Goal Setting
- How do we choose our goals?
- How do we avoid doing the wrong thing?
- How do we avoid wasting people’s time and money?
- What happens if we’re wrong?
- How do we learn from our mistakes?
These are all questions that have difficult answers. The danger, as
it happens, is not doing the wrong thing — the danger is doing nothing.
And, I believe, the source of our paralysis is actually the goals we’ve
chosen. In this I discuss some pitfalls in choosing goals and ways to
choose them in a way that makes us more willing to try seemingly risky
solutions and iterate faster.
Working Together to
Reveal Truth
It is not for us to assume that we can understand the variables that
affect others’ decisions. How we interact with the world somewhat of a
mystery. It is that mystery that makes life challenging, inspiring,
surprising, and unknowable. Struggling with our own selves is a grim
reminder of the difficulty we have in understanding others’.
The fog of the future ahead and the facts of the past behind. Both
are tainted by our own senses, our own experiences and our own biases.
As such, the decisions we make our tainted by the very same.
Minimizing these biases can only be done through honest discourse
with those who walked similar paths but came to different conclusions.
Weaving experiences together is the best way to reveal truth. While
stubborn allegiance to our own viewpoints is the most assured path to
feed falsehoods.
With this in mind, mistakes are not made through incorrect
conclusions but through reserved opinion.
Types of Goals
The difficult part of knowing where you want to go is distinguishing
between your destination and your next step. The latter is a means to an
end while the former is the end itself. As obvious as this may seem, it
is often forgotten or never considered in the first place.
So there’s a nuanced difference between setting your sights on a
general goal and locking in on a specific, unwavering outcome. The first
is a destination you want to arrive at while the second is marked by a
specificity which can actually limit your ability to apply creativity to
your solutions.
Having a detailed goal in mind implies that you know more about your
environment than you actually do. Goals that we are speaking of here are
inherently non-specific. They are light through the fog not a signpost
in a clearing. Expecting the latter will have you fumbling in
frustration when you encounter the fog.
As with any agile approach, as you approach the goal, it will become
more clear giving you the ability to waver less on the path you set for
yourself. But in order to do this youmust accept and
understand that you’re perspective is limited by your own experience.
Reject the notion of infallibility and open your mind to possibilities.
If you accept that diversity of opinions can you open your eyes to
unexpected solutions then you are well on your way to a successful
project.
Choosing Your Path
A humble attitude is a requirement that weaves its way through each
of our lessons in different forms. Approaching any problem with a
defiant stubborness of opinion is far more likely to move you down a
wrong path than eagerly soliciting others thoughts and opinions.
This behavior is often seen as weak or indecisive in our corporate
culture. But the truth here is that soliciting opinions and deliberating
on them is not indecisiveness until you are unable or unwilling to
choose one of these options.
Taking too long to choose a path suggests that you have defined your
end goal with too much specificity and are now worried that your
solution won’t address each requirement as expected. But the truth is
that we can never know for sure if a chosen solution will solve a
specific problem until it is tried. But wecan know that a
chosen solution can move us in the right direction toward a more
conceptual goal,
So, once again, success in crafting your goal is the catalyst that
triggers subsequent decisions and success. A goal that falls too far in
either direction (precision or vagueness) will lead to a more difficult
journey.
And the act of crafting your goal and taking your first steps is an
exercise in humbleness. Have confidence in what you know and solicit
opinions for what you don’t. But be honest with yourself when deciding
what you know and what you don’t. That might be the hardest part.
Wrap-up
As I finish this, I recognize that what I’ve written so far reads
like a self-help essay and not a practical approach to goal-setting. But
it occurs to me that so much of this is more art than science. I, like
most, would like these tasks to be deterministic. But by ignoring the
reality that in many cases, there are too many variables to accurately
predict the future we have to give ourselves the room to be wrong and to
make errors a fundamental and critical part of our process.
By all means, do everything you know to do to pick the right path but
don’t let it paralyze you. Be courageous enough to make decisions
despite the threat of wrong choices and humble enough to recognize that
you will make them. Being humble encourages you to solicit other
opinions and the courage helps you take a step when your path is
unclear.