How to set good goals

Setting goals

Setting goals and determining your vision is usually the first step that you take towards your system analysis.

This is where the project’s externally applied edge-conditions find a home, including stakeholder demands, time, and budget restrictions.

The goals determine our final destination. They are usually set with your entire team including the client and later revisited with the stakeholders, if applicable. Your goal is the dot on your horizon to aim for.

It is important to realize that you can have a goal for your intended project, as well as a separate goal for the method cycle you are about to begin.

Good goals

A bad goal distracts you from what’s important, and a good goal keeps you motivated. Good goals are expressed on a system level and performatively.

For example, a good goal is: “Our goal is for our company to maximally contribute to a sustainable society:”. Here, as a sustainable society is a system your goal reflects on, the company is the object within the system to improve, and maximally contributing to the system’s sustainability is the performative aspect.

Setting goals on a system level

Setting goals on a system level often means the system goals can get a bit broad and generic. This is okay. The sub-goals will provide further refinement.

One thing to keep in mind: do not limit the ambition of the overall systemic goal.

You have to be ambitious to be successful, and when we say ambitious, we don’t mean: “I want to make a lot of money from this project.”

We want to convey that you need to Overstate your goal so that your trajectory is resilient enough to make a long-term impact, without suffering so much from outside influences (all outside the limits of the system), and then achieve what really matters.