4
Goal Crazy
When Trying to Control the Future Doesn’t Work
Future, n. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.
– Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
IN 1996, A TWENTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD from Indiana named Christopher Kayes signed up with an adventure travel company to go trekking in the Himalayas. His intention, though it would prove ironic in hindsight, was to take a relaxing break. A punishing career as a stockbroker, and then as a corporate consultant, had left him burned out. Kayes had always been interested in the psychology of the business world, and so he had decided to pursue a doctorate in organisational behaviour instead. But first he needed time off, and when he saw an advertisement in a travel magazine for a group hiking expedition to Nepal, it seemed like the perfect answer. As the plane descended into Kathmandu, he recalled later, he was looking forward to ‘a refreshing immersion in Nepalese culture’, surrounded by the beauty of the Himalayas. But what Kayes encountered in the mountains was a troubling psychological puzzle that was to dominate his life for years to come.
While Kayes and his fellow hikers were exploring the foothills of Mount Everest, camping at night in tents, a disaster of historical proportions was unfolding near the mountain’s peak. Fifteen climbers died on Everest during that year’s climbing season, eight of them during a single twenty-four hour period that has since entered mountaineering lore, thanks largely to the bestselling book Into Thin Air, by the climber and journalist Jon Krakauer, who was among those on the mountain at the time. Kayes himself encountered some of the climbers and rescue workers who had been involved – exhausted men, emerging dazed into the foothills, struggling to make sense of what had happened.
Even in the modern era of commercial Everest expeditions, when anyone with sufficient money and some climbing skills can pay to be escorted to the summit, it’s still not that unusual for people to die in the attempt. What made the 1996 disaster so chilling – apart from the sheer number of dead – was the fact that it seemed uniquely inexplicable. The weather on the peak was not more perilous than usual. There were no sudden avalanches during the period when most of the climbers perished. The paying customers were all sufficiently skilled for the undertaking. Into Thin Air, controversially, attributed the tragedy in part to the stubbornness and arrogance of Anatoli Boukreev, a Kazakhstani climbing guide. There is some evidence for this, but it is ultimately dissatisfying as an explanation, too. Mountaineers, as a group, tend towards stubbornness and arrogance. Yet disasters on the scale of Everest in 1996 are mercifully rare.
In the end, what happened that year looked more like an outbreak of mass irrationality – an episode that reached its apogee around noon on 10 May at the Hillary Step, a wall of rock just 720 feet from the summit, in an event that has since become known as ‘the traffic jam’. Teams from New Zealand, the United States and Taiwan – thirty-four climbers in total – were all attempting the final stage of the ascent that day, from Camp Four, at 26,000 feet, to the summit, at 29,000 feet. The Americans and New Zealanders had co-ordinated their efforts, so as to ensure a smooth progression up and down the mountain. But the Taiwanese climbers were reneging on an agreement not to climb the same day, and an advance team of guides had failed to secure safety ropes at the Hillary Step according to plan, with the result that the smooth progression soon turned into a bottleneck.
Timing is one of the most important variables in any assault on Everest, and so climbers generally observe strict ‘turnaround times’. Leaving Camp Four at midnight, a climber can hope to reach the summit by midday, or soon after. But if he or she fails to make it there by the pre-arranged turnaround time – which might be anywhere from noon until two in the afternoon, depending on weather conditions, and the team leader’s attitude to risk – it becomes essential to call off the attempt and turn back. Failure to do so means the climber risks running out of bottled oxygen and facing Everest’s most dangerous weather in the dark. Yet confronted with the traffic jam at the Hillary Step, the teams pushed on, disregarding their turnaround times. Back at Camp Four, the American mountaineer Ed Viesturs watched the climbers’ slow progress through a telescope, and found it hard to believe what he was seeing. ‘They’ve already been climbing for hours, and they still aren’t on the summit,’ he remembered thinking to himself, with rising alarm. ‘Why haven’t they turned around?’
Members of all three teams continued arriving at the summit for two hours after two o’clock, the latest safe turnaround time. Doug Hansen, a postal service worker from Washington state who was a paying client of the New Zealand group, was the last to do so, at the astonishingly late time of just after four o’clock. He had ascended Everest the year before, but had been forced to turn back a few hundred feet from the top. This time, he never made it back down. Like seven others, he was caught in intense blizzards as darkness fell, which made navigation of the mountain impossible, and sent temperatures plunging to −40°F. They lay dying, unreached by the frantic rescue attempts that saved several other climbers’ lives. Years after climbing Everest had become a feasible project for amateurs as well as professionals, 1996 saw the highest recorded death toll in the mountain’s history. And even today, nobody clearly understands why.
