GA 473 | Setting and Achieving Strategic Goals with Calvin Williams

When you're a leader though, you carry the burden of not just achieving your own goals, but you carry the burden of achieving goals at scale, enterprise scale, organization, wide scale. So how do you build such a mechanism that coordinates and orchestrates the collective effort of an entire organization towards something greater than any individual could possibly accomplish?

Today I'm excited to welcome Calvin Williams back to the show. Now Calvin's been on a few times and we're going to link to those previous episodes here in the show notes there. But today on the episode we talk about Calvin's new book. It's called Fit, Fit Fit. The Simple Science of Achieving Strategic Goals. And so what we do is we sort of just walk through what is this whole fit things all about. And there's a lot of similarities and parallels, but maybe a few unique twists to things like Toyota kata, scientific thinking, PDCA A3, that sort of thing. But it's a really nice model that Calvin's come up with. So we really walk through that. And towards the end we spent a lot of time talking about sort of strategic goal setting. So at an organizational level. And one of the questions that I had was just like, how does a leader set a good strategic goal? Right. Because that in and of itself is very difficult because if you set a bad goal per se and let's say you achieve it and then nothing really happens because you achieved a bad goal. So it was a really interesting conversation on that side of goals setting. So yeah, so all the links are going to be below in the, in the app that you're listening on there and also go to gemba events.com we're going to be updating this page on a regular basis. This is where all of our in person workshops are happening now. So we're really excited to start offering those. We've done several now and they've been wildly successful and just so, so awesome to see 15, 20 people kind of come together and practicing different continuous improvement lean thinking activities. We've got a kata themed worksh, we've got sort of more of a boot camp, lean flow type workshop and many more to come. In fact, we've recently just hired a new team member named Tim and he's going to be full time. That's all he's going to do is help us build this workshop business. So again, Gemba events.com all right, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Calvin, welcome back to the show. How are you, my man?

I'm doing fantastic. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, man, I'm excited to have you back on. So just pulled it up before we hit record. So you are back. You were on an episode 318 structuring your continuous improvement efforts and then 4304, 33 being a scientific leader with Calvin Williams. So yeah man. So I'm excited to have you back on and, and if folks don't know who you are, where, let's start with where are you calling in from?

I am in Atlanta, Georgia. I, I work for a company called Improver. I actually started, founded the company about four and a half, five years ago. And it's a, it's a, it's a technology company. And I like to say we're, we're, we've, you know, at the heart of what we do is continuous improvement, but in more sort of the way we phrase it is agile strategy execution. Okay. Yeah. And yeah, we released a, recently released a book in December of, of 2022. And yeah, I really appreciate you having me on and give me a chance to talk more about that book, the premise of it and we can, you know, hopefully we can dive into some of the content here.

Yeah, yeah. So, well, you know the drill, Calvin. Been on a few times. So we right out of the gate. We'd like to start with a quote. So what do you have?

I'll start with Jim Rohn. Jim Rohn is, is emerging as one of my favorite authors from a, certainly from a mindset standpoint. And his quote is the purpose of a goal is not so much for the reward you get, the tangible reward you get from achieving it, but from the person you become from the effort of trying to achieve it. And I think that's profound because you know, if you think about it from a continuous improvement context, it's yeah, we're out trying to improve the world and make processes better, make businesses better and so forth, but really the true continuous improvement journey is the one you perform on yourself.

Yeah.

And that's amazing.

Yeah. Oh, I love it.

I love it.

So good man. So good. All right, well, what's the name of your book, Calvin?

Yes, the book is called fit. Fit and that's an acronym and an adjective and we could dive into that in just a moment. But it's called fit the Simple Science of Achieving Strategic Goals.

Simple science, that, that's a interesting term. So can science ever be simple? I don't know.

