Please not a goal cascade

How would you draw a mission driven organisation?

There’s an exercise I find helpful when working with abstract ideas — ask people to draw what they’re thinking.

This can surface people’s mental models, which often vary more than you’d think, even when people are using the same words. And in the context of organisational change this can help you understand why people keep being surprised/frustrated at each others’ behaviour without knowing why.

Recently I’ve been thinking about this in relation to mission driven working. What would I draw if I was asked to draw a mission driven organisation?

I guess it’s easier to say what I wouldn’t draw, which is a goal cascade — a hierarchy of boxes forking down from a top-line mission into its constituent components.

This post from John Cutler captures some of my objections to goal cascades but it’s written for a world of product work, which differs from mission work in various ways.

So as a contribution to the debate about mission driven working, I thought it might be useful to unpack why a goal cascade is a problematic mental model for missions.

Why not a goal cascade?

The first issue with a goal cascade is a sense of homogeneity/repetition.

The cascade gives the impression — even if we don’t intend it to— that a mission and its subgoals are similar in their form and material. It can therefore make us reach too readily for a common set of tools, approaches, research methods, and operating models.

In reality, of course, missions are very heterogeneous. Which is an ugly way of saying that any mission will be made up of wildly varied types of problem, each of which will lend itself to different responses.

It also goes without saying that all big societal missions are very different to each other. A mission for preventative healthcare, for example, is almost nothing like a mission for productivity. So we should expect our approach to missions to vary a lot, and we should be suspicious if it doesn’t.

Another problem with a goal cascade is that it implies a hierarchy — again however hard we might insist that this isn’t our intention.

It’s really hard to look at a goal cascade and not think of orders flowing down from the top of the system, like an org chart in an army. It’s even harder to look at a goal cascade and not translate this into a kind of physical space, with a leader sitting at the ‘top’ of the system. Which on some level implies a leader who knows how to do things and sends out instructions.

A key aspect of mission driven working is that important relationships run in many directions — top down, bottom up, peer to peer. It’s especially important, for example, that knowledge and ideas can flow up through the system, and sideways, as much as down. (You can see in my language — top/bottom, up/down — how hard it is to escape the idea of systems being vertical.)

Another key quality of mission driven working is that there are many different types of relationship: flows of information, loose mechanisms for alignment, tight mechanisms like contracts and legal obligations, and many flavours of accountability, among others. This again isn’t captured in the mental model of the goal cascade.

A further issue with a goal cascade is that it tends to imply an effort at coordination. This makes sense when you think of the idea’s provenance in a paradigm of control and industrialism — the structure looks mechanical.

Coordination is of course often a good thing. But in a complex system it can be an illusion and, done wrong, it can lead to rigidity, making the system fragile and less resilient/more prone to crisis.

A better word than coordination might be alignment. It better captures how you can use a host of techniques, and principles of system design, to encourage the actors in a system to push in a similar direction. And you can do this while preserving degrees of freedom, for example so that there’s space for innovation and local adaptation. We might then think of the connections in the system as being less like mechanical components and as being more organic, like tendons.

Seeking alignment rather than coordination also helps to mitigate another common problem of goal cascades/hierarchical organisations, which is the risk of overwhelm at the top of the system.

We’ve all seen times when a leader tries to coordinate activities in a complex system and becomes a bottleneck, slowing down delivery. By seeking control — often trying to reduce risk — the leader ends up making the system more fragile, which ironically makes things far more risky.

Alignment also fits the idea that a lot of the important work on missions happens peer to peer, and is often relational in nature. People can get more aligned thanks to soft but powerful mechanisms like getting along well with each other, or feeling intrinsic motivation — it can be a big deal just for people to get clearer, or to feel more excited about the mission outcome, and this can be worth a lot of investment.

So as well as putting less load on the ‘top’ of the system, an emphasis on aligning, rather than coordinating, can better harness the intelligence and energy of people across the system.

One last thing I don’t love about a goal cascade is that it lures us into an idea beloved of consultants— being MECE, or ‘mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive’.

In some contexts, being MECE is important. But the risk of being MECE in mission work, when each individual organisation — or even the government as a whole — is only a small part of the system, is that we end up feeling that our work has to cover off every one of those boxes at the bottom of the pyramid.

This is different from trying to have sight of the whole system, and understanding the system’s dynamics, and then using this knowledge to avoid covering everything. Instead you try to identify your best points of leverage, and make targeted interventions.

What’s the alternative?

So if mission driven organisations don’t look like a goal cascade — homogenous, hierarchical, coordinated, and MECE — what do they look like?

I’m kind of reluctant to add my own diagram to the many that have already been used to depict mission driven working. I’ll add links to some of my favourites at the end.

