Set Better Goals. Or Don’t!

We’re all just creatures of habit.

NOTE: As I go to publish this, I am painfully aware that 2025 has dawned in a devastating way for my colleagues, friends, and family in Southern California. And the year is promising to be a tough one for a lot of people I care very much about, in a lot of different ways. Be safe out there, folks. And be kind to each other.

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I’m not generally one to assign meaning to arbitrary calendar dates. Birthdays, anniversaries, “the ten year reunion,” whatever — never been my jam. In this way, as in so many others, I’m a weirdo.¹

But New Year’s Day is a little different. It seems to me, somehow, a little more intrinsic. Maybe it’s the proximity to the solstice and the obvious physical, environmental circumstances it recognizes. Maybe it’s just the intense importance we place on the numerical year demarcation. I don’t know. But it’s one holiday that I seem to feel in a way similar to how other people feel it. And yet...

Intellectually, I think one of the great New Year’s traditions — making “resolutions” — sucks and is for suckers. Why start doing something (or stop doing something!) on January 1st, when you could have started/stopped on November 14th? Or on Feburary 9th? Or whenever.

Sure, we feel the changing of the year, but what makes us think we can throw a switch day-and-date and change our behavior? And what could the impetus be to want to wreck up a perfectly promising new year by setting a bunch of goals we know (c’mon: we know) we won’t actually achieve?

Don’t we get enough of that at work?

Gooooooooaaaaaalllll! (Not that kind.)

I’m thinking of the word “goal” very broadly here. Even within the workplace there are business goals, creative goals, career goals, and so forth. Maybe on your team these are called “objectives,” maybe they’re called “targets.” Maybe they’re managed in a structure like “OKR” or “KPI” or “KRA” or “Growth Framework” or even something proprietary to your organization.

For the sake of this discussion, it doesn’t matter. Every system, framework, or rubric has advantages and disadvantages. Some are better suited for some organizations and types of work than others. I have many opinions about this (surprise!). But here I’m concerned with a higher-level sense of what makes a “good” goal, no matter how you might structure it.

In my experience, setting goals in the workplace is as much art as science. Good goals need to check a lot of sometimes contradictory boxes:

• They have to align with the direction of the team enough to feel logical and accumulative, but still feel forward-looking and aspirational.

• They have to be precise and well-articulated enough to actually be functional when prioritizing work, yet flexible enough to allow for the evolving nature of the work.

• They have to be measurable and accountable in a way that’s hard to manipulate.

• They have to be just the right amount of ambitious.

Said simply, goals should be meaningful, actionable, and measurable. A good goal is one that is important to the work, is something that can actually be done, and sets up parameters for measuring how well or poorly it's been executed against.

A good goal is also challenging without being dispiritingly difficult. Ambition is tough to calibrate: under-ambitious goals lead to disengagement, over-ambitious goals lead to cynicism and burnout.

Okay! Easy enough, right? Apparently not.

My boss’s goal is world peace…so my goal is world peace? Uh oh.

If we’re honest, we as creative professionals often don’t really have much direct authority to set our goals. A creative group within a larger organization may have a bit of autonomy to set some of the on-the-ground specifics about how it will accomplish its work, but any decisions about what that work is will come from the larger organization.

One way that this might be manifest is in a “cascading goal” system. OKRs basically do this by design. Other systems also include this sort of feature; I’ve worked within a couple of them.

Here’s how it goes: the individual or team at the top, senior management, whoever they are, creates a set of goals for the organization, and then they publish them to the team. Then, the next level down “cascades” some of these goals, adds some of their own, and then publishes to the team. And right on down. At the end of this exercise, the thinking goes, everyone has a set of goals for the time-period (annual, quarterly, whatever), and these goals should end up being:

• Aligned. Everybody’s pulling on the same oars.

• Transparent. They’ve all been published to the team, everyone can see what each other’s priorities are.

• Taxonomically clean. The goals sort from the general to the specific, with senior management setting high-level, strategic goals and each layer of the team adding critical tactical, execution-oriented detail.

Makes sense, right? It does! And one can imagine it really working well. But, at least in my experience, it’s…more complicated than that.