Except, just possibly, Chris Kayes. A former stockbroker turned expert on organisational behaviour might seem to have little to contribute to the post-mortem of a mountaineering disaster. But the more Kayes learned of what had happened, and as he continued to follow the case after returning home, the more it reminded him of a phenomenon he had witnessed all too frequently among businesspeople. The Everest climbers, Kayes suspected, had been ‘lured into destruction by their passion for goals’. His hypothesis was that the more they fixated on the endpoint – a successful summiting of the mountain – the more that goal became not just an external target but a part of their own identities, of their senses of themselves as accomplished guides or high-achieving amateurs. If his hunch about the climbers was right, it would have become progressively more difficult for them to sacrifice their goal, despite accumulating evidence that it was becoming a suicidal one. Indeed, that accumulating evidence, Kayes was convinced, would have hardened the climbers’ determination not to turn back. The climb would have become a struggle not merely to reach the summit, but to preserve their sense of identity. In theology, the term ‘theodicy’ refers to the effort to maintain belief in a benevolent god, despite the prevalence of evil in the world; the phrase is occasionally used to describe the effort to maintain any belief in the face of contradictory evidence. Borrowing that language, Chris Kayes termed the syndrome he had identified ‘goalodicy’.
During his years in the corporate world, Kayes had been troubled to watch goalsetting achieve the status of religious dogma among his colleagues. The situation hasn’t changed much today. The hallmark of a visionary leader, it is widely held, is the willingness to set big, audacious goals for his or her organisation, and then to focus every resource on achieving them. Individual employees, meanwhile, are encouraged, and sometimes obliged, to define their own personal work objectives, frequently in the form of ‘SMART’ goals. (The acronym stands for ‘specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bounded’.) Numerous self-help books advocate ambitious and highly specific goals as the master key to a successful and satisfying life: ‘By this time next year, I will be married to the woman of my dreams/sitting on the balcony of my beach house/earning £10,000 per month!’ One of the practice’s most passionate evangelists, Brian Tracy, in his book Goals! How to Get Everything You Want – Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible, insists that ‘Living without clear goals is like driving in a thick fog … Clear goals enable you to step on the accelerator of your own life, and race ahead rapidly.’
Yet Kayes couldn’t help but notice that it frequently didn’t work out that way. A business goal would be set, announced, and generally greeted with enthusiasm. But then evidence would begin to emerge that it had been an unwise one – and goalodicy would kick in as a response. The negative evidence would be reinterpreted as a reason to invest more effort and resources in pursuit of the goal. And so things would, not surprisingly, go even more wrong. Kayes believed that a similar thing had happened on Everest in 1996.
Chris Kayes is now a professor of management science at George Washington University, in Washington DC, and as he has travelled the lecture circuit in recent years, using Everest as a metaphor for all that is wrong with our obsession with goals, he has frequently found himself giving offence. ‘A businessperson should not study topics filled with such great tragedy and emotion,’ one Russian student lectured him curtly by email. ‘Questions of tragedy and the dilemmas of human existence should be left to the poet, the novelist, and the playwright. These topics have nothing to do with why we study leadership in organisations.’ But Kayes couldn’t let it drop. ‘It would be accurate to say that I think about the Everest disaster probably every day,’ he told me. ‘Almost like it was a death in my own family. “Haunted” would definitely be the right word.’ And there is persuasive evidence for Kayes’s hypothesis about what happened on the mountain, hidden away in a largely forgotten psychology study that was conducted in 1963. The study’s participants were professional mountaineers, undertaking an expedition to Everest.
That year, seventeen climbers were attempting to become the first Americans to reach the summit, and a psychologist named James Lester realised that the expedition presented an ideal opportunity to investigate what drove people to attempt such ambitious and dangerous feats. With funding provided by the United States Navy, Lester and a handful of colleagues gathered the mountaineers in Berkeley, California, where they administered a series of personality tests. Then – demonstrating an unusual degree of commitment to his research – Lester left sunny California for Mount Everest, accompanying the climbers as far as Camp Two, at 21,000 feet. There, he administered further tests on the climbers and their Sherpa guides. In his book Destructive Goal Pursuit: The Mount Everest Disaster, Chris Kayes relates Lester’s basic finding about the typical Everest climber: he was someone who demonstrated ‘considerable restlessness, dislike for routine, desire for autonomy, tendency to be dominant in personal relations, and a lack of interest in social interaction for its own sake. Their felt need for achievement and independence was very high.’ No surprises there: Lester had confirmed the truism that climbers tend to be domineering loners with little regard for social convention. But more intriguing findings were to emerge from the daily diaries that Lester asked the climbers to keep for the duration of the three-month period they spent preparing for, then carrying out, their trek to the mountain’s summit.
