I Am Not a Fan of the Language of Goals and Goal Setting

I am not a fan of using the language of "goals" and "goal Setting", mostly because of the experience most people have of the baggage that comes with them – success/failure, good/bad, reward/punishment (even if neither are explicitly in the mix, implicitly they are for most people). If people have, even the slightest fear of the negative consequences that come from failing to meet their goals, they will under-promise, or worse, not promise outcomes at all – not what is wanted and needed in most organization in our fragile economy.

So I have a different approach: 

• Get people in action first – get them to make dents, make an impact –  have them use their best intelligence to make something useful happen
• If they are in action already, then up the anti, do more stuff, more quickly - more dents, make a bigger impact, make more useful stuff happen
• Eliminate good bad or right/wrong or should/shouldn't, good/bad, ... from your lexicon – they kill spontaneity, creativity and initiative 
• If people have the concern they will be judged and evaluated based on whether they meet goals or not, are doing the right thing or not, they will subconsciously operate out of CYA and underperform.

And don't worry that the seemingly unfocused – just be in action and make something happen – instruction will lead to chaos, it won't. There is enough intelligence in the organization and in individual contributors for them to know what will and won't work, what will contribute and what won't – if we trust people to unleash their genius at work, they will.

To raise everyone's game and start focusing activities so that they have an intention to produce specific outcomes in time – outcomes someone wants, here are some recommendations:

1. Start with getting people to list the activities/actions they intend to engage in for the week, or even for a day – just what are you going to be doing - a big to do list. Best done before the week starts, say Sunday evening, or the evening before if it is being done daily [Column 1 of document attached]
2. Then the next step is to have people say what result/outcome they are intent on producing as a result of their doing/activities, item by item – each outcome to be specific and measurable [Column 2]
3. Then say by when they want to have that outcome produced – a specific date/time [Column 3]
4. Finally, say who the outcome is for, who is expecting it, waiting for it, and do they expect it by a particular time/date? – name a specific person and specific time if there is one [Column 4].

Then follow up: this part is designed to support people discover what has them deliver on their intended outcomes, and how come them fail to deliver. The context for the follow up is curiosity and learning – the intent is to discover, with the benefit of hindsight, what worked, what did not work and what was missing from most recent actions, to make subsequent actions more effective in producing desired outcomes. The follow up steps are:

1. When the activity is complete, check – did it produce the desired outcome: Yes or No? Encourage people to answer that for themselves – with no reasons, explanations, justifications, ... The coaching is, it is not good if the answer is Yes and bad if it is No – it is just what's so
2. If Yes, did the outcome get produced in the timeframe you said… Yes or No? Again, encourage people to answer that for themselves. Again with the coaching it is not good if the answer is Yes and bad if it is No – it is just what's so
3. Was the person who was expecting the outcome (#4) satisfied – did you meet expectations (M), exceed expectations (E) or fail (F) to meet expectations?
4. When the activity is complete, or time has run out, do an after action review so they can learn how to improve performance for subsequent iterations
5. I recommend that after action reviews be conducted often; after a meeting, a day of work, at the end of a project... this is a very effective practice to continually improve performance.

I find it useful too to encourage people to start noticing – again without judgement of evaluation – where they notice they are acting inconsistently with their intentions or commitments. In the beginning just notice, without trying to fix or correct anything, and notice too the reasons and explanations they give themselves. I wont say more about this for now.

In a collaborative and supporting relationship a manager, or colleague, can encourage people in their network of dependencies to experiment with taking on more audacious outcomes, or outcomes with shorter execution times. In a context where failure is not something to be avoided, but rather a learning opportunity, it is a low risk game and one with very high rewards in enhanced capability to reliably deliver on ones intentions.

Tom Watson Sr of IBM, used to say, "if you want to double your results, double your failure rate". I concur, what's more, I agree with him.