chapter 4
What goals do you want to achieve?
Supercharged teams have a laser focus on a shared goal, and everything they do is in service of it. However, sometimes people think they’re working towards the same goals, but either haven’t agreed on them, or interpret the same goal differently.
If you’ve ever worked on projects that involve ‘digital’, ‘sustainability’ or ‘personalisation’, you will know that people use the same words to describe completely different things. To work together well, a team must clearly define their objective and work out the best way to achieve it. A crucial stage in supercharging your team is defining what successful outcomes look like. The tools in this chapter will give your team a clear and aligned direction so that you are all working towards the same goals.
What you will learn in this chapter:
- • How to define the outcomes of your project, as well as the outputs
- • How to create a powerful, compelling vision of what success looks like for your team
- • How to ensure your team’s objectives are motivating and understood by everybody in the same way
The difference between outputs and outcomes
In marketing projects, my objectives are output-based, with specific deliverables like ideas, innovations and decisions, but when I started working in the public sector, I heard people use the word ‘outcomes’. The difference is that outputs are ideas, decisions and initiatives, and outcomes are what actually happen in people’s lives as a result of the work.
When I interviewed Inspector Marcus Cator of the Hampshire Constabulary we talked about how the police set targets and plan what they want to achieve. Marcus told me that there has been a shift away from output-based policing targets (such as how many arrests are made) because arresting people does not always mean that the causes of crime are dealt with. Even though the police still need to solve crimes and arrest criminals, they have more outcome-based targets, such as addressing the causes of crime, keeping vulnerable people safe, and working with the wider community to share responsibility for keeping people healthy and happy so they don’t find themselves in a situation where they turn to crime.
Tim Ferguson is CEO of Audience, and his team delivers big corporate events. He says if results are tangible and can be quantified, they are outputs. If they are attached to feelings or emotions, they are outcomes. Tim says that we can become fixated on the outputs (did we run to time, did we give all the updates we planned?), but forget the outcomes of such events (did we help them to develop stronger relationships with each other?). Tim says we must not underestimate the relevance of outcomes, such as trust and authenticity, as key drivers to outputs.1
In our teams, especially when we are under pressure, it can be easier to focus on the outputs and deliverables, without considering the outcomes. Outcomes are what can actually be achieved as a result of the team’s work – they can be a more strategic view, or deliver culture change or impact in people’s lives. Outcomes are often more emotional and motivating than outputs. I believe that a crucial stage in agreeing the team’s ambition is defining what both the outcomes and outputs should be.
Envisioning success
Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.
Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919)
Visualisation has long been a part of elite sports: Team USA, the United States Olympic team, took nine sports psychologists to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.2 Olympic athletes train to achieve peak physical performance, and they also train mentally for winning, by visualising what success looks and feels like. So powerful is visualisation that research has shown that it can improve physical performance whether or not the person visualising is also undertaking physical strength training.3
All supercharged teams envision their success. Visioning is a powerful way for a team to define what success looks and feels like, the possible positive outcomes that the team can create. If you focus first or only on the team’s outputs and deliverables, you lose the potential to motivate your team with a wider purpose. When we create a positive vision of a successful future outcome, the outputs and deliverables fall into place.
The key to visioning success is to create an ambitious goal based on an idealistic vision, to help teams perform better. Education research has shown that if you have low expectations of someone, they will fail to achieve even those, whereas if you have high expectations of someone, they will meet if not exceed them. This is known as the Pygmalion or Rosenthal effect, and studies suggest that it is similarly impactful in the workplace.4
Teams that are clear on a shared vision excel, and those without a meaningful or clearly worded vision limit their performance.5 Committing to goals improves performance, and if those goals are challenging and ambitious, they can raise performance levels, which is why at Google they deliberately set objectives that are ambitious and uncomfortable.6 Setting ambitious, idealistic or uncomfortable goals is an excellent way to make your team want to achieve more, which means they do achieve more.
The HIVE Portsmouth
Visioning success
Volunteering is good for you. Research shows that volunteering is enjoyable, gives a sense of personal achievement, and makes people feel they are making a difference. Volunteers improve their wellbeing and feel less isolated.7 So why don’t more people do it? We know it is hard for volunteers to find the right opportunities to suit their skills and time, and part of this is not knowing what opportunities are available to them.
