Escaping the Performance Trap with Radhika Dutt

In this episode of Leadership Bites, Radhika Dutt discusses her journey as a product leader and speaker consultant, focusing on the importance of transformative products and the pitfalls of traditional goal-setting methods. 

She introduces her new book, 'Escaping the Performance Trap,' which critiques the use of goals and targets in organizations and proposes a new framework called OHLs (Objectives, Hypotheses, Learnings) to foster innovation and adaptability. Radhika emphasizes the need for meaningful vision statements, the role of leadership in product development, and the importance of psychological safety in fostering a culture of experimentation and learning.

Takeaways

• Goals and targets can backfire, leading to performative behavior.
• Organizations need to prioritize experimentation and reflection.
• Vision statements should be clear and meaningful, not vague.
• A strong vision can guide organizational alignment and decision-making.
• Leadership plays a crucial role in fostering innovation.
• Puzzle setting and solving can replace traditional goal-setting methods.
• OHLs (Objectives, Hypotheses, Learnings) provide a new framework for teams.
• Understanding wicked problems is essential for effective problem-solving.
• Psychological safety is key to encouraging open dialogue and innovation.

To find out more about Guy Bloom and his award winning work in Team Coaching, Leadership Development and Executive Coaching click below.

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Transcript

Guy Bloom (00:19)
elevates us. listen, Radhika, it is fabulous to have you on this episode of Leadership Bites, so welcome to the podcast.

Radhika Dutt (00:32)
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Guy Bloom (00:35)
I am as well, you know, I get to speak to amazing people. ⁓

I have a sense of excitement about what we're going to talk about as well because it's quite in my sweet spot. Not necessarily from my own expertise but generally from my interest. So we've got you on as the expert. So if somebody met you at a social gathering and you were being introduced to people and they said, oh, what do you do then? What would you say that you do?

Radhika Dutt (01:06)
By the way, I really don't like that question in social settings, but here goes what I do. I am a speaker consultant and I'm a product leader. I work on how we build transformative products.

Guy Bloom (01:23)
And whereabouts in the world are you?

Radhika Dutt (01:26)
I'm based out of Boston, but for most people they can never place my accent. I like asking in social gatherings, well, you know, where do you think I'm from? So yeah, my accent is a little bit from all over the place. I'm from India. I lived in South Africa and I lived in Singapore and well, here I am now. I hold three passports and speak nine languages. So sort of from all over the place. But the key question was...

Where do you live? In Boston at the moment is how I'd go.

Guy Bloom (01:58)
So three passports and nine languages, so basically you're Jason Bourne. You could disappear at a moment's notice and appear anywhere in the world. That's what I've just heard there.

Radhika Dutt (02:02)
You know?

Well, yeah, you know, never told... Maybe that's why I don't like to tell people what I do.

Guy Bloom (02:14)
Nine languages is just, he's just showing off. Right, exactly.

Bloody hell, you know, that's just ridiculous. Okay, I won't test you. I do see these things on social media where you've got somebody that's fluent in, there's this one lad, he's on the internet and he goes onto these kind of chat boards and he speaks to people from Korea and...

Japan and China and he's fluent in every one of the languages and they just start talking and then all of a sudden he switches into their language and it just you could just see it blows their mind because he's you know he's US based and so he's just not he doesn't look right at all and and his accent he's just they go

Radhika Dutt (02:49)
Ha

Guy Bloom (03:00)
You know, like, it's not that you speak in the language, it's that your accent and your dialect is spot on. He's obviously got that mimic brain that can just feed into it, always super jealous. So let's, anyway, anyway, let's get into, let's get into you. ⁓ You, let's actually start with where your energy is right now, and then we'll kind of.

look at maybe where you've come from to get to where you are today. So let's just make sense of it for people. You have a book previously and you're working on a book now. So I would love to just get a sense of, and there'll be links and everything, but I would love to get a sense of, you know, that first book, just what its intention was, who it was aimed at. And then, you this second book, how it either builds on or it's a separate connection to whatever that is. Let's just kind of get into that journey. ⁓

Radhika Dutt (03:53)
Yeah. So the second book I'm working on, it really is standalone, but there's a reason why I'm writing it. And I just realized how important it was to write it, having, you know, just the experience from writing my first book. let me talk about this next book project that I'm working on. So the working title of the book is Escaping the Performance Trap, Why Goals and Targets Backfire and What Actually Works.

And so what I'm tackling in this book is my experience over a long time that I kept seeing side effects to using goals and targets. And for a long time, I couldn't articulate sort of why I felt like targets and OKRs, or OKR stands for objectives and key results, but why I kept seeing the same set of side effects, like what was wrong with OKRs. And finally,

You know, when I could articulate what was wrong with goals, targets and OKRs, what I realized was if I told leaders, you know, here's why you shouldn't be using it, what came back was, well, you know, what do I do instead? It's the devil I know versus, you know, if I have nothing else to replace it. And so it was only in the last year that I've been trying different approaches and I've found something that works so much better than goals and targets.

that I felt like, okay, I really have to write this book.

Guy Bloom (05:22)
So what were the side effects that you, what triggered your, hold on a minute, something's not quite right here.

Radhika Dutt (05:31)
So what I kept seeing over time is when you set a goal or a target for someone, the incentive you're creating for them is, look, ta-da, these are the numbers. You wanted to see them? I'm showing you great numbers. See how great a performer I am that I have achieved those numbers you set for me. So that's the incentive. And in reality, they might be showing you those numbers, but all the bad metrics on what is not working, they've probably swept under the rug.

