What qualifies me to speak on the subject of The Grammar of Goal Setting? I am a writer, not a grammarian. What's the difference? The grammarian understands when to apply the rules while the writer understands when to break them. I have as ragged a goal setting and goal achieving history as the least of you. I've tried to stick to the rules and broken many. Completely to my surprise, I have discovered some useful but often broken rules. So, I am a rule-breaker here to talk about some useful rules. I intend to do this by telling a series of stories that I hope you will find entertaining, if not wholly grammatical.

 Here's my first story: A man lost his keys somewhere along a rainy, dark street. A policeman, happening upon the man crawling around underneath a street lamp, offered to help. After a fruitless half hour, the frustrated deputy questioned the man. "Where, exactly, were you when you noticed your keys missing?" "Over there," the man replied, pointing to a dark storefront down the block and across the street. "Then why are you looking for them over here?" fumed the exasperated cop. "The light's better here," replied the man.

 Who other than me has had this sort of experience when trying to achieve goals? Sometimes I discover myself in the role of the foolish man, believing that I can achieve my goals here because the pursuit is easier here. And sometimes I am in the role of the helpful cop, questioning conception and believability. I'm pretty good at fooling myself into believing my own faulty conceptions. As Dietrich Dorner suggests, "As a rule, [an individual's reality model] will be both incomplete and wrong".

 This is our first dilemma as goal setters and achievers. Our conception of the goal is much more likely to be believable to ourselves than to others. Other's conceptions are naturally more believable to them. Both are probably provably incorrect.

How many of you have had someone else's meaningless goal foisted upon you as if it should be motivating? What did that act do to you? If you're like me, you felt embarrassed, as if you really should be motivated to meet it. Perhaps you started counting the peas on your plate. If you're at all like me, embracing this meaningless target robbed you of some of your abilities. Ones you could have invested in achieving the goal. This sort of goal setting transforms milestones into millstones. It might be correct in form but useless in application. I dedicate this talk to those of us who have been robbed of our best skills by the innocent injunctions of ignorant planners.

I am the founder of True North project guidance strategies. True North is very much like a writer in the grammarian-rich project management training and consulting world. We deal with the up front messes that many methodologies and consultancies assume away. We teach individuals and teams how to deal more effectively with their world as it is. We are pioneers in the field of Adaptive Project Management, which is the sort of project management that creates success out of the continuous mess that so often describes highly innovative environments. We define maturity as getting good at acknowledging how naive we've been rather than getting good at avoiding usually unavoidable crises.

My primary qualification for speaking on this subject is my experience with the damaging effects of meaningless objectives. Put another way, I have much experience with grammarians who apply rules without real-world exceptions. These are admittedly thin credentials. But with these credentials supporting us, I intend:
1) To remind you of the unavoidable chaos between yourselves and your goals and
2) To share a way of looking at goals that might enhance both your personal and your project community's collective ability to conceive, believe, and so achieve them.

Setting Goals
Goal setting influences goal achieving. The man with the missing key's poorly conceived search meant that he would continue looking as long as his belief held out, but this belief could not help him achieve his goal. If our mind can conceive an objective in a believable way, we can achieve it. The homily doesn't promise that we will achieve it.

Failing to achieve goals might be the result of poor goal setting, but there is no clear cause-effect relationship at play. Where our mind cannot conceive an objective in a believable way, we might lose interest in ever achieving it. Still, I'm continually astounded at how teams manage to achieve even the most poorly conceived goals. But goal setting should be something other than an exercise in challenging our teams, and conjuring up just any old objective won't easily translate into success. Whatever achieves goals, achieving them seems somehow tied to effective initial and continuing conception and confirmation. High believability at least eases the struggle.

What Brings Me Here?
My journey here started last fall, when a colleague asked for help. She and some associates had just finished one of those whirl-wind, energizing off-site meetings, where they helped several management teams define goals as a part of some enthusiastic balanced score card work. She described the resulting pile of goals as if hung-over and confessing responsibility for a large number of broken dishes after an all night party. She said that these teams had no experience managing projects, and the effort to achieve these exuberantly drafted goals looked like project work to her. Since she knew me as a project management consultant, she thought I could help. I asked her to send me a sample of the goals. Those of you who received a little blue card have a sample.

