Francis Wade | A reluctance to commit to game-changing goals

As a member of the C-suite, you have no problem supporting big hairy audacious goals, or BHAGs. These game-changing aspirations separate winners from losers, helping top companies disrupt entire industries.

However, you have also been exposed to the ideas in How Big Things Get Done by Flyvberg and Gardner. They report that the global success rate of long-term projects is appalling.

According to them, fewer than one per cent of major projects actually achieve their goals in terms of cost, time and features. Famous overruns, such as the Sydney Opera House, the Montreal Olympics and the Panama Canal, reveal a huge problem in converting human aspirations into reality.

Consequently, when any group makes a game-changing commitment, they are more likely to fail than not. For example, the movie Heaven’s Gate ran years over its schedule and had no official budget. Its overruns eventually caused the demise of the United Artists film studio.

But should these facts prevent your company from making a pledge to breakthrough results? Do these statistics prove that organisations should not try to achieve great things? Here are some reasons why it still pays to aspire to game-changing accomplishments, rather than surrender to incremental improvements.

There is no backstage

There are executives who believe their company can persistently maintain the status quo without making any changes.

It’s possible they are correct, but it’s similar to writers who ignore the existence of ChatGPT. They act as if there will be no disruptions in the future. While they continue banging away on their typewriter, they predict an unchanged market for their services.

While they may talk a good game, their passivity and inaction actually combine to implement a strategy of sorts: inertia.

Unfortunately, a ‘strategy of inertia’ is likely to catch up with them, eventually. There is just no way to hide backstage forever, believing their category can’t be disrupted.

On the other hand, there appear to be a few counter-examples. Some organisations manage to temporarily escape changing technology, shifting regulations, new customer needs, fresh competitors, declining supply chains and unstable prices of inputs. But not for long.

Even in the public sector, where longevity is supposedly guaranteed, units which can’t compete are being defunded. The philosophy is called contestability and it offers further proof that non-thinking doesn’t work.

Problem-solving isn’t enough

Given that there’s no place to hide, managers have a difficult time making the transition needed once they are promoted to the C-Suite. Why?

Up until that point, they have been lauded for their ability to produce quick results.

But once they arrive at the top, their short-term mindset must take a back seat to a new capacity to create an inspiring future. Put simply, they should trade a strong point for focused effort on improving a weakness.

For leaders driven by ego, this is hard. Now, they must struggle like amateurs.

To the average new entrant to the C-suite, this all feels like a waste of time. For example, in their strategic planning retreat to craft BHAGs, there are some typical skills to employ: carefully considering goals and purposes, exploring alternatives, investigating risks, or challenging assumptions. To a new leader, these are blind-spot activities.

In fact, they may argue in support of the old Facebook dictum: “Move fast and break things.” Fortunately for the social network company, they have recently forsaken this slogan, but not after monumental failures and bitter experience.

Stop delaying the inevitable

The fact is, almost every company puts off difficult challenges which require a decade or more to resolve. Instead, the executive team habitually takes up easy-to-solve issues.

Don’t believe me? Look around your organisation. Aren’t there important long-term issues which have lingered? Why do they persist? Previous managers failed to create the BHAGs and long-term strategic plans required to address them.

This may sound like all bad news – but is it?

According to innovators Chunka Mui and Alan Kay, these are opportunities to introduce game-changing innovations to your industry. In fact, they could make the difference between being an also-ran versus taking charge of a new category of solutions.

This isn’t a magical activity. These futurists lay out a process any company can follow to predict the future by inventing it.

This may sound overblown, but imagine a Jamaica in which every for-profit company is engaged in the finest forward planning on the planet. And what if this were true of governmental bodies? NGOs? Schools? Churches? Clubs and Service Organisations?

We had the right idea back in 2009 when Vision 2030 was crafted. But Jamaicans must take another step to realise this invented future, vision and BHAGs in every organisation’s annual planning.

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Francis Wade is a management consultant and author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity. To search past columns on productivity, strategy and business processes, or give feedback, email: columns@fwconsulting.com