How achieve your goals with the power of Impact Mapping

Tony Piper
Aug 27, 2017 · 3 min read

There has been much written about the importance of having SMART goals, but not so much about how to actually achieve them.

High achievers know that they can maximise their chances of success by leveraging their network and asking for help.

This story describes a simple process for doing this.

An Impact Map is a tool that’s very popular in the world of software development. It starts with a goal — the why — in the centre, and explores who can help you reach that goal, how they can help or hinder your progress towards the goal, and what you can do to encourage (or discourage) them. It very quickly generates a list of possible actions, which can then be prioritised.

Let’s apply it to a typical SMART goal. For example, you want to lose 10kg in 20 weeks.

The first step would be to map out a list of people (or organisations) who could help or hinder you in reaching that goal. For example, ‘Personal Trainer’, ‘my friend Mary’, ‘Mum’ as well as ‘Me’. Every time I use this technique, I can easily think of 20 people or types of people who can help me or my client.

The next step is to identify their natural behaviours — the how — that could help or hinder you reaching your goal. You might enjoy running and weight lifting. But you also enjoy food. A Personal Trainer can offer training. But they might be only available in the morning. Your friend Mary might be a regular runner. But she might live some distance away. Mum might be a supporter. But she might also be worried that you’re not eating enough, and be upset if you don’t eat everything she puts in front of you.

The final step is to identify what you can do to encourage or discourage those natural behaviours. You can encourage a PT to offer you training by finding a PT that’s right for you and also saving up so you have afford enough sessions. You might consider changing your sleeping hours so you can train in the early morning. You could encourage Mary to go running with you by asking her if she would like a running partner, finding a running route you could both follow together and arrange a time. You could encourage Mum in supporting you by giving her a regular progress update. But you could reduce the chance of Mum getting upset when you don’t eat everything by explaining your goal, taking her out to lunch (at a place where you can control what you eat) etc.

By the end of the process you should have a map that contains a lot of actions that you could take (shown here in grey):

A Sample Impact Map, created with MindMup

If you spend an hour doing Impact Mapping, you can easily come up with 40 or more actions.

Then all you need to do is prioritise which things you will do next. And if they don’t work, you can try some of the other actions. As a bonus, if you’re waiting for someone else to do something, you can continue to try things that don’t involve them. After all, the key to feeling as if you’re making progress is to make progress. The more of these things you do, the greater your chances of success.

If you’d like to learn more about Impact Mapping as a tool for software delivery then I’d recommend reading the book.

If you’d like to use it in a coaching session, get in touch and we can spend an hour together mapping out what you can do to help other people help you achieve your goal.


Originally published at www.tonypiper.coach.

Tony Piper is a coach based in London (UK), who specialises in working with IT professionals. When not coaching, he spends far too much time at the gym, riding his Brompton bike or singing semi-professionally.

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Tony Piper

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Coach, Consultant, Singer • https://www.tonypiper.coach

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