What does success look like?

​Colleagues,
 
Yesterday I asked you to think about the specific purposes behind some of your important initiatives. If you didn’t already do that, you might want to pause for a minute or two to reflect.
 
Once we are very clear about the purpose of an initiative, we need to consider very carefully what success looks like. If we don’t know explicitly what success looks like, how will we know if we were successful?

I’ll go back to the garden again for an analogy. If you’ve been reading consistently, you might remember that I had a bunch of tomatoes come up volunteer – my great opportunity! Pam and I created space and took care of them. These plants were in addition to the six plants we had intentionally planted. In all we wound up with about 30 tomato plants!

That’s a far cry from six, but it was a great opportunity, right?
 
Maybe.
 
It isn’t a question we can easily answer because we never defined what success would look like! 
 
Obviously, if all the tomatoes died before harvest, we could say we were unsuccessful, but how many tomatoes do we need to get to call the project a success? One pound? 10 pounds? 100 pounds?
 
In retrospect, we should have first asked what problem 20 volunteer tomatoes would help us solve. Then we should have defined a clear outcome.
 
Last night, Pam and I started talking about what to plant next spring. Yes, we did talk about tomatoes. We discussed why we wanted tomatoes and how they would make our lives better. We also discussed what success would look (and taste!) like.
 
What will you plant, and to what will success look like?
 
Do good and be well,
 
Frederick