Setting targets can limit performance.

Consider productive uncertainty as a more mission-aligned approach.

In most sports, you always know where you stand. The score is continuously updated, so whether it is a touchdown or a goal or a basket, you know the balance between you and your opponent at all times. And you often make strategic decisions with this knowledge: slow the pace down here, speed it up there.

Boxing is a notable exception. Knockouts aside, it is scored on a round-by-round basis, but you don’t know the score until after the bout has concluded. And because you only have a general sense of how you are doing, most boxers will continue to actively fight until the last bell, in case their naive understanding doesn’t match what is on the scorecards.

With the focus on OKRs and metrics, modern business tends to feel like most sports. You have a target and at least somewhat continuous measurement, so you can effectively judge how hard to lean in given your progress and the time left in the period (a sprint, a quarter, a fiscal year, whatever). 

This visibility is typically championed by managers, who then have a better understanding of velocity and can decide where to make investments in order to meet expectations. This aggregates all the way up the hierarchy to the CEO, who can balance the progress against the stock market and competitors.

But what if some parts of working need to be more like boxing? Instead of achieving a target, you simply continue to fight as actively as you can to reach the best possible outcome.

To say “your sales quota is $10k” is to make it more likely that each of your salespeople will land around that number, which is great for predictability but not for maximization. Whereas “we measure using deal value; fight for every deal” will create greater variability but likely better total outcomes; the productive uncertainty keeps people focused on continuous incremental gains.

This is more about targets than it is OKRs. Knowing what you are trying to accomplish is certainly in line with a boxing mentality; matches are scored on clear criteria that every boxer understands. But rather than setting a specific target, you use your understanding of the criteria to fight for every point.

Some workplaces already function this way and reveal some of the risks. Emergency rooms, for example, operate on the assumption that every person is worth helping, not on the notion that you simply have to help more than the target for the day. And because they fight for each life, ER staff have one of the highest burnout rates and worst worklife balances of any team in a hospital. Elite boxers fight only once or twice a year for good reasons.

But there are other structural ways to combat burnout: boxing is a limited number of timed rounds precisely to prevent injury. And so while productive uncertainty isn’t a fit for every team, it is worthwhile to question where targets make sense versus simply establishing a system for scoring and encouraging a point-by-point mentality.

And this matters, especially in mission-aligned businesses. Sales quotas aren’t vital to the advancement of the world but saving lives is. At Oceans, every sale is a job opportunity for someone who would otherwise be forced to leave their home and those they love; the target is not “100 net new accounts next quarter” – it is as many as we can possibly win. I don’t want “less than 5% regrettable attrition” – I want 0%. Because that is as mission-aligned as we can possibly be.