I didn't really need to look at the goals to know they would be weak. Most projects start with what I call a Bright Idea. This one was starting with a flurry of them. Bright ideas are the first approximation of the real goal. They are, as a class, vacuous, shifty, and impossible to manage. Bright Ideas are the first step in every project and they are always trouble. How the project's community copes with their initiating Bright Ideas always defines the ultimate success of their project. These goals, generated in the enthusiastic atmosphere of a celebratory off-site meeting were sure to be nasty examples of inherent unmanageability. My initial assessment would not be proven wrong.

After receiving her fax, I used a familiar heuristic for assessing her goals, the SMART test. Are these goals, I asked, Specific, Measurable, Agreed-upon, Realistic, and Time-bound? Some were. Many clearly were not. I could not SMARTly classify most of them. I couldn't classify most because I was missing the framing context. I didn't know their authors' culture.

 Those of us who travel overseas have stories of curious collisions with other cultures.
A colleague was frustrated after months of European traveling. He did not drink coffee. His wife did. After dinner, when the waiter asked who wanted coffee, he would raise his index finger and say "One." Two coffees invariably appeared. Then he happened to see a child counting out numbers on their fingers and he understood. The child started by pointing at her thumb, "One." Two found her pointing at her index finger, three, her middle finger, and so on; ending on her little finger with five. My colleague remembered how he had learned to count in the United States. One found him pointing at his index finger, not his thumb, and two at his middle finger, and so on; ending with five at his thumb! Ordering one coffee by raising his index finger gave a mixed message to European waiters, who resolved the conundrum by bringing two coffees. Thereafter, he ordered one coffee by giving the waiter a thumbs-up and only one coffee appeared.
These tangles are mostly context collisions, where our tacit assumptions antagonize each other. In reviewing this team's goals, I was missing their grammar, the means by which THEY make sense of their statements. Without their grammar, I couldn't hope to assess the functional quality of their goals.

 These goals were probably generated in a grammarless environment, anyway. Have you ever sat in the back of a bustling restaurant and listened to the conversations around you? They adhere to no rules of grammar. Enthusiastic off-site meeting communication has similar properties.

 There are grammarless languages. English isn't one of them. Grammarless languages have only a single interchangeable part of speech, which shifts according to context, order, tradition, and association. "Friend word car house" is a very different grammarless statement from "Word friend house car". In a grammarless language, everything is reduced to its simplest element. Everything becomes noun-like. The rules are simple but interpretation is very complicated. It is unlikely that anyone not fully oriented to a grammarless culture could interpret a statement as intended. This is how it was for me reviewing these goals. I could not tell their intentions because I did not know their grammar.

 What could I conclude without understanding their grammar? I could determine that most of their goals didn't make sense to me. I could also say, based upon my experiences working with teams, that this team was unlikely to consistently interpret each other's goals because English grammar does not just happen. Cross functional teams are too culturally diverse for meaningful grammarless interaction. Typically, the members of such teams agree on a grammarless goal and then head off in different directions pursuing it. I call this effect incoherence. Incoherence is the source of unmanageable projects. An unmanageable project is similar to an unflyable plane. Adding more pilots, more project management, is unlikely to affect the flyability, the potential for success. She called asking for project management help but I didn't think her teams needed project management as much as they needed some mechanical help -- something that would confirm the flyability of these objectives before her teams found themselves out of fuel at 30,000 feet.

My colleague was not pleased with this news. What would it take to provide meaningful context? Probably a healthy dose of disappointment, some steps to put their grammarless cocktail party conversation into some more conceivable and believable form. She did not welcome the idea of regathering these hungover revelers to diagram their previous night's intemperate proclamations. The last thing she wanted to do was have to assume the role of grammarian and editor to a group convinced they have just finished dictating the great American novel. And yet that was her responsibility. Either that or something worse.

