Howdy!

This week we ‘officially’ launched The Uncertainty Project. Many of you have been following the newsletter for almost three months if you’ve been with us from the beginning!

What have we learned so far? For one, there are quite a few people deeply interested in how individuals, teams, and organizations make decisions. It’s cool that we get to talk to many of you, but we’d love to get a bit more cross-pollination, so with the launch, we’re starting to do ‘Threads’.

With threads, we’ll be sharing ideas, opinions, and stories about product strategy and decision making - and anyone can comment, submit their own threads, and even build on other threads!

All of the topics we cover here will be threads! You can check out and comment on last week’s topic here.

We’re a bit unsophisticated to start, but it’s an experiment! Let us know what you think by responding to this email or leaving a review at the bottom of this post.

This week:

• 🎯 Topic: Exploring goal setting and OKRs through the lens of decision making

• 🧠 Bias: Strategic Misrepresentation

• 🛠️ Tool: ‘Even Over’ Statements, by Chris Butler

Exploring goal setting and OKRs through the lens of decision making

Over the past 5 years, while working on OKR capabilities for Jira Align, I’ve interviewed and engaged with dozens of organizations implementing OKRs at the ‘whole org’ level - and more broadly, navigating the transition from an output-driven to outcome-driven.

I shared my general takeaways from a recent podcast interview I did with Roger Longden on Giant Talk.

Observing organizations implementing OKRs, we were careful to keep our focus on this broader, and often a more cultural transition, towards ‘outcomes over outputs’ (captured and articulated by Josh Seiden here) - in which every path seemed to lead to ‘how do we make better decisions and align teams to do the same?’.

In a bit of a different framing, we can make the argument that OKRs are effectively a decision making framework that helps guide strategic decisions…

• What are we not focusing on?

• Should we measure success this way or that way?

• Is there evidence this is moving the needle?

• Should we cancel something and double down on something else?

• How are we going to allocate resources?

And if they aren’t helping guide these decisions, then are they much more than another vehicle for status updates on outputs and activities?

In short, the conversations we had with portfolio managers, product leaders, transformation teams (CoE), and program & operations, culminated in this philosophical question about how organizations make decisions - or decide how to decide.

It seems more often than not, we don’t recognize decision making as an explicit strategic activity - it just happens in between goals, plans, and work. And even if we do, why is it so difficult to describe how we make decisions, and how we measure the effectiveness of our decision making?

Are goals helping teams make hard decisions?

We might say the role of goal setting is to imagine/articulate some desired future and how we would measure success - then provide a framework for alignment without prescribing a solution.

John Doerr, in Measure What Matters, defines the ‘superpowers’ of OKRs as ‘focus, align, track, and stretch’. Focus, track, and stretch feel relatively straightforward, but how do we define ‘alignment’? If we say 100% alignment means all tradeoff decisions across teams are made perfectly in line with strategic intent (avoiding outcome bias) then obviously that’s impossible.

This would mean that any person in the organization put in the same situation with the same information would make the same judgment. That’s, of course, an outrageous expectation. We like to think there’s a ‘right’ answer and no equally plausible alternate realities - it’s less ambiguous.

Is this unpredictability a feature or a bug? Daniel Kahneman and Oliver Siboney would define this phenomenon as ‘Noise’.

“Some judgments are biased; they are systematically off target. Other judgments are noisy, as people who are expected to agree end up at very different points around the target. Many organizations, unfortunately, are afflicted by both bias and noise.” ― Daniel Kahneman & Olivier Sibony, Noise

In this newsletter, we’ve covered bias quite a bit (and we can see the self-reinforcing, entrenching nature as it clusters) but noise is different - and it’s not impossible to reduce this variability in judgment.

Would we define that as… alignment? 👀

In fact, many of the tools and techniques we cover can augment goal setting to drive this alignment. Principles, ‘Even Over’ statements, and Belief Challenging help us uncover (or at least make explicit), the real enemy of strategic alignment, competing, implicit beliefs, and assumptions that go unchecked - the silent, subconscious drivers of decision making.

We do have to keep in mind that this variability every individual brings to the table is, in general, a feature, not a bug. But as with most complex systems, we’re operating in this balancing act of organized chaos. To paraphrase M. Mitchell Waldrop - this is a delicate layer between the outer edge of spontaneity and the status quo.

This is a bidirectional relationship where too much constriction doesn’t leave any oxygen for spontaneity; held too loosely and there’s anarchy.

‘Alignment’ conversations can often be too binary - autonomous or hierarchical. From the lens of decision making, this either means decision making is centralized or decentralized - and both have their strengths and weaknesses.

This seems to deserve a more nuanced approach to both ’noise’ reduction and the ability to break the existing models driving decision making.

A few related topics we might cover in the future:

• In her book ‘Quit’, Annie Duke warns against a pitfall of goal-setting that isn’t considered enough - the risk of ‘escalation of commitment’

• Continuing to explore the role of conviction, intuition, and overconfidence in decision making

• More on connecting strategy to execution through the lens of decision making!

Let us know what you think! You can join the conversation on the thread in The Uncertainty Project. Want to build on or challenge these arguments? Submit a thread!

Bias 9/50: Strategic Misrepresentation

Strategic misrepresentation refers to the act of deliberately providing false or misleading information in order to influence a group decision or satisfy our own individual incentives. This can take many forms, from outright lies to subtle manipulations of data.

