Welch had given his aircraft manufacturing division a stretch goal of reducing errors by 70 percent, an objective so audacious the only way to go about it was to change nearly everything about (a) how workers were trained, (b) which workers were hired, and (c) how the factory ran. By the time they were done, the Durham plant’s managers had collapsed organizational charts, remade job duties, and overhauled how they interviewed candidates, because they needed people with better team skills and more flexible mindsets. In other words, Welch’s stretch goal set off a chain reaction that remade how engines were manufactured in ways no one had imagined. By 1999, the number of defects per engine had fallen by 75 percent and the company had gone thirty-eight months without missing a single delivery, a record. The cost of manufacturing had dropped by 10 percent every year. No SMART goal would have done that.
Numerous academic studies have examined the impact of stretch goals, and have consistently found that forcing people to commit to ambitious, seemingly out-of-reach objectives can spark outsized jumps in innovation and productivity. A 1997 study of Motorola, for instance, found that the time it took engineers to develop new products fell tenfold after the company mandated stretch goals throughout the firm. A study of 3M said stretch goals helped spur such inventions as Scotch tape and Thinsulate. Stretch goals transformed Union Pacific, Texas Instruments, and public schools in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. Surveys of people who have lost large amounts of weight or have become marathon runners later in life have found that stretch goals are often integral to their success.
Stretch goals “serve as jolting events that disrupt complacency and promote new ways of thinking,” a group of researchers wrote in Academy of Management Review business journal in 2011. “By forcing a substantial elevation in collective aspirations, stretch goals can shift attention to possible new futures and perhaps spark increased energy in the organization. They thus can prompt exploratory learning through experimentation, innovation, broad search, or playfulness.”
There is an important caveat to the power of stretch goals, however. Studies show that if a stretch goal is audacious, it can spark innovation. It can also cause panic and convince people that success is impossible because the goal is too big. There is a fine line between an ambition that helps people achieve something amazing and one that crushes morale. For a stretch goal to inspire, it often needs to be paired with something like the SMART system.
The reason why we need both stretch goals and SMART goals is that audaciousness, on its own, can be terrifying. It’s often not clear how to start on a stretch goal. And so, for a stretch goal to become more than just an aspiration, we need a disciplined mindset to show us how to turn a far-off objective into a series of realistic short-term aims. People who know how to build SMART goals have often been habituated into cultures where big objectives can be broken into manageable parts, and so when they encounter seemingly outsized ambitions, they know what to do. Stretch goals, paired with SMART thinking, can help put the impossible within reach.
In one experiment conducted at Duke University, for instance, varsity athletes were asked to run around a track and, when signaled, get as close as possible to a finish line 200 meters away within ten seconds. The runners in the study all knew, simply by looking at the distance they were being asked to cover, that the goal was absurd. No person has ever run anything close to 200 meters in ten seconds. The athletes made it 59.6 meters, on average, during their sprint.
A few days later, those same participants were presented with the same task, but this time the finish line was only 100 meters away. The goal was still audacious—but it was within the realm of possibility. (Usain Bolt ran 100 meters in 9.58 seconds in 2009.) During this trial, the runners made it, on average, 63.1 meters in ten seconds—“a large difference by track and field standards,” the researchers noted.
This difference in performance was explained by the fact that the shorter distance, while still challenging, lent itself to the kind of methodical planning and mental models that experienced runners are accustomed to using. The shorter distance, in other words, allowed the runners to participate in the athletic equivalent of breaking a stretch goal into SMART components. “All runners in our sample engaged in regular workouts,” the researchers wrote, and so when confronted with running 100 meters in ten seconds, they knew how to wrestle with the task. They broke it into pieces and treated it like they would other sprints. They started strong, and paced off other runners, and then pushed themselves as hard as possible in the final seconds. But when they were confronted with running 200 meters in ten seconds, there was no practical approach. There was no way to break the problem into manageable parts. There were no SMART criteria they could apply. It was simply impossible.
Experiments at the University of Waterloo, the University of Melbourne, and elsewhere show similar results: Stretch goals can spark remarkable innovations, but only when people have a system for breaking them into concrete plans.
This lesson can extend to even the most mundane aspects of life. Take, for instance, to-do lists. “To-do lists are great if you use them correctly,” Timothy Pychyl, a psychologist at Carleton University, told me. “But when people say things like ‘I sometimes write down easy items I can cross off right away, because it makes me feel good,’ that’s exactly the wrong way to create a to-do list. That signals you’re using it for mood repair, rather than to become productive.”
The problem with many to-do lists is that when we write down a series of short-term objectives, we are, in effect, allowing our brains to seize on the sense of satisfaction that each task will deliver. We are encouraging our need for closure and our tendency to freeze on a goal without asking if it’s the right aim. The result is that we spend hours answering unimportant emails instead of writing a big, thoughtful memo—because it feels so satisfying to clean out our in-box.
At first glance, it might seem like the solution is creating to-do lists filled solely with stretch goals. But we all know that merely writing down grand aspirations doesn’t guarantee we will achieve them. In fact, studies show that if you’re confronted with a list of only far-reaching objectives, you’re more likely to get discouraged and turn away.
So one solution is writing to-do lists that pair stretch goals and SMART goals. Come up with a menu of your biggest ambitions. Dream big and stretch. Describe the goals that, at first glance, seem impossible, such as starting a company or running a marathon.
Then choose one aim and start breaking it into short-term, concrete steps. Ask yourself: What realistic progress can you make in the next day, week, month? How many miles can you realistically run tomorrow and over the next three weeks? What are the specific, short-term steps along the path to bigger success? What timeline makes sense? Will you open your store in six months or a year? How will you measure your progress? Within psychology, these smaller ambitions are known as “proximal goals,” and repeated studies have shown that breaking a big ambition into proximal goals makes the large objective more likely to occur.
When Pychyl writes a to-do list, for instance, he starts by putting a stretch goal—such as “conduct research that explains goal/neurology interface”—at the top of the page. Underneath comes the nitty-gritty: the small tasks that tell him precisely what to do. “Specific: Download grant application. Timeline: By tomorrow.”
“That way, I’m constantly telling myself what to do next, but I’m also reminded of my larger ambition so I don’t get stuck in the weeds of doing things simply to make myself feel good,” Pychyl said.
In short, we need stretch and SMART goals. It doesn’t matter if you call them by those names. It’s not important if your proximal goals fulfill every SMART criterion. What matters is having a large ambition and a system for figuring out how to make it into a concrete and realistic plan. Then, as you check the little things off your to-do list, you’ll move ever closer to what really matters. You’ll keep your eyes on what’s both wise and SMART.
“I had no idea how what we were doing would affect the rest of the world,” Kerr told me. GE’s embrace of SMART and stretch goals has been analyzed in academic studies and psychology textbooks; the firm’s system has been imitated throughout corporate America. “We proved you can change how people act by asking them to think about goals differently,” said Kerr. “Once you know how to do that, you can get pretty much anything done.”
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