This article explores how organizations can connect objectives and incentives through well designed decision-making environments to command performance in complex environments.
In the world of organizational performance, the word objectives has lost its meaning. Instead, it has been blurred into broad aspirations and farfetched goals. These objectives are also not being supported by the decision-making environments in which people operate nor are they aligned with incentives. If organizations want to command performance in complex environments, they must view their objectives as something they measure against, not something to aim for.
Most organizations make the same mistake of setting objectives that are too broad, too vague, or too comfortable to challenge. They end up with statements so diluted that they either cannot be accomplished. Worse than that, an ‘anything will do’ culture develops rendering individual/team performance review meaningless.
You have likely seen objectives such as “Be the best in our industry” or “Achieve operational excellence”. When taking a closer look, what do those statements really mean in practice? How does someone in the front line connect their day-to-day decisions to that kind of objective?
If an objective does not sharpen the focus of an organization, then it is not an objective. Objectives must be concise, pithy, and actionable. They must allow every person up and down an organization to link their daily work to the bigger picture. Most importantly, an objective must drive individual and organizational decision-making.
However, there is a critical element that is often overlooked when considering the operationalization of objectives and that is the link between objectives and incentives. Decision-making environments represent the bridge between the two (see Figure 2). When objectives are not translated into decisions people make every day, incentives begin to operate in isolation, often leading to unwanted events and outcomes. By designing the decision-making environments as the bridge, organizations ensure that objectives inform behavior through context, clarity and consequence. Decision-making environments that are well designed can help convert strategy into action, aligning what the organization wants to achieve (objectives) with how people are motivated to act (incentives).
The following model extends this idea, showing how focusing on the environments where decisions occur creates coherence across systems. It transforms objectives from abstract statements into design constraints that shape choices, behavior, and ultimately results.
When objectives become disconnected from the decisions that drive them, they often shift from guiding performance to simply tracking results. This is the moment when organizations start managing outputs instead of outcomes and effects. A results-focused culture celebrates metrics that look good on paper but fail to reflect what is happening within the systems that drive those results. Over time, people learn to meet the target result rather than the mission. This results in making the organization appear successful while its underlying performance quietly erodes - a classic case of regression towards Goodhart’s Law.
For seven straight years, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig had zero lost-time injuries (LTI). On paper, they were crushing their safety objectives. However, in 2010 the rig exploded, killing 11 workers and triggering the largest marine oil spill in U.S. history (EPA, 2025).
Over 87 days, more than 130 million gallons of oil spewed into the Gulf of America. The disaster cost BP Exploration & Production over 5.5 billion dollars and damaged up to 8.8 billion dollars of natural resources (The Ocean Portal Team, 2018).
This begs the question: What went wrong?
Investigations and evidence suggest (Mullins, 2010):
Behind every mechanical failure there was a crew that was faced with a decision. This is where we see the true systems failure. It became evidently that situational awareness was not clear until it was too late. There was no alignment between what they were measuring (injury-free workdays) and what actually determined crew performance (process safety).
This disconnect illustrates how weak links between objectives and decision environments can distort performance. The crew's incentives – zero incidents – did not align with the data that determined operational integrity. The absence of a well-designed decision-making environments contributed to system vulnerability.
This catastrophic event is an example of what can occur when an organization is measuring results, not performance. They celebrate zero incidents while ignoring growing vulnerabilities in their systems.
Ask yourself:
Start with these questions. Not with dashboards or KPIs, but with decisions.
In the pursuit of achieving objectives, large, complex, data-rich organizations need to consider that activities and decisions will be constrained by the design of decision-making environments.
When decision-making environments are designed as the mechanism that connects objectives and incentives, objectives stop being theoretical. They become embedded in workflows, guiding both humans and systems toward the right trade-offs under pressure.
When organizations attempt to change how they set and execute objectives, they often fall victim to scope creep. Instead, get quick wins on the most important problems – pick 2 or 3 objectives and not 20. Use those to drive better decision-making environments, calibrate associated incentives and scale as necessary.
InterKnowlogy's Command Center is built with these principles at its core. Rather than creating another dashboard that reports after the fact, it is designed to align objectives across the organization, surfacing information that matters most at the moment decisions are being made. By structuring insights around critical objectives, the Command Center enables people at every level – from frontline operators to senior executives – to see whether they are meeting targets, understand why, and adjust in real time. The result is not just visibility but shared clarity, where data actively informs action and shapes future decisions instead of sitting in reports. The Command Center ensures the bridge between what matters (objectives) and what motivates (incentives) is active, adaptive, and measurable.
Organizations are not static entities. They are collections of depreciating assets, governed by systems trending toward failure, all designed, operated, and maintained by fallible humans. If objectives are not bridged to incentives by reliable decision-making environments, then commanding performance will be that much more difficult to achieve.
Commanding performance is about surfacing real-time insights where decisions happen. Learn how IK-CADDI equips mining and energy leaders to do exactly that.
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