The Made to Stick authors (Dan and Chip Heath) have been discussing whisker goals (as opposed to stretch goals) as a way to get a person (or team) moving forward. And it makes a lot of sense.
How often have you decided to "lose weight" and set such a high goal that you never got started? Or asked your team to start using Cobertura for code coverage, and asked for 90%... only today you have 1%?
Setting large goals feels like a smart idea. It's something the team can aspire to. It's a Big Goal that can help motivate us. The idea makes perfect sense on paper,but the reality is different. Most people, when faced with a big goal, give up. They won't even try.
Life is tough. We get "stretch goals" everyday, in every part of our lives. Your To Do list around the house is probably filled with them. Time with your family. Features at work for the next release. Cleaning up old code. Adding automated tests.
So when one more set of stretch goals comes across our desks, we tend to ignore it. Of course, this is not the desired effect.
Instead of putting stretch goals in front of your team (or yourself!), find a very small goal. Just a whisker more than they're doing today. Something so easy to do that they'll just take a moment and do it.
You might find that a team with small, achievable goals gets a lot more done, once they get rolling with a small start. If I might co-opt a famous sentence or two...
An object at rest tends to stay at rest. An object in motion tends to stay in motion
Link: Made to Stick: Set Smaller Goals, Getting Bigger Results
