1: A GE worker had an idea.
He suggested to his managers that they stop outsourcing the construction of protective shields for their grinding machines, as Charles Duhigg explains in Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity.
This employee was taking part in what GE called a “Work-Out” within a struggling division that made jet engine parts.
Yesterday, we looked at a potential trap with SMART goals. Even if a goal is specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound, that doesn’t always make it worth achieving.
“Workers spent hours making sure their objectives satisfied every SMART criterion, but spent much less time making sure the goals were worth pursuing in the first place,” Charles observes.
The Work Outs were designed to “shake people out of their focus on short-term objectives,” he writes.
The rules were straightforward: Team members could suggest any goal they thought GE should pursue.
“There were no SMART charts or memos. ‘The concept was that nothing was off-limits,’” says Steve Kerr, a GE consultant and former Dean of Faculty at USC’s business school.
“Managers had to approve or deny each suggestion quickly,” Charles notes, “often right away.”
“And we wanted to make it easy to say yes,” Steve recalls.
The worker told his managers that “the factory could make them in-house for half the cost,” Charles shares. “Then he unfurled a piece of butcher paper covered with scribbled blueprints.”
A SMART goal this wasn’t.
“It was unclear if it was realistic or achievable, or what measurements to apply,” Charles writes. “But when the factory’s top manager looked at the butcher paper, he said, ‘I guess we’ll try it out.'”
After 120 days, the blueprints were professionally redrawn. The worker’s idea became a set of SMART goals, and a prototype was put in place.
“It cost $16,000,” Charles notes, “more than 80 percent less than the outsourced bid.”
The Work-Outs saved the plant more than $200,000 that year.
“Everybody gets caught up in this tremendous rush of adrenaline,” Bill DiMaio, a team leader at the plant, recalls. “The ideas that people come up with are so encouraging, it’s unbelievable. These people get psyched. All their ideas are fair game.”
GE then had Steve introduce the Work-Out program company-wide.
The main goal of the Work-Outs was to get people to think bigger.
“People respond to the conditions around them,” Steve says. “If you’re being constantly told to focus on achievable results, you’re only going to think of achievable goals. You’re not going to dream big.”
The idea quickly spread. By 1994, every GE employee had taken part in at least one Work-Out. Profits and productivity went up, and hundreds of other companies started using the Work-Out approach too.
Steve joined GE full-time in 1994 and eventually became the company’s Chief Learning Officer.
“The Work-Outs were successful because they balanced the psychological influence of immediate goals with the freedom to think about bigger things,” said Kerr.
GE needed both: the freedom to dream big and the discipline to turn those dreams into a plan.
2: So when it comes to goal-setting, is “thinking big” the answer?
Steve says the answer is both yes and no.
It starts with getting “people to identify the ambition first,” he observes.
First, decide what is worth accomplishing. Then figure out how to accomplish it.
That’s where SMART goals come in.
Once a goal was approved, the team started a formal process to make it realistic and achievable, following the other SMART criteria as well.
Breaking big objectives into manageable parts is a key part of the process.
“Stretch goals, paired with SMART thinking, can help put the impossible within reach,” Charles observes.
3: The benefits of combining these approaches were shown in an experiment at Duke University.
“Varsity athletes were asked to run around a track and, when signaled, get as close as possible to a finish line 200 meters away within ten seconds,” Charles shares.
“The runners in the study all knew, simply by looking at the distance they were being asked to cover, that the goal was absurd. No person has ever run anything close to 200 meters in ten seconds.
“The athletes made it 59.6 meters, on average, during their sprint,” he notes.
“A few days later, those same participants were presented with the same task, but this time the finish line was only 100 meters away. The goal was still audacious, but within the realm of possibility. (Usain Bolt ran 100 meters in 9.58 seconds in 2009.)
“During this trial, the runners made it, on average, 63.1 meters in ten seconds—a large difference (compared with 59.6 meters) by track and field standards,” the researchers noted.
In other words, the runners performed better when the goal was extraordinarily difficult but still within the realm of possibility.
“This difference in performance,” Charles writes, “was explained by the fact that the shorter distance, while still challenging, lent itself to the kind of methodical planning and mental models that experienced runners are accustomed to using.
“The shorter distance, in other words, allowed the runners to participate in the athletic equivalent of breaking a stretch goal into SMART components.
“All runners in our sample engaged in regular workouts,” the researchers wrote, “and so when confronted with running 100 meters in ten seconds, they knew how to wrestle with the task. They broke it into pieces and treated it like they would other sprints.
“They started strong, and paced off other runners, and then pushed themselves as hard as possible in the final seconds.
“But when they were confronted with running 200 meters in ten seconds, there was no practical approach,” they explained. “There was no way to break the problem into manageable parts. There were no SMART criteria they could apply. It was simply impossible.”
Similar results have been shown in experiments at the University of Waterloo and the University of Melbourne.
“Stretch goals can spark remarkable innovations,” Charles writes, “but only when people have a system for breaking them into concrete plans.”
That’s the sweet spot: Dream big enough to stretch what you believe is possible. Then get specific about what you’ll actually do next.
More tomorrow!
____________________________
Reflection: Think about one of your biggest goals. Is it ambitious enough to stretch your thinking, but realistic enough that you can imagine a path to achieving it?
Action: Take one stretch goal and break it into its first SMART step: something specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound that you can begin now.
What did you think of this post?
