A Team Fails at Achieving a Goal

At SpaceX, most goals are “aspirational”. That is, they don’t assume that they will meet their goal exactly. They do their best to come close to it, or even exceed it. But they purposefully set goals that are a little higher than what they think they can achieve.

These goals are not work completion goals. They are always capability goals. Work completion goals are for repeatable tasks, which is appropriate for manufacturing. But when building something new and cutting edge, you are not executing a repeatable process, and you do not know how long a task will take. You can set a goal, but the goal should be aspirational, because there is no way to be certain that you can make it.

Capability goals are about attaining a result. For example, if you are designing an engine, an aspirational goal might be that the engine design will reach a certain level of performance. If you are building software, an aspirational goal might be that the software can perform a certain function.

No one should ever feel bad about not attaining an aspirational goal. The only goals that matter are the ones that determine ultimate success or failure in your desired outcomes. Along the path of working toward an outcome goal, you should have many aspirational goals, and not meeting those is normal.

Pay Attention to These Things

The things that a leader should pay attention to is whether people are,

• Are people focused on the ultimate outcome goal?

• Are they setting aspirational goals that have a chance at being reached?—or are they reaching too far, or not enough?

• Are they designing early tests, to check if their approach is likely to move them optimally toward their aspirational goal?

• After testing an approach, do they engage in productive and time-efficient discussions about how to improve their approach.

As a leader, it is your job to make sure that these things are happening. If not, it is necessary to intervene in some way. Some of the ways of intervening include,

• Engaging them in dialectic discussion about their aspirational goal and how they are tying to attain it.

• Determine if a particular kind of leadership is needed but is missing from the group; if so, either attempt to mentor one of them in their leadership style, or bring someone into the group who can provide that type of leadership.

• Give some pep talks to focus people on the right things, or to teach them some techniques.

What is highly inadvisable is to put pressure on a group to “not fail again”—unless the risk is truly existential. Sometimes it is: especially if you are a startup, it well could be that a failure will end the company.

But unless that is the case, putting pressure to “not fail” is is counter-productive. No one wants to fail, so that kind of pressure serves no purpose. In fact, the only thing that people should be afraid of is not being totally honest about their own assessments: if someone thinks something will not work, you want them to say so. Radical honesty about issues is crucial. That is the only kind of pressure that should ever be exerted: that people must be transparent about what they actually think, with respect to the issues at hand.

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