Forget Overdosing on KPI’s and Goals. Focus on this instead…

Written by Mark Wright. This article is based on insights from strategy expert Todd Coates and an excerpt from Atomic Habits, a New York Times bestselling book.

Learning from the Best

I recently had the opportunity to spend time with Todd Coates to talk strategy. Todd offers immeasurable insights into building enduring strategy and crafting authentic cultures that drive innovation.

Todd’s origin years with Luna Park Sydney and Australia’s Wonderland imparted expertise ranging from facility management, through to WHS requirements and working with boards and commercial owners; expertise that would prepare him to launch and lead the iconic BridgeClimb Sydney. As CEO of the award-winning company, industry-leading results were matched by its WHS outcomes, and commercial performance continuously lifted until its record final contract year. 

Inspired by this meeting with Todd, I continued my interest in supporting organisations with effective strategy deployment by reading the book Atomic Habits authored by James Clear.

Why not Start with Harm Prevention as a Goal?

It is well documented, that a more modern way of viewing safety perfromance is not the absence of harm, but more importantly the presence of effective controls.

Avoiding injury, business disruption, damage to assets, and psychological illness — these are all a set specific, actionable goals.

For many organisations, setting actionable goals is how health and safety change is managed. Each goal is to be reached. Often goals are set based on a series of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to reduce or eliminate harm. Often organisations who succeed are few, and also fail at a lot of them. Eventually, health and safety performance either plateaus or is suboptimal. Often results have very little to do with the goals and KPIs being set and nearly everything to do with the Objectives and Key Result (OKR) beliefs, values, practices, systems and behaviours followed.

• Sporting Coach: If you’re a coach, your goal might be to win a championship. Your system is the way you recruit players, manage your assistant coaches, and conduct practice.
• Entrepreneur: If you’re an entrepreneur, your goal might be to build a million-dollar business. Your system is how you create a value, test product ideas, hire a great team, and launch a minimum viable product.
• Musician: If you’re a musician, your goal might be to play great music. Your system is how often you practice, how you break down and tackle difficult tunes, and your method for receiving feedback from your instructor.

Now for the interesting question: if you completely ignored your goals and focused only on your Key Result Areas, would you still succeed?

For example, if you were a football coach and you ignored your goal to win a championship and focused only on what your team does at practice each day, would you still get results?

I think you would.

The goal in any sport is to finish with the best score, but it would be ridiculous to spend the whole game staring at the scoreboard. The only way to win is to get better each day. In the words of Mark Wright, “Focus on habits to support your destination, not the dashboard.” The same is true for other areas of workplace safety. If you want better results, then don’t overdose on setting goals and KPIs. Focus on what systems, conditions and behaviours positively influence the desired habits and that ultimately build high performance.

What does this mean? Are KPIs completely useless? Of course not. KPIs are a good indicators but evaluating Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are best for making progress. A handful of problems arise when you spend too much time thinking about your KPIs and not enough time designing your methods of deploying your OKRs.

Problem #1: Winners and losers have the same goals.

KPI setting suffers from a serious case of survivorship bias. We concentrate on the people who end up winning—the survivors—and mistakenly assume that ambitious goals led to their success while overlooking all of the people who had the same objective but didn’t succeed.

Every football player wants to win the game. Every candidate wants to get the job. And if successful and unsuccessful people share the same KPI, then the goal cannot be what differentiates the winners from the losers. It wasn’t the KPI of winning the championship that propelled the Penrith Panthers to winning four years in a row. Presumably, they had wanted to win the championship every year before — just like every other professional team. The KPI had always been there. It was only when they implemented an OKRs of continuous small improvements that they achieved a different outcome.

Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves. For more information on inputs and outputs, refer to the Health and Safety Index benchmark results.

Problem #2: Achieving a goal is only a momentary change.

Imagine you have poor workplace housekeeping and you set a goal to keep things in order it. If you summon the energy to tidy up, then you will have a tidy workshop—for now. But if you maintain the same sloppy, pack-rat habits that led to a poor workplace housekeeping in the first place, soon you’ll be looking at a new pile of clutter and hoping for another burst of motivation. You’re left chasing the same outcome because you never changed the system behind it. You treated a symptom without addressing the underlying contributing factors.

Problem #3: Goals restrict success.

The implicit assumption behind any KPI is this: “Once the KPI is reached, then we succeeded.” The problem with a KPI-first mentality is that you’re continually putting happiness off until the next milestone. Organisations often slip into this trap so many times, and this can drive the wrong behaviour, e.g. once the KPI is achieved we can finally relax; or worse, let’s change the way we measure the KPI, not the underlying contributing factors.

Furthermore, KPI create an “either-or” conflict: either you achieve your KPI and are successful or you fail, and you are a disappointment. You mentally box yourself into a narrow version of success. This is misguided. It is unlikely that your actual work done will match the exact journey of work planned. It makes no sense to restrict your satisfaction to one scenario when there are many paths to success.

Problem #4: Goals are at odds with long-term progress.

Finally, a KPI-oriented mind-set can create a “yo-yo” effect. Many runners work hard for months, but as soon as they cross the finish line, they stop training. The race is no longer there to motivate them. When all of your hard work is focused on a particular KPI, what is left to push you forward after you achieve it? This is why many people find themselves reverting to their old habits after accomplishing a goal.

The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building on OKRs is to continually learn, adjust, and improve. True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.

Fall In Love with OKRs

None of this is to say that KPIs are useless. However, KPIs are good indicator to check your progress and OKRs are good for actually making progress.

KPIs can provide an indicator of short-term progress, but eventually a well-designed system will always win. Having effective systems and controls is what matters. Committing to the process is what makes the difference.

Where to start?

Commence with understanding your current state vs. designed state.

FEFO Consulting has developed a proven Maturity Health and Safety Model that enables organisations to identify areas of focus, prior to establishing a strategy and methods of measuring success. To learn more contact us.

This article is based on Chapter 1 of the New York Times bestselling book Atomic Habits. Read more here. 

---

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

— James Clear, Writer

---

Key Steps to Creating an Effective Health & Safety Strategy