Small Steps Lead to Big Steps

As you are doing your strategic planning, it’s easy sometimes to look down the road and get worried about all the challenges you face. Major projects with new clients may look like they’ll never get done. Perfection might seem unattainable. Organizational change can seem like a never-ending process. Bureaucratic obstacles may appear insurmountable. If you are not careful, the planning process can really get you down.

So, do something about it.

An article by Elizabeth Grace Saunders at The 99Percent.com explored some of the reasons people fail to finish. Some people run out of enthusiasm, some get focused on other alternatives besides their current approach, and some are just so busy aiming for perfection they never achieve their main goal.

One approach that can really help is taking a large project and breaking it down into smaller, achievable, and measurable tasks. Focusing on small steps rather than just the ultimate destination helps to keep you on your path. Not only do you make progress toward your goal, just seeing that progress also helps you maintain your enthusiasm. You also have a better opportunity to see if something’s not working or if adjustments need to be made, rather than waiting until the end and then realizing another way would have been better (this helps overcome the concern about missing better alternatives).

Saunders suggests that

If you struggle with maintaining the energy to finish, individuals who insist (sometimes to the point of annoying you) on pushing through can be your greatest allies. Scheduled accountability and transparency gives you positive peer pressure to keep at it when your initial energy wanes.

Here’s how to make it a part of your routine: Break down your project into actionable, written goals such as: read the requirements, make note of important points, ask the client questions, etc. Then tell someone who prides themselves on follow through exactly what you will do and when.

When I was teaching undergrads, who typically took 6-7 classes per semester, I knew if they looked at the semester as a whole they would likely be pretty overwhelmed. What I suggested every semester was that my students take all the syllabuses from their courses and sit down with a calendar, plotting out when everything would be due for every class. Then, they should start setting deadlines for finishing drafts or completing final projects, so they could try to deconflict everything and also give them a timeline by which they could measure their progress. The idea was to take the four months ahead of them, which seemed pretty daunting at a macro level, and break them down into something much more manageable. Few students actually did this, but the ones who did told me they enjoyed a much lower stress level, and felt like they did better work.

This is the basis for The Progress Principle, by Theresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, according to an interview of Dr Amabile by Daniel Pink. She notes that

…small wins can happen all the time. Those are the incremental steps toward meaningful (even big) goals. Our research showed that, of all the events that have the power to excite people and engage them in their work, the single most important is making progress – even if that progress is a small win. That’s the progress principle. And, because people are more creatively productive when they are excited and engaged, small wins are a very big deal for organizations.

This concept has made its way into the public sector as well, most notably through the introduction of the Rapid Results concept into international development work. According to a colleague of mine who worked with the technique at the World Bank, Rapid Results, initially developed for the private sector, has become more important in the realm of policy and thought leadership because it helps address many of the barriers to creativity in that field. Public sector workers in many developing countries face challenges such as poorly functioning bureaucracies, limited resources, and low self-esteem driven largely by the public’s poor perception of them. The World Bank found that Rapid Results helped lead to high performance in spite of these systemic barriers, by helping leaders create a protected work environment where the effects of these these barriers were temporarily neutralized.

While it’s important to have a clearly defined goal, it helps to focus on the steps it takes to get there. There are many factors over which you have little control, but by breaking down your projects and initiatives into smaller, more manageable, steps, you can focus more on the things you CAN control, and in the end, make better progress toward your ultimate goal.