En route to base camp, the American team had split into two dissenting groups, each with a very different idea of how best to reach the top. The larger group favoured the well-established route via the South Col, a mountain pass ravaged by high winds, leaving it relatively free of snow. But a smaller group wanted to approach via the remote and never previously attempted West Ridge. (Even today, in a morbid statistical oddity, the fatality rate for the West Ridge is higher than 100 per cent, meaning that more people have died there than have reached the summit that way.) Noting the difference of opinion among the climbers, Lester made sure that their diaries included regular updates on how optimistic or pessimistic they were feeling about their chosen route.
Subsequent analysis of the diaries revealed an unexpected pattern. As the day of the summit attempt neared, the West Ridge group’s optimism began to fade rapidly, replaced by a gnawing sense of uncertainty. That was only to be expected, given that their route was untried. But as the climbers’ uncertainty and pessimism about the West Ridge option increased, the diaries revealed, so did their commitment to it. ‘The more uncertain climbers felt about their possible success in reaching the summit,’ as Kayes puts it, ‘the more likely they were to invest in their particular strategy.’ A bizarre and self-reinforcing loop took hold: team members would actively seek out negative information about their goal – looking for evidence of weather patterns, for example, that might render the West Ridge approach even more risky than usual – which would increase their feelings of uncertainty. But then, in an effort to extinguish that uncertainty, the climbers would increase their emotional investment in their decision. The goal, it seemed, had become a part of their identity, and so their uncertainty about the goal no longer merely threatened the plan; it threatened them as individuals. They were so eager to eliminate these feelings of uncertainty that they clung ever harder to a clear, firm and specific plan that provided them with a sense of certainty about the future – even though that plan was looking increasingly reckless. They were firmly in the grip of goalodicy.
The happy conclusion of the 1963 expedition – much as it spoils the neatness of Kayes’s argument – is that the West Ridge climbers went ahead with their dangerous plan, and survived. Too many of the relevant participants in the 1996 drama perished, meanwhile, for us ever to know with confidence exactly how far the same thought processes were to blame. But Beck Weathers, a paying client that year who was twice left for dead on the mountain – he lost his nose and several fingers to frostbite, having dragged himself back to camp – testified to the plausibility of the notion. ‘You can overpursue goals,’ he reflected afterwards. ‘You can become obsessed with goals.’
Mountaineers, of course, do not speak in the corporate language of targets and goalsetting. But when they refer to ‘summit fever’ – that strange, sometimes fatal magnetism that certain peaks seem to exert upon the minds of climbers – they are intuitively identifying something similar: a commitment to a goal that, like sirens luring sailors onto the rocks, destroys those who struggle too hard to achieve it. Ed Viesturs, who watched the 1996 tragedy through his telescope, spoke of this lure in vivid terms. ‘When you’re up there, you’ve spent years of training, months of preparation, and weeks of climbing, and you’re within view of the summit, and you know, you have – in the back of your mind, you’re telling yourself “We should turn around, ‘cause we’re late, we’re gonna run out of oxygen …” But you see the summit, and it draws you there. And a lot of people – it’s so magnetic that they tend to break their rules, and they go to the summit. And on a good day, you can get away with it. And on a bad day, you’ll die.’
If you’ve ever read a popular book about the importance of planning for the future, you will almost certainly have encountered a reference – and quite possibly several – to the Yale Study of Goals. This is a now legendary finding about the importance of creating detailed plans for your life: it is cited in the aforementioned Goals!, by Brian Tracy, but also in scores of other works, from the supposedly scholarly (books with titles such as Psychological Foundations of Success) to the more streetwise (the management manual Train Your People and Whack the Competition). The essentials of the study are as follows: in 1953, students graduating from Yale University were asked by researchers whether or not they had formulated specific, written-down goals for the rest of their lives. Only 3 per cent of them said they had. Two decades later, the researchers tracked down the class of ‘53, to see how their lives had turned out. The results were unequivocal: the 3 per cent of graduates with written goals had amassed greater financial wealth than the other 97 per cent combined. It is a jaw-dropping finding, and a powerful lesson to any young person thinking of just drifting through life. It isn’t surprising, then, that it achieved the status of legend in the world of self-help, and in many corners of corporate life. The only problem is that it is indeed a legend: the Yale Study of Goals never took place.
