"We celebrate noble failure."

If you are like most people, your relationship with failure is this:  you avoid it at ALL costs.  I am suggesting that if you are going to produce higher levels of performance, and especially breakthrough performance, you need to transform your relationship with failure.

I met a corporate executive once who told me that one of her favorite sayings was “We celebrate noble failure.”  What would “noble failure” look like?

If we really care about something and we want to make a difference and we “go for it” – not irresponsibly, but enthusiastically – and we don’t fully achieve the goal, then I would call that a “noble failure.”

The problem is that we usually don’t “go for it” because we are afraid of failing.  This singular fear keeps us from making more of a difference and increasing our performance.  What we need to do is to shift our focus from whether or not we fully achieve an Aggressive or Almost Impossible Goal to our actual performance on the outcomes we are committed to.  It’s a tradeoff.  If we set bigger goals, the research is clear that we will have higher performance.*  But it also increases the risk of not making it all the way – of failing.  If we can focus more on our delight from increased performance and away from our distaste of failure, then that is transforming our relationship with failure.  I am not saying you have to “love” failure, but you have to at least tolerate it.

Of course, one of the wise reasons you avoid failure is that it is often followed by negative consequences.  Research shows that organizations are only effective using “stretch goals” if they have a “safe-fail” work environment.  If you don’t have that kind of environment where you work, then my advice is to keep setting small Attainable Goals – publicly, with your bosses, etc. – and then set Aggressive or Almost Impossible Goals that you keep to yourself.  You can be publicly successful and produce higher levels of performance.  I gave an example of this in my previous blog.

IBM’s Thomas Watson, Sr., once said “The fastest way to succeed is to double your failure rate.”

And management guru Tom Peters has said “there’s no substitute for getting smarter faster.  And the way you get smarter is to screw around vigorously.  Try stuff.  See what works.  See what fails miserably.  Learn.  Rinse.  Repeat.”

Transform your relationship with failure.  Learn to celebrate “noble failure.”  Get smarter faster and make even more of a Mission Impact.

*Locke, E. A. & Latham, G. P.  A Theory of Goal Setting & Task Performance.  Englewood Cliffs, NJ:  Prentice Hall, 1990.

For more ideas on how you can lead breakthroughs in your organization, follow this blog and check out my web site at www.SheehanNonprofitConsulting.com   You will find free resources you can download, including a Breakthrough Strategy Workbook that you can download at no cost.  You can also check out my book, Mission Impact:  Breakthrough Strategies for Nonprofits, and buy it if you are interested.  And you can follow Sheehan Nonprofit Consulting on Facebook.

Using Almost Impossible Goals to Produce Breakthroughs

If you want innovation and breakthrough performance, you should set Almost Impossible Goals – goals that you think only have a 1% chance of being accomplished and you don’t know how to do it.

So how does this work?

You set the goal and then start thinking of new ways to go about it that you never thought of before.  Try to get others to help you out.  Here’s an example.

When I was a doctoral student at Ohio State I had an assistantship in the campus fund-raising office where they put me in charge of a project that had not been raising much money recently.  We set an aggressive goal of $50,000 and we beat it by raising $62,000.  Then I started learning about Almost Impossible Goals.

For the next year, I set a goal of raising $150,000 – and I told no one.  I started thinking about how we could do things completely differently to raise that amount.  And I started meeting with people I worked with and asked “Wouldn’t it be cool if we did WAY better than last year?  What would we have to do differently to produce a real breakthrough in our results?”  I never told them my actual goal, lest they think me daft.  But, they did start coming up with ideas.  After a few weeks I had a totally new design for the project – a new methodology about how to raise the money.  I took it to my boss and she approved it.  We ended up raising $143,000 that year.  We were short of my goal, but more than double the previous year. 

Here’s another option.  The next time you and your team are gathered to set your annual goals, go ahead and do it the way you always have.  Then when you are done, ask them for another thirty minutes of their time to do a little brainstorming.  Say to them:

“Let’s imagine we can get into a time machine and set it for one year from now.  Then we when arrive we find that, somehow, we produced FIVE TIMES better results than the goals that we set.  Here’s my question for you:  What new, different, and amazing things must we have done during the past year that allowed us to produce those results?”

Then let the brainstorming commence.  If you come up with some new ideas that have promise, then try them out and see if they help you produce some breakthroughs.  This is a way to “softly” introduce the idea of Almost Impossible Goals, and you can build on the approach from there.  

To fully leverage the power of Almost Impossible Goals we also need to conquer our fear of failure.  More on that next time.  Meanwhile, try some Almost Impossible brainstorming with some of your colleagues and see what kinds of new ideas you come up with.

