Dramatic Breakthrough in Strategic Planning - New and Improved Innovation Blog Site:

It's been said (by poet Robert Burns) that, "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley" (since he was a Scot writing in 1785, what he meant was that the plans go often awry). 

Regardless your language, you may have noticed this pattern yourself when working with innovation teams to put together compelling plans of action.

After years of research and number crunching, the results are in on a new technique that results in a dramatic improvement in the effectiveness of strategic planning and goal implementation.

New & Improved^®,  LLC, has recently completed a five-year longitudinal study where we tracked the goals created with two different approaches.  After facilitating creative strategic planning sessions, we had the group create their plans of action and then we checked in with them regularly to determine how effectively their plans had been absorbed by the organization.

The first group of organizations (control group) used the traditional SMART goals, which required them to create specific goals for the team or organization that are: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.  Yes, SMART is a traditional and clever (smart?) acronym to help one remember what a good goal is. 

Yet for us, we didn't feel that the set of SMART criteria quite fit what we observed in organizations.  Some things were missing.  Accordingly, the second group of organizations (experimental group) used our new (& improved! ha ha!) approach to creating goals.  While the first four elements of the goal always worked for us, we found that there was an element of audacious bigness that was missing.  Given the complexity of organizations and the ability of the human mind to learn and grasp the intricacies and minute details, we tested a new criteria which we dubbed, "Mammoth" to imply a grand scale and impart a sense of impressive bigness.  We found that it made communicating the goals throughout the organization much easier, since people were compelled to ask, "huh?" when they first heard it.  The research indicates that the lack of intuitiveness of the goal creates dialogue and forces communication, both of which are obviously good.

We also felt, and our research confirmed, that being forced to meet deadlines (Time-bound) violated the typical practice of innovation.  Given how few innovation initiatives and strategic plans happen within the schedule set forth by innovation teams, (this from our observational research), we decided to test the notion of allowing a degree of flexibility in adhering to schedules.  It's rather similar to Clayton Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma" scenario, where the strong adherence to a fixed target means that the team sometimes misses market shifts.  Our research team decided that we needed something that allowed the malleability that today's jam-packed schedules required.  So rather than time-bound, we tested the concept of a "Yielding timeframe" criteria.  This allows for the extensions, schedule slipping, and when necessary scope-creep that so many organizations require and in fact seem to encourage.

When all was said and done, we were surprised at the research results of this readily-observed approach to creating strategic plans and goals.  Our research has definitively concluded that goals that are Specific, Motivational, Agreeable, Rewarding, Mammoth and Yielding are far more likely to be integrated and absorbed by the organization, much like the elements of a contusion are absorbed by the healthy tissue that surrounds it.  Which is why, on April 1, 2010, we are confident enough in our research to declare SMARMY goals the next big thing in strategic planning.

What are your SMARMY goals?