I would have teams often who ask me, how do I frame these metrics for management? And I also saw that sometimes people said, OK, you want me to these goals? I'll hit these goals. And they told their teams, anything that doesn't achieve these OKRs, if it's not moving the OKRs, we're not doing it. Which then misses out on so many other opportunities. Like, you don't want either.

of such behavior, what you really need in an organization for innovation is you need experimentation, reflection, learning and adaptation, right? And that whole muscle of experimentation, reflection, adaptation, that atrophies over time. If you keep learning this idea that, you know, all these bad metrics, I'll just sweep them under the floor, as opposed to playing detective and figuring out what's actually happening here. And so that's what I realized that we have to

change this goals and targets sort of a mindset to something else that is more about puzzle setting and puzzle solving. And for high performers, know, the performance theater that is incentivized by goals and targets is so starving, whereas puzzle setting and puzzle solving is like catnip.

Guy Bloom (07:21)
Okay, so there is a thing here about, and I love the phrase, it fits with my vocabulary particularly well, ⁓ this idea of ⁓ performative behaviour. So there's a difference between something being your driving performance and something being performative.

So again, just for people who may be listening to this from different places and spaces, I would understand that and calibrate me or whatever the performance focus is. Right, there is a place in a space we're going to get to and either through motivational development or vision or purpose or all these lovely things. There's nothing wrong with that. We're trying to get from A, we're trying to go to B and good performance looks like. So there's something about if we don't know what good looks like, it's very hard to aim for what

would look like. Then there's something, maybe it's, you know, somebody said to me once, you know, if you pick up a stick you get both ends, which is, which I kind of like, which is, so at the other end of that, if...

the culture isn't right or the tone isn't right or whatever we're about to talk about next isn't right then what I start to do is get a very isolated singular focus where the performance of delivering that particular outcome is the only endeavor and that can lead to over focus or at its worst

bad behaviour where things become there is no need or room for innovation actually things get hidden and not spoken about because the only thing is that goal that's how I'm going to get promoted that's how I'm going to get praised that's how I'm going to get paid so actually if it ain't that I'm not interested have I translated and understood?

Radhika Dutt (09:13)
Exactly. to this, a lot of people will respond and say, well, but that's just a matter of setting the right goals, one. And two, they'll say, well, we need these goals and OKRs, targets, whatever you call it. We need that to be able to align the team on what is important and what is not important. And to which I say, well, why do you need goals for alignment? And the answer to this, by the way,

is that we use goals and OKRs almost like duct tape on foundational cracks. That's how we use goals and OKRs for alignment. Because a more effective approach to alignment is having a very detailed vision. Let's look at the kind of vision statements most companies have. A vision statement typically goes like, to be the leader in aerospace, to be the enduring global champion is Boeing's exact words of aerospace.

other vision statements, there's Snapchat's vision that goes like empowering people to express themselves and creating progress for humanity through that. What does that even mean? Even for Boeing, what does enduring global industrial champion mean? Do you measure aerospace leadership by market share, by shareholder returns, by technological innovation? The answer isn't clear.

And so ⁓ we have these really crappy vision statements that could mean anything to anyone. And so then you use goals and targets like these duct tapes that your ⁓ pieces of duct tape that you fix over those foundational cracks of a lack of a meaningful vision. So what if we could instead fix those foundational cracks instead, right? So in my first book, Radical Product Thinking, I talk about

what you actually need as a vision statement, not a bullshit statement like, you know, global enduring champion in aerospace, but rather a vision that says, what is the problem statement? And why must you fix it? Because maybe status quo doesn't need to be changed. And then finally, what's the end state and how will you bring it about? Right. So I'll give you an example of what I mean by such a detailed vision. So here's a vision statement. And I haven't told you anything about the company. See if you can picture this. Today when?

An amateur wine drinker wants to find wines that they're likely to like and learn about wine along the way. They have to find attractive looking wine labels or buy wines that are on sale. This is unacceptable because it leads to so many disappointments and it's hard to learn about wine in this way. We envision a world where finding wines you like is as easy as finding movies you like on Netflix.

we're bringing about this world through a recommendations algorithm that matches wines to your taste and an operational setup that delivers these wines to your door. So every time I share this vision, those words might change a little bit, but you hopefully saw exactly what we were doing and why we were doing it. The problem statement was clear.

Guy Bloom (12:34)
So I would call that the narrative. That's the problem. Those are the stepping stones. That's the outcome. So when I hear the narrative, or call it the story, but it's not just a story that doesn't have craft. This is a crafted, relatively short and succinct.

If it's written down, okay, might be that's the official version, but when we all talk about it, we might use slightly different words, we might use our own vocabulary, but actually you will hear the problem, you will hear the stepping stone, and you will hear the outcome, though Radhika won't say it like Guy says it, but actually when you hear the story, you'll both walk away, even if you spoke to us separately, and verbalise it again, and I could again spot the problem, etc. Have I understood that correctly?

Radhika Dutt (13:28)
Exactly.

You we don't need a vision statement that someone else can parrot back to us in our words. What we want is a vision statement that they state in their words. And then, you know, they've internalized it, right? It completely changes the mindset of what's a good vision. It's not about a short slogan or a b-hag. Yeah.

Guy Bloom (13:47)
So it's not a strap line, right?

