[Music] hi I'm David Mason I'm the director of data science and an OD consultant here at decision wise you've seen the results of the survey and you're excited to make some changes that will increase engagement so today we're going to spend the next couple of minutes talking about some best practices when creating your action plan now obviously this will take months to fully explore and it turns out YouTube won't actually let me upload a file that size so I'm just going to go over the five most important things to keep in mind I call them discovery point when creating action plans and then I'll give you one tip for each of them the very first step the first discovery point before anything else is to be incredibly clear about what your goal actually is the reason is that poorly made goals can be gamed take for example let's be a better listener that's a noble goal right so let's pursue that I make that my goal and one of the ways that I put it into action is to not interrupt people when they're talking so I sit back I let someone talk and then I say what I was going to say anyway because I wasn't really listening I was just not talking but I met the goal let's take losing weight there's a goal we've all tried at one point or another if I just want to lose weight I can still eat unhealthy just less of it I'm not really any better off health-wise and in fact I might even be worse off but I met the goal and in fact the fastest way to lose weight to be honest is just cut off a leg but that would be ridiculous right but it reaches the goal so discovery point number one is to be clear about what you want to accomplish and tip number one is once you have that figure out how to cheat on it because if you can cheat on it then it wasn't a good goal being more specific about the actual what that you want to accomplish discovery point number two is to now determine why you want to work towards this goal the goal should never actually be your goal what is the result you hope to achieve remember the goal is a tool and a measuring stick designed to help you arrive at that result so tip number two is to be brutally brutally on it ask yourself will benefit and if the answer isn't a resounding me I do then you have to have a reckoning saying you want to be a better listener is one of those things that sounds great but if you're honest answer as to why you want to is because your boss told you - or that it keeps the peace of the office then you don't have a strong enough motivation to sustain you when the going gets rough if your motivation is not aligned with the goal you need to find a way to either bring your motivation closer to the goal or the goal closer to your motivation but in either case don't proceed until this is in place now let's say you've made this big hairy audacious goal you're super excited about it hey that's great I'm excited for you to show for the stars I always say but how do you plan on doing this exactly so the third discovery point then is to determine how you will reach this goal let's take your awesome goal you have a great goal which is super clear and purpose and your pump to accomplish it now take that goal and chop it in half now chop it in half again now chop it in half again it's great to keep your big super goal but you're going to need to create some sub goals along the way there's a reason this video is only a couple of minutes long if your goal was to watch this video and then you saw it with 45 minutes long the majority of you would either just close this tab or randomly click through the playback bar we have her at the bottom until you got to the end see I totally finished it so tip number three then for this is to think like a video game that is to say you want to make your goals manageable video games are so addictive precisely because you were always accomplishing something you can't move left or right without going towards some goal if you finish a day and you feel like you haven't made progress on something important to you then you don't have manageable enough goals now you know what video games also do incredibly well tracking your progress and giving you feedback in real life you need to ask yourself when will you know you have succeeded and this actually accomplishes two things it gives you a deadline and it forces you to be specific about the goal otherwise when the time came how would you know you actually accomplished it right the terminology we use here is actionable steps or tangible paths tip number four is to help you with the win is to redefine the win ie think of the different types of time you can use we normally make a deadline but think about also maybe a period of time to accomplish something like I want to accomplish this during q2 or you could do it like an event like every team meeting or every time you walk in the and the door now every goal is different so I can't give you suggested timeframes but what you need to do is have a discussion where you bring someone in to help you figure out what that it so speaking of which this discovery point is who is going to help you with your goal cool can you bring in and what resources can they provide to help you make your goal seeking behavior more fruitful research shows that goals are much more likely to be accomplished if you bring someone else in even if that person is just a social support or a cheerleader type now tip number five is to not forget the who in the who of goal setting behavior there's a reason I phrase it that way because normally we think of stuff is just finding the resources do it ourselves pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps but what you need to do is you need to figure out who can help you in any way they can and you will be much more likely to accomplish that goal so now don't forget just recap everything is to find to discover the what the why the how the when and the who and if you do that you will be in a much better place to accomplish all the things that you said about in your action plan [Laughter] [Music] you