A “Mess” of Trouble is Heading our Way!

You probably have things in your organization that you know need to change, that you want to change, that you know absolutely must change, but – how do you get started?

Many experts agree that the first step in leading a change is to create a “sense of urgency” among those who need to help make that change happen.  But how do you do that?

One of my favorite recipes for creating a sense of urgency is an approach invented by Dr. Russell L. Ackoff, which Russ calls “Formulating the Mess.”

Russ says is that in order to get people to change, you need to need to very graphically show them what a “mess” they are going to be in during the future if they don’t change what they are doing now.  He recommends articulating a very clear future, which extrapolates current trends, and gives a specific picture of what the future will look like if change does not occur.  In fact, Russ says that “it is critical that the mess be presented in as realistic, as believable, and as shocking way as possible.”*

An example Russ gives is work he did with leaders of labor and management at an Alcoa plant in Tennessee who could not get others to understand that both sides in their contract dispute had to change their hard line positions.  They printed fake copies of the town newspaper, dated four years into the future, with the headline “Blount County to Lose Alcoa Plant and 2,300 Jobs.”  The lead article went on to explain the amount of money that the company would lose and the devastation to the local community economy.  Not seeing the date immediately, many people thought the paper was real.  The effort had its intended effect and both sides changed their demands.

I only wonder what might have happened if some leaders from the historic -- now defunct -- nonprofit, Hull House in Chicago, had done something similar years ago when their financial problems started.  Maybe they would have made the dramatic changes necessary and would still be around for the kind of people in need they had served since 1889.

Does your organization need to make significant change?  Show others the “mess” you will be in during the future if you don’t.

*Russell L. Ackoff, Re-Creating the Corporation, Oxford University Press, 1999.

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.

Goal Setting Primer

This is a summary of all the important things you need to remember about goals, with links to my earlier blogs for more detail.  Tack this to your bulletin board as a reminder.

1.  Set Goals!  The mere act of setting even general goals helps direct attention to relevant activities.*  Keep your life and work more relevant by setting goals.

2.  Set Goals as Outcomes.  Focus on what you really want, the results – not the activities.

3.  SMRT.  Make sure that ALL your goals are Specific, Measurable, Relevant, Time-Bound.  The more specific the goals, the more explicitly performance is regulated.*

4.  SMART v. 1.0:  Attainable Goals, which you have an 80+% chance of accomplishing, are good to use if failing at it will have many negative consequences.

5.  SMART v. 2.0:  Aggressive Goals, which you have a 35% chance of accomplishing, will improve your performance.  Research shows that the more difficult the goal, the higher the level of performance.*  But you have to be willing to accept the possible risks of failure.

6.  SMART v. 3.0:  Almost Impossible Goals, which you have a 1% chance of accomplishing, will require you to design innovative ways of going about accomplishing your goal.  “Working harder” on the same process won’t do it.  You have an opportunity for Breakthrough Performance with Almost Impossible Goals.

7.  Almost Impossible Goals are based on the philosophy that “Great Leaders Have a Healthy Disregard for the Impossible.”  Many things that people once thought impossible have been accomplished.  Set goals that inspire you and go for it!

8.  Celebrate Noble Failure.  If you are inspired to pursue a goal and you go for it, but you don’t make it all the way, then appreciate the progress you have made and appreciate that you worked hard at something you really cared about.  This approach will bring you more long term success than letting the fear of failure keep you from doing what truly inspires you.

If you use these principles and apply them to your personal and work life then I promise you much higher levels of performance and satisfaction.  Good luck with all of your goals!

I will write up an article discussing the eight goal-setting blogs and will post it as a free download on my web site by July 15, 2012.  Check it out then – SMART move.

*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.

"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.