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Key Takeaways
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Recently, I went to the dentist to check out a tooth problem. The root cause of my problem involved brushing my teeth—my dentist told me that I’d been brushing my teeth too hard. Electric toothbrush in hand, the plaque didn’t stand a chance. Unfortunately, neither did my enamel.
But knowing the problem is only half the battle. To make any real impact on my future oral health, I had to act. So logically, if brushing my teeth caused a loss of enamel, the perfect solution is obviously to stop brushing my teeth. Problem solved! Right?
Most readers will (hopefully) recognize the issue with this proposed solution. Will a brushing hiatus help keep my enamel from wearing? Absolutely! But the fatal flaw in this solution is that hyper focusing on solving this one issue will lead to a whole host of other problems: tooth decay, cavities, halitosis, just to name a few.
This is an example of tunnel vision.
What is tunnel vision? According to Merriam-Webster, a definition of tunnel vision is “single-minded concentration on one objective.” Imagine an 18-wheeler truck driving through a tunnel. The driver is completely focused on what is in front of them, totally focused on following the only path available to the destination. Everything else to the right, left, and behind is ignored.
This same sort of thing happens when we are so focused on solving one problem that we disregard everything else. The overarching goal fades into the background as our field of vision is consumed with figuring out how to fix this one specific thing, irrespective of the additional context.
But nothing exists in a vacuum. If we focus all of our effort on solving one single part of the whole, it could be detrimental to our larger purpose. As we pat ourselves on the back for a successful effort, everything else crumbles around us, and we find ourselves further from the goal than when we started.
You’re probably wondering by now, “what do tunnels and teeth have to do with business?” Consider the last meeting you were in where metrics were discussed. Perhaps the numbers were shown on a PowerPoint slide, dashboard, or spreadsheet. They were most likely color coded with various shades of red and green. This is when tunnel vision creeps in.
One example is our tendency to focus on the worst of the worst. Naturally, we jump to the metrics highlighted in red, the ones where a Grand Canyon-sized chasm separates us from a “good” rating. We are tempted to slip into solution mode, figuring out how to channel our collective efforts into fixing this terrible problem immediately.
Another example is when there is a “pet” metric for the organization. There might be a team-wide KPI associated with this metric, or one that the presenter loves to highlight at every meeting. Other things fade into the background as focus always shifts back to this one metric.
Let’s take a hypothetical example, using the tunnel vision concept on a metric like Change Failure Rate (CFR). Using ValueOps Insights, we take a monthly measurement for CFR and compare it against a target goal.
Judging by where the blue measures are in relation to the green target line, CFR is way out of bounds—and trending worse by the month. Sound the alarms!
Based on this information alone, a logical conclusion is that we should corral all resources available and get this metric back in line by any means necessary. Having a lower CFR is better than having a higher one. And there are certainly actions we can take starting today to improve this, in effect raising up an impenetrable wall through which no defects can ever hope to escape.
But if our sole focus is on reducing our CFR, then we risk missing the forest for the trees. As Shamim Ahmed states in his blog, “A vast majority of enterprises have a challenge balancing velocity with quality.” We must remember that resources aren’t infinite; there is always an opportunity cost associated with our decisions. When we choose to dedicate time, effort, and money to fixing one problem, we necessarily must shift those resources away from other issues or growth opportunities.
This is the central problem with tunnel vision. Hyper focusing on one single measurement prevents us from taking a holistic viewpoint and asking the critical question: “Is there something more important we should be doing?”
Instead of succumbing to a tunnel vision mindset, we need to see the big picture. This is where an outcome-oriented approach comes into play.
With an outcome orientation, we start by considering all the information at our fingertips in the context of our ultimate goal. We then target the most impactful opportunities or hindrances. Armed with that plan, we can zoom back in and decide on the actions to take in order to fix the problem at hand.
Back in our hypothetical scenario, one of our critical business goals is to improve the product’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) rating. Customer satisfaction is a key aspect to ensuring renewals, so we want to make certain that our customers are using our product consistently and are happy with their experience.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at an outcome-focused dashboard in ValueOps Insights.
The Outcome Confidence dashboard shows that Change Failure Rate (CFR) does play a role related to NPS. This means that improving our capabilities will somewhat improve our likelihood of meeting our NPS goal.
