Set Goals and then Check Your Progress

Check Your Progress

Many startups mistake the activities and outputs of their work as outcomes, which is dangerous. You need to make sure that you finish tasks against your goals to make progress. It is easy to fall into the habit of doing work without getting any results. You need to set focused goals, look for key results, and learn to set new goals based on what happens. There is a difference between what you think would happen and what actually happened as a way to set new weekly goals. We cover the Kanban system as an approach that will help you question whether your goal-setting methods are working.

How Do We Set Goals?

Setting goals isn't just about getting things done, it's about learning. As adults, we have to take structured time to reflect and learn. A piece of this is that you take your goals from last week and ask yourself what your goal was. Many founders will find that they often don't have a goal, they're just doing stuff as it comes. That's a problem because it throws them into a trap of motion versus actually making progress. In order to maximize your goal setting, you need to understand your previous results. You can do this by keeping note of the objective, expected key result, actual result, and the gap that kept you from meeting the objective.

It's important to confront the gap to meeting your goals with honesty so that you can take advantage of what you missed. The reason you want to write this down is because writing it down is huge. Wired into our brain is the hindsight bias. What happens is that it makes surprises vanish. When we experience things in life, our brain is wired for the reaction of just about what we expected would happen. The hindsight bias is important for most of our lives otherwise we would be living in a state of constant fear and surprise as to almost everything we encounter. However, in this context, the hindsight bias robs us of our learning because learning happens in between confronting what we expect will happen with what actually happens. If you don't do that, you don't learn.

This is a fundamental part of the scientific method. Another essential component of this is when a scientist goes, "Huh!" That is super important to note because all the big breakthroughs in science generally happen when a scientist goes "Huh!" And they go "Huh!" because they are confronting what they expected would happen with what actually happened in the lab results. So don't rob yourself of being able to go, "Huh!" Magic is inside of there. You will find insights into how your business works when you hear that. So you want to note the learnings and reactions you want to consider as you set your new goals for this week.

Then think about what advice you would give yourself based on those learnings. Learning is great but learning applied is what you are really after. Based on that learning, what advice did you give yourself on how you should operate, goal set, and focus for the next week? Think about the implications and how key results will tie into a given outcome. You also want to ask yourself why you are setting that specific goal. Why is it important to your business that you achieve this objective? What will you learn from this goal? Why are you doing it? Initially, when you're small, communication is all through osmosis - you're all on the same page. As you scale, you will need to become a storyteller.

By taking the time to think about how you set goals, you will improve the way you structure your thinking and it will also help you tell the story. Once you have clarity on what your goal is, you will have a list of to-dos. It's human nature to jump straight to the to-dos, and that's a great way to get a lot of motion but not necessarily much progress. It's important to acknowledge that there are unknowns, risks, obstacles that will get in the way of achieving your to-dos. As you move on to work on your goals, remember that checking in, not just setting your goals, is the most important thing, the one that actually drives progress in your business.

How Do We Make Progress on Our Goals?

Knowing what we can do today that will provide customer value is paramount to the items due next week. Manage your workflow so that you are continually doing work that provides customers with value while looking ahead to upcoming work that moves your objective and key results forward.

If you aren't making progress on your goals, however small or large, you are not making progress for your business. Goal setting is great, but it is ultimately about getting the work done that's inside the goal. So how do we do that? You can create a Kanban board, which is a really powerful way to visualize your work. This method comes from lean manufacturing. Leading auto manufacturers, such as Toyota and Lexus rely on this technique for driving value. What happens is that when they run low on parts, they put a card inside that bin, and when the parts go down, the card goes up, and that's a signal to the manufacturing piece right before it that more parts are needed. So they take that card, called signal cards, or Kanban in Japanese. This system is a combination in knowledge work designed to identify bottlenecks inside the company. The way this works is that you read these boards from right to left as you do work. The reason you do this is because the things closest to the right are closest to customer value. The idea is that the thing closest to the customer is the next thing that needs to happen. The system is designed for you to finish things, not just start them. You will achieve results when you finish things, which is why this system is designed to help you finish what you start.

A big piece of this system is visualizing work. It's so easy in knowledge work to just think you have things covered since you're working on stuff, but not realize how many tasks are begging for you to complete them. This can freeze and overwhelm you, which is why the Kanban method is a powerful tool that helps you keep all of those tasks in order. As you adopt systems like these, always ask yourself if it is supporting your progress. If it doesn't then change your approach.

How Do We Get Work Done Faster?

One of your greatest challenges is to establish and maintain a consistent flow of work: one that is set up to finish work before moving on to the next thing. It is crucial that you find that flow, prioritize it, and understand the consequences of saying "yes" to too many things.

One of the goals of the Kanban system is to get work to go as fast as possible. When you're thinking about your work, I encourage you to think about it like a banana. You don't want to pick a banana if it's just going to sit around and not actually get to someone, because bananas will rot. In your context, what is rotting is the knowledge that you are learning everyday, which may change the scope of the work that you need to do. So if you start something (if you pick it), start working on it, learn five things that make that thing irrelevant, and put it away.

The way we make sure that we get the banana to a customer before it rots is to make sure things are moving through very smoothly. When you think about a highway and you put more cars on the highway, nobody moves. We're doing that to ourselves all day long. Every time you say, "Yeah, I'll start that," you're putting another car on your mental highway and your mental highway gridlocks at about two to three cars. So if you're concurrently working on about two to three things, you're going to get a dramatic decrease in the effectiveness of the work you're doing.

If you're putting seven things on your plate, all you're doing is just worrying about the seven balls you are juggling. The way to improve this is by not trying to juggle everything. You also don't want to run ambulances down your highway. In other words, it's very tempting to stop everything else to focus all your time and energy on one single emergency task. Every time you run an ambulance, just like a regular highway, no matter how fast the highway is moving, it will come to a halt. And it takes a long time for that flow in the highway to come back to normal. Remember that the purpose of the Kanban methodology is all about finishing tasks, not starting them. Remember that you aren't a superhero - prioritize and delegate!