Still, rather than dodge the question entirely, I’ll close with a few reflections on the qualities I would try to capture in a picture of a mission driven organisation, if I had any artistic talent.

A typology for mission work

First on that point about the heterogeneity of missions. I guess at minimum I’d want to replace the repetitive boxes of the goal cascade by reflecting that there’s a typology of different challenges under any mission — squares, triangles, circles, stars, etc — and also by visualising that each mission is different.

The more I think about this, the more I wonder if it would be helpful to actually do the work of developing a typology for missions. Maybe we could name, say, eight to ten archetypal challenges that come up a lot when pursuing a big societal mission. And maybe we could even map each challenge to the most applicable tools/approaches/operating models.

To bring this to life a bit, one type of challenge that comes up a lot in missions is what we could call a ‘Complex Outcome’.

I’d define these as intermediate outcomes that are vital to the success of a mission and that are sufficiently complex that they can’t be achieved with siloed working, and that also require us to learn by doing.

You can spot these kinds of outcomes in public policy because they’re often areas where our progress has been achingly slow when operating through the traditional Whitehall policy system, with its silos and its separation of policy and delivery.

A good example would be the number of people installing heat pumps in Britain. This is mission critical for decarbonising homes, moving away from gas for home heating, and it requires action on a number of fronts — training more heat pump engineers, making it easier/unnecessary to get planning permission, setting the right economic incentives, etc.

It’s really hard, maybe impossible, to move at pace on a challenge like this without some kind of shared team, cutting across silos, and without short cycles of learning — so that you can see what’s holding up installations one month, adapt policy, and see what happens the next.

Our failure to form a team like this and shorten these cycles of learning explains why in the UK we’re currently installing around 60,000 heat pumps a year when we need to install over 600,000.

If I were a government trying to be mission-driven, I’d be tempted to choose 10–20 of these Complex Outcomes and be relentless about establishing the right conditions to progress them — applying the model described in The Radical How, a recent report from Nesta and Public Digital.

It wouldn’t be hard to come up with a list of outcomes like these. Two other examples include:

• The number of people who are currently out of work due to long-term sickness
• The proportion of small businesses that are using digital technologies and contemporary management practices

Anyway, my point is just that a Complex Outcome is one type of challenge that is likely to come up a lot under any big societal mission, and that it lends itself to quite a particular type of response.

A very different example is what we could call a Technology Bottleneck. These are cases where we literally don’t know how to solve an aspect of a big social problem, for example how to diagnose an illness earlier and much more cheaply at scale.

In these cases we would want to reach for an entirely different type of response. For example, we might launch a Challenge Prize to catalyse innovation, and the whole approach would be set up differently with a different operating model, culture, and governance.

The point being that under each mission you’d want a mixed economy of approaches.

Relational, not transactional

A second key quality I’d want to capture in a drawing of a mission driven organisation are those more organic relationships — alignment, not rigid mechanical coordination. This would try to get across that mission driven work is often relational rather than transactional.

This in turn links to the thorny question of how we would visualise the role of the centre of government in driving progress on missions, and whether, for example, there’s a mission equivalent to an institution like the PM’s Delivery Unit.

Without getting too drawn into this, the key thing I’d emphasise here is that mission working doesn’t marry well with intricate targets coordinated by a tough centre.

One reason for this, among many, is that with missions you’d want to work harder to achieve a sense of shared ownership, maybe by disaggregating the contributions made by different parts of the system. For example by negotiating and naming the contributions made by sectors/businesses to carbon reduction.

That word negotiating is important, because in mission-driven working the conversation itself is a critical part of the process. So some of the mechanisms you’d want for good mission-driven working are about supporting high quality conversations between the actors in the relevant system.

And although that can sound looser than the image of a tight set of targets, it can end up giving you a more precise sense of where the work sits in the system. Which in turn helps you give a truer account of how the system is performing and why, and a more honest view of your points of leverage.

Leading in the system

Third, I’d want to get away from that idea of leadership as pulling levers at the top of a system.

People sometimes use the phrase ecosystem leadership to capture the way that leaders in complex systems are not literally ‘in charge’ of all the pieces. It’s more that leaders play a vital function in the system, for example by allocating resources, making certain decisions, communicating a vision, or setting common standards.

This can be scary to admit but in most cases it’s really just stating the obvious. This is why most private sector companies have long moved away from an old school leadership culture of barking orders, and now use more contemporary approaches — systems leadership, servant leadership, etc.

Still, in politics, this raises tricky questions about accountability. Because of course Ministers are accountable to Parliament, and ultimately to the public, for the outcomes of the system they’re leading, and it’s no excuse to say ‘the system is complex’.