Maybe. Well, we, we certainly have found ways to complicate it. Yeah. And in my opinion, we, we sometimes over complicated. So yeah, yeah, the book breaks it down in very simple terms that, that, you know, in my belief, scientific thinking is, is a natural occurrence. I think a 9 year old baby thinks scientifically, right? They set a goal. They say, hey, I'm gonna walk across a nine month old baby. They say, hey, I'm gonna walk across the room, right? I'm gonna walk from the couch to the table. And they say, okay, let me try this by taking my first step, right? They take a step, they fall, they say, okay, that didn't work, right? They get back up, they say, I'm trying it a little bit differently to take two steps, fall, get back up, try to get it. Before you know it, they're clearing the room, running around and breaking things throughout the house. So I think, you know, even though a baby doesn't think in, in the academic terms that we do, I think they are following a very scientific process, right. Of, you know, form a hypothesis, try it, see what happens. You know, they don't always get frustrated with failure, right. They, they come to embrace it. And I think that's part of the scientific mindset. Embrace failure as part of the journey.

Yeah.

And you know, a lot of time kids just bounce right back up and keep, keep experimenting, keep trying there. In fact, they're, they're probably some of the most curious and experimentive people on the planet.

Yeah. I mean, have you done that marshmallow challenge? I'm sure you probably have over the years, right? Whether you build a tower out of spaghetti, you know, and you stick the marshmallow on top, we use it as sort of an icebreaker and we do in person. And what, what they find over the, what they found over the years is the, the teams that do the worst at building this tower, you know, it's like, you know, how high can you get it, you know, are like, you know, they say like the, the NBA's or, you know, because they're, they spend half the time arguing who's in charge and all the rest of it. Whereas kids, like kindergarten even, you know, they just pick up the mark the spaghetti and start building a tower, you know, and again, they're experimenting and seeing what works. But for some reason, as older and we're presumably smarter, right. Wiser, educated and all this kind of stuff, we lose that. I don't know why that's it.

Yeah, well, you know, the, the enemy of science and scientific thinking is thinking. You already know.

Yeah.

And the older you get, the more you think, you know, so kids don't have that presumption as much. So I think scientific thinking is more Natural, you know, when you're really young. It's just that. Yeah. Like you say, when you get older, you, you have other interests. Yeah.

Well, then pride and all this kind of nasty stuff comes in as we get older. And most kids, they don't really care about pride necessarily when they're little, you know, so.

Right.

But. All right, well, hey, so what's the premise of, of the whole idea of fit? You mentioned that it stood for something. So what's it stand for?

Okay, so FIT is both an adjective and an acronym. The adjective of FIT stands for focus, iterate and track. Right. And there's some significance to each one of those. So focus is select a goal, a single goal. Right. The science says that if you go from one goal to two, go, actually going down to one goal makes you 243% more likely to achieve it than if you had two goals. And for each incremental goal that you add, that likelihood of achievement goes down exponentially, continues to decline. So focus is, hey, set a goal. Make sure you're crystal clear on what you're trying to achieve. Iterate. The significance of iterate is that you're going to make a series of, series of incremental improvements as you make progress towards your goal and you're going to measure yourself at every step. So instead of implementing a whole slug of improvements at once, almost a, you know, you know, almost with the intent to disrupt the process, you just increment your way there in a more scientific way. Right. The scientific method is control all factors, improve one or change one and see what difference it makes to the system. You know, you're taking a little bit more of a scientific approach by taking baby step at a time toward the goal. That's the incremental improvement. And in fact, that's where the Agile component comes in at, because agile is very much incremental type of improvement and get, gaining, getting feedback after each, after each implementation. So, and then the tracking yourself, track your progress along the way. The significance there is you want to make sure you're going the right way. So you can almost use data as your compass. Right. Are you improving? Are you not improving? That last thing you did, what impact did it make? Is a 3% impact? Is it 5%? Is it 15%? You want to know, really isolate and measure, like how close you're getting to your goal through, through the process of tracking. So that's the acronym component.