Some years ago, a journalist from the technology magazine Fast Company set out to trace the source of the alleged study. No academic journal reference was ever cited when it was mentioned, so he began by asking the motivational gurus who liked to quote it. Disconcertingly, when asked for their sources, they pointed at each other. Tony Robbins suggested asking Brian Tracy, who in turn suggested Zig Ziglar, a veteran of the motivational-speaker circuit, and a regular fixture at Get Motivated! seminars. Completing the circle, Zig Ziglar recommended asking Tony Robbins.
Taking matters into my own hands, I called a senior Yale University archivist, Beverly Waters. She seemed friendly and eager to help, but when I mentioned the goals study, a note of frustration entered her voice. ‘I did a systematic check, years ago, when this first arose, and there was nothing,’ she said. ‘Then the secretary of the graduating class of 1953 did another systematic check, and nobody he spoke to had ever been asked to fill out such a questionnaire, or anything like that.’ She added that it was highly unlikely that it had happened in some other year, and been wrongly described as taking place in 1953, because the Association of Yale Alumni would have been involved – and nobody there could trace anyone who remembered it. Waters sighed. ‘It’s just too good not to be true, I guess,’ she said.
Of course, the non-existence of one study about the benefits of setting goals does not disprove the suggestion that setting goals has benefits; there is plenty of very real research testifying to the fact that the practice can be useful. What the story indicates, instead, is how far the fascination with goals has gone. You might never have written down any ‘life goals’ yourself, and you might well disagree with the imaginary Yale study’s implication that material wealth is the ticket to happiness. But the basic urge beneath all this is nearly universal. At some point in your life, and perhaps at many points, it’s likely you have decided upon some goal – to find a spouse, to get a specific kind of job, to live in a particular town – and then devised a plan to attain it. Interpreted sufficiently broadly, setting goals and carrying out plans to achieve them is how many of us spend most of our waking hours. Whether or not we use the word ‘goals’, we’re forever making plans based upon desired outcomes. ‘Consider any individual at any period of his life,’ wrote the great French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, ‘and you will always find him preoccupied with fresh plans to increase his comfort.’ Tocqueville’s use of the word ‘comfort’ should not distract us here; we are, of course, capable of setting far grander and more selfless goals than that. But the deeper truth remains: many of us are perpetually preoccupied with plans.
It is precisely this preoccupation that the followers of the ‘negative path’ to happiness call into question – because it turns out that setting and then chasing after goals can often backfire in horrible ways. There is a good case to be made that many of us, and many of the organisations for which we work, would do better to spend less time on goalsetting, and, more generally, to focus with less intensity on planning for how we would like the future to turn out.
At the core of this outlook is the insight that Chris Kayes and James Lester both reached in their studies of Everest mountaineers: that what motivates our investment in goals and planning for the future, much of the time, isn’t any sober recognition of the virtues of preparation and looking ahead. Rather, it’s something much more emotional: how deeply uncomfortable we are made by feelings of uncertainty. Faced with the anxiety of not knowing what the future holds, we invest ever more fiercely in our preferred vision of that future – not because it will help us achieve it, but because it helps rid us of feelings of uncertainty in the present. ‘Uncertainty prompts us to idealise the future,’ Kayes told me. ‘We tell ourselves that everything will be OK, just as long as I can reach this projection of the future.’ Obviously, climbing Mount Everest requires plenty of planning, and implies a specific goal
– reaching the summit. But to Kayes, the evidence suggested that in 1996, an aversion to feelings of uncertainty might have tipped the balance in favour of a fatal overinvestment in goals.
We fear the feeling of uncertainty to an extraordinary degree
– the psychologist Dorothy Rowe argues that we fear it more than death itself – and we will go to extraordinary lengths, even fatal ones, to get rid of it. As we will see later in this chapter, though, there is a powerful alternative possibility: we could learn to become more comfortable with uncertainty, and to exploit the potential hidden within it, both to feel better in the present and to achieve more success in the future.
It is alarming to consider how many major life decisions we take primarily in order to minimise present-moment emotional discomfort. Try the following potentially mortifying exercise in self-examination. Consider any significant decision you’ve ever taken that you subsequently came to regret: a relationship you entered despite being dimly aware that it wasn’t for you, or a job you accepted even though, looking back, it’s clear that it was mismatched to your interests or abilities. If it felt like a difficult decision at the time, then it’s likely that, prior to taking it, you felt the gut-knotting ache of uncertainty; afterwards, having made a decision, did those feelings subside? If so, this points to the troubling possibility that your primary motivation in taking the decision wasn’t any rational consideration of its rightness for you, but simply the urgent need to get rid of your feelings of uncertainty. Here are the words of one blogger on psychology, David Cain, reflecting on how an intolerance for uncertainty once dominated his own choices: ‘It’s quite disturbing to take a mental inventory of where [the intolerance for uncertainty] has steered my life,’ he writes. ‘It’s the reason I spent three years and ten thousand dollars learning computer programming, when I didn’t really want to do it for a living. It’s the reason behind every single day I’ve spent working on careers that don’t inspire me. [Uncertainty] feels like you’re sinking, and [that] it is positively imperative to scramble to the next patch of firm ground, whatever direction it may be in. Once you get there, you can let yourself breathe.’ Clinging too tightly to goals is one of the principal ways in which we express the obsession with reaching that next patch of ground.
