When the Metrics Have No Mission

Introduction: On Trend(s)

For most organizations, metrics are no longer new. It’s not cutting-edge to talk about measuring and monitoring success, even if most organizations still struggle to do it well. (Once, when pressed, a senior fundraising executive told me that bringing in $500,000 in donations was success for a large campaign because the number “just felt right.” Absolutely no shade to her – I’d wager that more metrics are done on intuition than we admit.) The tricky thing is, as metrics lose their sparkle, a lot of organizations are left with an unsettling sense that they should already be doing it. Doing the metric thing. And that, in fact, is actually quite hard to do.

It’s hard to imagine where your team should be in a year, when you have an immediate, crushing to-do list today. It’s hard to track the metrics that matter, when the data you have is irrelevant, unreliable, or otherwise unusable. It’s hard to build a culture that uses metrics effectively, when so many people have learned that metrics equate to punishment and blame. All of which is to say it’s unsurprising to see organizations spending a lot of time tracking metrics they can’t quite articulate the importance of, don’t use in decision-making, and/or overblow to make unsubstantiated claims of success. (“We trained 100 people, we’re changing the world!”)

The underlying thesis of this blog post is simple:

Any metric that is worth tracking, reporting on, publishing somewhere internally or externally, is worth articulating a goal for. An imperfect goal that’s used is better than none at all. Without it, the metrics don’t (really) matter.

The first half of this post will lay out the reasons why your metrics deserve the time a goal takes to write. You may already be thinking: “Of course, metrics need goals – but it’s not that simple!” You may not feel you have the time to write goals, or you may be in a transition period, or your metrics are mandated by some outside force. Sometimes the menagerie of things organizations track without clear motivation is a result of real limitations. I hear you. In the latter half of this blog post, I’ll propose a process on how you might write a goal that can be written rapidly, while still providing value to you and your team.

I am writing with the assumption that you do not need to be convinced that metrics are a worthwhile management tool, or that data makes decision-making better. If that’s you and you’ve found your way to my blog, I invite you to read my post about my own journey into data work before diving into this one.

Quick Definition Break

Because a lot of organizations use the same terms to signify vastly different things, I hope you’ll forgive a brief pause for definitions. These definitions avoid describing an ideal state – that’s what the rest of the blog post is for!

Mission: A paragraph that describes the end state a team is working towards, including what the team does, who it does it for, why, and the impact they’re trying to achieve.

Goal: A written statement that describes the desired outcome of work. Goals can represent the work at any level of the organization over any time period. They may connect directly to a stated mission, or to other, larger goals at higher levels of the organization.

Objective: A written statement that describes a milestone or subset of a goal. Objectives are statements that the team hypothesizes must be true in order for a goal to be reached.

Metric: Any quantifiable number that a team uses to understand or describe its work. Metrics can connect to objective or goal statements.

• Performance metrics define real or perceived success for a team. Performance metrics should be all or mostly in the team’s direct control.
• Contextual metrics define the operational environment the team is working in, that may affect its ability to perform.

Okay, back to business!

Part 1: Your metrics should have a goal

For those who prefer an outline (guilty), here’s what you can expect in this section:

1. On Ghost Goals: Your goals may not be written, but they can still haunt you.
2. Beans, Beans, the Magical Fruit: Even a million beans is still a pile of beans.
3. It’s Just Not That Deep: Lower your bar for good-enough goals.

On Ghost Goals

Every time I’ve been in a conversation about a metric without an explicit goal, I’ve been surprised by the presence of an implicit one. This “ghost goal” is in the room, shaping how people talk about the metric and how to interpret its results. It might show up in someone arguing that a spike doesn’t matter, or encouraging a change to how the metric is calculated. If you start documenting the reasons why people are making these suggestions, you probably have the beginnings of a goal.

