Fool’s Gold: The Success Measures That Don’t Measure Success
Fool’s gold looks like the real thing right up until the moment you try to cash it in. All too often, our definitions of success are exactly the same.
They sound great initially, everyone signs off, but teams ultimately struggle to explain what achieving them would actually prove.
This is really a definition-of-success problem.
Let’s look at an example. Say an apparel manufacturer wants to:
Create a faster, more predictable production flow.
That’s a meaningful objective the organization can rally around. So the team defines success this way:
Deploy the new workflow system across all factories by the end of Q2.
Train 95% of production and planning employees on the new standard processes.
Establish weekly cross-functional production reviews at every factory.
At first blush, these look like reasonable definitions of success. They’re specific, measurable, and easy to track. But if we achieve them exactly as written, will we have achieved the objective?
Let’s walk through it.
Deploy the new workflow system across all factories by the end of Q2. Done. Every factory is live and the deadline was met. Did production get faster or more predictable? Maybe, but the deployment itself doesn’t tell us.
Train 95% of production and planning employees on the new standard processes. Target hit. But are people applying what they learned? Is anything running better? We still can’t tell.
Establish weekly cross-functional production reviews at every factory. The meetings are happening. Is coordination actually better? More importantly, did it make the production flow faster or more predictable?
That last one is a particularly good example of fool’s gold. I’m all for better coordination, for sure. But holding a recurring meeting isn’t the same as improving coordination. It tells us that people got together, not whether they resolved issues faster, made better decisions, or improved the production flow.
This is where language that sounded perfectly reasonable when it was first discussed becomes much less useful to the people expected to deliver it.
So let’s take another shot at defining success:
Average production cycle time decreased from 18 days to 12.
On-time completion increased from 42% to 75%.
Queue time between production stages decreased from 4.5 days to 1.5.
First-pass quality was at or above 97%.
Side note: One thing I’ve found helpful over the years is to write results in the past tense, as if they’ve already been achieved. It gets people thinking about what will be different when the work is done.
Now the team has a much clearer picture of what success looks like.
The first measure directly defines the primary outcome: production takes six fewer days. The next two provide supporting evidence about what is changing inside the production flow. The final measure defines a constraint, making it clear that faster production doesn’t count as success unless first-pass quality is at least 97%.
The work required to produce those results might still include launching the workflow system, training factory teams, and holding cross-functional production reviews. But those are initiatives, not proof of successfully achieving the objective. Defining those milestones is important, and reaching them is absolutely a sign of progress and a reason to celebrate. But we still need to define the result we expect the work to produce.
A clear, practical plan should distinguish four things:
The objective: What meaningful condition are we trying to change?
The success measures: What evidence would show that it changed, and by how much?
The constraints: What conditions or boundaries must we work within while pursuing that change?
The initiatives: What work do we believe will produce the result?
When we blur those categories, teams can execute the entire plan and still leave the organization wondering whether anything meaningful improved.
Clarity up front makes a world of difference. It gives teams something specific to aim at, helps them tell whether the work is having the intended effect, and allows them to adjust when it isn’t.
A good, simple test when defining success measures is to ask yourself, “If we achieved this exactly as written, what would it prove?”
If the answer is, “It would prove that we did the thing, but we still wouldn’t know whether we achieved the objective,” then you’re probably looking at fool’s gold.
