What we can learn during the annual goals "silly season"

This time of year is called the "silly season" in motorsports because we're in the literal middle of our racing season AND we're all already operating in the 2023 season: planning partnerships, talent moves, and logistics for the year we won't start for another six months. 

Every summer I see something really similar with my corporate clients who set goals annually: sometimes between mid-July and September, even IF the organization did a mid-year reset after Q2, we find ourselves looking at our annual goals, scratching our heads, and wondering, "What were we thinking?"

For organizations that set goals annually in November or December of the previous year: when we set those goals, we did so based on the information we had at the time. Now, we have seven (or so) more months of information that may line up with or be dramatically different than the assumptions we set those goals based on. We know a lot more right now about what our goals for this year could or should have been. But, generally, now is not the time to "revisit" or "reset" our annual goals. In a lot of situations, it's better to stay the course, notice what we're learning about our goals while we work with them right now, and get ready for our next annual planning cycle (which is just around the corner) to improve, with what we learn during this "growing pains" phase.

This episode talks about a couple of specific opportunities that you can leverage for learning right now, while we're "living with" annual goals that may feel awkward:

• The creative exercise of evolving (not changing) Objective language; and
• What we can learn right now that makes us smarter about our most important organizational measures of success, which we may reflect next year as a North Star Metric and/or Topline Measures.

This awkward mid-year growing pain phase can be a source of frustration, and it can be a really valuable source of information and learning that helps us do better with our next round of annual goal-setting.

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