A goal is not a contract between present-you and future-you. They’re not even a handshake deal; at best they’re a drunken dare.
Goals help a leader or a team orient present priorities more intentionally, and clarify what progress looks like.
Even better, they establish a direction for learning, not a final destination.
Imagine two groups climbing the same mountain. One group focuses only on the summit and charges right up, off the trail, despite cliffs and lakes and snakes. The other group focuses on the next cairn while eyeing the summit at all times. At every cairn they re-orient toward the next and the next, knowing the landscape anew.
The group that focuses on cairns wins every time. The hard-charging summit-obsessed team probably doesn’t even survive the trek.
But most leaders sadly still buy into the stoic notion that second prize is a set of steak knives and withhold all the high-fives unless the (arbitrary) finish line is crossed.
Bollocks.
Staking it all on one audacious goal comes at the tremendous cost of potential learning: a smarter route to get to the original goal, a faster way to travel (dog sleds instead of horses), or that there is a better goal than the original one.
Smart leaders are flexible about their big hairy audacious goals, because the world looks different from the next cairn.
(Photo Credit: Science.HowStuffWorks.com)
