Win or lose, you’re gathering information

When the time period for your goal is reached, you can see pretty clearly whether you’ve achieved that goal or not.

It’s tempting to think of those as winning or losing. After all, if you failed to reach your goal, it feels like a loss.

But remember: While the results of an achieved goal are valuable in themselves, there’s a valuable win for you in either scenario.

That’s because the process of setting goals and measuring against them is not just about getting the results as a one-time effort. It’s a way to learn some very important things about your processes:

• Were your goals realistic and well informed?

• How effective are your strategies and tactics?

• How well do you understand the tasks and objectives that lead to desirable outcomes?

• How good are your processes in carrying out those tasks and reaching those objectives?

• Where could you tweak your processes to improve any of the above?

Answers — honest, well-thought answers — to those questions are the real, valuable outcomes of your post-mortem inquiry.

Whether you achieved your stated goal or not, that post-mortem is your chance to regroup and improve your processes for your next goal.

Here’s the thing:

Because you’ll always be trying to improve your results, a goal is not merely an effort to achive a certain outcome.

Most importantly, it’s a test of your proceses. And if you’re not testing and improving your processes, you have no reason to expect improvement in the outcomes.

All the best,
A.