Thank you for reading, Aidan.
Few things:
Nothing here precludes defining the intent of the business; in fact, that should be made clear.
Please note, I am not proposing empowered product teams should only set learning goals. I do mention when to set learning goals and when to set performance goals and why.
I do not agree you need continuously stepped goals at a distance. Teams can “spend all of their time being creative and generating interesting and valuable innovations” without guesses (goals). I personally do not need a target to do the best work I can. We should be doing that anyway, regardless if there is some goal. I should do the best work I can because that is what I want to do. That is what we should expect of ourselves any anyone else.
Yes, it is the "in record time" part of that statement that is the issue. Why? They were not ready for performance goal setting (re-read part on learning vs performance goals). Pretty clear they weren't...
It is not only a reaction to the command and control issue but it is also bigger than that. It is mostly about the fact that we optimize too much strategy at the highest possible level. Many companies assume the path to economic success is in making a handful of big economic choices correctly. This leads executives to concentrate decision-making authority at high levels and to design information systems that support this high-level decision making. Big decisions are important. However, we need strong systems to ensure that the many small economic decisions have impact. This is where you get the biggest bang for your buck when you begin to move fast, i.e., strategy moves downstream to the local levels, the teams. Additionally, slippage in long-duration projects rises exponentially with duration (mainly caused planning methodologies and a lack of short-term decision-making rules, i.e., not making bets > plans). A project of twice the duration can experience 16 times as much slippage. To make matters worse, commitments to long-horizon planning forecasts can create death marches around “golden projects” where no one in middle management will speak up when other opportunities arise.
Human structures become less ordered, less focused, and more blurred around the edges when we work to maintain the coherence of the product strategy each quarter (and beyond), as without active maintenance (I would argue that detailed planning should not exceed 60 days and should probably be done every 30 days) the line demarcating products become blurred, and coherence is lost.