Wildly Important Goal

What it is

The phrase comes from The 4 Disciplines of Execution by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey and Jim Huling, published by Free Press in 2012. FranklinCovey, the company the authors were with, listed the first discipline in its launch release as focusing on the wildly important goals.

The reasoning attached to the discipline is about spreading effort. A team that tries to advance many aims at once, the framework argues, accomplishes less on each of them, so the discipline fixes a short list and gives the items on it priority over the rest of the work. The list is meant to be ambitious as well as short. A wildly important goal is an outcome that would change the result, and not a routine target that the team expects to meet anyway.

The first discipline sets the target, and the other three supply the means of tracking it. The second picks the behaviours to count, described on the page for Lead Measure and Lag Measure. The third keeps those counts visible on a scoreboard. The fourth is the regular meeting described on the page for Cadence of Accountability.

Cal Newport carried the discipline over to individual work in Deep Work (2016). His version is a handful of professional goals with real return, and nothing outside that handful is granted standing when time is scarce.

In effect

Newport applied the discipline to his own academic year. He set a target of five research papers for 2013 to 2014 and reports that nine were accepted by the summer of 2014. That is one person's account of one year. It does not separate the effect of the discipline from his other circumstances in that year, and he offers it as an adaptation of a business book.

The research on goals supports a narrower part of the idea. Edwin Locke and Gary Latham reviewed thirty-five years of goal-setting work in 2002. Specific, difficult goals generally produced higher performance than an instruction to do your best, through four routes: they direct attention, raise effort, extend persistence and prompt people to find useful strategies. A wildly important goal that is written as a specific, demanding outcome fits that finding.

The same review attaches conditions. Goals worked better with feedback on progress than without it, commitment mattered most when the goal was hard, and the effect was smaller on complex tasks where success depends on finding a good strategy. On our reading, the other three disciplines are the framework's way of supplying the feedback and the commitment, which is why the first discipline is better read as part of the package than on its own.

A 2022 conference paper on a bank's credit division in Indonesia studied 43 relationship managers trained in the framework and reported a positive association between the wildly important goals discipline and meeting commercial credit targets. Its data came from questionnaires, interviews and company records at a single bank.

What it does not say

It does not say that a short list beats a long one. The goal-setting review concerns how specific and demanding a goal is, and it appeared a decade before the book, so it does not test the framework's instruction to hold the number of goals very low.

It does not say that narrowing is free. A 2009 paper in Academy of Management Perspectives, titled Goals Gone Wild, argued that the benefits of goal setting had been overstated and its side effects largely ignored. The list includes a narrow focus that neglects areas without a goal, more unethical behaviour, inhibited learning and reduced intrinsic motivation. The paper concerns goal setting in general, and the first discipline narrows attention on purpose, which makes the list relevant to it.

It has not been evaluated independently in the way a drug or a teaching method would be. The evidence offered by the company that sells the framework is a count of client teams, which FranklinCovey put at more than 13,000 in 2012, with no outcome data in the release. Not having been evaluated is different from having been disproved, and the overlap with goal-setting research is a reason to expect the practice to help in some settings.

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