Here’s a hypothetical that might better illustrate the point: Samantha runs a small nonprofit that provides coding classes for kids. The organization hosts classes in community centers, after-school programs, and libraries across the city, taught by professors from the local college. The organization tracks the total number of attendees per class, as volume seems like the natural metric. As Samantha reviews performance of different classes by location, she notes to her team that there’s one location that has consistently lower attendance than all the others. When she suggests cutting this class in favor of offering an additional time at their highest-attended location, her team disagrees. Someone notes that while few, the kids that do come to the class attend consistently. Another raises that there are no other coding classes available in the area, given that the neighborhood’s school doesn’t offer the topic. Someone else suggests that the other locations wouldn’t seem so well-attended if we filtered out attendees who only attended once, or didn’t stay for the whole class.

It’s hard to resolve the disagreement on Samantha’s team without articulating more about the perceived value of the class itself. Are we trying to expose kids to coding concepts, or are we hoping they walk away with more advanced skills? Which kids are we hoping take advantage of this service? It may feel to Samantha that the team doesn’t trust the metric, or isn’t on-board with data-driven decision-making. In my humble opinion, that’s not the root of the disagreement – it’s the goal. If the team gets on the same page about what the value the classes should deliver, the decision on whether to cut the low-attended class will be easy.

That’s the thing about ghost goals: they haunt. It feels like you’re arguing about the right math to use, or how to interpret a metric, but the core disagreement are two valid, conflicting interpretations of a goal that has yet to be made corporeal. Taking the time to write down a goal, even if it’s a poorly-written one, grounds a team in a shared reality.

I’m simplifying a lot of real-world complexities here, but I hope the point comes through: Why spend time disagreeing about ghost goals when you could be having more productive conversations about real ones?

Beans, Beans, the Magical Fruit

One of my favorite phrases in the evaluation community is “bean-counting” – a term for when organizations count what they can count, for no other reason than they can count it. Imagine a person at a table, counting a pile of beans: they place an index finger on each individual bean, name its number in the pile (“Seven!”) , and move it to the side. One, two, a thousand. Why spend the time to count beans? After all, even a million beans is still just a pile of beans.

Your metrics may not be bean-counters, but without a goal, how do you know?

I’m not going to wax poetic about the value of goals. I work in performance management, and I’m biased. I recently found an old Girl Scouts vest of mine with an achievement patch with “Ask me about my goals!” embroidered on it. I could genuinely wear that patch today and it’d be no less true than it was when I was eight years old. Even so, I know why goals can be hard to write and maintain, and the reasons why organizations struggle to write good ones. (I do work in performance management.) There are real pressures that make “just doing the work” seem an attractive alternative to the convening, consensus-building, and iterating processes that often accompany goal-writing.

The thing that goals do really well, though, is answer why. Without a goal, you’re likely to come up empty when answering for why what you’re counting matters – or worse, come up with multiple, different answers depending on who you ask. There are, of course, the metrics organizations track because someone else told them they had to (e.g., the Board, the funder, the donors, the communications team), but even in those cases, it’s still a worthwhile line of questioning. Why does the Board, the donors, the communications team want that number? What do they think it tells them, and do we agree?

Without a documented justification for tracking the metric (e.g., a goal), your metrics may very well be bean-counters. Counting to count. No one wants to spend precious time and resources counting a pile of beans, and the only way to ensure you’re not doing that is to write a goal.

It’s Just Not That Deep

I’m going to make the case that your goals don’t have to be good.

There is truly so much literature out there about how to write a good goal. Different philosophies about how and when to write them, what style to use, what level is ideal, how they should connect to other parts of the organization, how to ensure they’re ambitious and measurable and right. In my current role, I’ve written our recommendations for how to write a good goal. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with all the seemingly contradictory information out there. It’s even easier to put off writing a goal at all, because you want the time to do it right, at the right time.

My husband works in start-ups. If you ask him about goals, he’ll lament that he’s never seen a goal stay relevant for more than six months. The fast-paced, existential environment of a start-up requires an agility that can make goal-writing feel like a waste of time. And while I would not recommend the same style of goals for organizations across industries or maturity, I think the observation is relevant for most of us. Goals change. They should change. So why do we get stuck on writing perfect ones?

