What Is Your Outcome?

🔍 What Is Your Outcome?

It’s easy to lose track of the ultimate goal behind our actions—and waste effort in confused, futile box-checking. We don’t ask ourselves, “What will the end state be?” often enough. We assume we already know. It feels obvious. So we don’t write it down. But is it really obvious?

When I worked at a large financial institution, I set up encrypted circuits between our network and third-party partners. When I asked why a new circuit was needed, the requestor would often say something like:

“We need to open Port X for Protocol Y on our external firewall.”

“Thanks,” I’d say. “But that’s not the goal.”

“Yes, it is. That’s what my boss wants. And it needs to be in place next week.”

So I’d try again:  “When this connection is in place, what will the bank be able to do that it can’t do now?”

Often, they didn’t know. It hadn’t occurred to them to ask. Or they thought their boss wouldn’t like the question. I’d politely ask them to go find out—before we started the work.

Eventually, they’d return with something like:

“We need a secure way to exchange customer contracts with this partner. We can’t do that now.”

Perfect. Except—we already had a service for that. No new circuit needed. Just a quick onboarding to an existing solution.

Sometimes, the requested service was actually prohibited by policy or regulation. If we’d just opened “Port X for Protocol Y,” we might have created a compliance issue. But by clarifying the outcome, we avoided wasted effort—and potential risk.

🎯 The Great Ones Know Their Outcome

Jeff Bezos didn’t just want to sell books. He wanted Amazon to be the most useful place for customers to make purchase decisions. That was his outcome—and he held to it, even when others pushed back.

Bezos believed that if Amazon.com had more user-generated book reviews than any other site, it would give the company a huge advantage; customers would be less inclined to go to other online bookstores. . . . Naturally, some of the reviews were negative. In speeches, Bezos later recalled getting an angry letter from an executive at a book publisher implying that Bezos didn’t understand that his business was to sell books, not trash them. “We saw it very differently,” Bezos said. “When I read that letter, I thought, we don’t make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.” 

—Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

🧠 Energy vs. Reason

In my personal life, I sometimes default to action: buy a new tool, fix something I rarely use, or force a solution to a problem that might resolve on its own. But when I pause to ask, “What’s the real outcome I want?”—I often find a better path.

Mankind has always sought to substitute energy for reason, as if running faster will give one a better sense of direction.—Bernard Baruch

The outcome of any maneuver must never seriously be in doubt.— Federal Aviation Administration Handbook

In a world that rewards speed and visible productivity, clarity of purpose is a quiet superpower. We strengthen our peace of mind, our confidence we are making the best use of our energies. Maintaining this peace of mind requires more hesitation, more reflection, before jumping in to show everyone how 'effective' we are. We avoid chasing distractions that only look like progress.

How do you help your team stay focused on outcomes, not just outputs? I’d love to hear your approach.