Best Practices for Writing Effective Objectives
In Acclaim Ideas, everything starts with objectives. Objectives set the direction of travel for your organization's efforts, helping you to ensure that your people's creative efforts are aligned with what the organization wants and needs.
But what's the best way of writing objectives? Here are our top tips for making them effective:
1. Align them with your organizational objectives
It sounds like a no-brainer, but you'd be surprised how many times we've seen innovation teams working on objectives that bear little or no relation to what the organization is trying to achieve. This can happen for a number of reasons. One example is where a senior person says 'hey, let's do something exciting with AI/blockchain/robots' without pausing to consider whether this decision makes any sense. And before you know it, the tail is wagging the dog.
So when you're entering your objectives, make sure they are firmly rooted in, and aligned with, your organization's strategic objectives.
2. Think about where to play and how to win
Two of the most important elements of an organizational strategy are where to play, and how to win. 'Where to play' identifies the markets, sectors or industries your organization wants to target, while 'How to win' identifies what your organization can offer that market or industry that no other organization can: Your unique value proposition, your differentiator. Where to play and how to win are strong guides for where your organization needs its innovation efforts to focus, in order to address unanswered challenges in those markets and/or offer new ways of creating value.
3. Keep them high level, and not too specific
The more specific your objectives, the less likely it is that you are leaving any room for creativity or new ideas (and the more likely it is that you are writing tactics, not strategic directions). Objectives should be broad and high-level, so people can feel free to address them in as wide a range of ways as possible. The narrower the objective, the less likely it is that you will access the lateral thinking that could power truly radical innovation.
4. Inspire!
Objectives are an opportunity to get your people excited about innovation - so make them inspiring. Create excitement through your language and by painting a bright and positive vision of the future. The more excited and engaged your people are in your objectives, the more likely they are to come up with creative ideas on how to achieve them. Sometimes, using a storytelling approach can be really effective in getting people inspired: what will the world, and the organization, look like when this objective is achieved?
5. What does success look like?
Just because your objectives are broad and high-level doesn't mean you can't specify how you will know when they're achieved. For example, 'improving our standing in the market' is broad and high-level, but it's also rather vague. 'Being rated number one in the market for reliability and customer service' is measurable, while still leaving room for people to come up with ideas about how to achieve it.