No matter how Agile we are, many people struggle to achieve goals. People lose motivation or believe in the end goal. The path to follow doesn’t seem to lead anywhere. But, on my CV, I am brave enough to say “I achieve the unachievable”. It’s not because I am so special. It’s just mostly one trick, that I want to share here.
First: when you have a goal, you can imagine it as a trip. When you look forward, you see the goal you are moving to. When you look down, you see the path you are following now. When you look back, you see what you already achieved. The mistake many people make is they only spend attention on the goal they are moving to. Maybe the path they are following. But certainly not the achievements to look back on. And if you want to achieve anything, you must spend time on all three.
But to do that, you must first handle the goal and the path. Set a goal. This can be a project, an improvement, doesn’t matter. Then decide what steps are needed to achieve that goal. Here is where Agile comes back. The later steps, you do not need to describe in that much detail. The closer the step is, the more you need to know where it will lead you.
Then comes the most difficult part: rewriting the next few steps into achievements people can look back to. When starting your focus should be to create achievements. Achievements that everyone believes will bring you closer to your goal. What you want to achieve is not so much growth, what you want to achieve is trust. Trust that you as a group can get closer to the end goal. Trust that the path will bring you to your goal.
How do you do that? Think about a minimal valuable product. When you are working on a project, make a small subproduct, that already looks kind of complete. Even if it is not yet. When you are working on an improvement, think about a part that can already achieve something. To give an examples
- When I introduce test automation, I make a small set of tests, that cover important functionality. A set that can already be used.
- When I start in a new team, I try as soon as possible to find something, I can ask for feedback on. Using the opinion of someone else to improve, is a good start of a good team.
To make getting achievements easier, you can look for a measurable goal. It’s easier to stay motivated when you have 100 tasks and you see yourself achieving one task every day than to have one task that takes 100 days. Even if the result would be the same. And that is both for the motivation of yourself, the people you work with, and the people you work for.
When you can look back on one or more achievements, you most likely can get the trust you need to continue. Now the trust is there, you can more freely start working on reaching the goal. But never forget any of the three elements on the path to the goal, so both trust and motivation will stay.