Let’s say you want to change something in the world. Scientists will tell you to do it like this:

That assumes that figuring how what to do separately from doign it with a reasonable amount of effort in a reasonable amount of time. But the things we tend to care about are not like that (if it were that easy, it’d already be fixed). Another way to change things is adaptive management, an environmental science technique that takes place entirely in the real world:

You cannot run tests in a laboratory, because labs are hard to do properly and you don’t have time. At worst, you’re trying to change your life: you’ve only got one and you can’t spend it all theorizing.

For example, everyone trying to be more fit is doing adaptive management: you implement a diet and exercise regime, then measure weight, clothing size, appearance naked, energy levels, hunger feelings, etc.

The hardest thing about adaptive management is measurement (“what you can’t measure, you can’t manage”). A lot of things in the world are not directly measurable, so you have to find proxy measures. But proxy measures only obliquely get at your goal, for example: nobody is ever actually trying to “lose weight”, it’s a proxy measure for fitness. But using weight as a measure leads to perverse management plans like ketosis, which sheds muscle as well as fat.

I’ve been thinking about personal goals lately. I think, at least in this aspect, personal management is basically the same as organizational management:

Peter Drucker popularized management by goals (sometimes called “objectives”). Previously, managers said “do your best”: employee intervention emphasized behaviour like tardiness and team engagement; they believed the right behaviour leads to success.

Under management by goals, managers and workers collaborate to establish goals, then managers monitor performance and remove barriers, giving the workers flexibility to achieve the goals. Obviously the level of collaboration, style of performance monitoring and flexibility given to workers will differ according to project and organizational culture. But the general idea of guiding with goals is well supported.

The key challenge in management by goals is setting the goals. A very popular set of criteria for goals uses the mnemonic “SMART”:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

These are redundant because specificity and time-boundedness are necessary but not sufficient conditions for measurability (“did you or did you not achieve something specific by some time?”). Relevancy means that the goal is in alignment with personal and organizational objectives (which should just be bigger goals, eh?), and values. Research suggests achievability is the criteria most linked to goal success: people work hardest when their goals are challenging but not impossible.

I recently came across this old article by Peter Drucker (the 20th century’s greatest management guru) about managing yourself and career planning in the contemporary world. Some key quotes:

• “Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will happen. Nine or 12 months later, compare the actual results with your expectations.”
• “Many brilliant people [believe] that ideas move mountains. But bulldozers move mountains; ideas show where the bulldozers should go to work.”
• “One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.”
• “Very few of the people who believed that doing one’s own thing would lead to contribution, self-fulfilment, and success achieved any of the three.”
• “There is another reason to develop a second major interest, and to develop it early. No one can expect to live very long without experiencing a serious setback in his or her life or work… In a society in which success has become so terribly important, having options will become increasingly vital… For a great many people, there is at best an absence of failure. Wherever there is success, there has to be failure. And then it is vitally important for the individual, and equally for the individual’s family, to have an area in which he or she can contribute, make a difference, and be somebody.”

This blog represents – but, in itself, isn’t – my second major interest: reading, thinking and writing about ideas that are too multidisciplinary, abstract and esoteric to make a job out of. I don’t have measurable success in this interest, but I think I have an absence of failure.