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He’s Jeremy Thomas. And he’s Myron Weber. And this is the Mental Supermodels podcast.
Myron
This is the podcast that explores the theory and practice, the art and science of mental modeling,
Jeremy
Mental supermodels are practical techniques that influence your mindset when approaching complex problems and driving decisions.
Jeremy
Now, Myron, the other day you and I were talking about how companies are always placing bets, which they do by launching initiatives. Basically, mostly they’re looking for financial returns and they have different levers they can use to try to produce the best outcomes. You know, we talked about how they want to, you know, do things like drive digital transformation, launch new products, improve competitiveness, provide awesome customer journeys. And some are even looking to build positive culture and reputation. The point here is that if you want to give yourself the best chance to win, you set goals.
Myron
Absolutely, and the thing I want to make clear, there’s a ton of stuff out there in the world about goal setting, and this is not going to be a podcast episode about how to set goals. What we want to do is really make sure that as enterprises, as individuals in those enterprises, whether they’re leaders who are setting out the goals or whether they’re teams or individuals who are then receiving those goals and having to to act on them, that we can help provide some techniques for clarity and getting rid of ambiguity in that which is all about the discover stage of the strategy to execution model that we’ve begun talking about in previous episodes.
Jeremy
By the way, if I were ranking my favorite types of problems, ambiguity would be at the top. So mysterious.
Myron
Yeah, yeah, and it’s really interesting that making distinctions has been such an important part of every episode we’ve done in this podcast. We started out with it in in our introductory episode Zero. And it’s been a recurring theme and we’re not done with it yet.
Jeremy
Well, clarity is important, and I think making distinctions is a real key technique to defining clarity when approaching anything.
Jeremy
But, I’d like to start here by talking about the Discover stage, that you mentioned and that we introduced in prior episodes where you’re defining the strategic direction and setting goals during the stage. And this is where you want to limit your assumptions and increase your facts. Now, this could be at a company level, a team level or even an individual level.
Myron
Yeah. Now, there’s a confession I have to make, right? So I’ve been. I’ve been. You know, in business for a few decades now, I’ve read books, I’ve been to seminars, I’ve done, you know, whatever all the things.
Myron
And a lot of people talk about goals and objectives and I’m not even sure if I know the difference. So can we start there?
Jeremy
Well, I could tell you the way that I think about them. Great. You know, I think about goals as being something that’s specific that I want to achieve. And I know for sure if I have achieved it or not once it’s done. Objectives to me are the means by which I can achieve those goals.
Myron
Hmm. OK, so. You know. I’m going to maybe get a little philosophical here. Because I think that there’s a really, again, a distinction here that, this helps me and it might help other people. Again, regardless of what technique or process or book or guru you’re following for goals and objectives, this distinction goes back to one of the most fundamental questions of mankind.
Myron
And I’m thinking of all the way back to the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers like Zino and Parmenides and others who I’m not remembering all the names right now, but the fundamental question, or I should say one of the fundamental questions, because someone will come along and tell me that I’m wrong and they probably know a lot more about this than I do. But one of the fundamental questions was this distinction of Being versus Becoming. Is the world static? Is it fundamentally static and Being or is it fundamentally dynamic in Becoming? I’m going to move on from pre-Socratic Greeks before I get in over my head any further. But this is really important to be clear in how we think. Getting rid of ambiguity, making distinctions. So am I right in saying that by your definition, a goal is about a desired state of Being and an objective is about the process of Becoming that leads us to that state?
Jeremy
Yeah, that’s the way that I think about them. A lot of people have different definitions, but that’s the one that I always go with.
Myron
Those people are wrong. We now have the authoritative definition because it’s really clear and it’s based in in some ideas that are very important. And so let’s keep that in mind as we go along, but I want you to dig deeper into the process here now.
