Small Tweak, Dramatic Results: Planning

One of our values at New Story is “Think big, break down, execute.” This is applied to everything — especially planning. At the beginning of this year we set a 10-year goal to build 1,000 communities around the world. We then broke that HUGE goal into our 3–5 year goals and priorities and then into our yearly goals and priorities.

When we set our 2016 priorities, we made a mistake — a critical mistake. Whenever you set a goal, let’s say it’s to get a better job, get stronger or lose weight, you are likely to fail for one reason: your goal is not specific and measurable. How much weight will you lose? How will you measure how strong you are? With no specific metric, you can’t measure success or failure. You are in no better shape than if you didn’t have a goal in the first place.

Setting Measurable Goals Annually, Quarterly, Monthly, and Weekly

To fix our mistake we needed to make one small tweak — add a new column called: Measurable Metric. Instead of just saying our priority is to “blow up brand awareness,” our measurable metric is now: X number of press pieces, X number of speaking engagements, and X number of social followers. This allows us to set specific annual, quarterly, and monthly goals for brand awareness. All of those specific goals will then shape what we do on a weekly basis which then shapes our daily activities.

From a 10 year massive goal to build 1,000 communities around the world to our 2016 goals we now know what is required on a daily basis. Thank you measure metric — you are gold.