It is that actually is more of a, almost like a quote than anything else. It might have an element of lift in it, but this is something then that maybe is, when you read an inverted commas commercial vision, it's very often.

Intellectually you know what it says but you don't connect to it. This is asking you to find your own vocabulary to verbalise what you've just heard from me. Therefore it's not automatically...

but it's more instinctively internalised because I've assigned my language to what that is. So it's much easier for me to connect. And then there's an accountability for me taking ownership of when I say it. It has to get that narrative across rather than we all just learn on wrote that. So if we're tested, we've got the answer regardless of what it really means to us.

Radhika Dutt (14:48)
Exactly, I love it, that's right.

Guy Bloom (14:51)
Good, I'm keeping up with the main party then. That's because if you went, that's not what I said at all. That was going to be really painful. That's a completely different episode, guy. God. OK, so that's beautiful. I love it. I love the idea of ⁓ actually a senior team. Yeah, they might take ownership and accountability for the creation of a thing.

Radhika Dutt (14:53)
Hahaha

Guy Bloom (15:18)
But actually what we are smart enough to now not do is go right over to the marketing team who now just need to publicize it and of course everybody will get behind it. And that's very, I'm always fascinated by when I see teams trying to work on something that they think is going to unify X amount of hundreds or thousands of people behind, you know, 10 words or something like that. Cause I feel like going, well, good luck.

because in truth there's no personalization, there's no identity that sits outside of what you guys and gals think it means. So this is more of a, you know, maybe there's more work in it, but it becomes then part of how do we recruit, how do we develop.

how do we reward, what is the recognition, in terms of OD, organisational development, how do we put this into our structure to give people permission to verbalise in their own way and we as a management team have the capacity to recognise that you may not have used my words but I can recognise that you've understood my message because it's slightly harder than just parrot me back what I told you last month. ⁓ it's a much more mature space.

Radhika Dutt (16:25)
Yes.

Yes, and you know what you were just alluding to is the fact that this is a vision that you can actually use in everyday work as opposed to, you know, we write this 10 word vision and then that becomes something that people parrot back and you filed it away for posterity. So let me give you an example, you know, what you just said about getting everyone to use it, you use it in OD, et cetera. Like here's one example of how I use vision statements, right? So this, this,

vision for the wine startup that I shared. Whatever such vision you have, when you're prioritizing, whether it's, know, activities in terms of whatever initiatives you're taking, it could be even a sales opportunity you're evaluating. The way you can use this vision is you draw up an X and a Y axis, right? This X and Y axis represents the yin and yang of long term versus short term. As a leader,

you're constantly balancing this yin and yang of long-term versus short-term thinking. And building a great business lies in finding that perfect yin and yang. And so if you visualize that on an x and y axis, your y axis is, is this good for the vision or not? And the x axis is, is this good for short-term survival or not? And so things that are good for short-term, for the vision and short-term survival,

You know, those are the easy decisions. And very often in companies, you stick to those easy decisions. The harder decisions are actually when it's good for the long term vision, but it's not great for the short term. So an example of this is you might be investing in learning and development, or ⁓ you might be ⁓ taking some time to ⁓ fix your technical debt. Right. Those are investing in the vision sort of activities.

The opposite of investing in the vision is when you take on what I call vision debt, meaning it's good for the short term, but it's not great for the long term vision. So an example of that would be, you know, I really want to win this million dollar deal and I take on this custom work to be able to win that deal. This is a mega client, a logo that I want, blah, blah. So yeah, I agree to this. And you know what? There might be times when taking on vision debt is what you have to do.

Maybe you're a bootstrapped startup, you have to do that to survive. But if you keep doing that, it leads to the product disease I call Obsessive Sales Disorder. So my point is, when you have this sort of clarity on what is my vision, then you can start to figure out what is the right trade off. And you talked about accountability and getting people to internalize this, right? And so if as a leader, you show people

what trade-offs you're making in terms of vision versus survival. You know, if I'm even a developer or someone who's an individual contributor, I can take that learning from you as a leader and I can say, okay, this is how I can apply that sort of a trade-off in my work right now. Right? This is when I invest in the vision versus take on vision debt. And this is when I can make this easy decision. Right? So this, this creates sort of a common vocabulary and thinking for the whole team.

Guy Bloom (19:58)
There's quite a lot going on there, ⁓ which is great. And I like that because it's very easy. Now let me correct that. I think an organization's appetite is sometimes guided by probably that short and that long term, which is what some people think their capacity to take on certain thinking is.

Radhika Dutt (19:59)
Ha!

Guy Bloom (20:25)
And there's a bravery involved in deciding we're an organization that is going to hold to truths and still function as opposed to the singularity of it scores on the doors today because I'm driven by my fear or my whatever that might be. So the kind of organization that would start to think like this would

It's not so much what kind of organization, but it does require a capacity to want to not live in fear and to be able to react constantly, to have an organization where there's a maturity and an ownership of thinking that goes just beyond the performative. So who contacts you? Is this, you know...

Is it everybody, anybody or anybody, a CEO, somebody off a board, an HRD that goes, you know, how did you get those first points of contact?

Radhika Dutt (21:31)
It's the leaders who decide, you know, what we're doing isn't working. So often the kind of leader who reaches out is because, well, we're building this product. We've had this for a few years, but somehow, you know, maybe we're just not expanding our customer base. Like we're not finding product market fit beyond this initial growth that we've had. How do we grow this further? Right. So how do we rethink our product or like this next phase? That's one example.

