Goals & Indicators

Step 1: Where Do We Go?

The first step consists of setting goals, determining vision, and setting indicators and system boundaries. This is where stakeholder demands, time and budget restrictions find a home.

Setting Good Goals

Goals determine the final destination. They are usually set with the entire team including the client, and later revisited with stakeholders. A good goal keeps you motivated; a bad goal distracts from what is important.

Good goals are expressed on a system level and performatively. For example:

"Our goal is for our company to maximally contribute to a sustainable society."

Here, "sustainable society" is the system, the company is the object within the system, and "maximally contribute" is the performative aspect.

Performative Goals

Goals should describe intended outcomes, not determine the solution. This allows the largest possible solution space and prevents suboptimization.

Bad goal: "All buildings should use solar panels to provide electricity." This locks in a specific technology.

Better goal: "The neighborhood provides its own source of renewable energy." This allows solar panels but also other approaches.

System-level goal: "The neighborhood's energy system contributes to the resilience of the wider community." This opens the widest solution space.

Setting Sub-Goals

After the main goal is set, break it down into performance-based network and/or object goals. ELSI and the Network Parameters are good tools for formulating sub-goals and ensuring comprehensive coverage.

Visioning

For longer-term projects involving large groups, a strong vision can energize people and ground the goals in a real-world future perspective. The team formulates dreams and ideals through movies, drawings, written stories, and other media. From this, specific goals and indicators can be extracted.

With a vision in hand, you can also use backcasting: quickly running through a SiD method cycle in reverse to see if there are clear pathways towards the desired end result.

Project and System Boundaries

The project boundary includes external conditions: budget, time, resources, team, level of detail. The system boundary is an artificial edge at which you stop investigating specifics and regard everything beyond as "external."

The system boundary determines solution space. Larger boundaries provide more levers for change but increase effort. Set it as large as necessary for adequate solutions and as small as needed to remain manageable.

Performance Indicators

Indicators measure how well a system is operating. Set them early so you can compare before and after. To prevent externalizing problems, ensure the set of indicators is complete enough -- if you only measure energy and not toxicity, you might shift from one problem to another. This is where ELSI and Network Parameters are essential.

Case Study: Rotterdam Public Transport

When developing a public transport strategy for Rotterdam, the original goal was "to make the PT system more sustainable." After a systemic inquiry, the group redefined it:

"To increase the sustainability of the city region of Rotterdam by means of the Public Transportation system."

This "flipping" of the goal represented a major mental shift. A "sustainable PT system" is meaningless since PT is a means to an end. It makes much more sense to contribute to a sustainable city using the public transport system. This gave a completely different perspective and yielded far-reaching results.