an organization is a goal

made w/ midjourney

My take on "why set goals?" is that, by definition, an organization is a goal. This is why an organization has a mission and why its mission will probably be its most defining characteristic. It's why organizations in similar fields with different missions are so different from each other. It's why organizations that do similar things on different trajectories function so differently. The mission defines the organization.

When you are, by definition, One Big Goal, you have to back-chain all your activity from that goal. Guiding all your activity is very hard to do if you don't create sub-goals below the overarching, mission-level goal that operate at the annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly, or daily- and project-level.

I think my response to the contention that this doesn't apply to an organization that experiences a lot of flux in the market or a lot of change in the landscape is to say, "I don't know why you think you're that special. So many effective, goal-driven organizations are in that flux and the typical way they respond to that is by saying, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, but we still exist.'"

So if the way we want to approach research changes or AI development timelines objectively shift, we choose to still exist as an organization. We are essentially saying: we are still committed to the one big goal. 

There is at the very least one big goal that is never changing. That goal doesn’t fluctuate but the sub-goals you aim at to reach that big goal might fluctuate a good bit. You want to be choosy about the time periods for which you are creating sub-goals. If you expect to experience a ton of flux, then you would probably choose quarterly goals that are back-chained from the mission rather than annual goals that are back-chained from the mission. Things may be volatile enough that you need monthly or weekly goals, and plenty of organizations do all of the above. 

An important question to ask is what if you stopped doing this goal-setting and goal-chasing? You would effectively be saying "I am not sure about the degree to which we are accomplishing our big goal.” That helpless uncertainty is what goal-setting at the smaller level is designed to prevent.

-ben