"Goal setting… requires careful dosing."
Ordóñez, Schweitzer, Galinsky and Bazerman, Goals Gone Wild

I was in a meeting this week when a leader walked the room through the importance of KPIs inside their goals. So I asked: were the targets a step-change, or the next dot on the plot-line? The answer came back clean and confident. Goals should be achieved, so targets are calibrated to be hit.

Two minutes later, I asked about innovation. The same leader lit up. Loads of examples. Changed our performance for years. The same person, two minutes apart, describing two things that do not really get on with each other.

You cannot reward certainty and expect uncertainty. A system that tracks, reports and rewards hit KPIs, with targets calibrated to be hit, is a machine for safe delivery, and it is good at that. Then we ask it, nicely, to hand us some uncertainty.

Ask a team where their proudest innovations actually came from and look honestly. The skunkworks nobody was tracking. The stubborn individual who ignored their KPIs for a fortnight. The crisis that suspended the rules. Your innovation did not come from your goal system. It survived it.

The research agrees. Seijts and Latham showed that on novel work a specific performance target actively hurts: people grind on the number before they have discovered how. And Goals Gone Wild catalogued the rest: tunnel vision, gaming, sandbagging as the rational response to a system where missing is dangerous.

The fix is design, not posters. Separate delivery of the known from discovery of the unknown. Judge the portfolio, not the bet. Grade rather than score, so a bold miss can outscore a safe win. And make the reward system tell the truth about what you actually want. We call the result safe ambition.

The two questions from that meeting are now the first two in our goal-system audit: are your targets calibrated to be hit, and what happens to the person who misses one? In the changelog: the contradiction check moved to question one, because it finds the problem fastest.

List your five proudest innovations of the past five years. Next to each, write where it actually came from: the goal sheet, or the gaps. If the gaps win, your system is optimised against the thing you say you want most.

Build for the thing you actually want.

See you in a fortnight,
Matt

P.S. The full argument, with the research and the four moves in detail, is in the new essay: You want innovation. You built a system that quietly forbids it.