What makes a target meaningful?

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There is a mantra in management circles that anyone who has more than three priorities actually has none. ‘Three’ is entirely arbitrary, of course, but the basic point is that having too many priorities makes effective management impossible. We can substitute ‘targets’ for priorities, and the same mantra applies. Yet governments love setting targets, preferably for other people, as a means of measuring something or other, but it’s far from clear that they are actually measuring what they think they are measuring. Targets can often provoke behaviours which are more about demonstrating success than about achieving the aims underlying those targets.

I once sat through a meeting which was led through a spread-sheet detailing 93 key performance indicators for an organisation. Some were being met, many were not, and one or two were even being exceeded. Since the purpose of the discussion was to identify ‘efficiency savings’, part of the discussion turned on those targets which were being easily surpassed. It was an obvious opportunity: reducing performance down to the target level would lead to a saving in money and resources. On another occasion, I heard a suggestion in a discussion on primary school league tables that schools could improve their overall attainment levels in standard assessment tests by identifying the small number of individual pupils who were just below the target score and investing more time and effort in helping them. Two classic cases of the way in which setting targets can sometimes encourage the ‘wrong’ sorts of behaviour.

Those examples came to mind when I read Farage’s comments about scrapping the Welsh Government target for one million Welsh-speakers by 2050. He surely has a point, doesn’t he, when he talks about many government targets being meaningless and never being met? Both the date and the desired number of Welsh-speakers look to be essentially arbitrary numbers. In truth, the million Welsh-speakers has always looked like more of an aspiration than a target: a worthy aspiration, of course, but unless backed up by a detailed and achievable plan with adequate resources set aside over the next quarter of a century, it will be little more than a stick with which opposition politicians can regularly beat the government of the day for its lack of progress. And I see no sign to date of a plan which might actually stand a chance of delivering.

The first problem with Farage’s words comes not with his proposal to abolish what he, and many others, might legitimately see as a meaningless and arbitrary target, but with the lack of any meaningful alternative. His vague words about protecting and encouraging the Welsh language are even more meaningless than the target he seeks to abolish. He has no plans, and no interest in the matter. The second problem concerns the extent to which his aversion to targets is specific or general. It seems unlikely that he is going to abandon his own targets for zero net migration (or zero net migration of poor people anyway; the rich are, apparently, welcome). His aversion to targets seems to relate only to things that he doesn’t like. The Welsh language is clearly one of those.