> Instead of comparing yourself to arbitrary thresholds, use the raw metric as a KPI instead. Use "minutes until airborne" as the KPI. That you can optimise indefinitely, and it is an honest representation of your current process, not how it compares to a number someone threw out at some time.
You are completely right, but this is much harder to explain to a regular person who doesn't have a math/stats background.
"Get the aircraft in the air in 30 minutes" is much easier to understand, even if the underlying assumption is that the number can be anything – especially when, as you pointed out, there are some reasonable biology-based reasons for 30 minutes.
"Get the aircraft in the air as fast as possible, but then we'll try to optimize that number" is inviting confusion ("Wait, optimize? But we're already working as fast as we can!).
Of course, the tradeoff in the hard threshold is that people might stop improving after hitting the 30 minute threshold. In my opinion this is at least partially based on cultural factors – you should be working in search and rescue at least partly because you want to help people, and should be willing to optimize further to accomplish that goal.
You are completely right, but this is much harder to explain to a regular person who doesn't have a math/stats background.
"Get the aircraft in the air in 30 minutes" is much easier to understand, even if the underlying assumption is that the number can be anything – especially when, as you pointed out, there are some reasonable biology-based reasons for 30 minutes.
"Get the aircraft in the air as fast as possible, but then we'll try to optimize that number" is inviting confusion ("Wait, optimize? But we're already working as fast as we can!).
Of course, the tradeoff in the hard threshold is that people might stop improving after hitting the 30 minute threshold. In my opinion this is at least partially based on cultural factors – you should be working in search and rescue at least partly because you want to help people, and should be willing to optimize further to accomplish that goal.