However, in our scenario, customers can live with a poor CFR if the rest of their product experience is positive. To reflect this reality, CFR has a 5% weighting, which means that even a marked improvement in this metric will only make us slightly more likely to meet our goal. If there are other opportunities available, odds are that prioritizing them over CFR will give us a bigger bang for our buck.
To improve our confidence in hitting the NPS goal, we can see greater returns by instead focusing on improving mean time to recovery (MTTR). Because customers care more about our recovery time than escaped defects, the weighting for MTTR is higher than for CFR.
Although MTTR is “passing” as of today, our confidence score reflects that we are still less than 50% likely to remain where we need to be. This means that, based on previous months’ trends, we cannot be fully confident that we’ll continue meeting our target goal.
As our MTTR chart shows, we should not rest on our laurels. Instead, we should focus on remaining within the target range consistently over time to prove that the last two months were not a fluke. Since we’ve already proven our capacity to hit the target goal once, this will likely be easier to maintain than to completely turn around a failing metric like CFR.
We don’t have to ignore CFR if we have surplus resources to spare. But there is a good case to be made that we should prioritize enabling our teams to maintain the current MTTR (as well as the other NPS-oriented metrics) over taking our foot off the gas to hyper focus on CFR.
But we can’t stop there.
We can risk having tunnel vision even at an outcome level by only focusing on one business goal. MTTR may be the most helpful metric to address if we want to make sure we meet our NPS goal. But is NPS the most impactful business outcome for us to focus our time, effort, and resources on achieving?
If we look again at our outcome dashboard, we’ll see that we are already over 80% confident that we will hit our NPS Score goals. As long as we maintain our current performance trends, we are still highly confident in the likelihood that we’ll meet our NPS goal.
Customer growth, on the other hand, is a different story.
Based on the underlying metrics, we should only be slightly above 50% confident that we will meet our Customer Growth goals. I don’t like those odds. Improving our Customer Growth confidence presents a far greater opportunity for our team than providing slight improvements to our NPS confidence.
Now that we are focusing on the proper outcome, we can zoom back in to identify the problem. What is making our confidence in attracting new customers so low? Digging deeper into the Customer Growth dashboard, we can quickly identify the culprit: Daily Active Users.
Not only is this an incredibly important measure for growth success (40% weighting) but our performance up to this point has been horrific.
Measured weekly, our Daily Active Users measurement is actually trending upward. However, it is increasing at a very slow rate—much slower on a weekly basis than our target trendline tells us that it should be increasing.
Based on what we know today, we cannot be confident at all that our Daily Active User count will ever reach our target goal. If these trends continue, then the delta between the target and actuals will continue to grow exponentially. And because a high user count is critical to our Customer Growth outcome, we will continuously find ourselves at risk of missing the mark come the end of the fiscal year.
Armed with a holistic view of how each measurement impacts our chances for a positive business outcome, we can now make informed decisions around where to invest our resources. With the information we have, the best step forward is to put a major focus on increasing the number of Daily Active Users. This could include prioritizing customer requested features, removing barriers to entry, or running promotions to encourage daily log-ins.
If we have the bandwidth, we could also seek to address CFR or MTTR. However, because their potential impacts on our business are much lower, those metrics should not be our priority.
Of course, we cannot just set this plan in place and then walk away from it. Instead, we must continue to monitor our outcome confidence. Should we notice concerning trends or drop-offs in currently healthy areas, we must pivot and adjust accordingly, particularly if our focus on increasing Daily Active Users may be the cause of those drop-offs. When we stop keeping an eye on the big picture, we risk allowing tunnel vision to creep in again.
Which brings me back to my dental concerns. Although enamel loss is a problem, and seeking to eliminate it is a problem, the risks I face by eliminating toothbrushing from my routine are far worse. Instead, my dentist offered a two-fold solution: exchange my electric toothbrush for a manual one and change my brushing motion. This solution should address my enamel loss, while maintaining the benefits of consistent brushing.
But what’s true today may not be true tomorrow. In both business and dentistry, it’s crucial to avoid tunnel vision. Do not become so hyper focused on one red measure that you lose sight of the big picture. Your stakeholders—and your teeth—will thank you.