We often describe the impacts of decisions, challenges, and plans in desirable yet vague terms. Projects will “improve communication,” “make us more customer-centric,” or “increase innovation.” This vague language obscures the importance and urgency of these actions. Why they matter here-and-now isn’t clear, so they don’t motivate people and don’t help people make decisions. Perhaps worst of all, vague language hides a lack of alignment by making us think we agree. Avoid these drawbacks by clarifying the impacts you want.
Vague Impacts Fail To Answer Two Questions
Vague impacts start with what I call “generally good things.” Some examples:
- “We need to work collaboratively.”
- “Using this tool will enhance communication between departments.”
- “Adding this feature will empower our sales team to close more deals.”
- “A new purchasing process will save us money.”
These sound like things that every organization would want all the time. Who doesn’t think that collaboration, better communication, closing more deals, and saving money are good? The problem is that while they are excellent ideas, describing impacts this way leaves open two questions:
- How will we know if we’ve achieved them?
- Why is it critical to focus on them here and now?
If you can’t answer both of those questions, you’re probably dealing with a vague impact. For example, imagine that someone on your team decides, “We need to work collaboratively,” and sets this as a goal. You would likely have a lot of questions. How will you know when you are working collaboratively? How do we know you aren’t now? What will be different when you are working collaboratively? Why is it essential to focus on improving collaboration now instead of improving other things? “Working collaboratively” sounds like a worthy goal, but it’s too vague to be helpful.
Problems with Vague Impacts
Using vague language to describe results has at least four problems: it doesn’t clearly define what success is, it hides the importance of the work, it doesn’t guide decision-making and problem-solving, and it creates the illusion of alignment.
Vague Impacts Don’t Paint a Clear Picture of Success
Specific impacts are more inspiring and motivating than vague ones. They paint a clear and more compelling picture of where you are heading. Here are two ways to describe the impact of a change to the tools used by a software development team:
- “This change will improve the developer experience.”
- “This change will reduce the time to run our automated regression tests from 40 minutes to 30 seconds.”
Even if you are not a software engineer, I imagine the second description is clearer to you. If you were one of the engineers who uses those tools – and you’re familiar with the pain of waiting 40 minutes for them to run – you’d probably be more motivated to help this change happen if someone described it in the second way. Regardless of your role, you should be able to determine whether or not the tests run in 30 seconds – while knowing if the change has “improved developer experience” is much more ambiguous. With a vaguely described impact, people are much more likely to disagree about whether or not they have reached it.
Vague Impacts Obscure Importance and Urgency
Describing an impact with vague language doesn’t clarify why it is important or urgent to work towards now. The necessity of a vaguely defined result is probably obvious to you when you are the one explaining it. It’s only clear to you because of the context you have – a context not shared by everyone involved in or impacted by the work. Here are two ways of explaining the reason for shutting down an older system:
- “Migrating away from this redundant system will reduce our costs.”
- “Maintaining this single redundant system currently costs us as much time and money as all of our other nine systems combined, and those costs are increasing by 10% every month, so migrating away from it now will free up 50% of the time and money spent to maintain our current systems.”
Talking about generally good things doesn’t tie them to your current situation. “Reducing costs” is generally desirable. “Freeing up 50% of the time and money spent to maintain our current systems” (before it gets worse) sounds like a priority. Vaguely described impacts don’t clarify why it is essential to pursue them now instead of acting on other ideas.
Vague Impacts Don’t Help with Decision-Making
People produce better results when they understand the “What?” and “Why?” of their work. Knowing the specific impact your work is intended to have helps you make better decisions about how to do it. Having a clear goal helps you evaluate your progress toward it and enables you to make adjustments along the way.
Here are two ways to describe the impact you want from a software team that is working to improve a part of their software product:
- “Increase usage of the online payment feature.”
- “Increase recurring usage of the online payment feature by X%, leading to $Y/month in additional recurring revenue over the next six months.”
The first impact is rather vague; it doesn’t specify the criteria for a successful project. It also doesn’t help the people working on the feature decide between options for how they might achieve this growth. The second impact clarifies the immediate measure of success and defines what the downstream implications should be. This information helps the team prioritize their options and to measure their progress.
