This is the time of year when many of us try to set goals. According to The Conversation around half of all adults set New Year’s Resolutions, but only about 10% of people stick with them for more than a few months. This article is about how we have leveled up goal setting at CapFeather to help our clients and our team achieve more. We believe in setting goals because research links goal setting to better results (compared to just operating without explicit goals). Writing down your goals seems to link to greater results than just talking about them. Writing down your goals in SMART format is commonly accepted as best practice. But SMART goals won’t guarantee you the results you want. In a landmark large scale study published only in December last year, participants who were taught how to use SMART goals reported less success with their New Year’s Resolutions than a comparison group without the training. This was so surprising to the researchers they tried to explain it away as a self reporting error. It is less surprising to us because we had already identified some issues with SMART goals. So we set out to level SMART goals into something better. Read on to find out how you can MELT to achieve your goals…
SMART goals include both ‘move towards’ (positive) and ‘move away’ (negative) motivation
If you are not familiar with the SMART acronym it stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable (or Attainable), Realistic (or Relevant) and Timed. Being Specific with your goals ensures you can identify what you are aiming for. This means you can discriminate between potentially productive actions and those less useful. Staying on track helps you to make progress faster. Making progress faster is motivating. It’s positive motivation because the more progress you make the more progress you tend to want.
Measurable is the other positive motivation offered by SMART goals. Having evidence of your progress is motivating in two ways: first you increase your anticipation of the good feelings you will get from achieving your goal, and second you have more proof suggesting you will achieve your goal. Both anticipation and belief draw you forwards to success. While the S and M in SMART create positive motivations, the ART in SMART has some issues.
A and R in SMART seems to be tautological if the R stands for Realistic. How can something be achievable but unrealistic? If the R stands for Relevant it is just as redundant. Why consider setting an irrelevant goal? More significant is working out what actually is achievable. In our experience this is a non-trivial issue. If you achieve your goals does it mean you set your sights too low? If set lofty goals you don’t achieve then how motivated will you feel as a result of your lack of accomplishment? This is complex because the issue relates to your actual competency, your perceived opportunity, and your level of control in achieving your intended outcome.
This is all bound up in your locus of control. If you have an internal locus of control you will believe your performance is down to you. You may overestimate your ability and downplay the causal effect of external factors. If you have an external locus of control you will believe you are subject to external causes and conditions. You may underestimate your ability to make a difference. In both cases it comes down to a flawed belief. You may not be able to control the wind, but you can still set your course, rudder and sails.
Some people manage this by having two levels of goals. They set ‘normal’ goals and ‘stretch’ targets. This seems inelegant because below the locus of control issue is an evaluation and forecasting problem. Even if you accurately work out what is possible for you to achieve now, accurately predicting how much or how quickly you can learn is another matter. As you learn you should improve your capability to pursue and achieve your goals because you can’t learn less!
It’s difficult to accurately predict your learning rate.
Learning tends to happen over time at different rates. You may start learning some things quite fast but then slow down your additional learning as you approach higher levels of mastery. In this way your learning is like the way a hot coffee cools down to room temperature. The closer it gets to room temperature, the slower your coffee cools. People’s rate of learning about how to fit in with a group can be like this. But learning in different fields can be the opposite. You may struggle to learn much at all at first, until suddenly making a connection or breakthrough and then your learning can accelerate. Learning to play poker or chess can be like this. You tend to lose lots of games for a long time before you start to work out any strategies to win. As you get more experience you tend to get better faster, especially as you can combine different approaches. This type of learning is also relevant for design skills. The more things you have learned, the more potentially successful combinations you can make. These two ways to learn tend to be both gradual and exponential, but sometimes learning is punctuated. You may spend a lot of time trying stuff that simply doesn’t work until you get lucky. This is essentially the strategy of kissing frogs until you find one that turns into your prince or princess. Invention works like this. Edison was reported as saying he hadn’t failed after trying hundreds of times to find a material to make a light bulb filament. Archimedes principle of up-thrust in fluid equals the weight of water displaced apparently came to its namesake suddenly in a flash of insight while he was in the bath.