So it sounds similar. And I know you're, you're very, very familiar and practice, you know, scientific thinking. Toyota Kata, that sort of thing. So when we set these short term target conditions, as we're working our way towards a larger challenge, is this similar or is there, there's, is there a sort of a twist to, to fit?

Yeah, I would say it's very similar. I would say, yeah, that's that I would almost look at it like football, Right. American football. This is one of my favorite analogies to describe the way to think. This way of thinking is you know where the touchdown is. If you, if you're offense and you got the ball, you know where the touchdown is. And essentially what you're going to do is you're going to run a series of plays and effort to score a touchdown. Right. You're going to score first downs along the way, but between each play you're going to call a huddle. You're going to say, well, every time we run left, we get stopped. We should probably try mixing it up a little bit. Maybe let's throw over the middle this next time, see what that does. Right? You try that, you maybe pick up some yards, you get back in the huddle, you realize, okay, maybe, you know, that worked okay, but not as well as we want it. Maybe let's try running. Right, Right. So you, you sort of learning from every action you take. And Toyota Kata does talk about this, but so does agile, so does growth. Hacking a 3, I think sort of gets to this a little bit. There's many, there's many sort of disciplines that look at the process of improvement in this incremental way.

Yeah.

And yeah, Toyota Kata is one of them, is one of my favorite actually. But yeah, yeah, I would say it certainly does follow this, a similar pattern.

So, so what sounds like what we're really trying to do is let's think about maybe call it strategic goal setting or goal achievement sort of thing. So what do you, what do you, what do you think about that? This, that statement of strategic goal achievement? Is that really what you're trying to accomplish here? And if so, what problem are you, are you trying to, to address with that approach?

Okay, all right, so let me, let me, let me answer that question a little bit indirectly. Right? Because the adjective component of fit is to become fit. Just like the quote from Jim Rohn, the purpose of the goal is to help you become the person who can achieve it. Right. The concept of fit also is you use the process of goal setting and looking at where you want to be in the future. And in the book we talk about the moonshot mission of the 1960s. JFK says, hey, we're going to send a man to the moon and back within the decade. And at the time he set that goal, we were incapable of achieving it. We were far from it, right? We, we had barely got off the ground, right? We, I don't even know if we had satellites in orbit by, by that time around Earth. So by setting that goal, it triggered a series of continuous improvement journey essentially, right? We had to develop the engineering, had to develop the science, had to develop the technology, the capability to actually achieve it, right? So becoming fit, setting a goal, an ambitious goal, is sort of the step zero in becoming fit. But it kind of provides direction for fitness. And we talk about fit. The first, the first letter F is focused on, you know, what's most important to improve. If you look at fit almost like a PDCA type of process plan, do check, act, it's synonymous with fit. Except fit gives a strategic directive, right? It says we're not just going to improve for the sake of improvement, we're actually going to prove, because we have somewhere we're trying to get to, we're very clear on which mountain we're trying to conquer next, right? So that's the first prerequisite. Now any individual, any person can use that same concept, fit, focus, iterate and track to achieve anything, achieve a goal that they've set for themselves. When you're a leader though, you carry the burden of not just achieving your own goals, but you carry the burden of achieving goals at scale, enterprise scale, organization, wide scale. So how do you build such a mechanism that coordinates and orchestrates the collective effort of an entire organization towards something greater than any individual could possibly accomplish? And again, we use the moonshot and we use a lot of great examples in this, right? Diana Nyad, who swam from Cuba to Florida, in the book we talk about her journey and how she ended up building all the technology and the science and all that to accomplish that. We talk about the three industrial revolutions, right? The first one being the development of steam engine and it's always energy and transportations and communications that, that lead, that trigger an industrial revolution. And by the way, I think we're with AI and some of the latest software technology. We're approaching probably approaching a fourth industrial revolution, right? But yeah, so all of that is to say, hey, you know, as an individual, yeah, you can set a goal, you can achieve a goal, and there's some science to being able to do that and that'll make you more likely to succeed at it. But then as a leader, how do you orchestrate the time, talents, capability, science, thoughts, engineering of an entire organization and enterprise to achieve a moonshot. And I think largely companies don't do this very well.

