Selecting your goal when you participate in a Working Out Loud circle

Why this post?

I am currently preparing to be a member  and  a facilitator of my 4th Working Out Loud circle starting in September 2018.

I am often asked to give advice on what a person should choose as their circle goal.

This post gives my current best shot at answering that question definitively.

Goals in a WOL circle

Each member of a circle needs to choose an individual goal and build relationships that can help you with that goal during the running of a 12 week WOL circle.

How much time you can spend on your goal is a key consideration as input to thinking about your goal. Some of the time on your goal will happen automatically as you do the weekly circle guide exercises. Others may be doing a goal that is work-related and, therefore, you may be able to do work on your goal in your employment time. For many of us, though, circle work is done in our own time.

I would say that you should plan to spend each week of the 12 weeks 1 hour on reading the circle guides and doing the exercises, 1 hour on your goal specifically and 1 hour in the circle call. I view this as a minimum. You may decide to spend considerably more time than this especially if you do pick a goal that you really care about and are passionate about. I would also say that often people get caught up in the energy of doing a WOL circle and take things to the max!

In my experience, you often find that as you start doing a circle you will experience an energy that comes from meeting as a circle and meeting with people who are all working towards their goals.

The goal criteria are clear and unambiguous in the circle guides:-

1. Do you care about it?
1. Your goal should be something that you have an interest in personally, that you choose for yourself and not given to you by someone else.
2. It does not matter if it overlaps with someone else’s in your circle.
3. There is no rule that says a goal has to be work-related. It can be absolutely anything as long as it meets the criteria.
2. Can you benefit from the experience of others?
1. This is a key criteria. I find this the most challenging one to meet.
2. It is easy to pick a goal that you can do on your own but that defeats one of the core objectives of being part of a WOL circle.
3. What you pick as your goal will play a major part in what you learn in the circle as you seek to discover and connect with people related to that goal.
   
4. You have a great opportunity in the 12 weeks of a circle to develop amazing relationships with people within your circle and around the world.
5. I am no expert in picking these goals for myself but these other people could be people who you would welcome input from or review what you are doing or may be even use your output so could be people to help yiu shape your goal.
   
3. Can you frame it as a learning goal?
1. Your goal should be something that you learn about or explore.
2. The 12 weeks of a circle is an ideal time to concentrate on something new to you or something that you would love to learn more about.
4. Can you make progress towards it in 12 weeks?
1. You should factor into your goal how much time you are likely be able to devote to this activity.
2. Ideally, you will state the goal in such a way that it is clear to you and others that you are making progress and ultimately that you have achieved your goal.
3. So think of the end of the circle after being part of a circle, what will you have learned, created, co-created and done that is clear for all to see. If you do not have complete clarity at the outset includes some words that indicate how you will seek to get that clarity.
4. As a project manager at my core, this is all about defining the end point with as much clarity as you can.

I am reminded of Michael Hyatt’s SMARTER goals (article) which states that the best goals are:

1. Specific enough to focus and direct your energies.
2. Measurable so you can keep track of your progress.
3. Actionable with clear initiating verb that prompts specific activity
4. Risky enough to leverage our natural tendency to rise to challenges.
5. Time-keyed so you’re prompted exactly when to act.
   
6. Exciting enough to inspire and harness the power of your intrinsic motivation.
7. Relevant within the overall context of your life.

Using OKRs for a WOL Circle Goal

When it comes to wording your goal, you could use the format used for Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). OKRs are becoming increasingly popular and would be a good way of learning something new just by wording your goal. This may also help those of you who may have a number of sub-goals you want to achieve. Lots of content on OKRs in my notes from reading “Radical Focus” earlier this year.

“Some thoughts:-

O – Objective

• What you want to do
• Qualitative
• Inspiring
• Motivates
• Pick the goal that matters most
• Single sentence so easily remembered by all on the team, in the organisation
• Actionable by the team independently

KR – Key Results

• How you know if you have achieved the goal
• Make you a little scared you cannot make them
• Something tough but doable in 3 months
• All stretch goals, need to be hard but not impossible
• Impossible goals are depressing
• Hard goals are inspiring
• Quantitative
• Set confidence level of achieving each one then review that level each week”

See this example of an HR-related OKR (taken from this Weekdone page):

Interesting to me that the time period for an OKR is 3 months, the same as a circle!!

The confidence level is also of interest. This is to stretch the OKR setter. So instead of you having 100% certainty of what you write down as your OKR or goal, why not say you have 50% confidence.

The review your OKR each week is also good as you do that each week in a circle in any case.