We have found all three learning progressions can apply at the same time in business domains. Especially when it comes to customer strategy, marketing, sales and CX. Others have also tried to manage learning and setting. SMARTER goals are one attempt to deal with this problem by adding in Evaluate and Re-adjust. Even so, learning rate issues tend to stop some people from setting goals unless they feel certain to achieve them. They don’t want to be set up to fail. Unfortunately the Timed element of SMART goals is specifically designed to create the possibility of failure.
Timed goals put you up against a deadlines to drive urgency. If you have ever struggled to get on with things you might use deadlines on yourself. Deadlines can push procrastinators to act. The problem is they do this by prompting you to move away from the prospecting of failing to deliver by the deadline. The drive to act is negative. You get forced into emergency mode. This move away motivation tends to be more effective, appropriate and efficient in the short term. We have evolved to react quickly to avoid danger. And it is okay in short bursts to cope with a temporary crisis. But being driven by fear, anger, regret or sorrow is unhealthy in the longer term for both body and brain. Long term (dis) stress can cause heart, digestion, autoimmune and | or blood pressure pathology. It can also cause temporary mental issues like burn out, or similar to clinical mental illnesses like phobia, obsession, psychopathy, compulsion, neurosis and depression. But the worst part of operating with a sense of urgency is your focus narrows. We have found many business goals require a degree of creativity, initiative and resourcefulness to achieve. These elements diminish as your focus narrows. Often the benefits of not being distracted are outweighed by the costs of less flexibility. Being driven (away from something bad) is not as good for medium or long achievement as being drawn (towards something good).
So a few years ago we decided to try and evolve SMART goals into a process with more focus on positive move towards motivation and less negative move away motivation. Instead of driving people forward or having them drive themselves forward, we wanted them to be drawn to excellence. We started by leveraging what we know about applied psychology in business. We ended up with a process to MELT our goals. We have used MELT with our team and with clients to achieve remarkable results. One client with multi-million dollar annual revenues has increased their booked sales by more than 230% in the last twelve months. We think our results show MELT works better than SMART.
MELT stands for Measure, Excellence, Learn and Think through. Measure is similar to the M in SMART goals with the addition of the idea of using both leading and lagging progress markers. Goals involving developing good habits or replacing bad habits can be hard to measure. How do you know when you have kicked a bad habit or installed a good one? That’s why alcoholics celebrate every day sober - they cannot be sure they have kicked their habit, but they can celebrate how long they have successfully been in recovery. Excellence is similar to S in SMART goals. The idea is to identify an excellent result you aspire to achieve. We don’t attach a time frame in advance. Instead we check in regularly on progress. You can fall short of excellence but still have achieved something good or very good. You can exceed excellence and achieve something outstanding or even unique. When you MELT a goal progress is more important than getting across some kind of line before a deadline. Learn is about reframing failure into feedback. To achieve excellence you will need to identify how you expect to improve your capability. We typically learn from ‘failures’. When we succeed we merely validate we already learned something before. It is important to explicitly recognise setbacks are where you learn to increase your skill set and your operating system. Your operating system includes your beliefs about your goals, your self and your world. It includes things like your courage, curiosity, creativity and compassion. Our experience is most human elements people class as traits are often able to be developed. They are not fixed. You can improve your personal qualities. Taking action to achieve excellence helps you to improve more than just your skills. Finally Think through is about checking how your goals in different areas are likely to interact. You want to create your life to avoid gains in one goal area at the expense of losses in another.
The executive who sacrifices their health, family or ethics on the altar of their career is so common it is cliche. Thinking through is about remaining mindful of how obsession in one area of your life can have unintended negative consequences. The other side of thinking through is identifying how you can act to create synergy in your actions to achieve excellence. Can you exercise with your children or partner to make progress to health and relationship goals simultaneously? Can you build in formal training within your professional role to combine learning and career goals?
Tony Robbins on the difference between the need for having resources and being resourceful.
At the core of our process to MELT your goals is the realization everyone is resourceful to some degree. We just wanted to use our expertise in psychology to level up how goal setting is done to increase resourcefulness. In our experience MELT works really well for more significant longer term goals because it draws people to excellence.
Robert Dew is a Founding Partner at CapFeather Global with more than 2o years of corporate consulting and university lecturing in Innovation, Customer Strategy and Customer Experience. His PhD related to improving creativity in strong corporate governance environments. What he learned there is almost entirely about motivation. He has since recovered from the psychopathic application of SMART goals during his corporate career.