But otherwise it's sometimes been transformation projects too, where organizations are going through this growth and scaling. One company, for example, was transitioning from being a services company into a product company. how do you, know, something like that is so inherent to your DNA, whether you're a services company or a product company, like how do you transition from one to the other? And so that was...

my coming in to also help figure out what is our vision? How do we innovate in this new way? How do you stop taking on? Because when you're selling services, you know, that is your business. ⁓ When you start selling services as a product company and you're adding to your product and building software, ⁓ and you're essentially building custom stuff, then it becomes vision debt.

So the same thing that was good now looks like short-term thinking when you transition from services to products. So how do you deal with these hard problems, right? And get a whole team behind it and making the right decisions, the same kinds of decisions that a leader might want their team to make, but you can't be in every single meeting. How do you spread your thinking? ⁓ So yeah, basically it's to build.

To help teams as they want to build transformative products, that's kind of the summary of all of it.

Guy Bloom (23:25)
It's interesting because you say transformative product, but you're not talking about the new Dyson vacuum cleaner.

Radhika Dutt (23:32)
I love it. You're exactly right. So when I say product, my definition of product is a little different. I define product as the change you want to create. So it's the mechanism for the change you want to create. So meaning, you know, you can be creating change through whatever mechanism. So whether it's through activism, volunteering, your freelance project.

Honestly, Guy, your podcast is intended to create a certain change. So that's a product too, right? So ⁓ my book, I view that as a product to create a certain change. So whatever we're doing, we can think about it as a product. Product doesn't have to be software or hardware alone. You know, I work with the Monetary Authority of Singapore and I'm advisor on product thinking there. That's Singapore's central bank and financial regulator.

the head of the monetary authority described ⁓ policy as a product, that you can think of policy as product because that's your mechanism to create change in the market. And so the whole point of radical product thinking, which was the book I wrote first, the whole point is when you think about whatever you're doing as a product, then you can start to think about what is the change I intend to create with the product?

and then engineer that change very, very systematically. So that was where my background came in as an engineer. Like if you can think of what is the change, then you can work backwards and say, how do I engineer that change? And so thinking about product that way, by the way, means that if you're Facebook, you don't just say, my vision is open and connected, throw stuff out there and then say, ⁓ whoops, we have unintended consequences because...

You would start with, what is the change I want to create and how am I bringing that about?

Guy Bloom (25:27)
So when I'm working with teams, one-to-one with executives, often that representation of yourself as a product is a key way of thinking, which actually helps people say if this team is a product, if you are a product, then if you were creating this product,

what would you want the reaction to be, what does it stand for, what's the narrative behind it, what purpose does it solve. So if I've, again if I align, I wouldn't be necessarily have automatically used all vocabulary, but it's a very quick alignment I think to looking at, and that's not to negate its humanity or the emotions attached to it, it's to allow the application of process to something that might be a little

⁓ a little less, without you being able to do that, it might be a little harder to make those connections to it because it's more of an intellectual intervention as opposed to if it was a physical product, we could have it on the table and look at it. So for me, that helps.

Radhika Dutt (26:36)
Yeah, I love it. Tell me more. Like, how do you,

how do you, ⁓ tell me more. Like, how do you go from that? Like, you were thinking about leadership as a product or a team as a product. And then, you know, is that something that helps you sort of also engineer change systematically?

Guy Bloom (26:52)
Yeah, because I think one, let's just say for an example, next week I'm working with a senior team, they're coming together, few people are being let go, few new people brought back in. So one of the things I will do is I will ask them to consider themselves as...

We always say team and team development and what's out there. And that's fine, there's nothing wrong with that. But actually the product, the idea of as a product, what will be the look of you? What will be the feel of you? What will be the experience that this product creates? Now by doing that, and I hear that in what you're doing, what it does is it creates the ability to be what I call being elegantly disconnected.

which is I'm fully connected, but I need to also have an elegant disconnection to be able to see it from a distance. I need to be able to look at it. And if it's not a product, then actually it's just a load of words that are less tangible. So I think the productizing is to create tangibility and to be able to then have a point of reference for its impact.

without that it becomes not impossible by all means but it becomes harder. So for me that's what I do and then when we talk about the product of your brand as an individual or the product of you as a senior team we are then able to say

So how's the product doing? Right? And that gives us that automatic capacity to step away from being in it every day and to review ourselves as, you know, if there was a ranking against other products, how would we be doing?

Radhika Dutt (28:24)
Yeah. ⁓

I love this. You know, also because so many things that you said resonated for me. One, creating distance so that you're able to view things more objectively, right? As opposed to this is me, my leadership, this is my team, how are we doing as a team? Well, part of it may be my fault, quote unquote, because we're not doing well or something like that versus creating the distance and then thinking about it as a product. And you're creating the scaffolding and how you talk about it to help people think differently.

And if I take that one step further and that also aligns with what I'm talking about in the next book, ⁓ this whole puzzle setting and puzzle solving that I talked about, this works really well, even in this context of thinking about either your leadership as a product or your team as a product. Because when I talk about puzzle solving, ⁓ I asked three questions. The first question is, how well did it work?

This is where you have a hypothesis and say, if I tried this experiment, then I expect this because this is the connection. And then there might be leading and lagging indicators that I measure to test this question of how well did it work? And by the way, notice how it's not a binary question like in OKRs where you're saying, did you or didn't you hit this target? I'm asking really, like, tell me the good and the bad, the narrative, as you've called it. So that's the first question.

