In uncertain ventures, the value of a crystal-clear goal

I had the opportunity to attend the 99u Conference in New York last week. It was a blast. The most noteworthy presentation for me was from Sebastian Thrun, the driving force behind Google's self-driving car and Google Glass, and now the founder of online learning provider Udacity. Thrum was awarded the Alva Award, a lifetime-achievement prize for invention.

Many of Thrun's remarks were relevant to our work here. One that really struck me was this: When planning a new, uncertain endeavor, a crisp, clear objective is necessary. Planning the path is unimportant - the path emerges as you work. But a very clear objective allows for a clear assessment of success or failure, and an understanding of how far away you are from your goal.

Here's an example from the Self-Driving Car project. After Thrun's Stanford team had completed the 2007 Darpa Urban Challenge (a very clear objective in itself), Thrun and his team needed a new goal. He had moved to Google, and in collaboration with Google's executives eventually decided on a 1000-mile course all around the Bay Area, covering streets, highways, etc. It was an audacious leap from winning a contest on a closed course to confronting the chaos of real city and suburban driving.

But the goal was clear. Failure was easy to assess - if the car did not complete the entire 1000 miles, that was a failure. This enabled Thrun and his team to use a Build-Fail-Fix-Test-Fail-Fix-etc. approach. This rapid failure-iteration cycle allowed them to very quickly advance in capability for the self-driving car - from finishing a 60-mile course, to the 1000 mile test, to the current state where Google's fleet of self-driving cars tours the Bay Area on a regular basis, covering more than 300,000 miles so far without incident.

Having a clear objective allowed Thrun to focus on planning and executing the next steps, instead of wondering, arguing about, and/or redefining what success meant. This is crucial in an uncertain environment. The objective is reached by taking individual steps, every day, toward the goal, and using failures to help adjust the course toward the objective.

We can use this in our everyday work. When we embark on an uncertain venture - a new job, perhaps, or a new business venture, or a sales campaign - we should aim for a clear, timed measure of success, and share that with people who are helping us. A clear objective will allow the next steps you plan to be headed in the right direction, it will allow you to clearly establish whether you've succeeded or failed, and enable you to intelligently change course when required.

[Photo from GlacierNPS via Flickr Creative Commons]

Small-business owner Linda Kelly: what she would do differently? Go bigger

From an interview with Laura Kelly in the New York Times You're The Boss blog. Kelly is founder and owner of The Handwork Studio, a kids' needle arts and fashion studio near Philadelphia.

Q. If you were starting all over again, what would you do differently?

A. I would pick a business with bigger returns. Working 12 hours a day are the same 12 hours whether you are dealing with sales of thousands or millions.

Medical Device company CEO: "Too often we choose to believe in an optimistic scenario"

Adam Bryant's Corner Office column in the Sunday New York Times serves up some great lessons drawn from making and thinking about mistakes. Here are some from Mazor Robotics CEO Ori Hadomi, first about creating an environment that encourages people to report mistakes and then tries hard to learn from them:

I believe that it is much more dangerous not to report mistakes than it is to make mistakes in the first place. It’s natural that we make mistakes. The question is, what do we do with these mistakes as an organization? Do we repeat the mistakes? Do we learn from them? Do we investigate them and implement a solution?...

Hadomi also conducts a structured review of the main mistakes made in the past year, used to inform objectives for the coming year. This is something we've advocated and it's great to see a company institutionalize this process:

We have a very structured process of how we communicate and set expectations and define objectives. In general, I believe people perform best when they know where they are heading. I don’t like a culture where people are surprised. I feel that most people want to have some certainty about where they’re heading and where the organization is heading. So we have a process that begins with the management team defining the objectives for next year.

But before we set the objectives we have a tradition where we define the five biggest mistakes we made last year — and we’ll focus on the big ones, not the small ones. And every year we look to see if there is something common among these mistakes. Then we set the objectives for next year.

Q. What are some of the patterns you’ve seen in the mistakes?

A. One of the most obvious mistakes we found is that too often we choose to believe in an optimistic scenario — we think too positively. Positive thinking is important to a certain extent when you want to motivate people, when you want to show them possibilities for the future. But it’s very dangerous when you plan based on that. So one of our takeaways from that was to appoint one of the executive members as a devil’s advocate.

Q. Really?

A. He’s actually very challenging and he knows how to ask the right questions. He really makes sure to say to me, “Let’s be more humble with our assumptions.”