To understand one of the many reasons why goals can backfire, consider the experience of trying to hail a taxi in a major city during a rainstorm. If you’ve ever had to do this, you’ll be familiar with the despair it can induce – and you probably think you understand why it’s so difficult, since it seems like the kind of economics problem even a five-year-old could solve. When it rains, more people want cabs, and so demand outstrips supply, making it harder to find an empty vehicle. That’s obvious, surely? So when the economist Colin Camerer and three of his colleagues set out to investigate the problem of the rainy-day taxi shortage – taking New York City as their field of study – you can imagine the kind of looks they might have received from their colleagues.
Except, as their research revealed, the reason for the problem isn’t as obvious as it appears. Demand for taxis does surge when it rains. But something much stranger happens at the same time: the supply of taxis shrinks. This contradicts the standard economic assumption that when people stand to earn more money, they work more. You might have expected cab drivers, who have some discretion over the hours they work, to work the most when demand was highest. Instead, they clocked off earlier when it rained.
Further investigation revealed that the culprit was goals. New York taxi drivers rent their vehicles in twelve-hour shifts, and commonly set themselves the daily goal of taking in double the amount of money that it costs to rent the cab. When it rains, they meet their goal more rapidly, and head home sooner. New Yorkers are thus deprived of taxis during exactly the weather conditions in which they need them most, while drivers are deprived of additional income at exactly the time when it would be easiest to earn.
The point is not that it’s wrong for a taxi driver to choose more leisure time over more income, of course – that’s an entirely defensible choice – but that it makes no sense to take that time off when it’s raining. Far from behaving like stereotypically rational economic actors, the drivers appeared to act more like the pigeons in experiments conducted by the behaviouralist psychologist B.F. Skinner. Having learned to obtain a food pellet by pecking on a mechanism in its cage, Skinner observed, a pigeon would indulge in a ‘post-pellet pause’, relaxing after having attained a predetermined goal.
A taxi driver’s daily income goal is a very different matter to the goal of climbing Everest, and the researchers did not investigate the drivers’ emotional motivations. But it is possible to see the taxi-shortage problem as another, more minor example of how uncomfortable we’re made by uncertainty. The drivers, it would appear, preferred the regularity and reliability of a predictable daily income to the uncertainty of remaining open to the possibility of earning more. They had invested in their goals beyond the point that doing so served their best interests.
New York cab drivers were much on the mind of a university professor named Lisa Ordóñez when, in 2009, she and three of her colleagues embarked upon the heretical project of questioning goalsetting. In their academic field, management studies, the wisdom of goalsetting was rarely questioned, thanks largely to the work of two North American management theorists, Gary Latham and Edwin Locke. Over the course of the previous four decades, Latham and Locke had established themselves as the godfathers of goalsetting, publishing more than twenty books between them. Their credo was one of the very first things taught to incoming students at business schools: to be a success as an entrepreneur, what you needed first was a business plan, focused on specific goals. Anything less was unacceptable. ‘When people are asked to do their best, they don’t,’ Edwin Locke told one interviewer. ‘It’s too vague.’
Ordóñez and her colleagues mounted the case for the opposition in a 2009 paper with a heavy-handed pun for its title – ‘Goals Gone Wild’ – in the usually rather dry pages of the journal Academy of Management Perspectives. The goalsetting that worked so well in Latham and Locke’s studies, they pointed out, had various nasty side-effects in their own experiments. For example: clearly defined goals seemed to motivate people to cheat. In one such study, participants were given the task of making words from a set of random letters, as in Scrabble; the experiment gave them opportunities to report their progress anonymously. Those given a target to reach lied far more frequently than did those instructed merely to ‘do your best’. More importantly, though, Ordóñez and her fellow heretics argued, goalsetting worked vastly less well outside the psychology lab settings in which such studies took place. In real life, an obsession with goals seemed far more often to land people and organisations in trouble.
