The Antidote (10 page)

Yet the plan not only failed to work – it made things worse. Obsessed with winning back market share, GM spent its dwindling finances on money-off schemes and clever advertising, trying to lure drivers into purchasing its unpopular cars, rather than investing in the more speculative and open-ended – and thus more uncertain – research that might have resulted in more innovative and more popular vehicles. There were certainly many
other reasons for GM's ongoing decline. But twenty-nine became a fetish, distorting the organisation in damaging ways, fuelling short-termism and blinkered vision, all so that the numbers in the business news headlines might match those on the vice-presidents' lapels. But that never happened. GM continued spiralling towards failure, and went bankrupt in 2009; it ended up taking a bailout from Washington. At the Detroit Auto Show of 2010, the firm's newly installed president for North America, keen to show how much GM had changed, used the twenty-nine campaign as an example of what it would no longer be doing. ‘We're not printing [lapel] pins,' he told a radio reporter. ‘We're not doing any of that stuff.'

It is safe to say that Gary Latham and Edwin Locke's response to ‘Goals Gone Wild' was among the more furious outbursts ever to have been published in
Academy of Management Perspectives.
Ordóñez and her colleagues were accused of being extremists, of using ‘scare tactics', of abandoning good scholarship by stringing together anecdotes, of ‘spreading falsehoods and insults', and of ‘making unverified assertions'. ‘Oh, my God!', Ordóñez exclaimed, when I asked her about the dispute. ‘My face was hot for a week. It was just so completely personal. But put yourself in their shoes. They had spent forty years doing research into how wonderful goals can be, and here we were, coming and pointing out the pitfalls. It was nothing but a temper tantrum.'

The reason all this academic infighting matters to anyone else is that the two sides represent two fundamentally different ways of thinking about planning for the future. It was unfair, as it happened, for Latham and Locke to imply that Ordóñez and her colleagues had ignored experimental data altogether in favour of anecdotes. But the real lesson of ‘Goals Gone Wild' is that the simplified conditions of the laboratory almost never apply in real
life. In most artificial studies of goalsetting, participants are faced with a single task or simple set of tasks, such as the word game mentioned earlier; some of them are then encouraged to approach the task with a goal firmly in mind, while others are not. But as the case of GM suggests, outside the laboratory – whether in business, or in life in general – no situation is ever anywhere close to being this simple. In singling out one goal, or set of goals, and striving to meet it, you will invariably exert an effect on other, interlinked aspects of the thing you're trying to change. In an automobile manufacturing company, that might mean starving your research division of funding in an effort to meet a predetermined market share. Applied to the personal realm, it might mean attaining your goals at the expense of ruining your life. During one course he taught, Chris Kayes recalled, ‘an executive came up to me at the end of a session and told me his goal had been to become a millionaire by the age of forty. That's something you hear all the time in business schools. And he'd done it – he was forty-two, so he was right on target. But he was also divorced and had health problems. And his kids didn't talk to him anymore.' Another student had been furiously training for a marathon when he first met her. She succeeded in her goal – but at the cost of severe injuries and several weeks spent housebound.

This problem goes deeper than one might think. The standard answer to it, from the proponents of goalsetting, is that these are examples of people setting the
wrong
goals – overly ambitious or overly narrow ones. Of course, it's true that some goals are wiser than others. But the more profound hazard here affects virtually any form of future planning. Formulating a vision of the future requires, by definition, that you isolate some aspect or aspects of your life, or your organisation, or your society, and focus on those at the expense of others. But problems arise thanks to the law of
unintended consequences, sometimes expressed using the phrase ‘you can never change only one thing'. In any even slightly complex system, it's extremely hard to predict how altering one variable will affect the others. ‘When we try to pick out any thing by itself,' the naturalist and philosopher John Muir observed, ‘we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.'

