Research scientists (Wilson, Shenhav, Straccia, Cohen) finally put a number to the amount of failing we can handle before we give up on a goal. It’s 15 percent. If the tasks we take to achieve a goal result in errors and roadblocks totaling more than about 15 percent of our total effort to reach that goal, we just kind of give up. It is called the Eighty-Five Percent [success] Rule.
I think we all know some version of “too much failing makes us give up” is true, but having that number puts things in perspective. I can think of many past organizational goals where the failure rate on our tasks undertaken toward goal achievement was much higher than 15 percent. But what did we do? We kept going, because we were not going to accept anything “less” for the people we were trying to serve – children, immigrants, the elderly, and other groups systemically held at a disadvantage in society. To what end? Certainly not success.
Not only did we not achieve the goal, we burned out the team in the process. We lost momentum and collective knowledge as employees and partners peeled off to new ventures, uninterested in continuing a pursuit that was clearly not working. What’s most important is that we as public stewards forwent good progress that could have improved people’s lives incrementally, by chasing what we believed to be the virtuous pursuit of “audacious goal setting.” Maybe we should have pivoted sooner to a more achievable goal that we could complete and leverage to establish a new set of slightly more ambitious goals over time? Instead we held stubbornly to solving all of society’s inequities at once.
I’m exaggerating a little for dramatic effect. Most of the teams I’ve worked with were not absolute perfectionists. But the propensity to push the envelope on stated goals (more, better, faster) is ever-present, and the churn of new initiatives to replace the failed old ones is constant. I believe applying what we know about the neuroscience of the Eighty-five Percent Rule can help to counter this inclination to overpromise and underdeliver.
Why Not Set a 100 Percent Achievable Goal?
Stanford neuroscience professor Andrew Huberman, in his Huberman Lab podcast titled The Science of Setting & Achieving Goals, lays out the science behind all of this beautifully. It is well-worth a listen. One of the concepts he stresses in describing the Eighty-five Percent Rule is that the goal can’t be too easy, because the team won’t view it as worth pursuing. And while that sounds like a motivational poster tagline, there is actual science behind it. You need the right amount of dopamine, the neurotransmitter chemical that helps us determine the value of the goal we are pursuing, to get the blood pumping (literally). This increase in blood pressure motivates us humans to take on a new challenge. And dopamine is highest when we experience novel, positive events. Applied to public sector strategic goal setting this translates into setting a new and worthy goal (novel) that we mostly succeed at pursuing (positive).
So should we bring blood pressure cuffs into the boardroom? You need not be so precise in measuring and predicting the biological underpinnings of your goal setting. We internalize data from our experiences, and we can use that gut sense to guide and adjust our goals to a point where roughly 85 percent of the work we set out to achieve can be accomplished.
Visualizing Success … and Failure
As part of Dr. Huberman’s podcast, he covers critical component of positive visualization at the start of any goal setting activities, centering his discussion on a study by Balcetis, Riccio, and Cole. His explanation reminded me of the Heath Brothers change management principle “Find the Bright Spots,” in their book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard. The Heath Brothers describe the work of solutions-focused therapists who use the Miracle Question technique, asking patients to imagine they woke up one morning and a problem they were facing was suddenly solved. “What are the first small signs that tell you the issue is resolved?” the therapist asks the patient in an effort to help them visualize the tangible evidence of succeeding at their goal. Note that they ask about “first” and “small” signs to keep the patient from anchoring on too grandiose a vision for the future. (Eighty-five Percent Rule!) It’s a practical anecdote, and I’ve used that line of questioning with public sector clients to great success. But the path of getting to the goal does not stop with an initial visioning exercise.
Dr. Huberman says we need to couple positive visualization of attaining the goal with actual action toward the goal. Fair enough. The visualization exercises increase the blood pressure which gets us ready to charge forward, but the effect wanes quickly. We need to sustain the activation of our brains’ amygdalas to increase our systolic blood pressure, thus giving us the ongoing drive to accomplish the goal. How do we do this?
After a strategic planning team shares a collective high-five for coming up with their shared vision of success, they need to start planning for all the ways they could fail. If you are thinking, “this does not sound like the positive affirmation drum circle we’ve come to expect at my human-centered, helping-people government job,” you are not alone. I realize doomsday scenario planning is not the way many government agencies outside of emergency services go about conducting their business. But Dr. Huberman says the motivation from envisioning your future state only lasts for a brief moment. More powerful than our desire to move toward a successful future is our desire to move away from danger. It’s the way our brains were built, and it has a name – avoidance circuits.
All of Dr. Huberman’s talk on the desire to move from danger, made me think of Baltimore’s CitiStat program and similar performance management approaches, which turn on the bright spotlight of accountability. CitiStat conversations were set up by Mayor O’Malley and his team to identify and remove barriers to success in various goals set by the city. As part of the process, goals would adjust as new information came to light. Publicly sharing data, in front of the Mayor no less, certainly amps up desire to succeed. But I know many Baltimore city employees who said the process of getting up in front of the Mayor and their peers, to demonstrate through data their progress toward goals, racked them with fear that they were failing.
And that is where the process could go a little off the rails. Science says the focus on failing needs to be used as a scenario-planning tool. You need to consider what failing might mean to you, your team, and the work. Then you can set to work in ways which avoid the failures for which you’ve planned. But we can’t constantly think we are actually failing (real or perceived) as we implement the goal. This all comes back to the Eighty-five Percent Rule.
I had the opportunity to use the “Stat” approach while working for Mayor Fenty in the District of Columbia and on dozens of client projects since, and I have found that government leaders tend to be good at probing an issue (sometimes to death), but it is human to not be as good at pivoting to new approaches and adjusting expectations fast enough. When we use these types of accountability processes are we supporting the quest for success, or are we leaving teams to feel they are flailing in the ocean without a lifeboat? We need to be mindful of how the overemphasis on probing and underemphasis on pivoting can stymie trust building among participants.
Examining the Present to Prepare for the Future
To me one of the biggest ideas coming out of this research is that this information shouldn’t just be applied to an organization’s next strategic planning session. If your agency is already toiling away and not feeling successful, you probably have staff coming into your next strategic planning meeting defeated and tired. You need to address that energy before taking on a new goal setting, first by naming that what you might be feeling is rooted in neuroscience and not some personal moral failing, then committing to applying that science better in your future strategic planning work, and then showing your commitment by allowing staff to change existing goals. And when you do begin setting new goals for the future, remember the best path is: envision success, plan for failure, keep your fears close at hand, but delight in your accomplishments.
Good luck with your goal setting! But not too much luck. A few losses along the way gives you the drive to get to the finish line.
Shift Forward Consulting LLC 