To Everything, There Is a Season
"Ethics Proofing" Your Quarterly Goals at Work
I’m writing this blog post at my parents’ place in Baltimore a few hours before my family begins our celebration of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah. The Jewish High Holiday season is a time for contemplation - on what we’ve done in the last year, what we hope to do in the next year, on the people we want to become.
This season is also the time when many of us, regardless of our faiths, begin to contemplate our goals for the final quarter of the year at work. (Note to reader: I groaned at this transition along with you.) For those of you working in the technology industry, you likely have been asked to prepare your quarterly “OKRs” — objectives and key results you hope to achieve.
Every organization sets its goals differently, but, if you work at a tech company, the process of setting objectives is greatly influenced by financial incentives, set predominantly by the venture capital industry. Investors care mostly about the specific performance metrics they use to estimate the value of their investments. Common among these metrics are “monthly active users” (MAU), time spent, subscribers, and, of course, revenue. It makes sense, then, that individuals working at tech companies, of all sizes, would orient their personal goals each quarter toward these metrics as well. “I did x, therefore the business made y dollars” is as powerful a promotion argument as there can be.
However, this way of thinking — optimizing only around the few metrics investors care about — creates opportunities for negative consequences to emerge. If I only care about “time spent” on my app, I might promote a bunch of content — say, misinformation — that may cause people to react to the content and share it with my friends but erodes democracy bit by bit. I might include design elements designed to addict users to their phones, shortening their attention spans and destroying their focus. I might supress internal research about my product’s harm to teenage girls.
Most managers I meet would never want their products to have these unintended consequences. Yet, they point to the incentives and constraints presented by their organization’s goal-setting process as unmoveable obstacles to building ethical products.
However, I’m here to tell you there’s a way to ethics-proof your goal-setting at work — to push back against those incentives and constraints. That way: an idea called “inversion.”
Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s longtime right-hand man at Berkshire Hathaway, has been quoted as saying, “All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.” In other words, he elaborated, it is essential to consider what could go wrong in advance so that, in pursuit of one’s goals, one can avoid unintended consequences.
In practice, as applied to goal-setting, this “inversion” process is quite simple. The three steps:
When your manager asks you to lay out your goals or your OKRs, write them as you ordinarily would.
Then, take a look at them and ask yourself, “If I am successful in achieving these goals, what could possibly go wrong in the short term? What could go wrong in the long term?” List those “death scenarios” as well on a separate column of your spreadsheet or on a sheet of paper.
Finally, ask yourself, “How might I adjust my goal-setting to account for these worst-case possibilities?” Likely there is a caveat or a phrasing change that can help you maintain your quantitative objective while acknowledging ethical risks. If you feel like you need to, consult your manager about those changes. Adjust your goals accordingly.
Through this process, if you are confronted with ethical dilemmas at work, you can simply point back at the goals you set. If you and your manager have already agreed to an ethical path, it will help make ethical decision-making in the moment a little bit easier.
Is it possible to consider every potential ethical pitfall presented by your quarterly goals? No. Is this “inversion” mental model enough to prevent your colleagues and superiors from committing ethical breaches? No. And, even if every employee at every tech company were to follow this process, would it be sufficient to ensure that products are built and deployed in an ethical manner? Absolutely not.
However, these simple inversion questions can help you feel secure in the goals you set — at least from an ethical perspective — without deviating from the metrics that your boss and investors care about most.
Give them a try next quarter and let me know how they work out for you.