I should note here that these grammatical oversights are almost always inadvertent. We writers, like the goal setters in your lives, don't mean to torture the language. We just do. Those of us who get good at writing can usually credit no small part of our success to the editors who deftly humor us into general conformance. Asserting the need for editing can take courage, especially if your careless goal setter has more power and authority than you do.

 Somewhere in the middle of this weeks-long conversation, I decided that I really needed an explicit Grammar of Goal Setting. I needed a movable context within which goals might be meaningfully framed. This talk is the result of that idea.

SMART, DUMB, or JUICY?
I started assessing these goals by looking at the SMART test. It didn't work for me. Goals that satisfied the SMART test left me feeling DUMB. They were uniformly Dry, Uninspiring, Meaningless, and Banal. Where's the juice? I wanted goals that didn't leave me feeling dumber. I wanted ones that were believable for me. Here's what I decided I want for my goals:

 I want to be able to:
Choose a compelling goal.
Describe it in such a way that
Everyone gets it,
It stays appropriately in the foreground,
It can fine tune and morph without destroying itself.
Pursue it in a self-reinforcing manner.
Change it as needed to continue making sense.
Feel like celebrating when achieving it.
Able to walk away from it if it no longer makes sense.
Avoid losing it in the noise.
Understand and acknowledge if I miss it, so I can learn from the experience.

In short, I want JUICY goals. I want goals that are Judicious, Understandable, Intriguing, Complementary, and Yellable! Why? I want juicy goals because the road between here and there is very likely to be more difficult than I believe when I set the goal. I want juicy goals because if there's nothing in the goal for me, I'll lose it in the noise. I want juicy goals because I'd rather achieve a goal then lose it.

Change:
Our choicest plans have fallen through,
our airiest castles tumbled over,
because of lines we neatly drew
and later neatly stumbled over.
Piet Hein

Goal Setting initiates change. In business school, I learned that change could be managed so that it folds in unchaotic, step-wise increments. My real-world experience has contradicted this model. My real-world experiences have more closely mirrored Virginia Satir's Change Model, which identifies six essential stages of all change: Old Status Quo, Foreign Element, Chaos, Transforming Idea, Practice and Integration, and a New Status Quo. The Change Model says that change is a Chaos sandwich between a slice of what we believe at the beginning and what we learn by the end. Passing through each stage is a normal experience, not to be avoided or vilified. Some stages come and go quickly, others linger. Each stage is unique for each change.

Old Status Quo-
We set goals based upon what we believe in Old Status Quo familiar surroundings. Here things are predictable or predictably unpredictable. It's easy from here to assume the future will extend like the present, to forget the roller-coaster ride pursuing my last goal became.

Foreign Element-
The act of setting goals creates a Foreign Element, disrupting the Old Status Quo and initiating a period of increasing uncertainty and discomfort. The Foreign Element sometimes sparks denial, where I try to extend the Old Status Quo by increasingly inconveniencing means. Whatever I do, though, the Old Status Quo eventually collapses into a period of Chaos.

Chaos-
The future looks unsettling from inside the Chaos. Hopefulness chases despair which turns around and chases hopefulness again. There are short-lived peak and equally short-lived pit experiences. It is a roller coaster ride. These experiences feel wrong.

 This Chaos period is where I most need juicy goals. Without some compelling something, I am very likely to lose my ability to believe and so lose my course. Chaos can change goals, too, and Chaos is a lousy and sometimes necessary time to have to redraft goals. Death march projects hit chaos without reassuringly juicy goals. Pursuing juiciness can make tolerable even the most unsettling Chaos.

Transforming Idea-
At some point in this chaotic swirl, and no one can predict the timing of this event, a Transforming Idea emerges. Sometimes it arrives with a big brass band leading the parade, but most often it arrives like Carl Sandberg's fog, hardly noticed on little cat's feet. Yet something changes. Pits and peaks become more regular. Peaks might become more common. The picture begins to make sense, often in unanticipated ways. A period of Practice and Integration begins.

