Overcoming conflicting goals

At Meon Springs, we are really in to thinking in outcomes rather than fixing problems. What's the difference. An outcome should result from the question "What do you want?" However, that does not always happen.

For example - "What do you want"?

"I'm Hungry". - This is not an outcome, it is probably a problem. What do you want? "I need food". - This is getting there. It is describing what you think you need. What do you want?

"I want food". - This is an outcome focus and a simple goal for you to achieve.

An issue arises however with conflicting goals.

"What do you want"? "I want food and I also want to lose weight."

It is for these reasons that a system to structure conflicting goals is needed.

Here’s a conflicting goal resolution example at Meon Springs

A more complex and business example that we are currently facing is between a large fencing project on the farm and other maintenance that needs doing. We are working through it as below.

Fencing at Whitewool Farm

We currently have a big grant aided fencing project on at the moment that is taking our maintenance team away from other jobs. A grant requirement of the job is that it needs to be complete by August 2027 (Seems a while away but it is a lot of fencing).

Also, our Shepherd’s Huts are beginning to look a bit shabby and we are not getting round to painting them.

Here there are two goals – get fencing done to keep cattle in for welfare and legal reasons (the police get ever so upset when they are running down to West Meon on their own). - keep Shepherd’s Huts maintained to keep the customers coming back. 

The higher goals of each are, of course better welfare (for cows and people) leading to better profits. 

When the higher goal is established, it becomes more obvious which levers to pull. Such as:

Resources        We could inject other resources into the system to get both jobs done in less time.

Quality               We could delay the Shepherd’s Hut painting, in the hope that the customers don’t really notice. Scope                 We could reduce the scope of the fencing project and only do what is really essential.

Our planned resolution is this:

We recognise the cost of losing customers because our Shepherd's Huts are shabby is much higher than bringing in extra resource to keep them maintained. We also know that not getting the fencing project finished on time will cost us hugely in the future simply because we didn't take advantage of the grant

Our future plan involves a bit of all the above. And it will stop the oscillation between quickly slapping some paint on the Shepherd's Huts to quickly finding extra resource to get fencing done and all the arguments in between.