Jeremy
Thanks for thanks for clarifying that. It is a little it is confusing to think about goals versus objectives. But, you know, the important thing that we want to talk about here is that if we get back to our to our kind of overall framework, our six stages, all stages of that journey are important. But the Discover stage that we’re talking about here is really critical. If you’re using emotion and intuition instead of facts, both of those things can lead to producing vague goals that are wrapped up in an ambiguity blanket.
Myron
Yeah, you know, that reminds me of something else. Jeremy, can I tell you a story? Yeah, so I was I was working with a large client in in sort of retail and hospitality business, but these same ideas could apply to any company, any industry. But what happened was that goals were being handed down from the executives to senior management in some cases, certainly middle management and analysts and folks who were running various departments. Things like the loyalty program, marketing, sales analysis, all of these things. And I realized that the reason behind the goals was unclear to the people they were being handed to. And this, I think, is really common. I’ve seen this many times where things are understood by senior executives and sort of implicit and they don’t make that explicit to their team. Implicit meaning implied. You know, not directly stated. Whereas explicit means it’s explained and it’s laid out directly. So with this team I was working with in one of the sessions I had with them, I asked the group, “How does your business make money?” And each of the people kind of gave an answer from their perspective of, oh, well, our loyalty program this, this, this. And I got them to sort of think back to, well, why does that help you make money? And basically what we came down to at the end of it was a really simple, factual, non subjective model of how their business makes money, which in hindsight is completely obvious. But no one was thinking of it that way. Right? So it came to out of all the people in the world, some subset of them are potentially your customers. How many of those can you get to become your actual customers? Of those, how many times can you get those people to come back? How long can you get them to stay? How much can you get them to spend per hour while they’re there? And what higher margin goods and services can you get them to spend on? So there’s a there’s an actual mathematical model that is very factual that you can lay out and say these are the levers you can move in your business and everything that you’re doing in terms of your loyalty program, your customer service program, all of these other things, they are means to an end. But becoming explicit among these team members about what was implicit to the executives really helped them understand how to set better, I guess, how to translate those goals into better objectives. To put it in the terms we’re using here
Jeremy
It’s a good story because I think that as you mentioned a lot of times, these goals from the executives, or at any level, they can be really clear to them when they’re putting it out there because they’re using their gut instincts or their intuition or, you know, whatever decades of experience they have, and they just think that everyone can take that and run with it.
Myron
Yeah, you’re absolutely right, because actually, I told this same story to the CEO of another company about what I had done. And when I explained this explicit model, he said, well, yeah, that’s obvious. And it was. That’s kind of the whole point. Yeah, I’m glad we agree. Yes, it’s obvious.
Jeremy
It actually makes me think of another example because I’ve heard executives question performance of sales teams. For whatever reason, they feel like sales should be higher. So they’ll just set an arbitrary goal and say we need to increase sales by 50 percent by the end of the year. But I’m thinking, why do they think that sales could be higher than by 50 percent? Do they feel like that there’s a specific market segment where the company should be able to grow? Or do they believe that the salespeople aren’t being utilized efficiently? Do they think the sales teams can have better tools or data to improve their conversion ratios? Basically, what started out as an implicit intention should be made explicit in this case in order to remove assumptions and increase facts so that ultimately there’s a clear direction.
Myron
Yeah, and the thing I’m thinking as I’m listening to you talk about that is I don’t want I don’t want sort of where we’re going with this to get lost. Right. We’re in the context of the overall mental model of strategy to execution. In the first stage of that is the Discovery stage. And and so we’re talking about a lot of techniques here, but the techniques are how to execute effectively on this mental model that is what we’re what we’re diving deeper into. So all of this is about when you’re in that Discover stage, how do you make sure that you’re discovering effectively? Because as we talked about previously and just to recap, for those who either don’t remember or haven’t heard previous episodes, each of these stages has a purpose, has some constraints, some activities that you perform and then the outputs of that stage So the Discover stage has the purpose of setting goals or a goal or multiple goals. Right? And then one of the constraints, there can be many that might be specific to a certain context, but one of the constraints or one of the challenges is ambiguity versus clarity of what the goal is. Am I on the right track?