One illuminating example of the problem concerns the American automobile behemoth General Motors. The turn of the millennium found GM in a serious predicament, losing customers and profits to more nimble, primarily Japanese, competitors. Following Latham and Locke’s philosophy to the letter, executives at GM’s headquarters in Detroit came up with a goal, crystallised in a number: twenty-nine. Twenty-nine, the company announced amid much media fanfare, was the percentage of the American car market that it would recapture, reasserting its old dominance. Twenty-nine was also the number displayed upon small gold lapel pins, worn by senior figures at GM to demonstrate their commitment to the plan. At corporate gatherings, and in internal GM documents, twenty-nine was the target drummed into everyone from salespeople to engineers to public-relations officers.
Yet the plan not only failed to work – it made things worse. Obsessed with winning back market share, GM spent its dwindling finances on money-off schemes and clever advertising, trying to lure drivers into purchasing its unpopular cars, rather than investing in the more speculative and open-ended – and thus more uncertain – research that might have resulted in more innovative and more popular vehicles. There were certainly many other reasons for GM’s ongoing decline. But twenty-nine became a fetish, distorting the organisation in damaging ways, fuelling short-termism and blinkered vision, all so that the numbers in the business news headlines might match those on the vice-presidents’ lapels. But that never happened. GM continued spiralling towards failure, and went bankrupt in 2009; it ended up taking a bailout from Washington. At the Detroit Auto Show of 2010, the firm’s newly installed president for North America, keen to show how much GM had changed, used the twenty-nine campaign as an example of what it would no longer be doing. ‘We’re not printing [lapel] pins,’ he told a radio reporter. ‘We’re not doing any of that stuff.’
It is safe to say that Gary Latham and Edwin Locke’s response to ‘Goals Gone Wild’ was among the more furious outbursts ever to have been published in Academy of Management Perspectives. Ordóñez and her colleagues were accused of being extremists, of using ‘scare tactics’, of abandoning good scholarship by stringing together anecdotes, of ‘spreading falsehoods and insults’, and of ‘making unverified assertions’. ‘Oh, my God!’, Ordóñez exclaimed, when I asked her about the dispute. ‘My face was hot for a week. It was just so completely personal. But put yourself in their shoes. They had spent forty years doing research into how wonderful goals can be, and here we were, coming and pointing out the pitfalls. It was nothing but a temper tantrum.’
The reason all this academic infighting matters to anyone else is that the two sides represent two fundamentally different ways of thinking about planning for the future. It was unfair, as it happened, for Latham and Locke to imply that Ordóñez and her colleagues had ignored experimental data altogether in favour of anecdotes. But the real lesson of ‘Goals Gone Wild’ is that the simplified conditions of the laboratory almost never apply in real life. In most artificial studies of goalsetting, participants are faced with a single task or simple set of tasks, such as the word game mentioned earlier; some of them are then encouraged to approach the task with a goal firmly in mind, while others are not. But as the case of GM suggests, outside the laboratory – whether in business, or in life in general – no situation is ever anywhere close to being this simple. In singling out one goal, or set of goals, and striving to meet it, you will invariably exert an effect on other, interlinked aspects of the thing you’re trying to change. In an automobile manufacturing company, that might mean starving your research division of funding in an effort to meet a predetermined market share. Applied to the personal realm, it might mean attaining your goals at the expense of ruining your life. During one course he taught, Chris Kayes recalled, ‘an executive came up to me at the end of a session and told me his goal had been to become a millionaire by the age of forty. That’s something you hear all the time in business schools. And he’d done it – he was forty-two, so he was right on target. But he was also divorced and had health problems. And his kids didn’t talk to him anymore.’ Another student had been furiously training for a marathon when he first met her. She succeeded in her goal – but at the cost of severe injuries and several weeks spent housebound.
This problem goes deeper than one might think. The standard answer to it, from the proponents of goalsetting, is that these are examples of people setting the wrong goals – overly ambitious or overly narrow ones. Of course, it’s true that some goals are wiser than others. But the more profound hazard here affects virtually any form of future planning. Formulating a vision of the future requires, by definition, that you isolate some aspect or aspects of your life, or your organisation, or your society, and focus on those at the expense of others. But problems arise thanks to the law of unintended consequences, sometimes expressed using the phrase ‘you can never change only one thing’. In any even slightly complex system, it’s extremely hard to predict how altering one variable will affect the others. ‘When we try to pick out any thing by itself,’ the naturalist and philosopher John Muir observed, ‘we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.’
