The Repeating Patterns of Missed Goals
It’s end of year reviews and planning season so I thought I’d revisit everyone’s favourite topic - missed goals. When organisations and individuals consistently fail to achieve their goals it is often due to the same reason(s) which caused them to miss them previously. Reasons which continue to follow them into the next goal setting period. Postmortems are had, root causes are analysed, excuses are made and yet the cycle continues. Goals are missed because there are often underlying patterns at play which are either unknown or unacknowledged. Before diving into some common patterns it’s worth remembering why some goals are achieved.
Why are goals achieved?
Most people know the answer to this because the formula is actually quite simple. Goals are achieved due to focussed effort. This means that they are prioritised at the expense of other desired outcomes. Resources (time, people, effort) are disproportionately directed towards them, again, at the expense of other potential actions. Someone dedicates themselves to the task of ensuring it happens. That person has to both care enough and have the relevant power to ensure it crosses the finish line. Efforts are fuelled by a momentum of belief. A healthy dose of luck is usually involved too. Focussed effort requires tradeoffs to be made. It also requires knowing or at the very least having assumptions about what success looks like to ensure you’re on the winning path. In organisations, the winning path is your strategy. For personal goals, it’s your ideal life vision.
Repeating Patterns
If the formula is so simple then why are so many goals missed? Why is this the case even after extensive planning? My theory is that goal setting is not just a logical endeavour outlined in spreadsheets and Notion docs. It’s a process, where the goals selected and their success are often the result of psychological beliefs and cultural forces which are unknown, unacknowledged and unhelpful. These beliefs left undisturbed become repeating patterns of continuous failure. There are many. Below are 3 which I believe are among the most common:
Lack of Conviction
Wishful Thinking
Not Quitting
1.Lack of Conviction
A lack of conviction is to be expected in the early stages of a startup or project that flourished from a spark of an idea. Building conviction through discovery and action is part of the creation process. However, issues arise when the lack of conviction is unacknowledged. This is particularly troublesome in organisations which have overly scaled its headcount. A lack of conviction typically manifests in setting too many and/or constantly changing goals. It also manifests in giving importance to unimportant things and/or being unable to prioritise. A lack of conviction is a pervasive trap in startups where founders need to convince investors of their conviction to raise funds and candidates to take the risk to join an unknown entity. They carry this conviction into product and company building with their teams without rigorously testing their assumptions. A lot of time and cash is wasted this way.
One solution to the flip-flopping caused by a lack of conviction is to deliberately pick a path and set smaller goals/ship MVPs over a short time frame. Think days/weeks not months. Quarterly goals are the enemy of success in this case. Openly treat goals as an experiment with tight feedback loops. Prepare to fail a lot. Each goal once achieved should provide a learning which then informs next steps. Ultimately this should lead to a coherent strategy or an exit plan (see #3).
Sometimes a lack of conviction is a lack of caring in disguise. Cull any goals where you are ambivalent to the outcome. These are just a distraction.
2.Wishful Thinking
It’s said that a goal without a plan is just a wish. But sometimes a goal with a plan is still just a wish if that plan is wildly unrealistic. Wishful thinking takes many forms. It’s where optimism veers into delusion. It’s when grand visions lack starting points and specifics. It’s where known issues continue to be ignored in the hope that they resolve themselves without difficult actions needing to be taken. Wishful thinking often masks fear. When organisations and individuals fall prey to wishful thinking they usually avoid asking the difficult questions because delving too much into the details unveils how far they are from their target. For example, building a product without speaking to users is a form of wishful thinking. Equally, setting a sales target that is 10x your current revenue for the quarter is wishful thinking unless you have a clear plan of how to get there and are honest about how much of the variables you can control.
When goals are missed due to wishful thinking, the antidote isn’t less ambition. It instead requires accepting the reality of the starting point and working forward from there, usually with much extended timeframes…
3.Not Quitting
Perseverance is a value that people pride in themselves. In society, grit is glorified. Yet sometimes persevering can lead to a bitter end rather than a rewarding one. In her book Quit, Annie Dukes says “Success does not lie in sticking to things. It lies in picking the right thing to stick to and quitting the rest.” Research shows that when faced with unfavourable results people tend to double down on bad choices rather than quit. When goals are consistently missed despite best efforts it may be a sign that quitting is the best course of action. That product may never find market fit. That leader may never deliver. Not quitting some goals may prevent other more fruitful ones from being achieved. When deciding if you should quit a particular goal, especially one you’ve invested a lot of effort into, it is worth seeking external objective advice. Also ask yourself what you are losing by not pursuing it. It is often an emotional attachment rather than logical sense that keeps us persevering on a losing path.
Breaking Patterns
Luckily all bad patterns can be broken and more promising ones formed. The first question to ask yourself is why do you keep letting the pattern repeat itself without blaming someone else or the circumstances. That usually unveils a hidden pattern which you can use as a starting point to plot a more successful course.