From the archive - Your Fifth Strategic Goal Isn’t That Important
There is tremendous power in curating your goal list
Since there is an extra Tuesday in March, I thought I’d pull one piece from the archives to highlight. Here’s a piece originally published in April of ‘24.
Several years ago I was at an event for the leadership team, members and most engaged volunteers of a Nashville non-profit. During his address, the keynote speaker asked the audience to share the mission/vision statement of the organization.
The statement listed four or five priorities that the organization wanted to address. After hearing it, the speaker took a minute to reflect on each of the priorities and offer some thoughts that would be worth considering.
But, the most interesting part was not his reflection on each of the items. Rather, it was a quip he made as he reached the fourth and fifth items. He simply stopped speaking and said ‘these are actually not that important to you and you probably will do very little towards reaching them.’
His point was that if they were of greater importance they would have been listed higher in the order. But it felt bad to leave them out entirely, so they were relegated to the end of the list.
Whether in an organization or our own lives, there are a limitless of things we can possibly be doing. Far too often, there are too many key priorities, too many core values, and too many initiatives. When that happens, the extras get dropped off or the overwhelm factor (think Cheesecake Factory menu here) is so large that effort gets diluted across the massive list - meaning none actually get done.
This mirrors our basic biology. The human brain can only focus on a handful of things at a time. In his 2010 paper, “The Magical Mystery Four: How is Working Memory Capacity Limited, and Why?” Nelson Cowan notes that our working memory can only keep three to five items in mind.
From personal experience, five feels like too many. Three, with a maybe four, is a reasonable number.
The most critical thing is the curation of the three things that matter the most at the current moment. There is an old saying that if you have four hours to cut down a tree, you are best served by spending the first three sharpening your axe. Narrowing the list of priorities is the analogous form of axe sharpening.
Doing so may feel overly simplistic or reductionist. Yet, I’ve seen it first hand. The first 10 years of my career, I spent analyzing companies as an investor. No matter the business or industry, all businesses really only have 1-2 key things that really matter.
The same is true with our priorities. This is the 80/20 rule applied in yet another context.
This does not mean that other things may not be important for tomorrow. It is the sequencing of when they are addressed that matters. An apple picked early is bitter, but one picked at the right time tastes sweet.
But for today, pick what is most critical now. And the rest can wait.