Much like the human body, organisations need to send instructions and receive information about the environment and their current state. We don’t tend to think about the sense of where we are in time and space often, but some people have enough to give it a beautiful name: proprioception [pro-pree-oh-ception].

It seems wrong that I can’t think of the name for an analogous concept in organisations. Few people seem to have considered it long enough to even search for a word. We know instinctively that it needs to exist and we have created many systems related to it, like objectives and key results (OKRs), Agile, Kanban, SMART goals and (I’m sure) more. Nothing seems to cover this simple flow of instructions down and information back up directly.

Perhaps due to the current fashion of scientific management the vast majority of these systems focus extensively on how resources are to be allocated and what returns on those investments (ROIs) we are seeing. If you read my definitions of leadership and management you can see that this style of thinking sits centrally in the “management” zone. This is important but it’s missing something important too - what about leadership?

Leadership and organisational proprioception is about making sure that everyone knows what needs doing and that a truthful and accurate representation of the world state is understood. When we use primarily managerial tools to understand our organisation's position in time and space two powerful headwinds emerge:

  1. People focus purely on ROI (return on investment) & resource allocation rather than a mission (and why it's being done)
  2. There’s a large incentive to make yourself seem to be achieving more than you are

This affects both directions of information travel because your boss doesn’t want to be on the hook for working on the wrong thing and you don’t want to appear to be doing nothing and get laid off. If you’ve worked in tech long you’ll have seen many of these aimless teams with standups full of refactoring, updating dependencies and general “adrift”ness.

I feel this is so commonplace in tech right now that it’s a brewing bubble. Cash has been relatively cheap to borrow and the only tools organisations seem to employ dealing with ineffectiveness are layoffs. If I’m right in what I’m saying here, it should be clear why such large cuts in people result in such little difference in overall performance.

What to do

Preoccupation with ROI

I think the OKRs as described in John Doerr's “measure what matters” work without the measuring.

What seems profound in John Doerr's examples is people are being told what matters. What’s more, people are being told (or negotiating) so precisely that it actually can be measured. There’s no room for after-the-fact rationalisations and politics in such a system. It’s not complicated stuff:

  1. It should be really obvious who (one person) is responsible for an objective being completed
  2. We should record what objectives leaders are setting for people and evaluate them periodically
  3. We need to retire and replace objectives that have a difficult to determine end state (even if you don’t want to change direction)
  4. Objectives should be shared as publicly as possible, including how they are linked to one another (both up/down and across)

A warning: the number of people who think they’re doing this is considerably higher than those that actually are. This is because anxious people (see below) are likely to pretend they understand. We need to find ways to be sure people actually understand.

People “selling themselves”

People embellish details primarily out of anxiety - worry for how they will be perceived and so treated. It seems silly and reductionist on the face of it, however from your new starter to your organisation's most hardened apparatchik this is why people bend the truth. And this is great news because anxiety can be reduced.

In his book the coaching habit Michael Stanier Bungay breaks down what things trigger anxiety in people:

  1. Not feeling part of the tribe (in a tribe people support each other by default)
  2. Feeling the expectation is too high or unachievable
  3. The difference in status between you and another person. In a work environment this usually means you’re talking to someone more prestigious such as your boss or the CEO.

There are many things to improve each of these measures individually but repeated exposure to goal setting and updates can improve all of these problems at once.

Even for new joiners, seeing regular goals and updates from everyone (including your leaders) decreases every source of anxiety around objective setting and reporting.

It’s not complicated

This is bread and butter level leadership stuff but as with so many of the simple things I have never in my 15 year tech career seen it done perfectly and rarely do I see it done well. I myself have failed to deliver clear objectives despite knowing it’s essential, and I’ve felt the pressure to embellish what my teams were working on too.

Without this simple stuff you’re completely adrift, at the mercy of the market. I think too without this simple stuff we end up emboldening those people who just want to extract as much money from the organisation as possible. We should do better.