Jeremy
Yeah, no, you are. And I appreciate you kind of going back and setting the whole context here. Because our focus is on ambiguity and addressing ambiguity. But I also want to be clear that. Ambiguity and intuition aren’t bad. Not bad things. You know, it’s natural, actually, especially the more experience someone has, the more likely they’re going to listen to their instincts. But when they need other people to execute on their ideas, the purpose and expected outcome, as you just went through, needs to be clear. Clear enough so that they can begin testing some hypotheses with business cases. And, in fact, the outcome here is going to move them into the next stage, which is Map that we won’t go into into this episode. But the outcome is that you want them to be able to take this clear direction so that they can begin testing some hypotheses with their business cases. The purpose is to identify options. In this scenario here, the purpose being to identify options for increasing the sales with a target outcome of the best options to consider. So, you know, they want to identify options for increasing cells with the outcome of the best options that they should consider. This is an implicit goal that we want to make explicit so that the direction is clear because these high probability options will feed into that Map stage where the business cases are created.
Myron
Right. Right. OK. So another thing I’m thinking of is I’m as I’m hearing you talk about this, there’s a saying I heard many years ago that really resonates with me. I think it’s become maybe a little bit of a cliche, but I’m going to throw it out anyway. And that is your strength can be your weakness. And I see that many, many times with with executives or leaders, the folks who would be, you know, setting out the goals and the targets and handing them off to other people. They’ve gotten into that role because they have some combination of intuition and experience and hopefully intelligence and so forth that lets them. Hopefully make good guesses. Right? They aren’t always concrete and factual and they’re not running laboratory experiments to come up with, hey, I think we should do this. They are going with their gut. They’re going with their intuition, and they’re in that job because they’re hopefully good at that. Yeah.
Jeremy
And they want to place bets. That’s what we started talking about. They want to place bets, but they want to be smart about it.
Myron
But the weakness, the flip side of that, right, your strength is your weakness is if you are relying too much on the implicit, the gut feel, the intuition. Then the people that that’s handed off to can really struggle. And so I think that there’s some really tangible, practical things that we can leave the audience with here from a couple different perspectives. And again, keep me grounded in the Discover stage if I’m going astray here. But essentially in the Discover stage, you have, sort of people who are driving the goal setting process and then people who are receiving those goals and taking them into the Map stage, which we’ll talk about next episode, right? So what are some things that we would want to say for the goal setter? Techniques or important things to keep in mind? And I guess I’ll start that off by saying make sure that your goals are really goals. Right? And so I’ll go back to our basic distinction. Being and Becoming. A goal is a desired state at the end; not the process of how you get there. So be very clear in the distinction between ends and means. What levers of the business are you trying to move? And then, communicate your intention very explicitly to the people that you’re handing that goal off to.
Jeremy
Yeah, and I think the key point there is that you don’t want to leave things open to misinterpretation. And that’s one of the hazards of an implicit request or goal, is that it does leave it open to interpretation or misinterpretation. So just from the goal setters perspective, keep in mind that you don’t want to just assume that whoever’s taking this will be able to understand what your intention is and interpret it the same way that you’re thinking about it.
Myron
Right. Right. Yeah, that that happens all the time. And then, of course, then the flip side of it for the recipient of the goal is kind of the same, right? To ask the questions and make sure that all of those things are clear and that the goal is not ambiguous.
