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Over the years, thousands of training participants have made action plans in different versions of Knowly. Some manage to set clear and concrete goals, others don’t.
Before long we noticed a pattern, which has since been repeated many times: Those who manage to define their goals clearly are also much more likely to achieve them.
This is really quite self-evident – if the goal is unclear, it’s equally unclear whether you’ve actually achieved it.
However, this lack of clarity also has other, more subtle drawbacks.
If the description of a desired behavior isn’t observable, not only is it harder to evaluate whether the behavior has occurred but it also creates a higher threshold to performing the behavior. Devoting extra time and attention to thinking about additional steps is something a busy schedule often doesn’t allow:
So, how do we get participants to make concrete action plans and define their goals clearly? First of all, we have to define what it is we mean by “clearly defined goals” and help them describe their goals according to the definition we set.
You might have heard of SMART goals, a checklist of features that all goals should have. It’s well-supported by behavioral research and an excellent tool overall.
However, the problem is that actually applying this model requires a lot of cognitive energy, something that tends to be in short supply by the last hour of a training program.
At that point, I as a participant will likely feel exhausted and hopelessly “dumb” when faced with the “smart” goals I’m suddenly supposed to churn out. I’ll probably just jot something down and say to myself that I’ll polish it tomorrow. Fast-forward to tomorrow and that vague goal will still be there, half-forgotten, never to be revised.
I think we as educators should take a different approach. Instead of overwhelming our participants with the theory behind SMART goals (no matter how interesting it may be), we can give them wording examples that they can adjust according to their own circumstances. That way, they can set clear goals without having to master all the theory and principles behind it.
If we want to lower the threshold even further (and we do), we make sure that the examples don’t just have “the right shape” but that they are worded in such a way that the participants in our training program might very well use them as is, or at least only have to adjust certain details.
Tip for Knowly users: Write wording examples next to the fields where participants fill in their action plans, so that it’s easy to just copy-paste the examples and modify some of the words.
Below you’ll find a question that is, in some form or another, typically included in an action plan. One version is supported with wording examples, the other is not. Which version do you think will get the most responses with “the right shape”?
Question without wording examples
Question with wording examples
If you have some time before the participants write their action plans, you can take the opportunity to go over how you created the wording examples, perhaps also mentioning the concept of SMART goals. However, the key is to not put participants in a situation where they have to translate goal-setting theory into precisely worded goals. Instead, let them mimic what you do – this is far easier than applying a newly introduced model on your own.
I’m a strong proponent of templates, as they’re easier to explain and apply than a theoretical framework. These are templates for how two kinds of desired states might be described:
For a habit you want to build: “I’ve built a new habit: [Every Monday morning,] [after I’ve had my coffee,] [I ask each of my co-workers a coaching question].”
For behaviors in certain situations: “In every [1-on-1 meeting I’ve had] [this January], I’ve [asked one of the four coaching questions I learned during the training program].”
In your presentation you simply explain each part of the template – why they’re included, alternate wordings and (possibly) a little nugget about the research behind them.
At Knowly we’ve spent almost a decade building tools for educators who want to help their participants take what they’ve learned in formal training settings and implement it in the workplace. Managers who want to build a habit of asking coaching questions, salespeople who want to give every new customer a great needs analysis – these are just a couple of the many new behaviors we’ve helped establish over the years.
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