How to build an “outcomes-thinking” mindset?
Are you feeling stuck with your team’s efforts not equating to results as expected? Here’s how getting them talking the language of outcomes instead of “outputs” would help you a great deal!
Outputs or Outcomes?
As a team member or a manager what do you pin on? Is it outputs or outcomes?
On the outset this could appear like one of those conundrums where most would feel like they are stuck on something for a long time without making any worthy progress. But, there is a subtle difference between outputs and outcomes.
This here, is the image of the Bgraamiens Puzzle-The Lines. Simply put, the player has to attempt to put the pieces together within a stipulated time which obviously differs according to one’s age group.
Well! Let’s say someone manages to do that successfully well within the time.
What then? What happens?
Of course, the brain has been subjected to work in generating signals post wading through some visual complexity that called for a great deal of hand and the eye co-ordination.
But, that at best is a representative of an output.
(break…)
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All that it can give you is a sense of accomplishment, which may momentarily quantify as satisfaction.
Now, let’s assume some 100s of pieces of really old paper was found in an ancient chest by your ancestral home which now happens to be a heritage site (pardon me if that looks like a scene straight out of a novel by Michael Crichton or a movie directed by Steven Spielberg) which makes you a bit of royalty, but no harm in that there, is it?
So, you get the pieces and take a few days putting it all together & you see it forms a map of the very same place & it now points to some hidden treasure which dates back to a prehistoric era.
Supposing you believe in that, take trouble locating it and order a dig at the site & you eventually find the treasure. That’d then convert to 2 outcomes.
You putting the map together &
The dig resulting in finding the treasure
Also note, the dig may have taken 20 days & the area covered by the men digging over that period could equate to an output at the end of each day still quantifying tangible progress but all by itself, it doesn’t add to a direct goal in anyway.
So, as you can see outcomes is what one must learn to pin on but with the understanding that outputs could still dearly matter to a section of the people & all of that could absolutely be essential & necessary to make any progress.
Difference b/w Outputs & Outcomes
Let’s get to a more formal definition and an understanding of the all chief differences between outcomes and outputs.
Goals -> Outcomes
The whole approach ought to start from the goals or what could be commonly referred to as business goals. Usually considered leadership’s pets and they are essentially derived straight out of the organization’s vision or the product vision. And, this holds irrespective of the framework one is using for goal setting.
Let’s go over the conventional goal-based system step-wise (depicted in blue in the figure below):
goals (where do we want to get) that are earmarked as important ought to be a start aka goal setting exercise (which of those goals are important to us right now)
frame and define the strategy (what are we doing to get to the goals)
boil it down to a few strategic initiatives (what’re we required to do to deploy the strategy effectively) overarching into the strategy diving deeper to cover the nuances
define the KPIs to measure the success of the strategy, clearing up teams’ expectations
which essentially require one or more metrics to be tracked
The “Strategic Initiatives” to be undertaken could directly represent or could be the base from where “Outcomes” could be derived which holds good for the OKR-based approach as well.
The difference between the two approaches is how OKRs enforce more stricture and clarity. There seems to be a much greater cohesion between the Objectives defining exactly what’s important to the teams right now and the Key Results defining which of the results are to be tracked so as to add up to achieving those objectives. Also, tracking becomes easier allowing for a greater degree of transparency and alignment across all the internal teams & stakeholders.
Whatever be the frameworks used for goal setting, it could work very well if one tries to impart the “outcomes thinking as a mindset” to all the middle level managers at best for a start and then way down to each of the team members.
Outcomes thinking – A mindset
Hark back at the example of the lines & map puzzle at the beginning here.
Notice how it was a similar kind of a puzzle in both the cases.
The first instance needed one to put together pieces to form a pattern consisting of lines & the second one formed a map. In both those cases the person working towards solving the puzzle certainly needed to be very consciously working towards producing the end result which may have been nothing more than a picture of the final image that’s to be achieved.
But that is not outcomes thinking. That consciousness of the end result could be equated to the alignment in the parlance of working with a team per se.
So, what exactly is outcomes thinking?
Here’s a possible definition:
“Outcomes thinking is a conscious & continuous approach to decision-making that relies on assessing & factoring in all the relevant variables affecting those set goals directly or influencing them in any way either major or minor over every single instance”
Take a look at this table below:
The number of cold calls made by your sales teams / the number of direct e-mails sent / open rate of those e-mails in a given cohort may matter to you if you’re thinking of an outcome
But deep down you would know, the no. of sign-ups is more reliable a metric to pin on as it is a closer representative of the goals you have set
Benefits of outcomes thinking
It ensures that your perspective is always rightly oriented towards the major factors that matter to the org. in general and its line of business in particular. And, it does that by:
helping you focus on the right things always
pop the questions that really matter
identify all the relevant problems
unearth blockers much early
sharpens team’s ability to solve for the right problems
gets teams to be more user centric
As an extended exercise just to drive the point home, let’s summarize the sort of problems that those very A & B teams would be engaged with over their regular day’s workflows:
Troubles / blockers in adapting to Outcomes Thinking
Having said that, nothing is smooth sailing and nothing comes easy in the world.
Getting teams to adapt to outcomes thinking could be fraught with a few problems or blockers that would make gaining a buy-in tougher like for instance:
breaking the conventional thinking oriented towards solutions
exploring, sorting out, choosing the best way suiting the teams in question
communicating the value that it would add to teams
which definitely doesn’t come easy-neat. Truth be told, it may need a lot of sorting out at first & clarity amongst the leaders who are responsible for framing strategies and then subject to few experimentation cycles over a short silos whose results ought to serve as a reality check.
May be post some (n) cycles of exhaustive experimentation leading to of course tons of insight & learnings might eventually lead to crafting an implementable model or a framework to drive decisions forward henceforth.
Conclusion
The Incumbent Change:
Outcomes are more realistic and tangible for leaders to pin on, track and analyze progress, outputs may be dear to the internal teams: solutions teams for instance. But, outcomes thinking is a mindset and if propagated hierarchically at least one or two levels below could really work wonders in helping teams get teams more productive by making alignment more innate.