Anything that is widely and blindly handed down from management and self help gurus should always be scrutinized. I just read an article about why skepticism is healthy with regard to the rampant carpet bombing of goal setting mania. Researchers found goal setting itself is not magical. If the goals are poorly chosen, or not placed within an overall healthy context, they can lead to more problems than they resolve.
Human beings are too complex to have simple minded solutions that produce consistent results. Give one person a goal of a minimum number of blog posts per week and she might thrive on it, producing good, consistent work. Another person meets the quota but with lousy results. I think the point of all this is that goals are more useful if you have FEEDBACK. Otherwise, the complexity of the environment can cause a push back in ways you wouldn’t expect.
Anyways, here’s a summary of the research paper.
And I have a couple of words to say about big hairy goals.
2 Comments
I like your point, which is basically that even though goal setting is a good thing, when it’s done in the wrong way, it can be incredibly harmful! For example, we could feel incredibly defeated and like failures when we fail to achieve goals which are too much for us to achieve in the first place!
Hi Dan. Yeah, goal setting is useful tool. But like other tools it can be misused. I thought the paper made some good points. I think the reason we have a silver bullet fetish is that we crave certainty. Uncertainty ain’t so bad…