I personally think we can square this circle and that part of the answer lies in making openness an essential feature of mission-driven working. All outcomes should be public, as live as possible, and leaders should be able to account for the decisions they’re making.

Which incidentally is one reason I like the idea of bringing back the Covid-era monthly press conferences but for a short-list of critical, mission-related outcomes.

To my mind these press conferences were one of the radical innovations of the pandemic that we should have kept and built on — a regular, outcome-based briefing, with a political decision-maker flanked by experts, having to account for why they’re making those decisions in light of the evidence.

Participation

Fourth, in the context of a mission-driven government, we’d want to find a way to show that missions gain legitimacy and power from being participatory, for example by engaging frontline professionals and civil society.

This reflects that mission driven work is a collective endeavour, harnessing the insights and energy of professionals across a system.

This seems to me one of the most exciting aspects of the whole idea of mission-driven government and it’s also an area where digital technology and AI makes new things possible, ultimately promising new ways for citizens to relate to the state and each other.

For example, we can now connect a whole profession, such as teachers, into an ongoing conversation. This can provide collective intelligence — generating live, granular insights, including in qualitative form (text, video, etc) to guide decisions.

It can also help ideas to spread faster across a system. And just as importantly it can build a shared sense of agency and purpose behind a mission. Which is something that is missing from that old mental model of the goal cascade.

Points of leverage

Finally, if I was trying to visualise missions in the context of government, I’d want to capture that missions won’t be everything the government is doing.

I suspect this last point is especially hard to visualise, and perhaps a little contentious, because it reveals an ambiguity in how the word ‘mission’ is used.

I’ve heard people distinguish the different meanings of missions in various ways, typically drawing out three different meanings:

• Missions can be priorities — ways to focus your organisation/government
• A mission can be seen as a particular type of challenge — one that’s especially complex or ambitious — that lends itself to a ‘mission oriented’ way of working. This way of working can be codified in a playbook or a set of principles. See, for example, The Radical How, or the links I’ve shared below.
• Missions can gesture more broadly to a new mentality or spirit in your organisation/government — typically including: being more ambitious and purpose-driven, more iterative, less siloed, more open, and more participatory. And this spirit can be brought to everything you do.

These different definitions would give us very different ways of picturing a mission-driven government. More importantly, they would lead to different ways to operationalise mission-driven working.

If you’re treating missions as priorities, for example, you’d want to be disciplined. You’d try to resist everyone squishing their work under one of your mission headings, and you’d try to hold the line to make sure your money/attention isn’t eaten up by too much ‘non-mission’ work.

If instead you ran with the second option, and saw missions as a particular class of challenge that merits a certain kind of approach, you’d want to be very intentional about your ways of working.

You wouldn’t want to apply a mission method to everything, or even to lots of things, because there’s no way you’d do it properly. You’d end up with mission-washing.

Instead, you’d probably pick a short list of outcomes that really mattered a lot to you — and, if you’re a government, to the public. Outcomes that you think would benefit a lot from mission-driven working. Maybe like the ‘Complex Outcomes’ I named above.

You’d then pursue these outcomes relentlessly, being very intentional about your approaches.

Alternatively if you picked the third option, you’d be a bit looser about things. You’d use the language of missions to signal a shift in the spirit of your organisation or government, but you wouldn’t mind too much what work it described, indeed being broad might help to spread new behaviours.

Of course in reality you can have a bit of each of these, but I still suspect it’s useful to be clear about your intentions.

For what it’s worth, I personally favour majoring on the second approach because I think it’s more likely to result in meaningful change to the system and in noticeable improvements in outcomes.

So I would see missions as a particular — and important — aspect of what a government was doing, but not everything. And so missions would be visualised alongside the wider work of running and improving things, and that would include important but more near-term operational goals.

This all raises the important question of how you make those two areas of work — long-term missions and more immediate objectives — complementary. But that’s for another day.

I’m conscious I’ve rather dodged my original question by not turning that into a drawing, but believe me you’re not missing anything.

Here anyway are some links to various playbooks with visuals of mission-driven working from people with design skills:

• Vinnova’s playbook for designing missions
• 13 reasons missions fail, by Piret Tõnurist of the OECD
• Danish Design Centre: 8 qualities of mission-driven organisations
• More oblique but semi-relevant: Why goal cascades are harmful, by John Cutler

As always, I’m sharing this in the spirit of thinking in the open. Lots of smart people have spent careers thinking about these questions — and more importantly practising these methods — so I’d be interested in thoughts and critiques.

If you’d like to read more on these topics, you can follow me on Medium or Blue Sky or support my writing on Substack. Here’s a post on The Radical How, a report from Nesta and Public Digital. And two posts I wrote recently on similar issues: How to solve wicked problems and Move fast and fix things. And, for the big picture story there’s my book, End State.