Mission accomplished in Narnia

One of the great charades of the early 21st century was Dubya standing on an aircraft carrier, waving a banner behind him.

Mission accomplished, it said.

The Iraq war had achieved its goals of changing the regime, destroying nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, stopping terrorists, or whatever was the point of it all.

Perhaps the war was justified, perhaps not. Either way, it’s an embarrassing moment in hindsight. About a decade later, we were still fighting and witnessing the rise of ISIL.

Oh good.

But I don’t mean to upset young President Bush. It is a common mistake. We all have.

What mistake, exactly?

Well, it’s hard to declare victory when you don’t know what you’re playing for.

And you can’t declare success unless you know what the conditions are for winning.

Otherwise, it’s like waving the Mission Accomplished banner in Narnia. When you invade a fictional country, who knows when you will win?

The change initiatives are often the same.

There is great fanfare about the glorious new future that awaits on the other side …

But how do you know when you have been successful?

How do you know when you are zooming in or out?

More than that …

How do you celebrate small victories along the way, correct your course, and duplicate what works?

This is a common problem: not defining what success looks like. And it’s hard to see. In your head, everything is so clear.

It is obvious what looks like a good result.

And it is also clear in everyone else’s head.

But who can say that you are thinking the same thing?

If you can’t define and measure success, you can’t agree on what it is.

And it cannot show that it has succeeded.

Just because no one is leaving doesn’t mean you have solved your retention issues.

Just because you’re announcing new products doesn’t mean your workforce is more innovative.

Finding out how to declare victory is challenging. It requires deliberate effort and skill.

You need clear, unambiguous, precise, meaningful measurements, and … well, not ridiculous.

Statistics that cannot be played so easily.

Statistics that are somehow objective numbers and real reflections of the state of affairs.

Is not easy.

It may not even be possible.

But I will say this:

As with everything else, organizational trust helps.

When your employees trust their leaders, there is less need for cold hard facts. Sure, you want to measure things as much as possible. But the facts alone won’t convince anyone, and with enough confidence, people will follow you where the facts aren’t clear anyway.

And it goes the other way around.

If your leaders trust their employees, they are less likely to lie to you. One of the traps with data is that frightened subordinates tell leaders what they want to hear.

That is a recipe for many things. Changes in organizational goals? That is not one of them.