First, and most obvious, is that it runs a serious risk of violating Boyd’s First Law of Goal Setting™: do not take as a goal something that you are not in control of achieving. If you are required to cascade a goal like “ship the project on time,” you’re in trouble.

As I said, a good goal is “precise and well-articulated.” At the top level, “ship on time” is a fine way to align the organization with its business imperatives. But it’s hardly a way to describe the behavior of the folks on the ground doing the work, nor any way to hold them accountable (positively or negatively).

Now, I’m not suggesting at all that I should be able to set goals for me and my team that allow us to succeed even if the project fails. No, obviously all of us on a team need to be striving for the same ultimate outcome.

The problem is that a goal that I’ve been required to take, but am not in control of achieving, doesn’t actually hold me accountable for my work, doesn’t give me any tools to draw attention to places where I see risk developing, and — worst of all — doesn’t give my bosses and their bosses any meaningful insight into the actual state of the project.

Alignment is good. Blind compliance, not so much.

There are enormous pressures on those top-level goals. Being required to propagate an inappropriate or poorly formed goal is not a recipe for success. If your VP, or Exec Producer, or DPD, or whoever is setting those top level goals does it poorly, hey, there’s probably a lot wrong with the organization anyway.

But even if they create goals that are good at the top level, they might then become so full of their own “vision” that they insist teams take these same goals irrespective of their relevance to the actual work being done or the teams’ ability to even influence the outcomes.

This is not a fundamental problem with the system; it’s a problem with how it’s used. And I can say with anecdotal confidence that it does get used this way.

And it’s pretty crap when you’re in your performance review and realize your bonus is jacked because some clown in another department made bonehead decisions and derailed your force-cascaded goals. Ah, well.

Creatures of habit.

I have seen it suggested that it’s better (or anyway, more effective) to “create habits” rather than “set goals.” I think this is probably true, though it’s always seemed to me that the first step in forming new habits is…to set a goal to make new habits.

I don’t need to be pedantic about this — I do understand the point, and generally think there’s a lot to the idea of thinking of behavior as a series of habits that can be changed, rather than goals that have to be parameterized and measured (remember, that’s a key element of goal setting).

But being all that as it may, I haven’t figured out how it applies in the workplace, beyond notions of creating a “culture of excellence” (or of “achievement,” or of “best practices”). I can imagine there might be a meaningful way to manage a team in there, but I really don’t know how it might fit into the kind of accountability/reward systems that most teams use in individual performance management.

If anybody’s seen something like this work, I’d love to know how!

Which brings us back to resolutions. Thinking of resolutions as “habits” rather than “goals” might very well be useful for each of us individually, even if we’re stuck with “goals” at work.

There’s the old saying, incorrectly attributed to Einstein, that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different outcome. Einstein never said that…and it isn’t actually the “definition of insanity” either, obviously.

But! It’s a valuable little bon mot in and of itself. Doing the same thing but expecting a different result may not necessarily be insane, but it for sure is dumb. Changing a habit (starting a new one or stopping an old one, say) means, quite literally, changing what you are doing. Once that’s the case, expecting different results starts making some sense.

Setting a goal of losing weight, and then eating the same and exercising the same and sleeping the same means you are doing the same thing(s) and expecting a different result. Dumb. Eating less, exercising more, and sleeping better mean you are changing your habits: will you therefore lose weight? Maybe. Maybe not! The physiology is complex. But you definitely won’t achieve the goal without changing the habits, so may as well start there. And then…maybe you don’t need the “goal” at all. The habits have already changed.

Deb Liu, surely a more accomplished thinker than I about such things, had a great piece recently about her approach to resolutions: Ten Ways You Can Use New Year’s Resolutions to Change Your Life. While she takes a very much more positive view of resolutions than I do, and she uses the word “goal” in talking about them, most of her advice really is about habits.

And she concludes with a sentiment that might sound a little cynical², but which really aligns with what got me thinking about all this in the first place: “The year will pass whether you do it or not.”

So, Happy New Year. My resolution was to complain less about resolutions. Off to a rough start, 2025.

1. I’m at peace with this.

2. Huh, I wonder why it resonated with me?