An object that motivates all the action while its own nature is irrelevant; organisations often pursue one.
Hitchcock's term, explained by him as the thing the characters care about and the audience does not. Organisations pursue them routinely — a metric, a certification, an acquisition that everyone drives toward and nobody can say why.
In practice
- A firm's five-year strategy is organised around a certification that turns out to matter to nobody, and the reorganisation it caused was real.
- A department pursues an award for two years; the award is irrelevant and the capability built chasing it is not.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- The folklore of office life