Vague Impacts Create the Illusion of Alignment
Vague impacts are like the inkblots of a Rorschach test – they are entirely open to interpretation. People can project whatever they want onto them – including hopes, fears, and assumptions. They create the illusion of alignment because everyone agrees they are good things. Alignment, however, requires clarity. You don’t want to get nine months into a year-long project before discovering that each team member interpreted a vague impact (like “work collaboratively”) differently. You want to flush out hidden assumptions as early as possible. By allowing those assumptions to remain undiscussed, you avoid the hard work of generating real alignment by creating the illusion that it already exists.
Creating Alignment is Hard and Involves Disagreement
A group works more effectively when its members align on overall goals and direction. When they are aligned, each person’s efforts supports the larger whole. When they are not aligned, people can easily – and unintentionally – be working at cross-purposes.
Misalignment happens because each person in the group starts with minimal information. From the moment they hear about the goal, they fill in missing details with their speculation and assumptions. They don’t necessarily realize they are doing it, and they often don’t know that other people are filling in those details with their own different assumptions.
Creating alignment isn’t just about getting everyone to say, “Yes, I’m on board with this.” It’s about making sure the thing they think they are on board with is similar enough to the thing that everyone else is envisioning. Without that, their commitment is not useful. True alignment means clarifying the desired impact beyond people’s initial impressions. It means talking about hidden assumptions and working through disagreements. The purpose of the conversation is to discover where you don’t agree. Doing so is difficult and takes time and energy that people often want to spend on “doing the real work.” And skipping it often wastes more time and energy than working through it.
Five Techniques for Clarifying Impacts
Most impacts start vague. Making them more explicit can be challenging, but it is worthwhile. What follows are several techniques I recommend for clarifying desired outcomes. You’ve seen a few of these in use already, and I want to point them out specifically. You can use these if you are leading a change or helping carry it out. I’ll use a running example to demonstrate each of these tools.
Imagine being asked to take on an important project: Streamlining the compliance approval process for your software development teams. The desired result – a “streamlined process” – seems generally good but vague. Here’s what you can do to make it clearer.
Find Something to Observe or Measure (that Matters)
The first step in making an impact clearer is identifying something observable that demonstrates you have achieved it. Here are some examples in different domains:
- Sales per quarter of Product X (Sales & Marketing)
- Marginal cost per unit of Product Y (Manufacturing)
- Number of P1 incidents per month (DevOps)
These describe the results you want your change to create. They are lagging measures, so they are not the only measures that help to guide your work. They define the desired outcome by capturing the critical, observable change you want to achieve.
Taking these as examples, you have some conversations with the stakeholders for the “Streamlining the compliance approvals” project. You discover that they care most about the time it takes for compliance approvals. They think there’s too much delay between when a team submits a request and when it is approved. In this context, streamlining the process means reducing that delay – which is something you can observe and measure.
Include a Target
Once you have decided what you could observe or measure, you need to describe the specific change in that thing that you want the decision or project to create. In the case of improvement, you’re describing a goal or target. What defines success in this area? Going back to the previous examples, here are some possible targets for improvement:
- Increase sales per quarter of Product X to $40M.
- Reduce marginal cost per unit of Product Y to $5/unit.
- Reduce # of P1 incidents per month to 3.
Applying a measure to determine if a result has been achieved should look familiar if you know about Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). Key Results are the criteria you agree on for determining when the Objective (which is often vague by itself) is reached. Even if you don’t formally use OKRs, they can be a helpful guide for clarifying impacts.
Note that you may need to have multiple measures or key results to define the impact you want to have, particularly when you have competing tensions that you need to manage. For example, you might describe the desired result of a cost reduction initiative as “Reduce marginal cost per unit of Product Y to $5/unit while not allowing defect rates to increase.” Not allowing quality to decrease might be an assumption baked into every cost reduction goal. Hiding that assumption also hides a lack of alignment. Making it explicit paints a clearer picture and enables a better discussion about the real challenges in meeting the goal.
Going back to the “streamline approvals” project, you start by trying to set a target for the reduction in time spent waiting. Everyone involved agrees that zero time spent waiting – implying either instantaneous approval or not needing to use the process – would be ideal. The group eventually decides that if you reduce the time spent waiting for compliance approvals to 2 weeks, that would be enough improvement for now.
Include “From-To”
Impacts become even more apparent when you include the current value of the measure (sometimes called the “Jumping-Off Point”). I refer to these as “From-To” goals. Here are some examples of impacts that use the “From-To” technique:
- Increase sales per quarter of Product X from $10M to $40M.
- Reduce marginal cost per unit of Product Y from $7/unit to $5/unit.
