The coffee cup felt warm, a momentary truce against the sudden, calculated frost in the room. I was staring at the slide that read: “Customer Satisfaction: 86% → 156%.” My brain stalled. Not because 156% was high, but because it is, mathematically and practically, a phantom. A void.
“A stretch goal,” my VP said, leaning back, the phrase delivered with the tired triumph of someone who just discovered the word ‘synergy’ for the first time in 2006. “It’s meant to make you uncomfortable.”
I managed to point out that maximizing a satisfaction score, where 100% is the ceiling of perfection, to 156% was not uncomfortable. It was arbitrary. It was functionally nonsensical. It was, I whispered-and maybe this was the mistake-a lie. He just smiled, a small, patronizing curl of the lip that confirmed the worst: The goal wasn’t designed to measure effort; it was designed to normalize failure.
They call it high-leverage thinking. I call it psychological sabotage. We need to stop accepting this as normal high-performance strategy. When a leader mandates a goal that fundamentally cannot be achieved, they are signaling a lack of respect

