The incremental benefits of documenting goals for your metrics now – ridding yourself of the confusion that accompanies ghost goals, affirming that your metrics aren’t bean-counters, creating a shared language for your work – far outweigh the detriments of an imperfect goal. That imperfect goal will still help your work improve, as long as it’s used alongside a monitored metric. You’ll know your work better, and know how to write a better goal next time.

The key to this is that your goals have to be used to be useful. There is no point to writing goals, perfect or not, if they’re only looked at when you’re proposing a budget or making a communications push. Write the imperfect goal, but refer to it often. Bring it up in your team meetings, use it when you talk to others about your work, and include it in your reporting. If you have goals that no one on your team could rattle off when asked, you’re doing it wrong.

Part 2: Getting started, the practical way

I don’t know how your organization does (or doesn’t) do goals, so I don’t know how wild the suggestion I’m about to make is, but I’ll make it anyway: No matter where you sit in your organization, write the goal.

If you’re an individual contributor, that might look like taking the 3-5 metrics your team most often uses to describe its work, and writing hypotheses to test with different stakeholders. You could frame competing hypotheses of your ghost goal as a “this or that” question: “Are we trying to accomplish X or Y when we do Z?” No team can achieve everything, and to the extent you can, I hope you can help your team resist the urge to say both. As an individual contributor, you can’t commit your team to goals, but you may get clarity that helps your work right now.

If you manage a team, you likely have more say on your team’s goals, so it’ll be up to you to evaluate your circumstances. The ideal situation is a deeper reflection on your team’s mission and strategy, but I know there’s many times where that’s not feasible to do immediately. If, for whatever reason, you cannot do more robust reflection, I recommend identifying the 3-5 metrics your team uses most to describe its work, and writing something out. Share the draft with your team and your leadership, and keep it light – “This is how I’m thinking about the work we’re doing right now. Do you see it the same way? We can definitely change things as we go.” The hope is to create some initial clarity, not solve it all.

Goals vs. Objectives

Before I dive into recommendations for writing goals, I want to pause on how objectives should connect to goals. (I shared a bit about how I’m defining goals and objectives earlier here.)

Goals describe why. Objectives describe what and how. I typically write objectives as statements that, when all added together, make the goal a reality. These may be milestones or projects that address the same problem from different angles. Either way, objectives operationalize a larger goal, and typically describe the work that you’re doing right now. It may feel the most “real” to you, because the work you touch on a day-to-day basis.

If you don’t have written goals right now, I’d guess that your metrics are at the objective level. In my recommendations below, I have you start by writing an objective that describes your current metric, and then scaffold a goal – your “why” – atop it.

Writing a Rapid Goal

I want to provide a very practical, very fast way to write a goal, using metrics that already exist. This will not produce a perfect goal – that’s not the point! – but it should help you right now, until you have the space and time for a more intentional process.

1. Write what you’re tracking right now: Use a formula: verb + thing you’re tracking + a target value. The target is likely wrong at this stage, but I’ve found it helpful to put a placeholder at the beginning as a part of brainstorming. It makes the work feel real – and you don’t have to share it with anyone until you’re sure it’s right. Write an uninspiring, messy first draft, and resist revising. This is a draft objective.
2. Pull it up a level: Why is your team doing this work? What is it achieving? Imagine the world where you meet or exceed the target you put in as a placeholder: in that world, what would you have that you didn’t have before? It’s hard to reverse-engineer a goal from a metric, so don’t overthink it. Write a hypothesis, and don’t try to make it perfect. This is a draft goal for the objective you wrote in step one.
3. Refine: Now it’s time to do some quick sanity checks on the content, not the phrasing. You want to double check that you wrote down what you’re actually trying to do. Here are some questions I find useful for ensuring my content is on the mark:
   • Specifics: Go through each part of your goal and objective statement, and make sure you’re as specific as you can be. Imagine all the ways your objective could be misinterpreted. If there are some interpretations that don’t align to what you’re trying to achieve, close the gaps in your language to exclude them.
   • Cause-and-Effect: Do you really think your objective is a requirement for your goal to happen? If not, either your goal or your objective is not quite right yet. If your goal is right but the objective is wrong, it’s possible that your metric is a bean-counter and you need to track something else (or something additional).
   • End-state: With a general timeline in mind for your goal (e.g., however long you think it will take to complete the objective you wrote), ask yourself: is this really where I want to land? Would my team be satisfied with the reality as-written? If you’re hoping that the reality you wrote out in your goal actually triggers some other, secondary reality, write that instead.
4. Validate: Now you can start showing your draft to others and asking for their opinion. You will know your circumstances best, but I’ve found it effective to frame it as an invitation: “Does this represent the work we do? What feels off?”
5. Finalize: Once you know your content is right, you can allow yourself a little space to refine the language – but only if you want. Once you have a goal and objective(s) that feel more right than wrong, put down the pen and start using it.