The thinker who probably pursued this notion further than anyone else was the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who spent a significant part of his early career studying everyday life in the villages of Bali. These villages, he concluded, owed their social cohesion and effective functioning to customs and rituals that he described as ‘non-maximising’. He meant that these traditions had the effect of discouraging villagers from focusing on any one goal at the risk of a detrimental effect on others. A Balinese ethos of frugality, for example, was balanced with a custom of occasional ritual displays of conspicuous spending, thereby preventing the quest for wealth from damaging other social goals, and holding competitiveness and inequality among villagers in check. The obvious contrast was with Western industrialised societies, where maximising economic growth had become the goal to which all else was sacrificed. If life in America or Great Britain was best compared to climbing a ladder, life in rural Bali was more like an endless but graceful tightrope walk, resulting in a ‘steady state’ of social thriving geared to no particular set of goals. ‘The continued existence of complex interactive systems’, Bateson argued, ‘depends upon preventing the maximisation of any variable.’ This need not be taken as an argument for abandoning all future planning whatsoever, but it serves as a warning not to strive too ardently for any single vision of the future. As Chris Kayes pointed out, the mountaineers who died climbing Everest in 1996 did successfully reach their goal: they ascended to the summit. The tragic unintended consequence was that they didn’t make it back down alive.
What might it mean to turn towards uncertainty – to learn to develop a tolerance for it, or even to embrace it? To try to answer this question, I first sought out a recovering goal addict who I’d heard had some radical ideas on the matter.
I met Steve Shapiro in a poorly lit bar in New York’s West Village, where he was drinking a pint of Samuel Adams lager, working his way through a cheeseburger, and keeping half an eye on the baseball game on the corner television. There was nothing about his appearance, in other words, to suggest that he was anything but a quintessentially all-American forty-five-year-old. His job description might have given the same impression: he was a consultant who travelled the country running workshops with businesspeople. His life unfolded in conference suites, airport lounges, and hotel bars; PowerPoint was sometimes involved. Yet behind his quick smile and open features, the real Shapiro was a kind of enemy agent, because the message he delivered ran counter to some of the most deeply cherished ideologies of American corporate life. He argued in favour of giving up goals, and embracing uncertainty instead.
Shapiro did, in fact, start out as an all-American achiever, committed to his goal of becoming a highly paid management consultant. His punishing hours destroyed his marriage. ‘I’m not sure if my goals drove me to work the crazy hours I did,’ he later wondered, ‘or if I used my goals as an excuse to avoid issues in my personal life.’ He tried to dig himself out of such crises by means of even more goals (at one point, he recalled, he had a five-year plan to become ‘a leader in the innovation space ’). But none of these plans changed his life. What made the difference, in the end, was a conversation with a friend who told him he spent too much energy thinking about his future. He should think of himself more ‘like a frog’, she said. Shapiro was wondering whether to feel insulted when she explained: ‘You should sun yourself on a lily-pad until you get bored, then, when the time is right, you should jump to a new lily-pad and hang out there for a while. Continue this over and over, moving in whatever direction feels right.’ The imagery of sunbathing on lily-pads should not be taken to imply laziness. Shapiro’s friend’s point was entirely compatible with his hard-charging, achievement-hungry personality; it simply promised to channel it more healthily. In fact, it promised to help him achieve more, by permitting him to enjoy his work in the present, rather than postponing his happiness to a point five years in the future – whereupon, in any case, he would surely just replace his current five-year plan with another. The idea triggered a shift of perspective for Shapiro that would eventually lead to his reinvention as an advocate for abolishing goals.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the companies that pay Steve Shapiro for his advice have sometimes proved resistant to this idea. (‘People looked at me pretty funny sometimes,’ he said.) Chris Kayes has encountered similar opposition: ‘At any company I visit,’ he told me, ‘there’s always some manager who says, “You know, that stuff they did on Everest – taking huge risks, ignoring the consequences, ploughing on regardless – that’s what I want people to be doing round here!”’ Shapiro’s counterargument to his sceptical clients begins with what he calls ‘the happiness and self-worth side of things’: goal-free living simply makes for happier humans. In survey research he commissioned, drawing on samples of American adults, 41 per cent of people agreed that achieving their goals had failed to make them any happier, or had left them disillusioned, while 18 per cent said their goals had destroyed a friendship, a marriage, or another significant relationship. Moreover, 36 per cent said that the more goals they set for themselves, the more stressed they felt – even though 52 per cent said that one of their goals was to reduce the amount of stress in their lives.
