5 Tips In Making Wildly Important Goals
The temptation when you’re busy is to gravitate towards the quickest solution. While immediately feeling great because it puts out a fire, it often doesn’t alleviate the situations causing your fires. To respond to this conflict, we utilize the Four Disciplines of Execution (4DX). Created by Jim Huling, Chris McChesney, and Sean Covey. Our process is, every 12 weeks, we make a new WIG for our group.
The Four Disciplines are:
Focus on the wildly important (WIG)
Act on lead measures
Keep a compelling scoreboard
Create a cadence of accountability (through WIG sessions).
This article has a handy breakdown of each of the Four Disciplines. It’s worth checking out. In our experience, we receive the most questions on making WIGs and conducting WIG sessions. So, below, we will provide a little more information on forming WIGs and WIG sessions below.
Five Important Notes on making WIGs
Make sure your WIG is a goal and not just a task of the goal.
4DX gives you this helpful question to ask in determining your WIG - “Which one area of our team’s performance would we want to improve most (assuming everything else holds) in order to achieve the overall WIG of the organization?”
Here's an example
Task -- Complete 50 teacher reviews by June 7.
Goal -- Increase the average teacher evaluation score from 60% to 80% by June 7."
Make sure your goals are measurable and time-bound.
4DX uses the format of goal construction as X to Y by Z. Follow that format!
You can see in this goal how I've structured it like that "Increase the average teacher evaluation scores from 60% to 80% by June 7."
Aim for 80% Completion!
This book argues that if you neglect one element, the likelihood of achieving your WIG is low. But if you can reach 80% of your lead measures, which are aided and assisted by implementing each of the four disciplines, you will achieve your goal.
Finalize your WIG with the input of your primary stakeholders. This will increase their buy-in.
Make sure that the WIG is challenging but achievable.
You’re creating a game that is winnable but not impossible. If you would secretly be happy almost reaching the goal, you should rephrase your goal. For example, if you had a WIG to reach 1 million in sales, but you’d be pumped if you got 70k, make 70k the goal! Let everyone feel the joy of winning. Plus, it’ll help you the next time you create a WIG!
Implement these tools and you should be set up for achieving your most important goals.
How To Run a WIG Session
WIG Meetings are dedicated times to discuss and spur one another towards achieving your Wildly Important Goals. Without these dedicated times, your team can get so consumed in your whirlwind that you have a hard time advancing your wildly important goal. Read This Article —>