The second question is, what did we learn? And this is where I say, don't just give me numbers. ⁓ Tell me, you know, looking at the numbers, what is the story? What have you figured out like a detective that the numbers are really saying? So again, going to the narrative. And then finally, the third question is, what will you try next? Meaning based on how well it went and what you learned,

what would you ask for if I were to give you a magic wand? And so even in terms of thinking about either leadership or yourself as a product or as your team as a product, when you want to learn and grow, et cetera, like you need a framework for or scaffolding for experimentation, learning and adaptation, right? And so this way of thinking sort of helps you create distance and then apply learnings and adapt.

Guy Bloom (31:01)
So when you talk about puzzle setting and puzzle solving, that's in regard, in this particular context, it's in reference to the product.

Radhika Dutt (31:12)
It is, but it's more in reference to, when I was saying that goals and targets don't work. ⁓ It's really a reference to what works instead. And so instead of OKRs, what I advocate for is OHLs or objectives, hypotheses and learnings. So I'll give you an example of what I mean by puzzle setting instead of setting targets, right? So let's take the hardest problem, sales, where

We've always learned that sales happens via targets. And you typically say something like the objective is growing the business. ⁓ Your key result is, you know, achieve X million in revenues by the end of the year. So that's typically, you know, the side, the sort of OKRs that you see. What I propose instead is set the puzzle. So the puzzle might be sales grew over the last three years. They've stalled in the last year.

We need to get to revenues of X million by the end of the year. So by the way, I've still communicated what I want. We need to get to that revenue. But the puzzle is how are we going to get there given what's happening right now? So that's the objective. And the puzzle ⁓ also involves describing guiding questions, things that I honestly don't know the answers to. Is it that something is shifted in the market that we are not adapting to?

Is it that our salespeople are not feeling like they're winning in the market? Like, is there a motivation issue? are they not getting the right meetings? Or is our product, for example, targeting the early adopters, but we have just not grown beyond that early market? So what is going on? So that's the puzzle, right? And then once you set a puzzle, you also need the muscle for solving those puzzles, because

In goal-driven organizations, that muscle has atrophy. You know, like we are used to showing, ta-da, look, I hit those numbers and sweeping bad numbers under the rug. That muscle for looking at bad numbers and saying, okay, what's working, what's not, that's atrophied. And so that's where that puzzle solving that I talked about, asking, you know, how well did it work? What have we learned? What are we going to try next? You put that in place for puzzle solving. And so when you start using OHLs in organizations, you find that

goals and targets sort of automatically become de-emphasized because they start to feel less important because you constantly have ears on the ground. You can course correct because metrics are more actionable. And this is how a company where I brought in OHLs is what the CEO is saying that OKRs are like the view in the rear view mirror because you can see that we either hit them or we didn't. Whereas OHLs are like having ears on the track that you anticipate what's coming.

and it makes metrics more actionable.

So much to unpack there.

Guy Bloom (34:12)
Yeah, there is. And I guess what I'm trying to just think of is if...

Yeah, I don't really know any organizations that are not metric centric in one way or another, because if I'm going to give you, unless it's just on a whim of a judgment, there has to be in people's minds a criteria for what gives you that bonus or what allows us to say we've done a good job or whatever it is. Especially when we're driven by an agenda of fairness, you know, then we've got to be held to.

So what is the relationship? Now let me change that. Is it an AND or an instead of? i.e. get rid of OKRs and put in OHLs. So that would be an instead of. Or is it an AND which is... No, they go together because actually...

Radhika Dutt (34:57)
You

Guy Bloom (35:10)
If you don't have the one, then the other one maybe is quite fanciful, but if you do the OHLs properly but you have no metric, do we just look at each other and go, that right? So how is and instead of, or something else, I don't mind, but how would, if you were asked that, is it instead of, or is it the same? What would you say?

Radhika Dutt (35:34)
So when I bring OHLs into an organization, I don't ask them to throw out OKRs. I usually just use it as an and to begin with. But here's the thing. Let's challenge the mindset for a moment. What I described is the easy way of bringing in OHLs without challenging status quo, et cetera. But let's just for a moment, I do want our listeners to sort of be...

provoked by these thoughts. ⁓ Let's just for a moment look at why this mindset of measuring people with targets. Why do we think that it's effective? Like let's look at history and where this mindset came from because this isn't, it's so embedded in our psyche that we don't even question where does this come from, right? ⁓ OKR sound like they're brand new and innovative because,

Doar, John Doar, he only talked about them in 2017, 2018, right? And Larry Page said, oh, this was Google's success, the secret to Google's success. So it sounds like it's new. But if you look at where they came from, they came from Andy Grove from the 80s and 90s in Intel. And before that, they came from Peter Drucker from the 1940s. So I looked back at history. Where did he come? Like, what problem was he solving?

He was working with General Motors at the time. And in working with General Motors, the problem he was trying to solve was they had primarily an unskilled workforce that was working on repetitive tasks with little automation. And when you have that setting, it's easy to tell that Bob is a better performer than Andy because, you know, Bob did 45 tires ⁓ installation and Andy only did 40, right?

