Have you ever wondered:
“Am I doing goal setting wrong?”
If you have, the answer is probably “yes… and no”.
And that’s because: everyone is doing goal setting wrong, and nobody has a great answer for how to do it well, and it’s kind of always going to be messy. (There is hope - and more on that at the end).
Perhaps you might continue:
“People keep saying we need more clarity, and better alignment, and clearer planning, and I’ve tried so many frameworks but every time they just seem to become a huge bureaucratic mess that takes up loads of time to maintain - and people still complain we need more clarity and alignment. Aaaargh!”
This scenario will be totally familiar to many thousands of CEOs, ops directors and others. It seems that any approach to goal setting - however much it has worked magic at some other organisation - inevitably descends into chasing around a process, without getting any closer to the real heart of the issue. It becomes a cargo cult.
But why?
“Goal setting” means maintaining an agreement about where we are and where we are going. That relies on maintaining a shared version of reality - but reality refuses to stay nailed down. It shifts around constantly. It is also frustratingly ambiguous.
The same is true of people. They have many perspectives, some of which are complementary and some of which are contradictory1.
So reality moves, and people move. And against this backdrop, you have to try and work together effectively, which involves agreeing on roughly where you are, and where you’re going.
When I look at it that way, I think “no wonder this stuff is hard!”
But I also think: “this is what being an organisation is!” The reason we have organisations is to bring groups of people together to work on things they could not do alone. The continual re-alignment of reality that we call “goal setting” is the beating heart of organisational being. Our constant struggles to get it right are not in the way of work - they are work.
You might be willing to accept that framing - but still you want to know: “ what can I do?”.
My first answer is: K.I.S.S. - Keep it simple, stupid!
Keep the technology that you use to support goal setting extraordinarily simple. A spreadsheet or even a piece of paper. Keep the number of things on there extraordinarily small - and insist that when you add something, something else has to be taken away. Do not allow the details to multiply on the page. Let there be inevitable gaps that must be discussed. It is the conversations that you want to make happen, and that lead to real progress. By not getting caught up in fancy technology, you force yourself to keep re-focussing on the important part of the process and control the ever-present threat of bureaucracy.
I will have more thoughts and tips on this theme in the coming weeks - so subscribe if you want to hear them and you aren’t already.
This is true within groups - but it’s also true within individuals!