I led a visioning workshop on volunteering for residents and community groups in my local area. We asked people to draw the ‘perfect world of volunteering’. It took a little time for people to warm up, but soon we had drawings of stick figures being active and connecting with each other and their community, and out and about in nature. At the centre of one of the pictures, someone had drawn a beehive and explained that the bees were people being busy, pollinating different flowers by sharing information, and the centre of that was a hive where everyone could come to be connected with each other and their community. In our perfect world of volunteering, people felt needed, sociable, full of energy, and the hive in the centre made that happen.
Out of this idealistic vision came the idea for a charity to share information across voluntary organisations, connect people with the right opportunities, and build that strong, happy and connected community. A year after that idealistic vision was created, the HIVE Portsmouth became the hub that coordinated the city’s community response to the COVID-19 crisis, a response made possible by an army of local volunteers.
Great dreams aren’t just visions, they’re visions coupled to strategies for making them real.
Astro Teller8
Tool 7
Five futures
The five futures tool creates a successful vision of a project, supercharging it to drive optimism, energy and motivation towards a successful outcome. The key to any visioning exercise is to be ambitious, optimistic and idealistic at first. When a team creates what an incredibly positive future looks like, putting all their hopes, aspirations and emotions into that vision, they create their own ‘moonshot’, a term now used for very ambitious goals.9
Thinking about five years in the future when your team has been incredibly successful, choose one of these five questions to answer as a team:
- 1What are the five best outcomes our team will have achieved? (These are the big, meaningful consequences that changed people’s lives.)
- 2What are the five best ideas or initiatives we will have created? (These are the specific things we have created – any great ideas, however wishful or impossible go here.)
- 3Who are the five people who will have most benefited from our work and how? (These are the different types of customers, clients or residents we will help.)
- 4What are the five most important lessons we will have learned as a team? (These are the ways of working that made our team great.)
- 5How will our five most successful decisions have happened? (This is the journey the project took, and what we were able to overcome.)
The reason we ask for five is because it makes you go beyond the first few more obvious answers and stretches people’s thinking to be far more ambitious. Visioning is a creative exercise for inspiration, not strategic alignment. Once the team has explored the optimistic possibilities and created possible outcomes, they can then use the Project navigator tool later in this chapter to agree on the specific outcomes and outputs of the team.
Other visioning techniques include creating a front page of a national newspaper in five years’ time, or creating a perfect world as we did in the case study. Whatever the technique, putting people into a mindset of powerful future possibilities is incredibly motivating for a team.
Reframing your objective
When we define our team’s objectives, people use the same language to mean very different things. The bigger the topic, the broader the subject, the more I have found that people assume they mean the same thing when they don’t. This means that for the hardest topics we make the worst assumptions.
A case in point is overuse of the word ‘digital’. In a report commissioned with industry leaders, nine out of ten companies surveyed claimed they were undergoing digital transformation, even though only a quarter of them admitted to knowing what it was.10 Digital transformation means different things to different people,11 and what is ironic is what holds back digital transformation really comes down to culture and people, rather than digital skills.12
So, while we might start with an objective like ‘To digitally transform our company’, a reframed objective that would achieve a more successful outcome could be ‘To help the people in our company embrace new digital ways of working’. The first is based around the topic (digital transformation), and while it may be accurate, it is a limited, basic view of the objective and does not help us move towards a solution. The second is better because it is richer and helps to frame the importance of people in achieving a successful outcome (helps people change their attitude to digital transformation).
In his book Who do you want your customers to become? Michael Schrage talks about ‘The Ask’: how successful companies reframe their objective in terms of how they want their customer to evolve. So like Starbucks, who wanted customers to become discerning coffee drinkers, or Google, who wanted its users to become partners and collaborators in finding information, companies can achieve huge success by considering what they want their future customers to experience, believe or become.
