Invisible Solutions: 25 Lenses that Reframe and Help Solve Difficult Business Problems by Stephen Shapiro

Author:Stephen Shapiro [Shapiro, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Published: 2020-03-03T05:00:00+00:00

Try increasing your goals to stretch your thinking. If you ask “How can we get a 5 percent improvement?” you get incremental thinking. But if you ask “How can we get a 50 percent or 100 percent improvement?” the old models of thinking won’t work, which forces you to devise new approaches and solutions.

Stretch goals are ideal during the innovation process when you are developing solutions. However, they might not be the right strategy for measuring day-to-day performance of employees as they can lead to the dysfunctional behaviors described in the REDUCE lens (#3). (Wells Fargo learned this lesson when their overly aggressive cross-sale goals led employees to open unneeded accounts for customers, sometimes forging client signatures on paperwork.)

It should be noted that this lens is often used in conjunction with other lenses. Once you’ve established a stretch target, you may need to reframe the problem again to generate better solutions.

Examples of This Lens in Action

At a large greeting-card company, cards took eighteen to twenty-four months to move from concept to store shelves. Senior executives set a stretch goal of getting new cards from concept to market in less than a year. Individual departments within the firm—designers, writers, artists, printers, shippers, and so on—believed this new stretch goal could not be met. Even so, the target became a rallying cry. In the end, the company managed to get its cards to market in only four months. The seemingly impossible goal had forced the teams to abandon their conventional approaches and to try something completely new. Previously untried forms of cross-departmental collaboration were part of the solution.

One of the most well-known examples of setting stretch goals comes from President John F. Kennedy’s challenge to the United States to “put a man on the moon by the end of the decade,” which sounded completely impossible to most people at the time. This stretch goal, proposed on May 25, 1961, was met on July 20, 1969, with the Apollo 11 mission.

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