Great, easy to tell. And we apply the same idea today to really complex problems. So let's say you measure a researcher by how many papers have they published. And that's when you get the toxic environment that we have in academia today, where people are stealing each other's research or there are really crappy papers out there or falsified data, right? Like this is the incentive that we're creating. ⁓

Let's look at even the same manufacturing problem. And you look at applying the idea from General Motors to Boeing and Dreamliners where you have skilled labor doing ⁓ manufacturing of airplanes. And then you see all the quality problems that we have in Boeing. So what is clear is there is a problem with golds and OKRs. ⁓ Even Intel, we say that Intel succeeded.

or made all of this innovation happen in the 90s because of OKRs. If you look at what Walter Isaacson wrote about Andy Grove and what drove all that innovation, he said it was Andy Grove's paranoid obsession with never getting complacent. It was getting his team to constantly experiment, adapt, always expecting that there are going to be unexpected changes. And we built a framework for the easy stuff that, ⁓ Andy Grove,

This is how he communicated goals and we said, yeah, you know, we'll just take this and we apply that to our problems. Well, we didn't take the core part of what made Andy Grove successful, his constant experimentation and adaptation. In fact, he wrote the book, Only the Paranoid Survive. What we are missing is a framework for that. Yeah, for how do you continue to do this experimentation and adaptation? And that's what I want to solve with this book.

sorry, hold on. Like something changed where, ⁓ you might have to edit this out. I apologize. Give me one second. good. Now I can hear you again.

Guy Bloom (39:32)
no, that's fine, that's fine, it's just come back, yeah.

So I love the idea of formulating for repetition, which is the, I like that, therefore if I can find the formula for it I can repeat it. And intellectually you go, yeah of course, you know, that makes absolute sense. Yeah, who wouldn't want that? And you know, think about a franchise, well that's what it is, isn't it? That's the formula, repeat it, and boom, that's the process.

Radhika Dutt (39:46)
Exactly. Who wouldn't want that?

Guy Bloom (40:00)
So in some ways, that's probably relatively powerful. If there are things that are set, if there are things that are defined, the box needs to be made two inches wide and three, whatever that is. So actually we are looking for repetition, but something that probably then doesn't have a variable attached to it.

It itself does not vary, therefore why does McDonald's work? Well McDonald's works not because it's great food but because you know it won't be bad. Right? It's the formula isn't five-star cuisine but it's wherever you are it will be reasonable. So actually we just want to repeat that and we don't want you to think or innovate. In fact...

Radhika Dutt (40:46)
exactly this.

Guy Bloom (40:54)
Don't mess with it. In fact, we're even going to send you the amount of cleaning fluids for your franchise. You don't tell us. We know how much cleaning fluids it takes to clean that. So that's what you're getting. Right? So that makes sense. The thing probably then starts to fall down when, if you start to apply a formula that is...

defined to take away people's ability to bring their character and their thinking to it, it then drives down innovation, it drives down the ability to be wrong, it drives down the ability to be curious, because actually, and then we go down to the lowest common denominator, because actually the application of

A isn't the issue, but a formula that holds you to a set of behaviours that have no free will in them, but only obedience. That's when we end up with a problem.

Radhika Dutt (42:05)
Yeah, exactly. And to this, right, people say, well, that just means that I'm getting my low performers to at least meet this and the high performers, you know, it's not that they don't have free will. But, you know, when I was doing research for my book, ⁓ there was a message board that I was looking at and there was an employee at Intel who was working there, you know, during Andy Grove's successors.

So Andy Grove's successors had OKRs. They just didn't have this experimentation framework or mindset. And so what they did instead was a lot of short-term thinking. They missed out on the whole opportunity for mobile chips. They missed out on the opportunity for a standalone GPU, which is the whole AI revolution that they missed out on, et cetera. And so what this person on the message board was saying was, working

at Intel for five years, felt like the only people who could survive, it was almost like this filter for the people who could survive, were the ones who didn't care that much about their work, who were willing to put up with just achieving numbers and painting that fairy tale until they were ready to move on.

Guy Bloom (43:23)
Yeah, there is a phrase in the UK where he used to be the queen, but we now got a king and it basically goes, know, the king thinks the world smells of paint because there's somebody three meters ahead of him painting everything. All right.

Radhika Dutt (43:36)
it.

Guy Bloom (43:37)
And that's what it is, right? It's very easy for, which is performative, which is that actually how will I be measured, how will So there's something here that says whether or not you're in organisation of development, whether or not you're just sitting on a board or whatever it is that says...

what do I really want? Not as an outcome, that might be easy, but I've to be very, very careful about what I measure and I've got to be very, careful about what I want as data. Because if I set a tone that is so rigorous that it itself isn't organic or I can't handle...

people's curiosity or them offering me new insights because that's the board pack. Now this is a classic example of it makes absolute sense that you don't have random conversations in board meetings with any old information being brought in because it's chaos. So what do we do? We formalize the board pack. Makes sense. The only trouble is then, right, anything outside of that board pack, right, doesn't get to the table. So this is a weird juxtaposition.

Radhika Dutt (44:43)
you

you

Guy Bloom (44:53)
of actually what I would just call balance. How do you have strategy, intention, a plan that you are focused on, that you're asking everybody to adhere to, and yet at the same time, the capacity to solve the puzzle, the capacity to bring innovation to the thinking. So our ability to want to...

operate within I may be asking definitive questions to get definitive answers, but also my capacity to set a question that allows you to think, which then creates a new set of answers, which creates ownership because you've created it or and then as an all. So it's this, there's a quote by Scott Fitzgerald, I say nearly every podcast, which is the sign of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold to opposing truths and still function.

