Set the Bar High - Then Move it Up a Notch

In previous posts I've written about the need for a curious mind when brainstorming and being innovative. I've also rambled on about giving creative ideas time to mature into benefit giving innovation. This time around I want to talk about how we can ensure how we can continuously improve our creativity and innovation by setting challenging goals and objectives for ourselves, our projects and our businesses.

Any management or personal development guru will be able to tell you about the importance of setting and tracking goals so you can stay focused and have something to strive for. One technique for setting goals is to ensure that they are SMART.

S: Specific, M: Measurable, A: Attainable, R: Realistic and T: Timely.

Think about this... Each one of these characteristics is restrictive, dull, tedious, suggests paperwork and is really a vehicle for senior managers to makesure we only set goals they want us to achieve.

Don't be SMART it's boring. As the highly entertaining Steve McDermott points out, who ever achieved anything by setting SMART objectives? Was NASA's goal of putting a man on the moon considered realistic at the time? Of course not, what's the point doing something you know is attainable, where's the challenge in that? And as for specific? Do you really, really know, in your heart of hearts what you want to be doing in five years time, never mind ten? Do you really think that won't change anyway between now and then.

So, to set challenging objectives and goals that will stretch you and drive you to be creative and achieve things you can't even dream of, you need to set STUPID objectives:

S: Sexy, T: Technologically insane, U: Uncertain outcomes, P: Practically impossible, I: Inceredibly tough and D: Downright pleasing when you achieve them.

Another problem with realistic, or attainable, or measurable is that it smacks of benchmarking - monitoring what others do and then trying to do it as well. Tom Peters in his, frankly, wacky book Re-Imagine scoffs at Benchmarking because it's based on the "follow your leader" paradigm - "You can't be remarkable by following someone else who has already done the remarkable". He goes on to dig in the knife by pointing out the insanity of benchmarking - "we pick a market leader and launch a five year program with the goal of being as good as who was best five years ago, five years from now!"...

So, if we want to be truly creative we need to set the bar high and keep pushing it up. We may never achieve the ultimate goal (perhaps you want to be a multi-millionaire) but we'll generate lots of new ideas in trying to achieve that goal, and perhaps, just perhaps, one of those ideas will turn into an innovation that gets us part way to that goal... After all, is being just a millionaire that bad a deal?

Remember: Don't be SMART be STUPID.