I could spend a long time recommending frameworks that would make your draft goal better, punchier, easier to track, better aligned to your mission, but I wouldn’t recommend doing that for a rapid goal. If you can do goal-writing in a more intentional way, this style of rapid goal-writing no longer makes sense. Thankfully, there are a lot of resources out there for writing goals in an intentional way if that’s where you’re at – a subject for another post.

An Example

Let’s run a rapid, intentionally imperfect example with the above steps.

Let’s go back to the example we covered when talking about ghost goals: Samantha’s team, who works at a nonprofit that offers coding classes to kids. If Samantha were to write a rapid goal with the above steps, it might look like:

1. Write what you’re tracking right now: Samantha could write something like:
   • Train 100 kids in coding.
2. Pull it up a level: Samantha could write a few things down, depending on what she believes the program is trying to do. For simplicity, let’s say Samantha writes:
   • Help kids build relevant skills for the workforce.
3. Refine:
   • Specifics:
     • How do we define a “relevant skill” for the workforce? Is coding a relevant skill for all jobs in the workforce, or just some?
     • Which kids do you want to participate in the program? Is this program for every kid who wants to join, or are you hoping certain kids participate?
     • Who do we consider a “kid”?
     • What would someone have to do to be considered “trained”? If a kid only participates in half of the training sessions, or leaves early every class, are they trained?
     • Does the training prepare kids for any job, or is there a specific industry or type of job that the training prepares for?
   • Cause-and-Effect:
     • If participants do nothing but attend training – regardless of their experience with the training, if they liked it, if they can demonstrate certain skills – will they have relevant skills for the workforce? How would you know they’ve built the skills?
     • Are there other things you’re doing to prepare them for the workforce? If so, those might be additional objectives.
   • End State:
     • If your participants build the relevant skills, but not one of them gets a job, are you still satisfied with the work you’ve done? The answer absolutely could be yes – this is a sanity check, not a trick question!

As you go through this exercise, you’ll likely feel the tension to press for a mission, to write out additional objectives, to make a perfect system. That energy is not your enemy, even as I encourage you to not act on it right now. If that’s how you feel when you write goals, that’s amazing – and maybe it’s time for a more intentional goal-writing process that starts with the mission and goals, not the metrics. If you’re truly in a place where you’re writing a rapid hypothesis for your 3-5 most used metrics, this is where I’d recommend you stop for now.

Of course, the thesis of writing rapid goals is twofold: they’re better than no goals at all, and having imperfect goals will eventually create enough tension to instigate a more intentional goal-writing process. If you find yourself consistently stuck with rapid goals that never graduate to an intentional process, then it might be time to take a step back and interrogate why.

Conclusion

The curse of writing a blog post like this is that it has to be general and unspecific, in hopes that general and unspecific advice can be helpful to your situation. I hope I’ve given you enough reasoning why goals are important for your metrics, as well as a path to writing something more useful than not.

I want to end where I started: this work is hard. It’s okay to start where you are, with what you have right now. I believe in iterative improvement, as long as the iteration continues. You might surprise yourself with where you land with steps that seem very small to start.