The Crucial Role Plans Play in Goal Attainment

31st May 2018- New Tottenham stadium: Spurs schedule first test event for August, but doubts remain over opening date

14th June 2018-Tottenham: Liverpool the visitors for first game at new stadium on the weekend of 15-16 September

13th August 2018- Tottenham delay move to new stadium over 'safety issues’

25th August 2018- Tottenham Hotspur Stadium hit by ANOTHER setback as burst water main floods electrics

25th September 2018- Mauricio Pochettino: Daniel Levy has told me Tottenham will be in the new stadium by Christmas

26th October 2018- Tottenham stuck at Wembley until 2019 with no timeline on new stadium delays

5th January 2019- Tottenham Hotspur new stadium update: Opening fixture will not be played against Arsenal (2nd March 2019) due to security fears

9th January 2019- Spurs announce more delays with little chance of move before mid-March

3rd April 2019- Tottenham fans finally return home as new stadium opens for Crystal Palace clash

Tottenham Hotspur are not the only ones. The opening of the famous Sydney Opera House 10 was years late and 1,457% over budget. And as little as a third of construction projects in the UK finalise within 10% of their original plan date.

These are intensely complex projects that require the perfect orchestration of thousands of individuals and resources. Yet the everyday professional, with a small team of 5, is just as bad. Deadlines are perpetually missed. Targets face no risk of being hit. And personnel come to be robbed of their evening hours and weekends just to get finish projects before it gets to unacceptable levels of lateness.

And let’s not forget that 80% of New Year’s resolutions are scuppered by only the second month of the year.

We’re great at setting goals. But on the whole, we’re terrible at reaching them. That’s even the case for the easiest ones we set, let alone the audacious ones.

However, there is something psychologists have found time and time again can reverse this almost inevitable trend.

Something called “Implementation Intentions”.

Implementation Intentions

An implementation intention is a self-regulatory strategy in the form of what’s been termed as an "if-then plan".

Quite simply, it involves specifying the when, where and how of goal-directed behaviour.

A very basic example would be the following:

Goal: Losing weight

If-then plan: “If I want to lose 10 pounds by next quarter, then I need to run 3 times a week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings, at the gym and for 45 minutes each time .”

The phenomenon of implementations was first studied by psychologist Peter Gollwitzer, who conducted a simple experiment to see how simple plans can dramatically increase the likelihood of students handing in assignments on time.

In the late 1990s, Gollwitzer asked his students to email him an assignment two days before Christmas. Half of the students were simply given the assignment and mailing date, whereas the other half were asked to form an ‘if-then plan’, e.g. when exactly they would mail it, where they would mail it to, and how they would mail it.

Gollwitzer waited for the assignments to arrive and found that 72% of if-then planners successfully mailed him their work, compared with only 32% of the non-planners.

In well over 100 subsequent studies on implementation intentions, it’s been found that they dramatically increase the chances of achieving all kinds of business, academic, and health goals.

The technique is of course not going to be the key factor in building a football stadium on time. But its simple premise quickly hones one’s focus onto simple goal driven behaviours that otherwise too easily fall by the wayside - those 10-15 things we are repeatedly tasked with but fail to ever accomplish in a timely and exemplary fashion.

It’s also a technique that can be integrated into the briefing strategy of managers and senior leaders. This will ensure minimum confusion among team members who know they have to do something, but have no idea as to how to do it, or even when they have to do it by.

So the next time you or your team set a goal, be sure to spend an extra few minutes upfront to turn it into an if-then plan.