So how do you, what tips or advice do you have for maybe that leader out there that's running an organization or running a company or something like that on, on setting that long term moonshot strategic, like goal? Because how do you, it's, it's easy to say, well, we're going to go do xyz, but why, you know, it's like, do you have any advice or thoughts on, on how to set a good long term strategic goal before we even worry about fitting our way there?

That's a great question. And it is a bit of an art and it is a bit of a science. So it's both. And it's also got to be something you're willing to be attacked and be, you know, not everybody's friend for even setting. And it's got to be somewhat ambitious, right? Because you know, the science of it is that if you're an organization and you've got 10,000 people in your company, or if you got a thousand people in your company, right, you got to make it big enough so that all thousand people have an important role to play and you got to engage a thousand hearts and minds in the achievement of that goal. So yeah, it's got to be worthy of needing a thousand people to achieve, right? It's got to take everything you got, plus a lot more, right? So, so yeah, you can almost think, hey, what's the, how far do, how far can we go currently? Right. Obviously it has to be much further beyond that and how far is, you know, hard. It gets to a point where it's hard to imagine and maybe dial it back just a little bit from that, right. Has to be something that's not common, that requires the unique makeup of you as a leader, but also the unique makeup of your organization capabilities and, you know, people and everything else that makes up the company. Technology, processes, et cetera. Has to be something important, right? I, like, I look at Elon Musk, right? Whether you're a fan of Elon Musk's politics or not, you know, I think his results and what he's achieved is undeniable and continues to achieve is undeniable. So if you look at it, Elon Musk, such a mission driven organization individual, and his companies are also extremely mission driven. You can clearly see that Elon is out to save mankind from itself. So Tesla, of course, is trying to get, you know, Personal vehicle transportation and also trucks and other stuff off of, off of fossil fuels. Right? That's, you know, apparently that's bad for the planet. And you look at SpaceX, right? Colonize Mars and other, other space ventures, you look at, you know, the boring company creating, you know, creating opportunities to, to, to travel underground, you know, and reduce, reduce the, the environmental footprint of travel, long long range travel and all that kind of stuff. Right. I mean, you know, I look at a guy like that and you know, it's, whether you like him or not, it's inspiring. What he's doing is inspiring.

Right, right.

So there's a lot of leaders out there like that, you know, Walmart, Sam Walton set out to create the ultimate, you know, low cost retail experience. Right. Go one place and get anything you might need. Especially for a small community that may not have access to a lot of different things that you can find in bigger cities. Right. Many, you know, Toys R Us once set out to be the ultimate toy buying experience for children. Right. Look at what we're doing at Improver, right? We're, we're, you know, creating a situation where everyone improves something important every day. Right. I mean that's, that's a very hard thing to manage, very hard thing to perceive and then actually do is, is a whole nother thing. So yeah, I think you got to sort of dream bigger. Bigger than what you think you can do. Maybe just slightly bigger than what you think is even possible. Yeah. Right. Just kind of be right on the outside of that. Yeah.

My friend Mark Rosenthal, you know, you may know Mark, big, big scientific thinking, Toyota Kata guy and he talks about when you're setting these long term challenges that he, he likes to use the analogy you should, it should, it should be one of those things after you say it, you sort of like suck air through your teeth. Like that's going to be tough, but so it's, it's doable. But man, this sucks there your teeth a little bit because you know it's going to be, it's going to be tough, right?

Absolutely, absolutely. I always appreciate it. It makes it, it's like your, it becomes your icky guy, right? I don't know if I'm saying pronouncing it right, icky guy, Ikai guy or something like that. But it becomes the thing that gets you out of bed in the morning because you know you got work to do.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and it's aspiring if you think you can get there but you're not there. You know, and we're Going to get better and that it's intrinsically motivating.