For more ideas on how you can lead breakthroughs in your organization, follow this blog and check out my web site at www.SheehanNonprofitConsulting.com   You will find free resources you can download, including a Breakthrough Strategy Workbook that you can download at no cost.  You can also check out my book, Mission Impact:  Breakthrough Strategies for Nonprofits, and buy it if you are interested.  And you can follow Sheehan Nonprofit Consulting on Facebook.

SMART v. 3.0, Almost Impossible Goals

There are times, many times, that setting an Almost Impossible Goal – a goal that you think only has a 1% chance of being accomplished – can be the SMART thing to do.

Let’s quickly recap my recent SMART blogs.  First, all goals should be Specific, Measurable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.  The question is, “What ‘A’ do you use to fill out the formula?”

Attainable Goals are those which you think you have at least an 80% chance of accomplishing.  This is a good approach to use when accurately predicting performance is the priority.

Aggressive Goals are those which you think you have a 35% chance of accomplishing.  This is a good approach to use when your priority is improving performance.  This approach leverages one of the important findings from goal research:

The more difficult the goal, the higher the level of performance.*

But today, improved performance is not enough, especially for a lot of nonprofits who want to make HUGE improvements in the quality of life for those they serve.  For individuals and organizations who want innovation and breakthrough performance, this is the time to set Almost Impossible Stretch Goals.  By definition, an Almost Impossible Stretch Goal is one that you think has only a 1% chance of being accomplished and you don’t know how to do it.

As you consider this approach, remember one of my favorite quotes:

Great Leaders Have a Healthy Disregard for the Impossible**

How many things can you think of which people said were impossible and yet they happened?

*People told Roger Bannister that it was impossible to run a mile faster than in four minutes.  But he set the goal.  Not so impossible after all.

*If you told someone twenty-five years ago that many of us today would be carrying around a small device that we could make wireless phone calls from, listen to more than 8,000 songs we had recorded on it, and access The Internet, they would have said “impossible.”  Then they would have asked what The Internet is.  But people set goals to invent these things.  Not so impossible after all.

*In 1961 when President Kennedy set the goal for the USA to land a man on the moon and safely return him, many experts gave lots of scientific reasons for why it was impossible.  But he set the goal anyway.  Not so impossible after all.

You can think of many more examples.  The point is that throughout history, people have dreamed dreams that others said were “impossible.”  But they set their Almost Impossible Goals and the dreams came true.

What are your dreams?  What inspires you?  What goals, if you achieved them, would make a breakthrough difference for you or for those your organization serves?

Almost Impossible Goals ignite our creativity.  Since, by definition, we set the goal so big that our current methods of going about them will not work, our creativity automatically kicks in to start thinking of new ways of achieving the goal.

In 1994, when Jack Welch was CEO of General Electric, he commented on GE’s use of the Almost Impossible Stretch:

“stretch is a concept that would have produced smirks, if not laughter, in the GE of three or four years ago, because it essentially means using dreams to set business targets -- with no real idea of how to get there . . . if you do know how to get there then it is not a stretch target.”

“In a company that now rewards progress toward stretch goals, rather than punishing shortfalls, the setting of these goals, and quantum leaps toward them, are daily events”

And these targets “are making seemingly impossible goals exciting, bringing out the best from our teams.”***

Remember:  the idea with the Almost Impossible Stretch Goal is to create a new way of going about the accomplishment of the goal – to inspire creativity, not to make you work twice as many hours using the same methods as before.

Intrigued?  Play around with setting some Almost Impossible Goals and see if you generate some new creative ideas.  But be careful about sharing your crazy new goals with too many people.  Remember that most people only set "Attainable" goals and they think this "Almost Impossible" stuff is irresponsible!  No wonder innovation is so rare.

There’s a ton more I could say about Almost Impossible Goals, but this blog is already too long.  Stay tuned for more tips next time on how to use Almost Impossible Goals to produce innovation and breakthrough performance in your organization.  If you can’t wait until the next blog to learn more, then download my Mission Impact book from Amazon onto your Kindle and read Chapter Five.  Downloading a book from The Internet?  Not so impossible.

*Locke, E. A. & Latham, G. P.  A Theory of Goal Setting & Task Performance.  Englewood Cliffs, NJ:  Prentice Hall, 1990.

**Thanks to Gene Hoffman for sharing this gem with me

***The Wall Street Journal, March 8, 1994.

 

For more ideas on how you can lead breakthroughs in your organization, follow this blog and check out my web site at www.SheehanNonprofitConsulting.com   You will find free resources you can download, including a Breakthrough Strategy Workbook that you can download at no cost.  You can also check out my book, Mission Impact:  Breakthrough Strategies for Nonprofits, and buy it if you are interested.  And you can follow Sheehan Nonprofit Consulting on Facebook.