Practice and Integration-
Goal achieving is not just about sparking Transforming Ideas. Fitting and cutting work remains before the Transforming Idea is suited to the New Status Quo. The Practice and Integration period is first similar to Chaos. We are learning. We spot level ground before attaining it. This can be the most frustrating time in the pursuit of goals, because after so much effort, predictability is still incomplete. Our earliest attempts to settle are disappointing. This stage is a dedication test. Something might even discredit the Transforming Idea before you can realize a New Status Quo, slipping us back into the Chaos we thought we had left far behind. Practice and Integration are tough.

New Status Quo-
This is where we achieve the original goal if things went according to plan. This might be where we achieve an alternate goal if things didn't go as planned. Often, in the transforming experiences of Chaos, the original goal gets transformed into something more realistic or more useful. Maybe we've learn how naive we were and adapted. This is where we integrate difference into a new base. A different familiarity emerges -- perhaps better, perhaps not.
 

The Change Model says that while we can describe where we'd like to end up, we cannot define exactly how we will get there. Our journey will surprise us, and may even fill us with despair. These are not problems but easily anticipated features of every significant change. This is the context within which all goal pursuing occurs. I cannot achieve goals without experiencing this roller-coaster ride. I have seen many attempts to engineer smooth change processes that resulted instead in surprise roller coaster rides. Better to assume a roller coaster ride than to be surprised by one.

 Good goal conception assumes a roller coaster ride because assuming otherwise contributes to unbelievability during the chaos stage, which impedes goal achieving. What contributes to good conception? What creates believability?

My colleague did not want to reassemble her goal setters because she didn't want to have to deal with the resulting chaos. How would you feel if, after you had confidently dictated the balanced score card equivalent of the great American novel, the typist began to complain about your abuse of grammar?

A Grammar For Goal Setting
Most agree that a goal makes a statement about some future experience, but not all goals are equally clear or equally distant. I see five distinct parts of goal setting grammar: Aspirations, Constraints, Regulators, Targets, and Legacies. Not all of these parts can be described SMARTly noun-like because not all are person, place, or thing-like. Some are deliberately indistinct. Some are not intended for "achievement." Some guide. Others inform. Some achievements will not be accomplished by the project, but will be occur as a result of the project having been done, long after the project is completed. Others will be met but will not persist.

Each part has its place. Misplaced, predictable tangles emerge.

Aspirations-
Aspirations are the 10,000 foot perspective on the undertaking. They are infinite and unbounded. They are the goals that we eternally pursue but never actually achieve. Because of this, Aspirations are not meant to be SMART- Specific, Measurable, Agreed-upon, Realistic, and Time-bound. They are meant to be Fuzzy, Subjective, Unattainable, Unrealistic, and Eternal. They are the antithesis of SMART.

This does not mean that aspirations are DUMB. Effective aspirations are never Dry, Uninspiring, Meaningless, or Banal. Great aspirations are the very soul of JUICY. Aspirations are the North Star by which the project navigates. No sailor ever achieves the North Star.

Some aspirations are useful to every project, but no project can long succeed on aspirations alone. Projects attempting to exist solely on aspirations are called "Objectiveless" projects because they have no objective destination. Aspirations are always assessed subjectively, in a wholly different manner than other types of goals. Examples include such intangibles as Superb Quality, Excellence, Best of Class, Maximize, Minimize, etc.

 I don't mean to suggest that Aspirations are less important than their more tangible counterparts. We should never be fooled into believing that these intangibles cannot be the real criteria upon which rests the initiative's "real" success. You must understand who's subjective nose will assess whether your project's aspirations have been satisfied.

Constraints-
Constraints are the project's outside boundary goals. These goals set limits. I think of Constraint goals as the pipeline through which the project effort flows. Budget and time goals are common constraints.

 Constraints are curious goals because they are not really achieved. What's left after you achieve a budget goal? Certainly not a budget. You have exactly no budget. How do you determine if you are "on budget?" We accomplish this by an act of projection, by creating a set of assumptions about the nature of the past and its relationship to the future. We can never know for certain if we are "on budget" until the project is complete -- and then, of course, the information is useless for constraining the project.

