Goals for a Decade

I am now sixty. I don’t feel any different and I don’t know that the change has many practical ramifications, though I am looking forward to skipping the line at Costco once out of quarantine.

For the past few weeks I have pondering a set of goals for the next decade. The set for my fifties proved surprisingly robust and helpful despite being formed in a time of turmoil. Now I have a more stable life and the process should be easier.

We are trying to do this as a couple, through some form of iteration. We can both produce priorities independently then work together to address any contradictions and trade offs. It feels like a constructive and productive way to talk through the possible dilemmas we will face in the next few years, and to make explicit all those assumptions that have been hidden before.

When I defined goals ten years ago, I wrote down that they were for two decades, which feels rather heroic and unnecessary now I look back. It would be quite a feat to produce goals that could remain relevant for as long as ten years, but twenty seems too far. Perhaps it was an effort to recognize that health is likely to become an increasing constraint from now on. One context of any goal for my sixties must be to maximize the chances of being able to enjoy life in my seventies. Fate will play its part, but good choices now improve the odds, to a greater extent than would have been the case earlier in life.

Thoughts about health give another clue. It is possible to come up with a set of goals that are generic and not very helpful. We call all subscribe to peace, joy, health and love, especially as we reach the years when such things are far from guaranteed. But what actions would such goals lead to, beyond taking no risks? The aim of any set of goals is to produce a life of fulfillment and one with all the other generics. The trick is to find some priorities that make them more likely to come about. A lot of corporate mission statements make the same mistake, becoming so generic that any company on earth could subscribe to it.

The other pitfall is to be too specific. Some people of my age go for bucket lists, but I don’t like the idea. The list can become too much like a checklist, and tends to be too dominated by destinations and experiences. There is a risk of such lists missing the point, and leading to lives without peace but lots of air miles to take to the early grave.

For my sixties, I’ve come up with four themes, which I hope can lead to the generic outcomes by offering clear priorities. The first is kindness. The coronavirus has allowed us all to take stock of what we miss most, and in my case volunteering at our old folks’ home comes near the top of the list. Visits to the home always leave me in a good mood that lasts several hours, and the reason is kindness. The home is a place of kindness, full of kind people, and where I can learn to be more kind myself.

I would like to seek out places and people of kindness, to take opportunities to be kind and to become kinder. The home is a good example, but the priority can also guide other activities and indicate what to avoid, for example the Trump twitter feed. I have some choirs that are kinder than others. I can practice being kinder to my family, and try to spend more time with its kindest members. If I am offered any work, paid or unpaid, I can check in advance how good a fit there is with this theme.

The second theme is enlightenment. I enjoy learning things, mastering some skill or finding an explanation for some event or behaviour. It also gives me pleasure to offer enlightenment to others. There is room in my life for projects, and I need a means for selecting good ones and some trigger to actually embark. Languages are a good option, so is history, especially history of music. I have recently tried writing something longer than a blog, and see this decade involving more reading than the last. I love coaching others when the opportunity arises. I love to travel, but at a slow pace so the travelling itself does not become too stressful. This could be a decade of enlightenment.

Early music is the third theme, and what I missing the most during the pandemic. The older I get, the fussier I become in terms of my tastes. I have been so lucky recently with the chance to sing the very best early music in quality groups and beautiful locations. This might be my last decade with a serviceable voice, so I want to use it while I have the chance. Studying early music is a promising avenue too.

Finally I envisage a bias towards simplification. A highlight of recent weeks in Portugal was an absence of clutter and an abundance of time. I have also recently made a big effort to unsubscribe from mailing lists and love my emptier inbox that has resulted. A life with fewer accounts, cards, passwords and files feels like a life with more space for enjoyment. It would also be good to reduce legal and financial ambiguity. Simplification can also help with the projects and the travel plans. Complex itineraries, short layovers and one night hotel stays feel like good things to target for reduction.

In many ways the themes work together, but there are some potential conflicts. A kind, simple life would probably spend most of its days in Portugal, but then where is the early music? The best enlightenment projects will involve people and places, and that won’t always be simple. Performing quality early music usually involves regular commitments, which might not always be simple.

