Scientific Definition
Criteria for a workable outcome: stated positively, in your control, sensory-specific, ecological, and worth the cost.
Plain-English Definition
Criteria for a workable outcome: stated positively, in your control, sensory-specific, ecological, and worth the cost.
Feynman Explanation
Most goals fail the well-formedness test before they ever fail in execution.
Core Principle
Criteria for a workable outcome: stated positively, in your control, sensory-specific, ecological, and worth the cost.
Mechanisms
Pending editorial review.
Criteria for a workable outcome: stated positively, in your control, sensory-specific, ecological, and worth the cost.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
OKR scoping, project chartering, personal goal setting.
Inputs (Triggers)
Pending editorial review.
Outputs (Behaviors)
Pending editorial review.
Behavioral Signature
Most goals fail the well-formedness test before they ever fail in execution.
Examples
- Practitioner-standard outcome design alongside the Well-Formed Outcome pattern.
- OKR scoping, project chartering, personal goal setting.
Pending editorial review.
Famous Experiments
Pending editorial review.
Design Principles
- Run every important goal through all five conditions before committing.
Measurement Approaches
Pending editorial review.
Evidence
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
The Perverse Incentive Lens™
How this behavior is exploited — and how to redesign around it.
- Run every important goal through all five conditions before committing.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Interactive Mini Network
Click any neighbor to re-center the graph and follow the threads of connection.
Knowledge Graph Neighbors
Auto-linked to the rest of the Human Behavior Taxonomy by family, domain, dimension, and shared keywords.
Intuition is trustworthy only when the domain is regular, practice is plentiful, and feedback is fast.
How will I feel about this in 10 minutes / 10 months / 10 years?
Inattention or forgetfulness caused by low attention, hyperfocus, or distraction.
Forgetting to compare an offer with the next-best alternative.
Outcomes that could have happened but did not.
Overthinking a situation so that decision-making stalls.
The first number on the table silently sets the range for every number after it.
Tversky & Kahneman's classic: identical outcomes flip from 'risk averse' to 'risk seeking' when framed as lives saved vs. lives lost.
Our perception is shaped by what we selectively pay attention to.
Favoring suggestions from automated systems over conflicting human judgment.
A color appears different depending on adjacent colors.
Decisions are constrained by available information, cognitive limits, and time.