The thinker who probably pursued this notion further than anyone else was the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who spent a significant part of his early career studying everyday life in the villages of Bali. These villages, he concluded, owed their social cohesion and effective functioning to customs and rituals that he described as ‘non-maximising'. He meant that these traditions had the effect of discouraging villagers from focusing on any one goal at the risk of a detrimental effect on others. A Balinese ethos of frugality, for example, was balanced with a custom of occasional ritual displays of conspicuous spending, thereby preventing the quest for wealth from damaging other social goals, and holding competitiveness and inequality among villagers in check. The obvious contrast was with Western industrialised societies, where maximising economic growth had become the goal to which all else was sacrificed. If life in America or Great Britain was best compared to climbing a ladder, life in rural Bali was more like an endless but graceful tightrope walk, resulting in a ‘steady state' of social thriving geared to no particular set of goals. ‘The continued existence of complex interactive systems', Bateson argued, ‘depends upon preventing the maximisation of any variable.' This need not be taken as an argument for abandoning all future planning whatsoever, but it serves as a warning not to strive too ardently for any single vision of the future. As Chris Kayes pointed out, the mountaineers who died climbing Everest in 1996 did successfully reach their goal: they ascended to the summit. The tragic
unintended consequence was that they didn't make it back down alive.

What might it mean to
turn towards
uncertainty – to learn to develop a tolerance for it, or even to embrace it? To try to answer this question, I first sought out a recovering goal addict who I'd heard had some radical ideas on the matter.

I met Steve Shapiro in a poorly lit bar in New York's West Village, where he was drinking a pint of Samuel Adams lager, working his way through a cheeseburger, and keeping half an eye on the baseball game on the corner television. There was nothing about his appearance, in other words, to suggest that he was anything but a quintessentially all-American forty-five-year-old. His job description might have given the same impression: he was a consultant who travelled the country running workshops with businesspeople. His life unfolded in conference suites, airport lounges, and hotel bars; PowerPoint was sometimes involved. Yet behind his quick smile and open features, the real Shapiro was a kind of enemy agent, because the message he delivered ran counter to some of the most deeply cherished ideologies of American corporate life. He argued in favour of giving up goals, and embracing uncertainty instead.

Shapiro did, in fact, start out as an all-American achiever, committed to his goal of becoming a highly paid management consultant. His punishing hours destroyed his marriage. ‘I'm not sure if my goals drove me to work the crazy hours I did,' he later wondered, ‘or if I used my goals as an excuse to avoid issues in my personal life.' He tried to dig himself out of such crises by means of even more goals (at one point, he recalled, he had a five-year plan to become ‘a leader in the innovation
space '). But none of these plans changed his life. What made the difference, in the end, was a conversation with a friend who told him he spent too much energy thinking about his future. He should think of himself more ‘like a frog', she said. Shapiro was wondering whether to feel insulted when she explained: ‘You should sun yourself on a lily-pad until you get bored, then, when the time is right, you should jump to a new lily-pad and hang out there for a while. Continue this over and over, moving in whatever direction feels right.' The imagery of sunbathing on lily-pads should not be taken to imply laziness. Shapiro's friend's point was entirely compatible with his hard-charging, achievement-hungry personality; it simply promised to channel it more healthily. In fact, it promised to help him achieve
more,
by permitting him to enjoy his work in the present, rather than postponing his happiness to a point five years in the future – whereupon, in any case, he would surely just replace his current five-year plan with another. The idea triggered a shift of perspective for Shapiro that would eventually lead to his reinvention as an advocate for abolishing goals.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the companies that pay Steve Shapiro for his advice have sometimes proved resistant to this idea. (‘People looked at me pretty funny sometimes,' he said.) Chris Kayes has encountered similar opposition: ‘At any company I visit,' he told me, ‘there's always some manager who says, “You know, that stuff they did on Everest – taking huge risks, ignoring the consequences, ploughing on regardless – that's what I
want
people to be doing round here!”' Shapiro's counterargument to his sceptical clients begins with what he calls ‘the happiness and self-worth side of things': goal-free living simply makes for happier humans. In survey research he commissioned, drawing on samples of American adults, 41 per cent of people agreed that achieving their goals had
failed to make them any happier, or had left them disillusioned, while 18 per cent said their goals had destroyed a friendship, a marriage, or another significant relationship. Moreover, 36 per cent said that the more goals they set for themselves, the more stressed they felt – even though 52 per cent said that one of their goals was to reduce the amount of stress in their lives.

