EMILY (00:08)

When you're striving for a really big goals, it's important to not only measure the most important outcomes, but how well you do them. It's not just going for it at all costs. Understand that the more ambitious an objective is, the more likely it is that there's going to be unintended consequences. Measurable OKRs always have quantity associated as we've learned a milestone that we can measure.

But instead of just stopping at that number of calls made, or the amount of new sign ups for example, a counterbalance adds another metric that ensures the quality of our work as well. So if you've committed to building three new features in the next month and that's also an ambitious goal, you'd also want to add a key result to aim for fewer than five bugs per feature. In the testing phase, the result is that your developers will not just churn out a broken product, but they'll be incentivized to write cleaner code when writing your key results. Consider Is there anything that feels particularly ambitious that you want to make sure has a quality counterbalance?

An overemphasis on performance without a counterbalance can produce harmful, even devastating consequences. Closely tying rewards to certain goals can result in a win at all costs mentality. Here's a very well-known historical example of what can happen when you have an ambitious goal without a system of checks and balances. In the late 1960s, Ford Motor Company's president at the time, Lee Iacocca, decided that his company would not sit by idly as the new Japanese competitors dominated the small car market.

So they developed the Ford Pinto, which was an incredibly small and affordable car. Now, the Pinto would help them compete in the small car market, but time was of the essence. They had a big job to build that car and a very fast timeline to do it. Not only was a small car new to Ford, but the Pinto had to be no more than 2,000 pounds and not a penny over $2,000.

And a delivery deadline of just 25 months, a record at the time and still impressive today. The problem was that well into the development cycle, an issue was discovered with the fuel tanks that made these cars incredibly dangerous. The engineers noticed this and brought it up the chain. But since everyone was rushing to achieve their goals, it wasn't given the attention it deserved.

Production continued as planned. Hitting their milestones was the most important thing. Well, they did hit their ambitious targets, but at such a great cost. When the car went to market, they found that people were getting into low speed accidents and their fuel tanks would burst into flames.

It cost several people their lives and the company its reputation for a long time after. It was investigated. cars were pulled and Ford was heavily fined. Today, their cars are some of the safest in the market, so lesson learned.

But it was a terrible PR disaster. This is an example of what can happen when you're just focusing on ambitious goals without a quality counterbalance.