The Size of Your Success = The Size of Your Goals

Congratulations! You’re halfway through your journey of organizational clarity, working to lay a strong foundation for the future. You’ve done the groundwork – aligning your team, facing the facts, assessing your current landscape, and visualizing where you want your organization to be in the coming years. Now, it’s time to take the next pivotal step – identifying your Big Goals.

What is a Big Goal?
A Big Goal is a broad, long-term qualitative area of focus that is clearly relatable to the organization’s vision for the future. An organization should have no more than three Big Goals as part of its strategic plan; any more than three will overwhelm the organization and compromise the success of all goals.

Big Goals provide a clear sense of direction and purpose, inspiring your team to reach for new horizons. They are audacious, ambitious, and at times, even slightly intimidating. They push your organization to grow, innovate, and break through perceived limitations.

The Characteristics of Excellent Big Goals
Before diving into the process of defining your Big Goals, it’s crucial to understand their characteristics. Big Goals should be:

• Clear and Specific: They are well-defined and clearly stated, leaving no room for confusion. They should answer the “what” and “why.”
• Measurable: You should be able to track your progress and know when you’ve achieved your big goal. Tangible metrics help keep your team motivated.
• Challenging Yet Achievable: Big Goals should be demanding enough to inspire hard work but still within the realm of possibility. They should stretch your organization, not break it.

Identifying Your Big Goals
So, how do you begin identifying your Big Goals?

• Revisit Past Exercises: Reexamine your Visualization exercise and all the confronting reality exercises you’ve completed. Pay close attention to recurring themes and patterns – those are your Big Goals looking to emerge!
• Create Categories of Ideas: Now try to force some of the ideas together. Which ones are saying the same thing?
• Prioritize: Once you have a list of categorized Big Goals, it’s time to narrow them down to the top three. Prioritize by considering factors like impact, feasibility, and alignment with your vision.
• Refine: Hone in on your selected Big Goals, making sure they meet the characteristics mentioned above.

Don’t get caught up in perfecting the wording of your Big Goals – we’ll dive into that in our December emails. For right now, simply focus on aligning your team on the three Big Goals.

Your next move will be to figure out your Step Goals, the one-year initiatives driving your strategy. More details on this will be in our next email! For now, download our Law of 3s Template to get you started.