What Happens When You Make Perfection... a Failure?

Striving for good enough...with OKRs.

The Frontier Psychiatrists is a newsletter. It's written by one Psychiatrist, Owen Muir, M.D. It's a health-themed newsletter. It's also an exercise in imperfection. That imperfection is not an accident. Here is the story…

An influential book in my life? It is not about medicine. The book is called Measure What Matters. It is by John Doerr; you can buy it on Amazon with that link!

John writes about the system called objectives and key results (OKRs). Andy Grove originally developed this management and goalsetting methodology at Intel.

I think it's a meaningful bulwark against perfectionism. It is a philosophy. OKRs are a system for setting measurable goals. But—there is a quirk. This quirk makes it different—and more powerful— than other goal-setting approaches. The system works as follows:

1. set an overarching objective, and the point is to be audacious.

I'll give you a very real-world example:

“I'm going to write a great health-related newsletter (all by myself) that influences people’s decision-making towards a better future.”

Now, here's the trick: you have to figure out how to determine if you're moving toward that goal. And it has to be measurable. When you start this process, you don't necessarily know the best way to measure things for yourself or a larger organization; this is the scaffold.

The amazing, not quite perfect, band The Dismemberment Plan— live.

There are rules:

2. At the end of your audacious goal, you add the statement: “as measured by:”

Next, you limit yourself to between two and three (easily) measurable key results demonstrating that you are appropriately pursuing that goal. The quirk is

3. if you achieve more than 70% of your key results in any given quarter, you did it WRONG. Getting it perfect means you didn't get it RIGHT.

My God, right?

This is a system to learn how to set audacious goals! I could've set my goals for this newsletter— and did— as follows: “as measured by… publishing an article every single day.”

That is a “key result.”

This is not the same as a key performance indicator (KPI). Key performance indicators are measurable. Some, however, are all or never—you don’t want to close 70% of surgical wounds! Many things are measurable; not all KPIs are useful tools in this OKR framework.

All Key Results are KPIs; not all KPIs are suitable Key Results for your strivings.

I write an article almost every single day. I will calculate that for my readers at the end of this quarter, and you can see how I did. I didn't know what key results were the best way to build an influenced audience with this newsletter. Did I get it wrong with this key result? First, I have achieved the goal more than 70% of the time! I underestimated the difficulty, and thus the audaciousness, of a daily one-person newsletter for me as a writer.

By writing a daily Health-themed newsletter, I failed to be audacious enough! Or I didn’t select the right tools with which to measure. I would probably want to set another key result to guide me when I revisit the original goal and its measurement. Which is very much the point. OKRs are not “set and forget”. They are set and revisited. It’s an iterative process. We learn, with OKRs, that successfully striving is the meta-goal. We know if we succeed by measuring iteratively, and in failing to be perfect, we learn the right degree of stretch in any epoch.

Perfection is imperfect. Striving is a learned behavior and a set of skills. Not always striving is an easy way to avoid the audacious. In my example, my daily publication schedule might not be the best way to achieve my goals.

I’d have to find a better way to measure. Repeat.

Perfection is poison for those who wish to strive. To succeed at striving is to fail… the right amount, over and over. OKRs are an antidote to the hopelessness of perfectionism and the fragility of narcissism.