Constraints properly framed give our project judgment. They help us understand the limits of our investigation and the resources at hand. No project can run on Constraint goals alone without risking Objectivelessness. Mistaking constraint goals for Aspirations usually leaves a project DUMB because Constraints improperly applied are rarely juicy.

Regulators-
Regulator goals are the decisions we make in advance, before we have to make them. We decide in advance to let a certain methodology define our approach. We make these decisions now, believing that holding to them will improve the effort's flow through the pipe. Sometimes we are right.

 Strategic process decisions are usually Regulator goals. We assume our Regulator goals will help, and it is often very difficult for us to shift when we find we have incorrectly defined them. In World War One, the British leadership took years to recognize that their strategy of attempting to intimidate the enemy with massive frontal assaults no longer worked. In the same way, we often see methodologies and schedules followed as if success were simply a matter of following the defined process. Task plans and the resulting schedules are Regulator goals because they define how we think the project will unfold. In general, Regulator goals are much easier to set than achieve and very difficult to recognize as a cause of difficulty. Setting these carelessly can obstruct progress.

 Regulators are curious goals. What do you get if you achieve a Regulator? Sometimes you get a medal or ISO certified. When our Regulator goals get in the way of success, we might get a medal for having the courage to redefine them. Projects with nothing but Regulator goals are like a boat with nothing but a rudder.

Targets-
Target goals define the point where the project ends. They are the common point of convergence where all project activity ceases. They represent an instant in future time. They describe the event that unambiguously defines the end of the effort's flow through the pipe. This is the point where both Constraint and Regulator become moot because we can assess whether we satisfied our Constraint and Regulator goals, but this appraisal has no effect on anything that happens next.

We often mean Target when we say 'goal.' But Targets are not necessarily persistent after they are met. A classic Target is First Customer Shipped. After this point, the development project ends and an ongoing manufacturing process takes over. For another example, the flight I took down here earlier today ended when the airplane's wheels touched the ground. The airplane ride ended shortly after that. My trip continues.

 Targets are often otherwise meaningless points that have had unusual significance ascribed to them. A signoff by itself is pretty meaningless. Projects that have only Target goals are poorly constrained, poorly regulated, and dry. No one's going to passionately pursue a sign-off.

Targets are often usefully described as metaphors. Especially when the project's community is very culturally diverse, finding a metaphorical Target description is useful.

Legacies-
Legacy goals are ones that are achieved as a result of the effort, but only appear and may continue after the development effort ends. The project is no longer around to monitor the satisfaction of these goals, but it must have addressed these conditions to succeed. A project's product requirements usually defines Legacy goals. The project can test to determine if these states are likely to be achieved after the project concludes, but these states won't appear until after the developing project and its testing capability is gone.

 One of the goals distributed here tonight said, "Increase Census by 10%." This MIGHT be a Legacy goal, but we're missing the time period and some other details that would make the goal's intention clear. The project might be a project to develop a process that would, within two years, increase the census by 10% per year for five years thereafter. The project to develop this process might be completed in six weeks, years before the expected Legacy goal is achieved.

Most projects have Legacy Goals. Those that have only Legacy goals are poorly constrained, processless, and dry. Sometimes the Legacy goals are so numerous that they become meaningless goal swarms. Sometimes Legacy goals are so technical that they become meaningless to large portions of the pursuing community. In these instances, the judicious use of metaphor helps.

The complete Grammar of Goal Setting consists of five distinct parts of "speech": Aspirations, which are never achieved, Constraints, which bound and can be "satisfied," Regulators, which govern how we pursue, Targets, which mark the end of our pursuit, and Legacies, which define what will hold true over time as a result of having pursued. Each inhabits a distinct place in the project life cycle. Our goal setters are very likely to innocently fail to make adequate distinction when setting our collective course. Like good copy editors, our job is to clarify without losing the author's intent.

