A Refinement on Setting Goals

Interesting piece in the Boston Globe I found by way of the Blog of the Nation from NPR...

Goals are great. "Among psychologists, the link between setting goals and achievement is one of the clearest there is, with studies on everyone from woodworkers to CEOs showing that we concentrate better, work longer, and do more if we set specific, measurable goals for ourselves." I've talked about the importance of specifics and metrics in setting goals on this blog before. Goals and reaching or not reaching them are pretty much the foundation of all our dramatic narratives (total Matt Good uncited conjecture). Goals are good. But of course, the worthy aphorism "Know Thyself" applies as much here as everywhere else...

There is risk in setting goals. This is pretty obvious on a small scale (visiting the grocery store with the goal of buying some beef does not help you if you are making fish, even if you did reach your goal). Of course, it's easy to pretend that a given concept, when properly dressed up with bigger words and impressive, accomplished backers, is not at its core that given concept at all. Seems to be happening a lot in our world these days.

Take GM: they set out to regain 29% market share, but "In clawing toward its number, GM offered deep discounts and no-interest car loans. The energy and time that might have been applied to the longer-term problem of designing better cars went instead toward selling more of its generally unloved vehicles." Yop. Wrong goal. Except in this case, it turns out that the goal they set was mutually exclusive with the goal they should've set. Oops.

Right about now, you're supposed to think about myopia and remember that I wrote up a nice little post about Wakefulness of Mind just a few minutes ago. Being wakeful (or intellectually curious) will help you to set the correct goals, and to realize when one specific goal is mucking up the broader picture.

Are the two in conflict? No, they actually are in harmony, even though they work on opposite ends of the spectrum. Wakefulness attempts to understand all aspects of an issue, and goals attempt to focus on just one of it's facets. Either without the other is suboptimal.

Another reason rampant goal-setting can be dangerous: "Business professors Maurice Schweitzer of the University of Pennsylvania and Lisa Ordonez of the University of Arizona, co-wrote a 2004 paper on what people do when they fall just short of their goals. According to Ordonez and Schweitzer's experiment, in which subjects played a word game and then reported how well they did at it, what people do is lie to make up the difference." This is not the kind of thing you want large companies to be tempted to do when sales are down. Or car companies to do when their Pintos keep exploding

Here's a few more choice quotes from the article that sum up some of the new thinking on goals:

• "Goal setting has been treated like an over-the-counter medication when it should really be treated with more care, as a prescription-strength medication."
• "You know how Shakespeare wrote that the fault is not in our stars but in ourselves?" asks Latham, a professor at the University of Toronto. "Well, the fault is not in our goals but in our values."
• If you are GM, argues Schweitzer, "You clearly don't want 29 percent market share, you want something much more complicated than that."

I think the takeaway here for us is to know ourselves. It should be easier for us to monitor how well a goal is working than it is for a huge corporation of tens of thousands of people. But is it really any easier to know ourselves? To know what we really want? Perhaps not. But it is perhaps the most important requirement for being intentional, and one that should be in a state of continuous reevaluation.