There will also need to be trade offs with my wife and my family. Perhaps this decade will bring the gift of grandchildren, and spending kind time enlightening them and being enlightened by them feels appealing, but, with kids on three continents, hardly simple.

I believe that the trade offs are part of the point of the goals. If achieving the goals did not involve trade offs, then the goals themselves are probably too trite, and their value as a trigger for personal thought and for conversations with family members would be limited.

Are these goals SMART? They are not at all, really. But I don’t think that diminishes them. Team goals and short-term goals need to be SMART, because clarity of expectation and focused action are critical. But I have a full decade for these goals, and, while I will work with others, the key actions are only mine. At the end of the decade, it will be easy enough to assess how well I have achieved the goals.

The only theme where some discipline could help is the one of enlightened projects. It is too easy to be lazy and to become fixed in habits and to procrastinate. I need to make sure that I start enough projects – if they have been well chosen, it will be no problem to maintain momentum after that. Perhaps there is a role here for some resolutions each New Year.

I recommend the process of setting longer-term life goals, and not just for those of us nearer the back end of our working lives. And I’m happy that I had the idea of looking for a limited number of themes as a way to express the goals. No doubt the decade will throw up plenty of surprises, but I feel more ready than I did a few weeks ago.             

The Glory of Goals

I have always found setting goals useful. This weekend I will turn sixty and I am taking the chance to spend time defining goals for my next decade. I am finding it a valuable process.

There are some pitfalls with goals. One is that setting goals can itself become a form of procrastination, like all lists. Oliver Burkeman in the Guardian Weeklyfrequently advises us to be careful of tools that can be used that make us feel productive but defer action. The daily checklist is the most obvious example. Many of us can comfortably make it to the afternoon without actually achieving anything useful, simply by wasting time making lists. Lists are not achievements. They are meant to help us prioritise and define actions, but they achieve nothing unless we actually do the actions.

That is another pitfall of goals, especially in politics. Often a platform is a set of goals, usually the sort of universal goals that nobody could object to, but with no definable policies to achieve the goals. Left-wingers want to reduce inequality, but struggle to define meaningful policies that would retain support during implementation.

Even so, such goals are better than nothing, which is just as well because often they are all we are given to help us decide how to vote. Trump was always devoid of policies and even the goals were vague, but we should not be surprised that many actions have been anti-immigrant and pro-business.

Elisabeth Warren shows how doing goals the right way can work against getting elected. She had clear goals and set down policies that demonstrably would have worked towards achieving them. Sadly, every policy attracted the ire of some interest group and set her up as a target and ultimately doomed her campaign. A robust debate process and an intelligent media would help, but while we lack those Bidenesque vagueness may be smart. But in business we don’t have to be so naïve. If a new CEO, or even a new boss, arrives with a set of goals that sound convincing, celebrate their courage but then stay cynical until you see some policies and plans to back them up.

There is a lot of literature about how goals should be SMART, that is specific, measurable and so on, but in my experience lack of SMARTness is not the major problem. The letter of SMART that is most important for me is the last one, T for timed.

Often people set goals because they are told to, with a time duration set by somebody else. Budgets and staff reports are annual and require input according to deadlines. Again, these goals are better than nothing, but thinking about time horizons can lead to more useful goals.

For many projects, I recommend as many as three time horizons, each always with a current set of goals. The longest horizon is for the end of the project or a major milestone. The shortest is not much more than an action list. The middle is the most useful and bridges the other two. How could we describe a good place to be in six months if we complete the next twenty action lists? What description in six months time would place us best on the journey towards the project goals?

It is also important to review goals at the most useful frequency. For the short term, I might like a horizon of two weeks but a review each week, so there is a rolling update of actions and achievements. The long-term goals should be reviewed too, perhaps annually, to take account of new realities. The middle set can be a fantastic agenda for a quarterly team meeting. What did we achieve? What can we learn? Where do we stand against the bigger picture? Where do we go from here? What will have to be different to succeed?