Right.

To absolutely want to get there. So what? So we got a lot of, a lot of continuous improvement folks. Lean six Sigma listening to this right now. So where do you see this, this whole idea of fit fitting in within the continuous improvement community?

Yeah, I think there's, there's sort of a, I don't know if I want to call it an epidemic, but I suppose it could be called that of, of random improvement in the continuous improvement world. Where I actually just had a conversation with a lady today. She says we're throwing a big event and I got two hours and I need a speaker to come provide everybody with a tool. And when you walk, when they walk out of the event, they got to be able to go to the shop floor or to their workstation and start using this tool and making improvements. Right. Oh, by the way, you know, we're doing this event because the senior leaders are off site doing something else. And this will just be junior level people right. In this event. So, and in my mind, and Ron, you know, you know too, is that okay, you go send a bunch of low level people, you know, individual contributors out to work and the moment they make a change that their boss does not find appealing, all hell can break loose. Right. You kind of need that alignment from the top. You kind of need a direction for improvement. And this, this epidemic of random improvement has led to CI being compartmentalized as something they're doing that's not so important as viewed from the C suite. Right. They're just doing it. Right. And it's not so, it's not so relevant to what I do as a, as an executive leader.

Yeah.

So to, to sort of bridge the gap. What should happen is, and Toyota I think knows this is, you know, you got to sort of prioritize from the top, like what is really most important to improve. Kind of set that North Star. Like I say, which, which mountain as an organization are we going to conquer next? Yeah. And let's go collectively toward that and conquer that mountain. Right. And then what happens after that is, is, is fit, you know, focus, iterate, track. You're iterating on a routine basis monthly if you're a, you know, leader or manager, weekly if you're, you know, frontline supervisor or early management level, and perhaps even daily if you're at the front line level. Right. But on a routine basis because humans are a creature of habit. So you need that routine because if the moment you like, you know, you talked about Jim Quick before or not Jim Quick, but James Atomic habits. James Clear. You know, if you don't have that routine, then you missed one and then all of a sudden you've missed 10 and all of a sudden you're not doing it anymore. It's not exactly right. So you kind of need that. Right. So, so fit in that that routine iteration process becomes the mechanism through which you make progress up the mountain and conquer the mountain. Right. As an organization. So good stuff. Yeah. So CI people, you know, the sort of, the implication is that you got to be working on what the. What's important and really the CEO should be responding to what the market deems to be most important. So yeah, you've got to kind of stay lockstep with the market.

Yep. For sure.

Yeah.

Good stuff, man. Well, hey, Calvin, where can folks find a book? Anywhere books are sold, I guess. Or.

Yeah, I wish. Not quite yet working on that, but right now it's on Amazon. You can either Google or go to Amazon and type in fit. Fit Dash. The simple science of achieving strategic goals. Okay. It's out there now. It's actually got a perfect five star rating on Amazon. And yeah, early on when it was launched, it was the, the best selling new release for leadership training. Nice. Management science, organizational change and one other one other one I'm drawing a blank, but congratulations, we can include that in the show notes. Yeah, I appreciate it. I appreciate it.

Yeah, yeah, just folks have probably already found it. Just kind of scroll down on your, on your app there, whatever you're listening to. So. And we'll have it all linked up and. Yeah, that's great. And then also best way to connect with you. Calvin, I know you're on LinkedIn. Any other platforms.

Yeah, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. My company improver is@prover.com I m p r u v e r dot com. It's the easiest way to execute company strategy. And lastly, I have a personal website@calvinlwilliams.com you can, you can reach me on any one of those.

Great. Great. All right, well, hey man, thanks for coming back on. This has been fun and again, congratulations on the book.

Thank you, Ron. Can't believe half an hour's gone by already. Great chatting with you, man. We'll talk soon.

Take care.

Bye.

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