And I think what I'm hearing is that this is a, there's this balance between we've got to live in the moment and deal with what's in front of us, but at the same time, we've got to be able to hold a future that hasn't happened yet with the unknowns that go within it. We have to have a group of people that can do as they're told and crack on and be not obedient, but relatively obedient. But at the same time, we need people that can think for themselves and be curious and...

And so what you're doing, I guess, is offering something that is balancing those two things. If I've understood that, you're not saying do away with, and this is some aspirational academic la la land of wouldn't it be awesome if, but actually it's got to hold a midpoint because most organizations aren't that mature, even if they think they are. And you've got to go into places that, you know,

Radhika Dutt (46:29)
Exactly.

Guy Bloom (46:50)
might be a couple of people that think like that, but there's another 5,000 that don't. And I'm interested maybe in that, how do you bring this into organizations where the maturity will be a distribution curve?

Radhika Dutt (47:01)
Absolutely, yeah. And that's such an important question, right? Because as a leader, you can't just say, I'm going to get rid of OKRs and apply this everywhere, ⁓ because you feel like at least you have some semblance of control with OKRs and you're losing all of that, right? Like, what if your team is not able to measure exactly like you're saying, that they're not rigorous, right? Because everything that I described in OHLs, while I'm asking them to describe the narrative for me,

All of the narrative is based on being a detective around the data, like really measuring a lot and figuring things out. But the way I've used this in organizations is rather than instituting OHLs everywhere. And OHLs, again, it stands for objectives, hypotheses, learning. So instead of this puzzle setting, puzzle solving across the organization, start with just one particular area. ⁓

team that you know can really run with this. ⁓ And then, you know, even you as a leader sort of need to practice your skills and how you use this Tiger team and being able to ⁓ experiment, learn and adapt, right? Because exactly like you said, it's not that you're saying to your team, go off and, you know, I actually am ⁓ a company that works on

this B2B sass and you've just figured out the puzzle for how do you play the cello better? Like this is not, this is not what you want your team to go off and figure out, but like how do you create the scaffolding for the team where they're not going off and working on unrelated things? And so, you know, you've communicated the problem to them, you've created this puzzle setting together, and then, you know, you do these regular sessions with the team where they present to you, how well did it work?

What have we learned? What are we going to do next? And you, both you as a leader and the team, you learn how to use this approach to be able to experiment, learn and keep moving the market, right? And the more you use this, you then start to normalize this. So I was talking to someone just earlier today and they were saying that, you know, when they started using this, they started using this approach, not just for presenting results around features or product.

Guy Bloom (49:03)
Hmm.

Radhika Dutt (49:20)
But they started using it even just over the course of regular work days, thinking about the question of what have I learned? What am I going to try next? And so that sort of mindset shift is what you want.

Guy Bloom (49:34)
Yeah, and I think this is where I going from being interested in it to very interested is when you offer an individual or a team a new process, let's just say like coaching, for example, it's always presented as being incredibly complex and it takes you ages to become a coach. In truth, it's not that complicated. There's only so many questions you can ask and there's, know, et cetera.

But actually what you notice is that at first, guess what? It starts out as being complex and it requires conscious competence and I've got to be prepared to get it wrong and we've got to learn together. ⁓

Radhika Dutt (50:11)
Mmm.

Guy Bloom (50:17)
But actually then what happens is over a period of time, we get to the point where actually we can have relatively quick conversations that contain a lot of this in it. It's less defined and it's less algorithmic because we now know it so well. Back to your point, you were so familiar with it. We've now normalized the conversation and there's a shorthand because now we know the stepping stones and we're kind of inherently moving towards it.

So for me there's a sense of if it's a good idea and you want to get there, you're going to have to go through that learning phase. Not the intellectual learning, but the learning of doing it enough that it becomes something that is a familiarization, a normalization. It's the way we are here to the point where if I now join the organization new,

I'd very quickly adapt it, or adopt it I should say, sorry, because that's what's going on here. It's always difficult, it's always different when it's a brand new intervention, but if I join, and that's what everybody's doing around here, and that's what I experience all over the place, I will get in line with that very, very quickly, because that's the inherent approach to this. So that feels, and I do like the idea actually of...

Radhika Dutt (51:12)
Yes.

Exactly.

Guy Bloom (51:39)
setting the puzzle or setting the thing we're trying to deal with can become a very quick, I've seen that in emergency services and in the military, where they will go, right, what's the problem we're trying to solve here? Which is in essence an element of what's the puzzle. And they start...

Radhika Dutt (51:59)
I didn't realize that

it's there in military too, tell me more.

Guy Bloom (52:02)
Well, depends. I can't speak for the entire military, right? Or the entire, you know, but I have, having come across, well, exactly, having come across various places and spaces where I've sort of come into contact with, the fire brigade or the fire service in the UK and whether or not it's as formulaic as this, I don't know. But I've definitely heard people, you know, set the problem. And that, they've not used the word puzzle, but...

Radhika Dutt (52:08)
then you would be the one who's the spy.

Guy Bloom (52:30)
if you're setting the problem, they go, well, what's the solve here? What's the thing we're trying to solve? And whatever that phrase is, but I think that exists in that context of not what do we do, but actually let's first establish what the issue is. Right, well, there's 50 of them and we've only got 24 bullets. Okay, well, that's a problem that we've got to solve. That's the puzzle.

