distinct (mutually exclusive) and that address all of your objectives with respect to the issue at hand (collectively exhaustive). 

To keep the illustration simple, I won’t quantify the end objectives. In practice, however, you should establish a measure of achievement (MOA) and a goal for each of the end objectives in the bottom row of the hierarchy. Doing so will enable you to determine the degree to which the objective (or goal, if you prefer) is achieved. There are three kinds of measures—natural, constructed, and proxy. Some objectives admit to natural measures that are easily identified. For example, revenue is easily measured in terms of dollars. Objectives that have no natural measures require that you develop a constructed or a proxy measure. An example of a constructed measure is a five-point scale that is constructed to measure a company’s public image. A proxy measure measures something in terms of another thing. For example, if there were no way to directly measure the amount of corrosion that air pollution is causing to the statues in a city, one could use sulphur dioxide levels in the vicinity of the statues as a proxy measure of corrosion.  

Means objectives are organized in a bottom-up network. The network starts with a base set of actions (means) at the bottom of the network and works up to specify the precise means by which the base actions will accomplish the end objectives. Note how a means network specifies the way in which a particular base action influences one or more end objectives. Also note how the means network, taken as a whole, describes a mechanism for accomplishing the end objectives. Finally, note how the mechanism elucidates the alternative means of achieving a particular end objective and that more than one means may be required to accomplish the objective. 

So what’s the lesson in all this? The lesson is simply this. The next time you are called to action, or you call yourself to action, consider using objective-focused thinking rather than alternative-focused thinking. Objective-focused thinking is about getting clear on what you want to accomplish (the end objectives) and building a mechanism to accomplish it (the means objectives).

Kevin W. Holt, the founder of Co.Innovation Consulting, is a strategic planning consultant and meeting facilitator based in Phoenix, Arizona. He works with commercial, government, and nonprofit organizations to develop innovative strategies and solutions. His strategy consulting and meeting facilitation practice centers on the use of proven processes mapped to collaboration technologies (e.g., electronic brainstorming) and specialized software tools (e.g., the Blue Ocean strategy canvas). The technologies enable him to serve as both an offsite meeting facilitator and a virtual meeting facilitator for strategic planning workshops, innovation labs, brainstorming sessions, feedback sessions, and other types of meetings. Kevin is the author of Differentiation Strategy: Winning Customers by Being Different, published by Routledge in June 2022.