Tool 8
Reframe your aim
Ask a boring question, get a boring answer. Ask a motivating question, get a motivating answer. And if you can ask a supercharged question, you are more likely to create a supercharged answer. This tool is about rewording your team’s objective in a way that makes it more meaningful, more inspiring and more ambitious.
As a team, reframe your project objective by creating new versions through these lenses:
- 1Reword the objective as if you were explaining it to a five-year-old child or an alien from another planet.
- 2Reword the objective as if you were a well-known company or personality.
- 3Reword the objective as if you had all the money or resources in the world.
- 4State the objective as if you had no money or no resources.
Once you’ve collected your reframed and reworded objectives, choose the best wording and frames to create one powerful, reframed aim for your team.
Example:
Reframe Your Aim
Original objective: To Digitally Transform Our Company
| Five-year-old child | To help everyone learn how to use computers and the internet better so that we can beat the robots |
| Alien from another planet | To help humans to communicate their culture and intelligence into the future and explore life beyond earth |
| Well-known company (Netflix) | To deepen the emotional experience our people feel when digital technology helps them |
| Well-known personality (Margaret Attwood) | To free workers from the slavery of routine tasks and unnecessary mental load, so that they have more time to dedicate to fighting injustice and creating better lives |
| All the money | To give every single person in the company the highest spec digital makeover to give them every technological enhancement possible |
| All the resources | To teach every employee everything they need to deeply understand and learn everything that technology has to offer them in their work |
| No money | Tell everyone they have to teach themselves how to transform their own job to be more digital, or leave the company |
| No resources | Switch off all non-digital communication tomorrow and let people catch up if they can themselves |
| Important reframed angles | Communicating culture and intelligence Deeper emotional experiences Freedom from slavery and drudgery Digital enhancement Teach themselves |
| Final reframed aim | To perform a deep digital makeover for every individual in the company so they can experience the benefits of a successful digital transformation at first hand |
Project scoping
Some of the biggest failures are projects where the project scope was not fully agreed, or changed massively after it had started. I once did a three-month innovation project for a toothpaste brand, creating a new six-point benefits checklist, new ingredients and benefits to sell a premium innovation. At our debrief, the senior stakeholder was disappointed. He said that what he had really wanted at the beginning of the project was an innovation that would create a new red pack to stand out on a shelf. Unfortunately, he hadn’t told us that.
To help avoid just such a situation, successful companies like Unilever use a scoping template that follows the same structure for all projects, and is signed off by all team members and stakeholders before the project gets underway.
Tool 9
Project navigator
Building on all the best scoping tools and templates from the different teams I’ve worked in, here are the main points your team must align on at the beginning of a project – and keep coming back to as the project evolves. Even agreeing on the journey so far can be important. The story people tell has a huge influence on the approach your team takes. Feel free to use the business terms in the second column if more appropriate.
| Journey so far | Context | The reason we are here today, what has happened so far to get us here, the context of the market, the background of the team or business and why this is more important now than it was before |
| Destination | Objective | The end goal of our project or team, what’s in it for us and what will we create or make happen as a result |
| Guides | Assumptions | We are guided by these beliefs, values and assumptions |
| Gifts | Resources | The talents, powers, resources, time, people, tool and budget we have for this journey |
| Roadmap | Plan | Where we plan to go, how we will get there and the timing of our journey |
| Traps | Out of scope | Where we will not go, risks we will avoid and where we won’t spend our time or attention |
| Treasure | Outputs | What we aim to create or find, the prize of success, what we plan to win or achieve and what we will deliver |
| Destiny | Outcome | What this journey means, how this journey will make the world a better place, the possible future we will create when we get this right and the ideal outcome |
Make your goal big and clear
The best teams work towards a singular goal, and the most ambitious goals inspire the best results. Going beyond a basic business objective to align on a project ambition that creates successful outcomes and then scoping the team’s work well is the foundation for a supercharged team to achieve success.
Key take outs
- • The human benefits (outcomes) of your project are as important to the success of your team as the business objectives (outputs).
- • Your team will achieve more if they are working towards ambitious goals based on a compelling vision of success.
- • Properly scoping your project and agreeing clear objectives that are understood by everybody in the same way are key to delivering a project that achieves its goals.