By Marie-Claude Turcotte
Those who know me are aware that I am constantly in training; I have this visceral need to learn. I recently realized that a recommendation kept recurring in many trainings, regardless of the subject studied: objectives. In a LinkedIn training with Mathieu Laferrière a few years ago, he recommended that we set objectives for our publications. In the reference document of the Quebec Quality Movement on strategic planning, it is written to set strategic objectives. In my black belt training with Yves Lebrasseur, he said that we must have an objective for improvement activities. But why is it so important to set an objective?
The objective of an objective is to determine where we want to be, but I may not be objective. For me, without a clear objective, I tend to wander a bit. I always move forward, because it’s in my nature, but I don’t always know where I will end up. It’s a bit like when I go for a motorcycle ride on a beautiful summer day. If I don’t know where I’m going, I end up coming back home after twenty minutes and I haven’t really enjoyed the ride. Ultimately, when you have nowhere to go, you always end up there. This is why setting an objective increases the likelihood of achieving it.
To set a good objective, I recommend that it be SMART, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable (or Ambitious), Realistic, and Time-bound. A quick search will allow you to learn more about this method if you are not already familiar with it. But before setting this objective, I especially recommend that you fully understand the current situation and the issue you are facing. Indeed, your objective allows you to accomplish your vision, but that vision must not be clouded. Your objective might not be the same if you want to reduce errors during production as if you want to increase customer satisfaction, even if the two subjects may seem related. Reducing order errors will certainly increase customer satisfaction, but perhaps facilitating the ordering process will increase it even more. In any case, the proper analysis of the problem will guide you to the right solution, but that is a topic for another article.
Thus, to achieve objectives, they must first be defined, they must be SMART, and they must also match the context. Objectives are like a lighthouse in the darkness; during the stormy crossing, the clearer they are, the more likely we are to reach them.