How To Choose Your Goals For 2010

Resolutions are worthless crap. That’s because they’re usually huge undertakings requiring big changes, which often leads to burnout. That means we fail. How many times have you resolved to lose weight in the new year only to lose sight of it pretty quickly after January? I’ve done the same thing. We don’t need resolutions. We need solid goals.

Goals are not worthless crap. They’re not because they’re specific, measurable, and attainable. They’re smaller chunks, which are manageable. But how do we choose our business goals for the coming year? This year I’m going to use a method called Appreciative Inquiry. Appreciative Inquiry says an organization which tries to appreciate what is best in itself will find/discover more and more of what is good. Appreciative Inquiry uses these steps:

1. DISCOVER: The identification of organizational processes that work well.
2. DREAM: The envisioning of processes that would work well in the future.
3. DESIGN: Planning and prioritizing processes that would work well.
4. DESTINY: The implementation (execution) of the proposed design.

Isn’t that a lot better than looking at what is wrong? You identify your strengths and enhance those rather than looking for what is broken. Appreciative Inquiry doesn’t mean you shouldn’t fix what needs it–but it does lay a solid foundation for prioritizing your growth efforts.

Now is the time for the Discovery phase. Using this method, here are the things I feel are going well, and thus will be my focus in 2010:

Teaching. This blog has been a rewarding experience for me, and I feel it has helped others. It has gained readership steadily, and thus, we’ll be putting more of ourselves into this resource in the coming year. Specifically, I want to inject more “how-to” content to help readers. The contest we ran sometime back was lots of fun, so we’ll look at running some more contests in 2010. We have some other ideas for sharing knowledge too, so watch out for these in 2010.

Partnerships. We’ve developed some very fruitful partnerships in 2009. These partnerships have enabled the growth we’ve seen during the year. We’ll be reinforcing these partnerships by exploring new opportunities for collaboration.  We’ll also be looking for ways to increase our network of strategic partners.

Personal branding. This is more of a “me” thing than a company thing, but it can help the company’s growth as well. Late this year, I started relinquishing my old usernames with social media services and using my real name. This is all in the name of personal branding. I want to be the name thought of when others in the area discuss websites, online strategy, and amazing good looks. Ok, that last one was a joke. I didn’t do much with personal branding this year, but it’s moving in the right direction. There are plenty of opportunities for me to move forward with this–and most of my efforts will be getting involved in the community and being present.

If you look at your strategy for 2010 using the lens of Appreciative Inquiry, what are your goals going to be?

Learn about Appreciative Inquiry on Wikipedia and on the Appreciative Inquiry Commons.

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