Bosses are more frequently persuaded, though, by Shapiro’s other argument: that getting rid of goals, or focusing on them less fixedly, is often also the best way to extract results from employees. He seduces them with anecdotes about the effectiveness of operating goallessly, such as the tale of the Formula One pit crew with which he worked, whose members were told that they would no longer be assessed on the basis of speed targets; they would be rated on style instead. Instructed to focus on acting ‘smoothly’, rather than on beating their current record time, they wound up performing faster. Then there was the story of the sales team that went from missing its targets to exceeding them – as soon as it became company policy to keep those targets a secret from the salespeople. ‘You can have a broad sense of direction without a specific goal or a precise vision of the future,’ Shapiro told me. ‘I think of it like jazz, like improvisation. It’s all about meandering with purpose.’
More recently, the benefits of a goal-free approach to business have started to be substantiated by more than mere anecdote. A few years ago, the researcher Saras Sarasvathy recruited forty-five entrepreneurs who met a predetermined definition of ‘successful’: they each had at least fifteen years’ experience in starting businesses, and had taken at least one company public. She presented them with a detailed hypothetical scenario about a potentially lucrative new software product. (Confusingly, it was software to help entrepreneurs launch businesses.) Sarasvathy then conducted two -hour-long interviews with each participant, probing how they might take this promising but vague idea and make real money from it. She generated hundreds of pages of interview transcripts – and then hundreds more when, for the purposes of comparison, she conducted a parallel exercise among executives at older, larger corporations.
We tend to imagine that the special skill of an entrepreneur lies in having a powerfully original idea and then fighting to turn that vision into reality. But the outlook of Sarasvathy’s interviewees rarely bore this out. Their precise endpoint was often mysterious to them, and their means of proceeding reflected this. Overwhelmingly, they scoffed at the goals-first doctrine of Latham and Locke. Almost none of them suggested creating a detailed business plan, or doing comprehensive market research to hone the details of the product they were aiming to release. (‘I don’t believe in market research,’ one anonymous participant told Sarasvathy. ‘Somebody once told me the only thing you need is a customer. Instead of asking all the questions, I’d try to make some sales.’) The entrepreneurs didn’t think like high-end chefs, concocting a vision of a dish and then hunting for the perfect ingredients. They behaved more like ordinary, time-pressed home cooks, checking what was in the fridge and the cupboards, then figuring out, on the fly, what they could make and how. ‘I always live by the motto of “ready, fire, aim”,’ said one. ‘I think that if you spend too much time doing “ready, aim, aim, aim”, you’re never going to see all the good things that would happen if you actually started doing it. I think business plans are interesting, but they have no real meaning, because you can’t put in all the positive things that will occur.’ The most valuable skill of a successful entrepreneur, Chris Kayes is convinced, isn’t ‘vision’ or ‘passion’ or a steadfast insistence on destroying every barrier between yourself and some prize you’re obsessed with. Rather, it’s the ability to adopt an unconventional approach to learning: an improvisational flexibility not merely about which route to take towards some predetermined objective, but also a willingness to change the destination itself. This is a flexibility that might be squelched by rigid focus on any one goal.
Saras Sarasvathy has distilled her anti-goal approach into a set of principles she calls ‘effectuation’. It is an outlook with implications far beyond the world of entrepreneurialism; it might serve as a worthy philosophy for life. ‘Causally minded’ people, to use Sarasvathy’s terminology, are those who select or are given a specific goal, and then choose from whatever means are available to make a plan for achieving it. Effectually minded people, on the other hand, examine what means and materials are at their disposal, then imagine what possible ends, or provisional next directions, those means might make possible. The effectualists include the cook who scours the fridge for leftover ingredients; the chemist who figured out that the insufficiently sticky glue he had developed could be used to create the Post-it note; or the unhappy lawyer who realises that her spare-time photography hobby, for which she already possesses the skills and the equipment, could be turned into a job. One foundation of effectuation is the ‘bird in hand’ principle: ‘Start with your means. Don’t wait for the perfect opportunity. Start taking action, based on what you have readily available: what you are, what you know and who you know.’ A second is the ‘principle of affordable loss’: don’t be guided by thoughts of how wonderful the rewards might be if you were spectacularly successful at any given next step. Instead – and there are distinct echoes, here, of the Stoic focus on the worst-case scenario – ask how big the loss would be if you failed. So long as it would be tolerable, that’s all you need to know. Take that next step, and see what happens.
‘See what happens’, indeed, might be the motto of this entire approach to working and living, and it is a hard-headed message, not a woolly one. ‘The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning,’ argued the social psychologist Erich Fromm. ‘Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.’ Uncertainty is where things happen. It is where the opportunities – for success, for happiness, for really living – are waiting.
‘To be a good human,’ concludes the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum, applying this perspective to her own field of ethics, ‘is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertainty, and on a willingness to be exposed. It’s based on being more like a plant than a jewel: something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.’