In most cases, this is not a deliberate or conscious act. We should assume most people act with positive intent, but incentives are strong. Many quotes echo this point - the most famous probably being Charlie Munger’s, “Show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome.” And another by Upton Sinclar…

This can cause major challenges in group and strategic decision making, and can be particurly problematic in situations where the stakes are high and there are misaligned incentives.

Another concern is that strategic misrepresentation can create a toxic culture within an organization. When individuals feel that they cannot trust the information being presented to them, they may become more guarded and less likely to share their own ideas and perspectives. This can lead to a lack of diversity in thinking, which can be broadly detrimental to group decision making.

Overall, strategic misrepresentation is a complex issue that can have a significant impact. In this case, shavings really do make a pile. Like a game of telephone, manipulated or contaminated information can cause significant issues (especially if it’s systemic).

One of the more common symptoms, in the context of goal setting and status updates, is the concept of ‘watermelons’.

This occurs when there is no safety in discussing challenges or conflicting information, so you end up with presentations that represent everything as healthy - green on the outside - but in reality, there are significant issues - red on the inside.

Tool: ‘Even Over’ Statements

This technique is by Chris Butler, Lead Product Manager at Google Core Machine Learning. You can find links to his other work here.

It’s a great tool in relation to the topic of goal setting and augmenting OKRs with an explicit framework to help make hard decisions easy.

The “even over” is a type of statement that gives direction to generally choose a type of “thing” over another type of “thing.” This is used as a way to write down tradeoffs that might be considered in a strategy, manifesto, or set of principles. Each “thing” in this case should be a theme, type, or category rather than a specific situation. It can be simplified to just an “over” statement as well.

I first heard about “even over” statements from Jordan Husney of Parabol as a strategic tool. They had written a post ​​How to Use Even Over Statements for Prioritization but I’m not sure of the origin of these statements.

The Agile Manifesto is probably the most well-known set of these statements to help define how “agile practitioners” should act (bold emphasis mine):

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

• Working software over comprehensive documentation

• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

• Responding to change over following a plan

In these statements there is guidance on how to choose, by default, one thing over another but it isn’t a hard and fast rule. As the Agile Manifesto states “while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.” It is meant to be guidance in decision making or a governing constraint.

The benefit of “even over” statements is that it should simplify or make easier hard decisions for everyone on the team. It should also convey the general decision making belief of senior leadership within the team so they can avoid unnecessary escalations.

Writing great “even over” statements

The key to a good “even over” is that you should look at the hard decisions currently being made by your team and encode them inside an “even over” statement. It should be two things that could be entirely good choices but we are going to choose one over the other. The statement should not be a choice between an obviously good and obviously bad option. That won’t make people’s decision making easier because they will already plan on making that decision.

First, you should identify the key controversies inside your organization and make a choice between two “good” choices to write a particular “even over.” There could be multiple but it is key to not write too many. It is hard for people to remember a lot of these statements.

Next, you should try to find an example of where you made the choice inside the organization. Examples can be very helpful in describing and making these statements real. If there are no examples for a particular statement it may be aspirational rather than currently used.

Finally, you should aim to make the statements less specific and more generalized to allow them to apply to more cases in your organization. You can do this through “why laddering” and “challenge mapping” exercises to understand the underlying reason for the statements you come up with.

You shouldn’t be concerned that the “even over” statements may overlap and could possibly contradict each other. These are not meant to be MECE or perfect in their logic. They are meant to be a written down model of what your organization chooses which will sometimes be contradictory.

Communicating the “even over” statements

Once you have “even over” statements you should create a way for people to hear what they are, understand the reasoning behind them, and ask questions about how it might apply in particular circumstances. This can be part of a larger strategy presentation. When performing strategic rehearsals (aka “war gaming”) you should focus on these statements as a guide for making decisions to see how they work.

You should also save the statements with your key strategic documents. This is where recent examples can be helpful in setting context.

Using “even over” statements in your day-to-day

The statements should provide a way to detect that something that seems right based on intuition but is not a recommended tradeoff by the statement should be discussed. It can be an early warning sign of strategic drift or changing circumstances.

When making a new decision consider whether any of the “even over” statements apply. If so, which side do potential paths from the decision side on?

This is closely related to prioritization methodologies in how it can become a rubric to help stack rank and compare/contrast between possible paths forward.

“Even over” anti-patterns

Remember, that these statements are meant to make decision making easier but should not stand in the way of good decision making. If there is evidence that you shouldn’t follow the “even over” statements you shouldn’t do so. This may point to a need of adjusting them but they should never lock you into what is considered a “bad” decision.

Also, if you find that people keep writing their own “even over” statements for their documents without pulling from the main statements then they may not be valuable.

Adjusting your “even over” statements

As you use these statements you may find that they don’t apply to most decisions or are not helpful. In those cases you should choose to drop or modify the statement.

If you are finding that there are many escalations taking place but have a common theme, it may point to a need for a new “even over” statement.

It is ideal to review your “even over” statements on some cadence that you would review, test, and update your overall strategy since this is a way for everyone to apply it to their day-to-day.

Resources

• How to Use Even Over Statements for Prioritization | Parabol

• Manifesto for Agile Software Development

• Brave New Work: 44. Even Overs on Spotify 

We hope this post was helpful and interesting! Have feedback? Just reply to this email! It would be great to get in touch!