Setting Finite Goals to Continue the Infinite Game

For those of you who don’t already know, alongside being a husband, father, and ergonomist, I do a bit of running. In some of my recent runs, I have been thinking about why I run, how this has changed over the years, and what my goal actually is. I’m sharing this all here because I believe that it ties very closely to my approach to work as well, and during this period where ergonomics teams across industry are probably setting goals for 2025, I felt it was a good time to talk about it.

When I started running 20 years ago, I ran to train for an event. My first event was the Great North Run half marathon, and all of my runs in the 5 months or so leading up to that time were about building my strength, speed and stamina for that event. Once the half marathon was done, I stopped running for over a year, until I entered my next event and had to train up for that. This pattern continued for a number of years, but with the events I entered getting longer and more frequent, I found myself with fewer and fewer periods of ‘down time’ where I wasn’t running. Effectively though, I was running to meet the finite goals of completing different events.

Over the past few years, however, my ‘why’ for my running has gradually shifted, to a point where now I believe I am entering events for a reason that is almost the complete reverse of why I started.?

Nowadays, I run because I know that it is good for me; it provides me mental space to get away from the stresses of life, it keeps my cardiovascular system in good shape, and it sets me up for a healthier later-life period than if I didn’t exercise as much as I do. This is not something that will ever be ‘finished’. I cannot say that I have ‘completed running’ or that I have ‘won at being healthier’. As such, it is the definition of the infinite game, with all of the pitfalls that we all no doubt know only too well for any infinite game we’re involved in.

I do still run in events, some of which are stupidly long ultra-marathons, and some of which are shorter runs where I look to run a bit faster. These events are very much finite games, as they have a beginning, a middle (sometimes a very long, very slow middle, if I’m honest), and an end. I know myself well enough now to know that I will also never win any of these events in terms of finishing first, but they can be completed and therefore provide all of the benefits that we know of finite games.

Taking part in these events hasn’t changed all that much over the years, but my approach to the whole thing has. Infinite games are difficult to stay motivated for every day; they take extreme discipline and dedication to maintain effort in, and the lack of an ‘end’ can sometimes be demotivating. I therefore now enter events to provide me with short-term, finite goals which then ensure that I keep myself going in the infinite game of keeping running. The finite games of the events provide me with opportunities to continue to improve how I perform in the infinite game of keeping running. They also help to keep me motivated, they provide me with opportunities to test my progress in the infinite game, and to demonstrate to myself that all the work I’m doing is worthwhile. Being totally honest, they also provide an opportunity for me to show others what I can do as well, which also helps with my short-term motivation.

This is where I see the parallels with work as an ergonomist, and particularly as an ergonomist in a company with the scale of somewhere like @Amazon. If you ask any Amazon customer, they will probably tell you that Amazon does things fast. And they are right; as a company, Amazon moves incredibly fast. Things change incredibly rapidly for a company of its scale, but it is still a company of incredible scale, so big changes do still take some time.

When I held a ‘find our why’ workshop with the EU Ergonomics team last year, we identified the following as our team’s ‘why’:

“To?advocate and innovate on behalf of our people, so that we create a work environment optimised for human capability and safe system performance.”

No matter the rate of change at a company, our ‘why’ will never be completed. For us, ergonomics really is an infinite game. As such, it is sometimes difficult to stay motivated in and takes a lot of discipline and dedication to continue to do right.

That is where annual goal setting comes in. As a team, we set ourselves goals that will not only enhance the workplaces of our colleagues, but that will continue to refine and improve how we deliver ergonomics to Amazon. These goals have finite ends, with sub-tasks, programmes, deliverables and impacts that we can actively pursue and measure. They provide us with the shorter term motivation and measurable impact that prove to us that our infinite game is still the right one to be in, and that we are still in it.

‘So what is the point of your post?’ I hear you asking? Well, it is simply to suggest that whenever you enter a process of planning goals for future periods, you look at each of them and compare them with what your personal and team infinite games are. Are the goals going to help you keep moving forward? Are they going to motivate you when things get hard? Are they going to help you show others the progress you are making in your infinite game and why it is so important??

Because if not, maybe it’s time to re-evaluate