The other parts of SMART can be flexible depending on time horizon too, and not all goals need to be as SMART as each other. The short-term list usually needs tight definition and clear accountabilities, but the middle list can mix this sort of goal with more subjective items, for example relating to a culture or a reputation with key stakeholders. The long-term ones can be similarly mixed, some defined by project boundaries and others perhaps more about ways of working or setting up for the future.

I remember exactly when I composed my goals for my fifties. I did it while away from the office and over a relaxing week, but otherwise the occasion was not conducive at all. I’d recently made a decision to quit work without really thinking it through, and I was hurtling into a marriage crisis having just escaped a long period of denial. Still, crafting the goals helped find some perspective amidst turmoil.

Given that the decade encompassed a change of career, life partner and continent, the goals held up remarkably well. Here is what I set down eleven years ago:

·     Enjoy company (real or virtual), offering intelligence, depth, vitality, and challenge of assumptions.

·     Coach interesting young people to grow with confidence. Start this with my daughter, grandchildren, or others.

·     Achieve deep relaxation, from sunshine, no need for wearing many layers, time, the lack of everyday stress, fresh air. Maintain robust fitness of the mind and body.

·     Follow my musical passion – singing, choir directing, listening, understanding, appreciating, performing, experiencing.

·     Take cultural, spiritual, and educational journeys. Find wonder from history, nature, beauty, magnificence, literature, architecture, sport, films, philosophy, food and drink, and human radiance.

I still like the list. It is manifestly not SMART, and I think it is better for it. There are few obvious actions indicated, but they give guidance and have enough depth to remain valid for an extended period. I have referred to them explicitly a few times during the decade, and many other times sub-consciously, most especially when I first defined them. It would not have been a sin to change some of them every so often, but that has not proven necessary.

It is also quite easy to assess now how successful I’ve been. The first one was always going to be a challenge without a regular office environment, but through reading and blogging and seeking out interesting people I think I have managed to grow. The other four have formed a sort of background agenda for the choices I have made over the decade, even though compromises have been inevitable and events have sometimes conspired in other directions. Deep relaxation is not simple in New York City!

If I give myself a star rating for each goal, I think I have done the least well at the last one. I can be rather lazy, and I’ll certainly embrace journeys when they are forced or appear in front of me, but I think I could do more to proactively seek them out. That is a key learning for the list I have been marinating for my sixties. How can I be a more proactive explorer?

Apart from the ever-present stress of the pandemic, the last weeks have been perfect for goal setting, so I have high expectations for my new list. I am also take the chance to merge my own list with that of my wife, and have found it an excellent method for taking some perspective on what is important for each of us and where we can help or team up and where we must compromise. God willing by the time I write my next blog I’ll have started a new decade and will be back in New York, and hopefully will have a new set of goals to guide me. 

Policing the Police

Although the trigger was tragic, it is great that debate has been rekindled in the US about police brutality and the wider issue of race discrimination. Sadly, I can see it becoming rather like the related question of gun control, which flares up every time there is a tragedy and then goes quiet again without any meaningful change.

I have experienced policing in many countries, though not its toughest functions and usually as one of the privileged. Still, I have seen enough differences and practices to have some opinions about how policing might be reformed.

First, I find it problematic that the issues of police reform and race reform become confused, because potentially it can harm both worthy causes. Racism is evil and prevalent and needs to be addressed, though eventually time will provide most of the cure. Different outcomes for races are damaging and are largely due to historical racism, but the best responses are about equalizing the playing field of opportunity now, or even slanting it in favour of the historically oppressed, rather than debates about history.

There is racism within police forces and it cannot be tolerated, but I suspect it is not the prime cause of different racial outcomes at the hands of the police. The reality is more about poverty and disadvantage. It is correct for police to focus on places of disadvantage where most crime occurs: indeed intelligent targeted policing has a very good track record at reducing crime and even improving neighbourhoods. The fact in the US is that these neighbourhoods happen to be overwhelmingly black. If the police were humane and development focused, the extra attention of police on minorities would actually be good, because the police can play a role in helping communities develop. So it is damaging to consider differential statistics about arrests as about racism, because they are not, at least not primarily.

