Sunday, September 9, 2012

Ready…Shoot…Aim?



It’s a clever way to describe all too common a problem.  (Obviously not a new problem, or we wouldn’t have grown up hearing “look before you leap.”)

I know we’re a more frenetic, action-oriented society today.  Whether you call it Attention Deficit Disorder or something else, we seem to have trouble taking the time to just think.  We want to be “doing” all the time.  That’s not all bad—it’s hard to “accomplish” without action.  But unless you’re exceptionally lucky, it’s hard to accomplish the right things without at least a little thinking… 

The trick is to incorporate thinking into your planning.  The process certainly isn’t going to come as a revelation, but we all need an occasional kick in the rear to remind us to follow it:

1) Define your goal--specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, timely, etc.
2) Develop a plan to achieve that goal
3) Execute the plan
4) Evaluate the result

The question I’m addressing here is whether we spend enough time on the first step.  I’d argue that we don’t.  (Or else we do, but fail to adequately communicate the goal to those involved in the subsequent steps.  But that’s a subject for another column.)

So however you want to go about it, make sure you take the time to think about what it is you are trying to accomplish.  The goal statement is your target. Without a target, your team has got nothing to shoot at.  And if they don’t have anything specific to shoot at, things are going to get pretty exciting when the guns start going off.

So enforce the process.  And start off your planning process with a definitive GOAL statement.  At least that way you’ll know that if things go awry, it’s because of poor “shooting,” and not poor “aiming.”