- Reduce # of P1 incidents per month from 13 to 3.
To use “From-To”, you include the current value of what you’re observing in your desired impact. Doing so makes the magnitude of the desired change much more apparent. This often provokes discussion about the thinking behind the effort. What makes people believe that degree of change is possible? What assumptions is that goal built on? Being specific in this way helps to dispel the illusion of alignment so that you have the discussions you need to generate actual alignment.
In your “streamline approvals” effort, you investigate and discover that the wait time for approvals is relatively constant and predictable. It’s currently seven weeks, rather than the target wait time of two. When you share this with your project team and stakeholders, you discover that only one person knew it took that long; everyone else assumed it was three or four weeks. The ideas they had come up with for achieving the two-week target might not work. As a result, you talk about what you’ve learned and brainstorm new options for meeting this more ambitious goal.
Include “By-When”
Most impacts have some timeline attached to them. I worry when these are not made explicit. Someone somewhere has some expectation about when you will achieve these impacts. I would much rather know that up-front rather than be surprised by it when the implicit deadline approaches (or passes). Clarifying your impact by including a “By-When” clause can help you avoid these unpleasant surprises. Returning to our examples:
- Increase sales per quarter of Product X from $10M to $40M within three quarters.
- Reduce marginal cost per unit of Product Y from $7/unit to $5/unit by the end of the year.
- Reduce # of P1 incidents per month from 13 to 3 over the next three months.
This is another place where being clear about what success looks like can spur the difficult conversations needed to create actual alignment.
Returning to the “streamline approvals” project, you ask the project sponsor and other key stakeholders when they expect the time reduction. Of course, they would love to have it done “right away,” but you discover that other organizational changes that rely on the improved process aren’t likely to start within the next two quarters. The project team discusses this and agrees that while it’s not immediately obvious how to achieve these results by the end of the next quarter, it doesn’t seem impossible either. You all agree that the desired impact of your project is to reduce the time spent waiting for compliance approvals from seven weeks to two weeks by the end of the next quarter, and you are ready to start finding ways to do that.
Embed the Why
Most goal-setting frameworks – and most people communicating goals – stop here. They clearly define the “What,” the “From-To,” the “By-When” – and they leave out the “Why.” The clearest impacts establish their importance in the current situation. They illuminate “the impact behind the impact.” They make it obvious why this particular decision, project, or goal is crucial to focus on here and now. I recommend that when communicating a desired impact, you embed the why. One way is to add “So That.” To revisit our examples:
- Increase sales per quarter of Product X from $10M to $40M within three quarters so that we can reach profitability before our IPO.
- Reduce marginal cost per unit of Product Y from $7/unit to $5/unit by the end of the year so that we can match our competitors’ prices.
- Reduce # of P1 incidents per month from 13 to 3 over the next three months so that we can focus instead on implementing a new load-balancing system to support next year’s customer growth.
Adding “So That” helps make quantitive results meaningful. It connects a clear but relatively abstract impact to your current situation. Including the purpose in your goal can help you avoid accidentally gaming your metrics. Once everyone knows the reason you’re pursuing a result, it allows you to ask, “Are we achieving the quantitative results in a way that doesn’t fulfill the purpose behind them?”
To revisit the “streamline approvals” project one last time, you remember that some of your stakeholders mentioned that “other organizational changes that rely on the improved process aren’t likely to start within the next two quarters.” You realize that you’re not entirely sure what those are, so you ask about them. You discover that your company is planning to launch versions of your product – which has different compliance needs for each US state and must be approved on a state-by-state basis – in multiple new states by the end of the year. You’re currently offering it only in three states, and your product strategy calls for launching it in a dozen more. Several of your competitors have been slow to move in those states. You believe that if you can cut a month out of the launch process, you’ll be able to capture significant market share. You bring this information back to the team, and together you craft the final version of the project’s goal: “Reduce time spent waiting for compliance approvals from 7 weeks to 2 weeks by the end of next quarter so that we can launch in new states before our competitors.”
The Power of Clear Impacts
Clearly described impacts help people know what is actually wanted from a decision, solution, and project. They connect “generally good things” to the situation at hand in a way that makes their importance and urgency obvious. They motivate people to achieve them, and they provide guidelines for decision-making. Clear impacts make actual alignment possible and ensure that everyone is working to achieve the same thing. The next time you hear a vague impact – or you notice yourself describing an impact in vague terms – take the time to make it clearer.
