I recently realised I have three generic approaches to everyday tasks – I’ll execute with absolute precision, wing it, or blank it out.

Taking up the hem on a pair of jeans requires exactness, managing my finances falls into the ‘winging it’ category, and I ignore cleaning the windows as long as possible.

Baking is something else that requires meticulous accuracy in both ingredients and technique and is part of what makes the ‘Bake Off’ television series so gripping and heartbreaking: chocolate hardens before it’s spread on the sponge, bread gets scorched, and souffles collapse. Baking is essentially chemistry, so when a recipe goes wrong, it goes spectacularly wrong, and there’s no way to regroup apart from starting again, creating dramatic TV and a bin full of congealing ingredients.

Cooking is more adaptive. You can rescue mistakes by adding new ingredients or changing the direction of your dish, from, say, a stew into a curry.

Communications is a profession that sometimes requires deliberate measurement, such as increasing employee engagement or launching a new product. At other times, your measurement may need to be less stringent and more flexible, such as retaining confidence in a company during a CEO leadership transition.

But as communicators, are we often guilty of ignoring measurement altogether or freelancing in the kitchen too frequently? Measuring is hard and it’s boring. It can squeeze all the fun out of the creative process, and it commits you to a specific outcome you’ll be judged on later. If you agreed to prepare the pavlova for Christmas pudding, pivoting to a trifle just looks like a massive fail.

Why don’t we measure stuff?

We know we should set clear project objectives that we can measure, but often we don’t.

Sometimes we don’t measure things because it is challenging to identify objective ways of doing so, or we argue that we don’t directly influence all of the elements that impact the outcome, so we can’t be held accountable.

But maybe we don’t do it because there are other competing drivers sabotaging our intentions.

The Immunity to Change coaching model, developed by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow (2009), outlines a way of revealing hidden assumptions and commitments that are operating like a brake on things you’re persistently failing at but determined to change.

So, let’s apply this model to setting measurable objectives in communication plans and see what it reveals.

What’s your big and important goal? I want to get better at including measurable objectives in my plans and I want to be able to report back on how these projects performed.

Things I do to sabotage this:

• I write high-level, generic objectives full of motherhood and apple-pie statements. For example, ‘retain and engage top talent’ when I am not clear who constitutes top talent, so I can’t extract their engagement scores or know if they’ve left the company.
• I often use the objectives my stakeholder sets for the entire project, even if I know they are unrealistic or unachievable.
• I don’t explore where I can get data related to my objective.
• I don’t spend time evaluating the success of the communications as I am too busy moving onto the next project.

What scares you about doing the opposite of these actions:

• It’s a real hassle to find out how I can measure this goal and it will take a lot of time I don’t have.
• It will slow down the completion of my plan.
• The project’s objectives, as outlined by the stakeholder, are unachievable and then I will look like a failure on these metrics.
• I don’t know how to write a measurable communication objective.
• I only want to be responsible for delivering the communications and I don’t want to be accountable for the failure of the overall project.
• It will be too hard to explain why I have written the objectives in a measurable way rather than just using the words my stakeholder wants and understands.
• I don’t want to have a difficult conversation with my stakeholder about why their objectives are unachievable.
• My communications might not deliver the results.

What are your hidden competing commitments?

• I am committed to getting on with things.
• I am committed to a smooth relationship with my stakeholder.
• I am committed to looking successful.

Underlying big assumptions that you hold:

• Hard data on outcomes will show my shortcomings.
• Nobody is interested in exactly how these projects perform; they just want the work done.
• Getting information I need to measure these objectives will be complicated and time-consuming.
• Delivering is king, evaluating is for sissies.

Does any of this sound familiar?

If you think you’ve started to reveal the real reasons you’re not setting objectives, you’re ready to start making progress on the new you, the version of yourself where you set measurable objectives. In the next blog, I’ll use the four big assumptions as our starting point to map out steps to success.

 

Reference
Kegan, R. and Laskow Lahey, L., 2009. Immunity to change: How to overcome it and unlock the potential in yourself and your organisation. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press.