Beware of goals

In this episode, we explore why the common notion of using goals for motivation may not be such a good idea…

Set your goals! Set up those targets! That’s the way to get people motivated! That’s the way to get results!

Actually, uh, no…

In fact, they’re often the very worst thing we could do.

We really do need to beware of goals.

---

Okay, yes, goals are kind of important in some sports, of course, if sometimes only in a rather gloomy way:

Goal (image CC-BY José Antonio Cartelle via Flickr)

Yet people miss those goals far more often than they actually hit then - and the goal itself can be full of holes sometimes, too:

Goal (image CC-BY Filippo Diotalevi vis Flickr)

And outside of the realm of sports, goals can be really risky, and as we saw in the previous episode, ‘The Performance Paradox’, targets can kill. Literally. Not A Good Idea…

So why are goals so problematic as a means for motivation? The main reason is that once the goal is achieved, they usually kill motivation stone-dead. To give a real example, US President John Kennedy set the nation a goal to land a man on the Moon by the end of the 1960s, they did achieve that goal. Yet after a few more missions over the next handful of years, enthusiasm faded away, and no more manned activities have taken place there in almost fifty years. The achievement of the goal itself was a core part of what killed the motivation, because it had been framed as a goal.

If we want motivation to continue onward indefinitely, we need to frame it in terms of a vision, as in the ISO-9000:2000 sense, or as a continuing story, as in the sense of a trade-mission. In that way, the motivation is continually refreshed and reaffirmed, and doesn’t fade away over time as it does with a goal.

---

The reason why this has been worrying me is that I’ve recently been looking in-depth at the United Nations’ global Sustainable Development Goals, and noted in the reporting that success on almost all these goals has been going backwards over the past few years. Okay, the COVID pandemic played a notable part in this, and ongoing wars in Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.haven’t helped either. Yet I do have to wonder how much of this loss has been an outcome of framing these much-desired changes as goals, rather than as ongoing missions. There was much enthusiasm, at an identifiable global scale, when these initiatives were first launched back in 2015, but over time the awareness seems to have faded away almost to nothing - viewed as Somebody Else’s Problem, perhaps, rather than as the global ‘everyone’s responsibility’ that they actually are. It seems so much forgotten now that at first I couldn’t even find any progress data at all: I had to ask a friend who worked in that field to help me find it. Its aim is tackle global-scale disasters in a sustainable way: yet it’s clear that there’s not much sustainable success as yet, and the lack of information now is pretty much disaster in itself. Ouch…

---

So perhaps the best way to summarise this is that if we need sustainable success - particularly if we’re working on large scale change - and we also need sustainable motivation to support that quest, then there’s a simple warning that we need to note: we need to beware of goals.

---