Setting our 100-Day Goal
Setting our 100-Day Goal
Setting the 100-Day Goal is the most important step in the Start-Up Workshop. Committing to a shared goal, especially one that feels scarily ambitious, binds the group together and sets the stage for them becoming a team.
This Learning Deep Dive is primarily addressed to the Team Coach. Naturally, others can use it if they are filling in for the Team Coach
Purpose: The main purpose of the session is for the Team to convert the focus area or impact indicator of the Challenge into a unique, 100-Day Goal. We refer to the 100-Day Goals in 100-Day Challenges as SMURF goals (not to be confused with SMART goals).
Another purpose of the session is to give Team members the chance to interact with each other and experience each other. Setting a goal can create tension, as some team members may be more risk averse than others, some may be ambitious and bold, and some may be reckless. These attributes will come out in the session, and they will influence who team members elects as their Team Leader in the next session of the agenda.
A third purpose is to give the Team the experience of autonomous and collective decision making. No one will tell them what the goal should be. They will need to negotiate it among themselves. It is part of creating the enabling environment of 100-Day Challenges.
This is the most important step in the 100-Day Challenge. It defines the team and binds them with a common purpose and a joint commitment. As you see below, we break down the facilitation process of this team conversation into 3 steps.
Process time: 90 min
We suggest that you proceed with 3 steps to support the Team in this part of the agenda:
Introduce the ideas of SMURF goals
Facilitate a discussion to lock in a 100-Day Goal. It is helpful to start with a few templates for possible SMURF goals related to the Focus Area (impact indicator) of the Challenge.
Help the Team refine the 100-Day Goal
Step 1: SMURF Goals
Build out the logic of SMURF goals (Smart, Measurable, Unreasonable, Results-oriented, Fast), by engaging team members in two exercises:
a) Tennis Ball exercise. This helps the Team experience and appreciate the power of a group of people committing to unreasonable yet believable goals. It drives home the ‘U’ in SMURF.
Download the facilitation guide on the Tennis Ball Exercise to help you and you will also learn about this in the Face-to-Face training.
b) Jeha & the King’s Donkey story. This drives home the ‘R’ in SMURF. This is essential to avoid the Team regressing from a results-oriented impact indicator goal (e.g. “increase the number of survivors who report gender-based violence” to an activity-oriented goal (e.g. conduct an awareness campaign on GBVF on campus).
If you feel there is still ambiguity about what the R means in SMURF, use the A/B exercise to challenge the team to compare different types of goals.
You did the answers to the before in the the Deep Dive in Week Minus 4 “Developing a short list of Focus areas”
Emphasise the differences between SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) and SMURF goals. Not all SMART goals are Results-Oriented. SMURF goals always are. SMART goals are Achievable. SMURF goals are unreasonable and bordering on the impossible!
Step 2: Shaping the Team's 100-Day Goal
As part of your preparation for the Start-Up Workshop, you prepared two or three SMURF Goal templates that match the Focus Area (impact indicator) in the Challenge Note.
Here are the 100-Day goal templates for different focus areas. You can download a copy of it here to help you prepare your two to three templates:
Present the 100-Day Goal templates, you prepared, to the team. Ask them to discuss these to see if which one they are comfortable with. If need be, customise one of these with them. Making sure they agree on how progress towards the goal will be measured. (20 min)
For the selected template, ask the team to fill in the blanks with numbers or percentages that represent how ambitious they would like to be in the next 100 days.
- After some initial discussion, you can ask each team member to write down a number or a percentage on a post-it note; then, they can share these and discuss. Use voting if need be. Remember that we are not seeking consensus but rather the willingness of each team member to work towards achieving this Goal. Naturally, if they feel that it is “pie in the sky”, they will not take it seriously. They need to believe that it is possible to achieve it, however remote that possibility may be.
- Leave room for discussion and argument. It is essential that everyone feels heard before agreeing on a 100-Day Goal. Keep reminding the team that the leaders encouraged them to set highly ambitious goals. Remind them about the goals they heard about in the videos.
Here’s how some of the goals might look at the end of this step.
Step 3: Refining the Goal
More often than not, the team will be so eager to move on to the 100-Day Plan that they fail to ask important questions about their 100-Day Goal (15 min):
- Compared to the baseline, does the goal feel really “unreasonable”?
- When will we start measuring progress towards the goal? And how often will we measure progress after that?
- Is the goal framed as “In 100 days,… OR “Within the last month of the 100 days…?” Which framing is most suitable?
- What are the possible adverse consequences of pursuing this goal? What are ways to mitigates these?
This step will help you guide the team as they discuss these questions so they can refine and, if need be, adjust their 100-Day Goal. After the preliminary goal is set, we suggest that you congratulate the team on completing the toughest part of the Start-Up workshop, and that you give them a short break.