As I re-read my OKR book notes, the quadrant format of a sheet to track and review would also be an ideal thing to do as you set and track progress to your goal. See this example from “Living With OKRs”:

“Suggested sheet in 4 quadrants:-

• Top right – Objective, followed by 3 Key Results with 5/10 after each KR
  • = 50% confidence of hitting them
• Bottom right – Health Metrics
  • Things we want to protect while we shoot for the moon
  • Forces a discussion each week about these
  • Continue to watch
• Top left – This Week
  • P1 x 3, P2 x 2
  • Key priority tasks this week to affect the OKRs
• Bottom Left – Next 4 Weeks
  • Pipeline of important things that we expect to happen
  • Helps eliminate surprises across the team

OKRs hold me/us to my/our promises even when I/we feel like sliding back into my/our comfort zones

We need to commit to each other and to our organisation and our goals and then execute like mad people”

I have never used OKRs but I may use them for my goal in my 4th WOL circle from September 2018.

Examples: my WOL Circle Goals to date

The following real-life examples of the goals I set myself in my 3 previous circles may help you as you consider yours. I am not holding these up as ideal or as role models but I wanted to give you a flavour of some goals that have been used in circles.

1st Circle

The goal from my first circle:-

To create more long-form content than I have done prior to starting in my first WOL circle and to do so in a way that:-
(1) leverages both my personal knowledge and practical experience
(3) inspires people to engage and apply that content in their daily lives
(3) reduces any "barriers to entry" for the subject area
(4) encourages the reader to continue and build on the conversation
(5) is jargon-free and accessible to people unfamiliar with the subject area

and where the content takes the form of:-
(1) blog posts and comments on other people's blog posts
(2) Facebook posts and comments on other people's Facebook posts
(3) Tweets and replies to other people's tweets

and is either:-
(1) proactive with no specific prompt from another person's content
(2) reactive indirectly to another person's content
(3) reactive directly to another person's content.

This will include making explicit content that historically has been "hidden" behind "Like"s and "RT"s.

2nd Circle

The goal from my second circle:-

"To read Jane Bozarth's "Show Your Work" book in 10 weeks, apply it by making notes of the book and adding my perspective and thoughts to those notes and then actually showing my work during the 10 weeks. This will include seeking feedback on that work and looking for co-creation opportunities with a view to actually co-creating products in weeks 7-9."

3rd Circle

The goal from my third circle:-

Summary

To read and apply three books on Leonardo da Vinci, working deeply and OKRs (Objectives and Key Results).

In Detail

My plan for 2018 and One Word 2018 is to work closely with Fiona (Michaux) in a variety of ways but including publishing in tandem with Fiona a set of blog posts throughout 2018 on our chosen words for the year of "focus" (mine) and "energy" (hers).

To fulfil my core desire of being simultaneously a generalist and a specialist, I will focus my learning in 2018 as follows:-

1. In January to further encourage my voracious appetite for learning, I will read and apply Walter Isaacson's Leonardo da Vinci

2. in February to address my issue of being easily distracted and to start working and reading more deeply, I will read and apply Cal Newport's "Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World"

3. in March to understand Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and set my 1st set of personal OKRs, I will read and apply Christina R. Wodtke's "Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results"

In parallel with the above, I am setting the following milestones:-

1. all my loose paperwork reviewed, scanned and binned/retained (end January)

2. all my digital content moved to a new easy-to-find-stuff directory structure on all my devices including hard disk drives (end February)

3. a document consolidating my learning of using Workplace by Facebook and including the wider community's assessment of that platform versus other platforms we have used with a view to extending our use of that platform beyond the end of March 2018 created and issued to the two Facebook execs who gave me free access to Workplace to run a WOL circle on (end February)

4. a Lessons Learned blog post published covering the running of the Workplace by Facebook community and including members of the community's assessment of how I ran the community (end March)

5. all my CDs ripped to mp3 by iTunes and the CDs given away to good homes to free up space (end April) - but I will probably need to start this when we are doing this circle!

The 3rd circle goal above is embarrassing as I started and achieved none of the non-book reading-related ones and they all still need doing.

Over to you

And now over to you, what will you choose as your circle goal?

Remember that there are specific exercises in the circle guides early on in the 12 weeks and you do not have to pick your goal before the circle starts but it would probably help if you started considering now what you will choose as your goal.

When I did the Immunity to Change HarvardX MOOC, we had to pick a goal for something in our life that we wanted to change. That was a challenge to me but I remember some early video clips in that MOOC that were really helpful in making me think. See some images from the video below. I am not saying this content is ideal for a WOL circle goal but it certainly stirs up ground in your mind to help you generate ideas for your goals. You could consider it a guided journey to think about your goal.

I would encourage you to start writing some thoughts down about what you are thinking of doing as your goal and sharing those with others. This could be with your circle if you have some lead in time before the formal start of your circle. It is a good way of getting dialogue starting ahead of the circle as people get to know each other. This will also help firm up your goal as people ask questions about your goal for understanding and clarification but also contributing ideas for your goal even before your circle has started.

I would also encourage you to publicise your goal widely (if that is appropriate) so that you get people contributing to your goal that you have never heard of and have never contacted or contributed to before. Any such info from this source is all a bonus!

Best wishes for your goal selection and every success in achieving your goals.