Right? And then it's that capacity for the room to hold ideas as part of the solving process that aren't trying to come up with the answer, but the potential of what the answer might be. And that means that you've got to be psychologically safe enough as a team or a division or as an organization to accept ⁓

an idea that may not be fully formed or fully right, but by offering it, it helps the conversation move on because somebody's able to bounce off it and or take off an idea from me and 5 % of an idea from Fred or whatever it is. And then we move that. So actually seeing it as a puzzle. And if you do an activity with a team where actually the only way it can usually be solved is by everybody throwing their ideas into the middle.

i.e. if I gave you all this problem individually and said you couldn't come out of the room until you'd solved it, some of us would die in that room. We wouldn't solve it by ourselves but by the organic nature of, could we, could we, how about, then we end up solving the problem. So I think that, I think that when it's often offered,

is a much longer game of sitting down and strategizing and solving the problem. But actually, I think what I also hear you doing is, yeah, there's nothing wrong with that. But actually, how about if it became something that operated at pace? It becomes part of the culture. It is what we're familiar with, that way of presenting. That's what I notice is when people try and solve problems, when an organization or a team, whatever, aren't comfortable with offering wrong.

Radhika Dutt (54:26)
Exactly.

Guy Bloom (54:42)
they will only offer what they think right. And that's when you see paralysis. Because if I don't think I'm right, I'm not going to say it. And in the solving of a puzzle, where you have to offer 5 % of an idea, because that's all I've got right now, but does it help? So again, think that capacity to turn it into quick thinking, because we're good at it.

Radhika Dutt (54:50)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And you know, one thing that really strikes me even with your example of what's the problem that we're solving, like when you have goals and targets, it's almost like your assumption is we know the answer, not just the problem, but also the answer that if you do this and achieve this, then we're on the right track. But sometimes we don't know the puzzle well enough to be able to define

Guy Bloom (55:10)
That's quite exciting as well.

Radhika Dutt (55:35)
you know, if you hit this number, then I know we're doing well, right? That's sort of a problem where you said we have 25 bullets and 50 people, what are we going to do? We're outnumbered. Like the answer to that isn't, you know, if I just set you this target that this is what you do, you'll figure it out. It's more that we are going to have to set the puzzle and solve it. And that's what's going to get us out of this mess.

Guy Bloom (55:59)
As Rittle and Webb had this thing around 'Tame & Wicked' problems, which is A tame problem is a problem that's being tamed and between us all, if we put in the center all the things we've tamed before, either one of us has already got the answer. and or because we've tamed so many things, which is what experienced teams get to do, we'll have the answer. But a...

A wicked problem is one where anybody goes, anybody done this before? go, no. COVID would be a classic example. Historically, there's a problem. We batten down the hatches as a company, give it six months and we'll be back out of it. But actually, they can't return to work. And it went on and it went on and it went on. And then all of a sudden it went from a tame problem to a wicked problem. And people...

Radhika Dutt (56:52)
And we often assume that a problem is tame, whereas it's wicked actually. And an example of this is, I was working with a company, they hired someone from Google because they thought, well, you from Google have dealt with numbers and optimizing numbers all the time. We hire you, you'll figure this problem out. And it turned out like, yes, they optimized it in a different context, but they had never worked in this industry and it wasn't a matter of optimizing those numbers. It was a wicked problem.

Guy Bloom (56:57)
Bingo.

That's beautiful and that's right. And one of the big things I talk about with entrepreneurial startups or mid-sized businesses is be careful of employing somebody from a huge organization because what they're used to doing is pulling a lever that's attached to 20 other things. But when they come here, they're gonna pull that lever and it doesn't go anywhere. All right, and so For them, it will be wicked.

Radhika Dutt (57:42)
I love it.

Guy Bloom (57:46)
For you it'll be familiar, but it'll be wicked for them because they spent the last decade very, very senior. And now, interestingly enough, they can be in a wicked spot. So listen, again, I don't think there's, out of the 140 podcasts that I've done, about 120 of them I've said, you know, with a bottle of wine and a pizza, I could keep this going for the next four or five hours. But I'm just alert to the fact that we're coming up on an hour.

Radhika Dutt (57:55)
Yes.

Guy Bloom (58:11)
So listen, this is a great conversation. If people wanted to, I don't know if they can put the name down for the book, sometimes you can go on Amazon and say, when this comes out, let me know. how do people stay connected to you? Where do they go?

Radhika Dutt (58:27)
⁓ So find me on LinkedIn, Radhika Dutt, and I'll share a link to the OHLs template so that people can download that ⁓ and use OHLs. And the cool thing about, you know, wanting to share this as a sneak preview to my book project is I'm in the writing process right now. So the book will come out about a year from now, but I'm in the writing process. So in fact, if people use OHLs and they want to share with me their experience,

it might actually make it into the book as a case study. if they'd like to reach out to me, find me on LinkedIn. ⁓ and also find my previous book, which is Radical Product Thinking.

Guy Bloom (59:06)
we'll make sure we make everything available to people. So listen, want you to stay on just for a minute to make sure everything uploads, because otherwise you're going to see a grown man cry if anything goes wrong there.

You've been an absolute rock star. This has been a passionate conversation in the sense of I can tell sometimes people are quite formulaic in their responses, but I can see the depth of your thinking. And I know you're offering it in a way that's palatable. And I get that, but it's nice to be with somebody that gets their topic and has a clear sense of where they're going with it. And I enjoy that. So thank you very much.

Radhika Dutt (59:40)
Thank you. I really love those insightful questions and the examples you are sharing. Love it.

Guy Bloom (59:46)
stay on. Make sure that everything uploads. Thank you. Bye bye.

Radhika Dutt (59:50)
Thank you.