Bosses are more frequently persuaded, though, by Shapiro's other argument: that getting rid of goals, or focusing on them less fixedly, is often also the best way to extract results from employees. He seduces them with anecdotes about the effectiveness of operating goallessly, such as the tale of the Formula One pit crew with which he worked, whose members were told that they would no longer be assessed on the basis of speed targets; they would be rated on style instead. Instructed to focus on acting ‘smoothly', rather than on beating their current record time, they wound up performing faster. Then there was the story of the sales team that went from missing its targets to exceeding them – as soon as it became company policy to keep those targets a secret from the salespeople. ‘You can have a broad sense of direction without a specific goal or a precise vision of the future,' Shapiro told me. ‘I think of it like jazz, like improvisation. It's all about meandering with purpose.'

More recently, the benefits of a goal-free approach to business have started to be substantiated by more than mere anecdote. A few years ago, the researcher Saras Sarasvathy recruited forty-five entrepreneurs who met a predetermined definition of ‘successful': they each had at least fifteen years' experience in starting businesses, and had taken at least one company public. She presented them with a detailed hypothetical scenario about a potentially lucrative new software product. (Confusingly, it was software to help entrepreneurs launch businesses.) Sarasvathy then conducted
two -hour-long interviews with each participant, probing how they might take this promising but vague idea and make real money from it. She generated hundreds of pages of interview transcripts – and then hundreds more when, for the purposes of comparison, she conducted a parallel exercise among executives at older, larger corporations.

We tend to imagine that the special skill of an entrepreneur lies in having a powerfully original idea and then fighting to turn that vision into reality. But the outlook of Sarasvathy's interviewees rarely bore this out. Their precise endpoint was often mysterious to them, and their means of proceeding reflected this. Overwhelmingly, they scoffed at the goals-first doctrine of Latham and Locke. Almost none of them suggested creating a detailed business plan, or doing comprehensive market research to hone the details of the product they were aiming to release. (‘I don't believe in market research,' one anonymous participant told Sarasvathy. ‘Somebody once told me the only thing you need is a customer. Instead of asking all the questions, I'd try to make some sales.') The entrepreneurs didn't think like high-end chefs, concocting a vision of a dish and then hunting for the perfect ingredients. They behaved more like ordinary, time-pressed home cooks, checking what was in the fridge and the cupboards, then figuring out, on the fly, what they could make and how. ‘I always live by the motto of “ready, fire, aim”,' said one. ‘I think that if you spend too much time doing “ready, aim, aim, aim”, you're never going to see all the good things that would happen if you actually started doing it. I think business plans are interesting, but they have no real meaning, because you can't put in all the positive things that will occur.' The most valuable skill of a successful entrepreneur, Chris Kayes is convinced, isn't ‘vision' or ‘passion' or a steadfast insistence on destroying every barrier
between yourself and some prize you're obsessed with. Rather, it's the ability to adopt an unconventional approach to learning: an improvisational flexibility not merely about which route to take towards some predetermined objective, but also a willingness to change the destination itself. This is a flexibility that might be squelched by rigid focus on any one goal.

Saras Sarasvathy has distilled her anti-goal approach into a set of principles she calls ‘effectuation'. It is an outlook with implications far beyond the world of entrepreneurialism; it might serve as a worthy philosophy for life. ‘Causally minded' people, to use Sarasvathy's terminology, are those who select or are given a specific goal, and then choose from whatever means are available to make a plan for achieving it. Effectually minded people, on the other hand, examine what means and materials are at their disposal, then imagine what possible ends, or provisional next directions, those means might make possible. The effectualists include the cook who scours the fridge for leftover ingredients; the chemist who figured out that the insufficiently sticky glue he had developed could be used to create the Post-it note; or the unhappy lawyer who realises that her spare-time photography hobby, for which she already possesses the skills and the equipment, could be turned into a job. One foundation of effectuation is the ‘bird in hand' principle: ‘Start with your means. Don't wait for the perfect opportunity. Start taking action, based on what you have readily available: what you are, what you know and who you know.' A second is the ‘principle of affordable loss': don't be guided by thoughts of how wonderful the rewards might be if you were spectacularly successful at any given next step. Instead – and there are distinct echoes, here, of the Stoic focus on the worst-case scenario – ask how big the loss would be if you failed. So long as it would be tolerable,
that's all you need to know. Take that next step, and see what happens.