Over the past few years I have been conducting something of a social experiment on a few of my friends. The hypothesis is simple: can you motivate people to achieve their goals primarily by believing in them, and supplementing that belief with basic project management tools?

It sounds dumb, it sounds like a really stupid experiment to conduct, but if you stop and think about the implications, it become clear that if this works, our fundamental approach to people management in a professional setting might be wrong. In fact, if the premise is that goals become achievable for people that believe they are achievable, then the idea of performance management in a professional setting needs to be completely reversed.

What Does it Mean to Believe in Someone?

This is something I think people get wrong pretty often. The shortest, most basic answer is probably “having confidence”. It’s not wrong, but it’s not complete either. A lot of people have confidence in themselves, sometimes unearned confidence, often confidence in impossible things. In fact, the Dunning-Kruger effect is specifically a cognitive bias in which people of limited competence in a specific domain overestimate their ability in that same domain.

But not you, reader, you’re definitely above average at most things. Probably.

The other problem with solely relying on confidence is that real confidence has to come from within. You can’t give confidence to anyone. You can convince them to have it, you can help them develop it, but you can’t just hand it to them.

Believing in people is really about helping them develop confidence by providing clarity of vision. Let that sink in for a minute.

Goals Are Neat, Vision is Better

Saving up to take a vacation to South America later this year is a goal. Paying down your credit card by 2026 is a goal. Lowering your team’s technical debt by Q4 by way of removing unused dependencies is a goal.

Interestingly, a lot of us will probably recognize these more like an OKR, or as a target, but in reality, just goals. Dress it up in any fancy corpo-speak you’d like, my personal favorite is SMART Goals.

When Goals Aren’t Big Enough

What if your goal cannot be time-bound because it’s not specific, you have no idea what it will take, or how to measure it? What if you goal is simply a dream you feel you must make real?

“I want to build the world’s premier talent agency focusing on technical leaders, peer-coaching, and team-building, and I want to grow it by putting together a network of like-minded technical leaders.”

No measurements. Not super specific. No timeline. But one hell of a vision.

“I have had an idea for a tabletop game that centers around 3d-printable modular spaceships. I want to make that game a reality.”

Better, more specific, but still no timeline, no direct action to take, and only one thing to measure. An awesome dream though.

Vision is really this concept that, we have a goal that doesn’t really fit the goal framework because it’s too big, and it isn’t really a project yet, because we’re not sure where the work is yet. In fact, more accurately, we might call vision a “horizon 2 project”.

Vision → Goals → Tasks

Once you know your vision, it becomes easy to build goals towards it. Once you know your goals, it becomes simple to build tasks towards your goals. And once you have your tasks, well, now everything is just a matter of time management and discipline.

Some people like Growing Tomatos, Slicing Pies, or Embracing the Suck; experiment, find the combination of time management and prioritization strategies that actually works for you, and your life, otherwise none of it will really work. Finding the techniques that work for you is important, because relying purely on motivation is not going to cut it. Motivation is fleeting, applied discipline sticks and gets things done.

Putting the Clarity in

So, how do you, someone outside the vision, help someone else find the clarity in their vision?

Refine it.

Yeah, it really is that simple.

If you have a dream that feels out of your grasp, no matter how reasonable it might seem to anyone else, that will feel perpetually frustrating, maybe a bit maddening. Some might even go as far as to say “impossible”.

If someone is willing to bring that dream within reach by helping you break it down into actionable goals, and break those goals down into tasks, and maybe even keep you accountable to a timeline, all of a sudden, that impossible dream feels achievable.

None of This is News

Right? If you’ve ever done agile in any half-decent software engineering org, all of this should sound familiar to you. We do this constantly. In a professional context, this is pretty much a required part of the job.

So why does it sound so strange to apply it to our personal relationships? Generally speaking, our friendships aren’t about getting things done, or productivity, or project management. Sometimes our friends just need a little help getting to a place they can actually turn dreams into projects, and projects into goals, and all of that into work.

So, How’d the Experiments Go?

Honestly, mixed results. Sometimes, amazing results - games launched, dreams reached, stars plucked from the sky and placed into mason jars, and quite neatly placed as price pieces on mantles. Other times, hard truths learned - one friend discovered he did not have the emotional resilience he thought he had, and had to take a large step back from his dream, one which would absolutely require he increase said resilience.

The point is that each of these friends got to the point where their dreams came into focus as projects, and those projects became actionable; they took action, or they are taking action. In many respects, I haven’t been able to falsify my hypothesis yet.

Of course, the data scientist in me says I need more points of comparison, so … time to make more friends. 😀