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Goals, vision, and indicators

In this video, Tom explains the goal-setting stage to dives deeply into the challenge to uncover the true motivation of the project.
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In this phase. We are trying to figure out what the true motivation is of our project. We’re trying to drill down to systemic understanding of what the goal is that we were trying to achieve that’s why in this phase. We are very conscious about the words that we use and how we formulate a goal in relationship to the system that we’re dealing with in addition to this here. We set boundary conditions such as how much time we have for project with what First we need to work any kind of budget of things like that.
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And in addition in especially in later Cycles, we start adding key performance indicators that we usually do on an object left together with the object indicators with the systemic goal and the boundaries we create our solution space that we will then start to be able to investigate. In this phase. We also often make a vision and the vision really is very helpful. Especially when you’re working in a team to get a shared understanding of what the potential future image of what we hope to achieve would be doesn’t need to say anything about the solution but more of what it what is the future world or or situation look like in which we have solved this problem.
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And what is it giving us and that can really lead to additional insights about different team members. Some different stakeholders, but it can also Inspire and Lead the Way in finding a more accurate goal in the process an important aspect of setting the right goal is that we set the goals on a systemic level and also that we also make our goals performative these two aspects are something that we will go in further in the rest of the course.

As we tackled in the previous week, the first step of the SiD method consists of setting the goals for a project, determining its vision, and, usually at a later stage, setting its indicators and system boundaries.

This is where the project’s externally applied edge-conditions find a home, including stakeholder demands, time, and budget restrictions. This is also the stage in which a major revision of the project usually takes place in later cycles.

Let’s recap!

The different parts of this stage are:

  • Goal setting on System, Object, and Network levels

  • Develop a vision (optional but recommended)

  • Set project and system boundary

Goal setting is usually the first step to take, but it’s not uncommon for an analysis of the context of a challenge to precede it, meaning we execute step 2 before step 1.

The goal-setting phase usually contains the following elements:

  • Set the goal for the project on a system level

  • Set sub-goals on network and object level

  • Develop a joint vision

  • Define the project and system boundaries

  • Set indicators (KPI’s) to measure against in the evaluation stage

When setting goals, we try to strictly use ‘performative’ goals of the sub-goals by developing Key Performance Indicators. With ‘performative’ we mean to identify a goal that talks about a system’s performance only, not about a physical property or static position.

Main goals are further refined with sub-goals, and as a performative goal ensures we remain focused on what truly matters. Besides, this is the stage where the boundaries are stated, in terms of the time and resources available for the project.

In more advanced iterations, we narrow down the scope and performance of the sub-goals by developing Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s).

We will explore the details of these goals ad indicators and how to identify them in the next steps.

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Systems Thinking for Sustainability: Practical application of the SiD method

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