I’m pretty sure mud pies don’t need instructions.
Photo by Infrogmation
Seriously, as kids we didn’t have to ask someone how to make genuine dirt cakes. We just scooped up some soil, added water, sprinkled liberally with imagination, and as Emeril would say, “BAM!” So what does this have to do with goal setting? I’ll explain.
For the last 3 weeks I’ve focused on Goal Setting. I mean really focused on it. And I’ve learned a lot about the process (I’ll talk more about that in a future post). For now, let’s just say that focusing on goal setting has definitely helped me move some key areas of my life forward. So that’s good, but I couldn’t ignore a gnawing feeling in my gut that something remained unexamined in the process. There was something that I just wasn’t doing regularly to move my goals forward as swiftly as I knew I could.
Measurement and Accountability
Two concepts kept coming up and refused to be ignored – Measurement and Accountability. Both are decent five dollar words when tossed into a corporate memo but worth Olympic gold when part of the goal setting process.
While my goals had evolved from vague wishes to clearly defined targets, I wasn’t really measuring my progress methodically. Instead I would go through a mental checklist of the number of meals I ate for the day, my workout routine, my daily reading and writing goals, etc. and at the end of a week if you asked me how I scored I couldn’t really tell you. I could only manage to say “better” or “a bit off” which meant little more than nothing.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?
How do you quantify “A bunch”? Imagine if football took that approach – the Cowboys scored “a bunch” beating the Redskins in the playoffs by a total of “a little.” Doesn’t really work does it? Sure a coach might tell a player after a game that he “ran like crap” but you can bet that come practice time the stop watch is out and the performance is tracked and measured. So what about the mud pie analogy? Bear with me a little longer.
So deep down I knew that I needed to get real and record this stuff but it just seemed like one more thing to do. Wasn’t I already trying to do more than I had the month before? Something else was happening. By keeping my results vague, I was subconsciously avoiding the risk of failure. I was also being lazy. But worse than risking failure is leaving the outcome to chance.
There’s a saying “What gets measured gets improved”. Not necessarily true. Measure a cup of dirt with water and you still don’t have a delicacy. What about all those clipboard carrying gym-rats? They measure. They weigh. But most avoid strategic change so they end up looking the same year after year.
Metrics give us awareness but we still must DO. Perhaps that’s the rub. Now we’re responsible for adjusting because tracking reveals the gap between current performance and what we’re trying to hit. Without a system to track actions and results, we simply cannot make the necessary corrections to progress systematically. It all becomes guesswork.
In a great article by Scott Young he puts it this way, “If you measure something, you gain conscious awareness of it. If you gain conscious awareness, you increase your ability to control it.” And we all like control don’t we? Sure, at first glance, but when we dig a little deeper we discover that control (or power) requires us to take responsibility. It means overcoming any laziness that hinders us from making it happen. So the recipe once the goal has been set becomes:
- Take Action
- Measure the Result
- Make a Decision About the Result – Continue what we’re doing? Or Adjust our action?
- (rinse & repeat)
KNOWING IS EASY. DOING TAKES GUTS.
Remember, knowledge is not power. It is the potential for power. It gives us the power to make the necessary corrections. Just knowing is not enough. Doing is what counts. If knowledge was the sole ingredient there would be very few out of shape people and a lot more world class athletes. Do. Measure. Adjust. Do differently or repeat what worked. Pretty simple stuff. Simple, but not easy.
QUALITY ISN’T MEASURED IN MINUTES.
Years ago I worked in a call center. Talk time (the duration of the call) was measured, tracked, and evaluated for each customer service representative. Unfortunately, it was emphasized as the most critical metric of each call. What wasn’t being measured was the number of customers that called more than once to resolve a single issue. So it really didn’t matter that the average call duration was two minutes if customers had to make three calls to customer service.
It would be much better to average four minutes per call if it meant that the problem was solved the first time. That’s a much better measurement. So we have to be careful that we don’t get too bogged down in the numbers and miss our overall objective. All the measuring in the world won’t turn a mud pie into a chocolate cake. It requires changing the recipe.
Bottom line: measure the important actions, hold yourself accountable, stay with it, keep adjusting, and before you know it, “BAM! Goal accomplished!