The police in any society perform a necessary function, or protecting the population from crime. With no police there would be more crime, which would affect disadvantaged areas the most and make inequality worse, not better. We should also not forget the initial success of the Guiliani zero tolerance policy. If crime is uncontrolled, aggressive policing can be effective. Even so, the police in most countries could be improved.

As much as possible, the police should be treated like any other business or public utility. It needs a purpose, goals and KPI’s and regulation, and from that flows recruitment and other policies and a performance appraisal system.

In most cases it is the performance appraisal system which is most flawed. Who polices the police? The customer is society and is represented by local and national governments, and that is where things go wrong.

The NYPD is a good example. The NYPD and its unions form a powerful bloc locally, and their endorsement can get a mayor elected. The rest of the public is not interested enough to care about the details, so around election time the police tend to acquire additional budgets and powers. The NYPD are well paid, have excellent pensions, and, perhaps most important of all, have protection against being sued and are almost impossible to fire. The Fire Department, Corrections Officers and other unionised public servants have secured similar benefits over the years. They are the main reason lazily run cities and states now have unsustainable finances – pension liabilities for public servants have become crippling.

So now there is a public outcry for more accountable policing, and Bill DeBlasio has to play both sides. Still, it is a rare opportunity to redress the balance.

The lack of individual accountability is the biggest problem. Recent NYPD police commissioners have done a good job, but they are powerless to impose discipline. When they are tempted, Pat Lynch, the obnoxious head of the sergeants union, reminds them who is the real boss. There is a rump of violent officers, many no doubt racist, who remain secure in their jobs despite repeatedly breaching all guidelines.

The effects are pernicious. Why should new officers behave well when their peers can get away with anything? Leaders resort to giving the bad apples desk jobs or hiding them on unnecessary assignments, driving up costs. And everyday efficiency goes by the board as well. Next, the jobs become sinecures for the wrong sort of cop, whose sons follow them into the force to perpetuate the unhealthy culture.

So individual accountability must be the core reform. Having secured that, I would take a micro approach and drive efficiency and culture at a precinct level. A police precinct is not so much different to a petrol station or supermarket. I can always tell a well-run business by observing small things. In the case of the 112^thprecinct of the NYPD, I have never had a courteous interaction, I have never witnessed a courteous interaction, and every day I see cars parked lazily, illegally and unsafely.

Apart from anything else, why do they need so many cars? Placard abuse is a topic than comes up in the news once per year and then disappears without meaningful change. I can’t believe all the police placards near us are valid. Even if they are, the vehicle budget must be ripe for a heavy cut. Why can’t the NYPD ride to work on the subway like the rest of us?

I will give one compliment to the NYPD: they don’t take bribes. That puts them way ahead of forces in most developing countries and, sadly, some developed ones too. Whether that has come from management or union, I applaud it, because petty corruption in a police force is the most poisonous thing of all.

Once there is accountability and a locally driven initiative to work on culture and efficiency, the next lever is recruitment. Here there is an opportunity to increase racial and gender diversity, and to remove bias towards alumni families.

There are a couple of specific US issues that should be easy to address. The disposal of excess military equipment to police departments is comically short sighted and counter-productive. Then there is mission creep, prevalent in the NYPD and elsewhere. It is hard to fund good programs to house the homeless or protect the mentally ill, so such things are added to the remit of a place where funds are always plentiful – the NYPD.  

As with much in US society, media and Hollywood have done a lot of damage too. I hate the way that Hollywood movies never rarely involve fat people, always have characters that are either all good or all bad, run away from ambiguity and generally stifle intelligent thought. Portrayal of the police is a good example. In most cop shows violence and disrespect for protocol is idealised. This is just one more factor perpetuating the negative culture.

There is much than can be done to improve policing around the world. Best practice is probably in Scandinavia or the Benelux, as usual. Policing in the US is uniquely handicapped by the gun culture and by its history of racial animus. But treating the police more rigorously as a business can achieve parallel progress. Personal and precinct accountability is a critical first step. Then be good COO’s and hack away at waste and other local failings. And I would be forever grateful is somebody in the 122th precinct sorted out the fleet of cars and how it is parked.