Jeremy
Yeah, a point I’d like to make here is that it’s, and I’ve been there myself, I’ve seen a lot of people in this situation where a goal or a request, however big or small it is, has been handed to you. And because it’s handed by someone that’s in a higher position than you’re in, there’s an assumption that they know exactly what they’re asking for and that you should understand it. So you take it and run with it. But I think at this point it’s important to not be afraid to ask clarifying questions. Don’t, you know, and I see this all the time, you just want to take it and hope that you can figure it out as you start going. So just taking the time to ask clarifying questions, even though it’s handed to you from someone that’s in a higher position, it’s really important to take the time to ask a few questions, make sure that it’s clear to you. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Myron
Yeah, yeah. And for both the goal setter and the goal recipient, you know, I think something important to keep in mind is don’t set yourself up for failure. Set yourself up for success. And specifically what I’m thinking of there is as much as sort of unrealistic expectations are thrown at people sometimes, the reality that we all know is that we can’t be equally good at everything all the time. Right? And so when someone is handed a goal like, you know, improve sales or increase loyalty program participation or whatever that would be, I think it’s always really helpful to take that back to the explicit intention of that underlying model and say, OK, the levers we have to make more money in our business are: We can increase our market share. And even that gets to be an ambiguous term sometimes. So I like to just call it sort of very directly what it is. Of all the possible people who might be our customers, how many of them can we get to show up then? Of those, how many can we get to spend money? How many of those can we get to come back more frequently or maybe not more frequently, but buy more things while they’re here? Is that more individual products or services? Or is that a higher quantity? You can get down to this very clear model? And so when someone is handed a goal, I think asking those questions, if they’re the goal recipient or if they’re the goal setter, which of these very specific levers are we trying to move by doing these things and pursuing this goal?
Jeremy
And I think it’s also important for the goal setter to be clear about their intention whenever they’re making a request or specifying a goal. If they could be clear about their intention if they know it’s implicit because it’s more of an idea that they want you to take and run with it and run it through your process of business cases, your analysis, to try to make it explicit. But it’s good for the goal setter to be up front about that. They shouldn’t just say here’s a goal, go increase sales by 50 percent. They should say I have an idea that we should be able to increase our sales by 50 percent, because I know the market pretty well and I know our market share and I believe that we can increase our sales by 50 percent in this target segment over here. Can you take that and validate my thinking on it so that we can then make it a goal, make a realistic goal out of it? A lot of times people will just take that initial idea as an explicit goal and try to achieve 50 percent in sales. The goal setter should be very clear. This is an implicit idea that I have. Help me figure this out and make it as explicit as possible.
Myron
Yeah, yeah. And I know we’re kind of hammering the same point here, but I think it’s so important. I want to maybe re-emphasize it with one more perspective before we close out. And that is, you know, it’s very rare that a student in school would learn math by doing each type of problem once and saying, OK, now I’ve got it. I’ve done one addition problem, now I can move on to subtraction. I’ve done one quadratic equation and now I’ve mastered that. And I can move on. Right? It takes repetition and it takes practice and it takes reinforcement. And so it would be completely unrealistic to think that people have left school and now they’re out in business but that no longer applies. The thing that’s obvious to that CEO, “Well, yeah, that’s obvious” about his business model needs to continually be reinforced to the team and the expectation that people who are mired in the day to day activities and maybe don’t have that intuition, that experience to understand the business model are always going to realize the underlying why of what they’re doing. That’s unrealistic. And yet it’s important that they understand it. We’re not talking about mental models for, you know, for rote work or like assembly line work. We’re talking about knowledge workers who are being given goals and tasks to do. And it’s very hard to execute effectively and consistently without understanding the underlying why the idea of because I said so can work in a factory or assembly line setting, in many cases. It does not work with complex human systems and knowledge workers. Would you agree?
Jeremy
Yeah, it’s a good point. Puts everything into a good context.
Myron
Well, then let’s close it out with that. We are continuing to explore the mental model of strategy to execution. We’ll move next episode into the Map stage. But just remember that mental modeling is simply the discipline of seeking to understand systems in a structured way so that when you act with intention, you increase the likelihood of achieving your desired outcome. And that’s why we’re trying to spread the word of mental supermodels.
Jeremy
Yes. And you can get the show notes and learn more at mentalsupermodels.com. And this specific episode is mentalsupermodels.com/3.
Myron
Awesome, thanks, Jeremy. See you next time.
Jeremy
Thanks. We’ll see you next time.
