To keep your 2020 vision in sight keep your eyes wide open.
The start of the year offers a fresh opportunity for businesses to set goals and make plans but towards the end of the first quarter those goals may already have started to become unfocused.
To keep your 2020 vision in sight keep your eyes wide open. We sometimes only see what we want to see.
We can only prescribe solutions to visible problems.
A goal needs to sharp enough to feel the edges supported by measurement to keep the goal in sight.
As Peter Drucker said, “what gets measured gets managed”. So details matter, but they can also cloud judgement and stifle imagination.
Detailed reports can blind you
Automation has made reporting quicker and easier but analysis has never been more complicated. In some areas we can measure everything, perhaps too much?
Dashboards display fancy pie charts, word clouds and graphics but at times they leave me baffled on where we are, what we have actually achieved and how that helps the business reach our goals.
A decade ago reports were largely tables and figures that required explanation. Some were embellished with vaguely relevant detail and copious amount of data, which often had me scratching my head. Others lead to rich conversations where you could ask and answer three basic questions:-
- How are we performing?
- Why is performance doing that?
- What should we do about it?
Measurement can be microscopic which is fine if you are a high-speed hedge fund trader who can make millions having information a fraction of a SECOND before other people but for most of us reporting can blind us. I have learned not to overreact to a spike or a dip. Comparing month on month might just be a blip or it could be a slip. Humans by their very nature tend to have an optimism bias and over-report the good news and under report problems. Unless you have a genuine culture of transparency, openness and honesty you’ll never be sure what is really happening until it’s too late.
Let teams own the goal
The best goals motivate, inspire and unite colleagues. Let people own the goal rather than inherit the goal. If your business is enthusiastic and engaged they will smash the goals.
I’m also a great believer in an agile mindset. An agile mindset is one which is curious but focused, and has the desire to learn and share.
If your vision is too narrow-sighted you can miss pockets of growth; too broad and you can miss the goal entirely. That’s why it can be so hard to set goals and meet them, but if your business is growing then consider that the best goal of all.
