Set yourself up for success with highly ambitious goals

Two incidents happened last week. The first was Leicester City winning the Premier League in the UK. At the start of the Barclays Premier League season, the chances of Leicester City winning soccer’s richest league were considered as remote as aliens landing on the moon.

The second was billionaire reality TV star Donald Trump completing his transformation from long-shot White House candidate to presumptive Republican presidential nominee after his commanding win in Indiana’s primary forced his main rival Ted Cruz to drop out of the race.

The New York billionaire, who has never held public office, had repeatedly defied pundits’ predictions that his campaign would implode.

He prevailed despite making outrageous statements along the way that drew biting criticism but still fed his anti-establishment appeal. He can now prepare for a match-up with Hillary Clinton in the November 8 election.

The two incidents reminded me of Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs).

The idea of a BHAG was coined by Jim Collins in his book Built to Last. It is supposed to be big and audacious. To external people a BHAG may seem questionable or even improbable.

So I did a bit of research into the matter. I came across two psychologists Gary Latham and Ed Locke, who have studied BHAGs over the last 40 years. They found that challenging goals tend to increase motivation and performance relative to more easily attained goals.

I was amazed that, in fact, a large body of psychological research supports the idea that BHAGs tend to be better than smaller goals for a variety of reasons.

The power of the BHAG is that it gets you out of thinking too small. A great BHAG changes the timeframe and simultaneously creates a sense of urgency. It is a real paradox. So on the one hand, you’re not going to get a BHAG done in three years.

You’re not going to get it done in five years. A really good BHAG probably has a minimum length of about a decade, and many take longer than that. Two decades. Three decades. So time frames extend to where you are no longer managing for the quarter but for the quarter century.

On the other hand, because it is so big and so audacious and so hairy it increases the sense of urgency. You look at it and say, “Oh my goodness, if we’re going to bring the world into the jet age or transform education or put a computer on every desk, then we have to get to work today with a level of intensity that is unrelenting.”

Because the only way you can achieve something that big is an absolutely obsessed, monomaniacal, overwhelming intensity and focus that starts today and goes tomorrow and the next day and the next day and the next day for 365 days and then for 3,650 days--that’s how you do it.

As I have mentioned previously in this column, immediately after university I worked as an instructor in Outward Bound. I would set for clients a BHAG to climb Mt Kilimanjaro. Standing at 5,895 metres, Mt Kilimanjaro was certainly a BHAG.

Setting that ambitious goals tended to increase satisfaction. I found that my clients who set higher goals and achieved them were ultimately more satisfied with the outcome than those who set lower goals and achieved them.

Because BHAGs are, by definition, really valuable to us, we are more likely to feel satisfied as we pursue and ultimately achieve them.

And if you think about it, that makes sense: We’re probably not going to be real satisfied if we aim low and hit the mark. We’ll probably be left wondering how much more we could’ve accomplished if we had set our sights a little higher.

A lot of exceptionally impactful companies started out solving a problem right in front of them and then discovered how big the potential contribution of solving that problem could be. And they recognised they could achieve that.

Very often for companies it’s organic how they get into that. As for me-I think that the whole entrepreneurial mindset is infused with a BHAG perspective.

So what is your BHAG?

Mr Waswa is a management and HR specialist and managing director of Outdoors Africa. E-mail: [email protected].