Using Goal Setting Grammar
The There There Test-
Enough theory! How might a project manager improve the manageability of a project by applying this theory in the real world? Applying the theory is exactly like good copyediting. It means risking introducing some disappointment for those who dictated the great American novel. Good grammar isn't the same as good writing, so this is not simply a matter of applying some hard and fast rules. Both author and copy editor might find application to be hard and slow. This process can be excruciating.

 I start with the There There Test. Taking a goal, I first ask if it is a Target, a description of the project's end point. Is there a There There? If yes, I put the goal into the proper form for a Target goal, which is a descriptive noun. I might choose to describe it as a metaphor if the descriptive noun is not generally understandable.

 Let's take a sample goal: Centralized Cash Management in Place. Is there a there there? Perhaps. I would clarify the Target by adding: Controller signs-off on Centralized Cash Management process. Now we have an unambiguous Target. Too technical for some? Try adding a common metaphor such as: Central Bank Opens for Business. Remember Napoleon's comment that people will not fight for complicated goals.

What will be the long term effects of Centralized Cash Management? Our Target goal doesn't say. It's often the case that discussing Targets highlights the need to clarify Legacy goals, too.

Another goal? Maximize Census. Is there a There There? No. Might this goal be an Aspiration? Perhaps. What will determine if it IS an Aspiration? Our agreement that it is. If we agree that it IS an Aspiration, we can so assign it and go on.

Another Goal? The full test starts with the There There Target test, moves in turn to Aspiration, Constraint, Regulator, and, finally, to Legacy, stopping where ever the goal seems best suited. What decides what it is? Our explicit agreement.
 

Good Writing is Not Just Good Grammar
"No one is apathetic except in pursuit of someone else's goals."

I have not been explicit about whose goals are we pursuing. I have proposed that goal achieving is eased by good goal conception and believability. I have acknowledged that, especially in the case where we pursue significant change, the pursuit will be an unavoidable roller-coaster ride which is very likely to change the goal. We have provided a framework within which to parse our goals as a means to better engineer the intention behind them. We have also reported that this parsing process is like copy editing a rough manuscript and is likely to be interpreted by naive goal setters as disruptive and disappointing. I am left after all this talk with the sense that I must be pursuing someone else's goals.

Who's goals do we pursue? The client's. The sponsor's. The company's. The division's. The bosses. The final step in the transformation of a naive goal into a juicy one happens here. (pointing to my chest) Whether the goal is classified as an Aspiration, a Constraint, a Regulator, a Target, or an After, if it's not yours, if there's nothing imbedded in it for you, your pursuit is likely to be something less than juicy.

What's in it for you? What do you want? The best goal achievers are those who find a way to use their goals as mediums for getting what they want, but they have to know what they want before they can get to that. Let's face it, increasing the Census by 10% is not going to get me salivating. But there are some things I can get pursuing that goal that will make the pursuit juicy enough for me. No one else has to know. This is between me and myself.

The best teams use their common goals as mediums for getting what each individual finds personally juicy. We cannot insist upon individuals making such choices without destroying their choice. We can only offer the opportunity, a reminder, as I am doing here. The most powerful pursuit is fueled by these personal goals within the shared, public one.
 

What ever success I have had as a writer, I ascribe to the skill of my copy editors. In the years before I could tolerate being edited, I cringed in a dark corner, terrified of their criticism. Now I rarely second guess them. I am not a grammarian. I am a writer. Most of the rules I break, I break unknowingly. What I say almost always makes sense to me, but I am not my reader anymore than most goal setters are their project teams. The copy editor improved my reader's ability to conceive, believe, and so achieve my intended result.

To recap:

Goal setting is a process of conceiving and believing.
Goal Achieving is a roller coaster ride which sometimes changes the goal.
Not all goals are achievable, nor should they be.
Care in parsing goals improves shared understanding, which improves clarity of conception and believability and contributes to achieving the goal.
Each is best served when we find something personally juicy within each goal.

david

For more information on the Grammar of Goal Setting:

For a chart describing the tangles common to grammarless goal setting, look here:

For an explicit process description for assigning goals to their proper place, look here:

For the overheads from the presentation, look here:
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Thanks, David A. Schmaltz True North pgs, Inc.