When Edwin Locke, a young organizational psychologist in the 1960s, started asking factory workers about their daily routines, he stumbled on something deceptively simple. The workers who performed best weren’t necessarily the most experienced or the most talented. They were the ones who had a clear, measurable target in their heads: “assemble ten more units before lunch.” Those without concrete benchmarks seemed to float through the day, guided more by habit than purpose.
Locke’s quiet discovery would later become one of the most robust findings in management science: specific and challenging goals improve performance 90 percent of the time. But what Locke couldn’t have imagined was how this principle, so deeply human, would one day become the organizing logic of machines.
Because goals, it turns out, are not just psychological tools. They are the software of progress—the invisible architecture behind every leap forward, whether it’s a runner breaking a record or an AI system learning how to optimize a business in real time.
The Bullseye Problem
What’s a game of darts without a dartboard? Archery without a target butt? We all want to hit the bullseye but think far less about the space in between. The milliseconds between release and result. That’s where everything changes. Wind resistance alters speed, speed shifts trajectory. Tiny movements compound into completely different landings. The real art lies in aiming not just where the target is, but where conditions will take the arrow.
Most of us live and work with a similar tension. It’s easy enough to state our bullseye - grow revenue by $x, lose y pounds, expand market share by z% - but we don’t always know if we’re on track or how to adjust mid-flight when conditions change.
In business, that gap—the space between “where we are” and “where we need to be”—is often filled with dashboards. Endless dashboards. Charts that tell us how we’ve done, and models that forecast how we might do. But they rarely tell us what to do next specifically within the context of achieving our overall goals.
It’s like a pilot getting endless updates on fuel, wind, speed, weather, other air traffic - but without any bearing on if the plane’s actually heading towards the right airport.
That’s the fundamental insight behind RabbitHawk: in a world drowning in analysis, we bring alignment. We connect data and decisions with direction to ensure every action moves you closer to your goals.
