Think Like A Team, Win Like A Team

culled from:articlecity.com

Whether you’re in the middle of planning your department’s budget for the next year or deciding who to hire, making short-term priorities and reasonable goals are essential steps to winning big.

The best organizations learn to create targeted goals that reflect their priorities. Harvard Business Review published a recent article on the transformative power of the if-then concept to make goals and improve your group’s planning strategy.

Humans are naturally programmed to form if-then contingencies. It’s part of our genetic wiring. When we make goals for ourselves and follow up with those goals, we create a link in our brains between certain situations or cues (if “x” happens then I will do “y”). This establishes powerful triggers for action.

According to studies, if-then planners are 300 percent more likely to reach their goals. If-then strategies also improve team performance by sharpening the group’s focus and delegating members to finish key tasks. This approach to planning eliminates the troublesome gap between knowing and doing.
Solving The Groupthink Problem

Peter Gollwitzer refers to if-then planning as “instant habits.” If-then planning can solve the usual problems that groups face when making decisions. Teams often suffer from groupthink, a situation in which members don’t have an incentive to go against the grain. Research proves that if-then thinking improves organizational decision-making because it forces team members to exchange information with one another in order to develop a solution to a problem.

Further studies by J. Thürmer, Frank Wieber and Peter Gollwitzer show that if-then plans can help groups reduce the common problem of unintentionally allocating resources towards failing projects. The team needs to accept the failure and move on once they determine that the time, money and effort aren’t making a return on these projects. Adopting an outsider perspective helps the team change its focus and goals.
Avoid Lost Causes

Wieber tested the effectiveness of his approach by forming three groups. He asked them to pretend they were a city council that needed to decide how much to invest in a public preschool project. In phase one the groups received information forming the project in a positive way, and they assigned funds accordingly. In phase two they received positive and negative information: construction had begun and a local store was donating materials, but the building union wanted a substantial raise and environmental activists had voiced concerns about the safety of the land. Rationally, the teams should have begun to decrease funding at this point, given the uncertainty of the project’s success.

Lastly, in phase three, the groups received mostly negative information: oil had been found in the sand pit, parents were outraged, and fixing the problems would be time-consuming and expensive. Teams that made no if-then plans increased the percentage of budget to the project in phase one and phase three. Teams that made if-then plans (If we make a decision, we will take the perspective of a neutral observer that was not responsible for any prior investments) reduced their investments from phase one to phase three by 13 percent, on average.
Setting Subgoals

Accomplishing goals will become easier if your team uses if-then plans to set these goals. Breaking major goals into smaller, concrete subgoals allows you to identify the necessary actions required to reach each subgoal. For example, if you were trying to improve your team’s communication your subgoal could be to reduce information overload among staff members. To accomplish this you instruct members who are forwarding any e-mail to explain why they’re doing so. (The rationale: People will be more selective about what they pass along if they have to provide a reason.) The if-then plan for each team member would be “If I forward any e-mail, I’ll include a brief note at the top describing what it is and why I’m sharing it.”

Encourage team members to review their if-then plans regularly, as planning if-then statements in advance has proven to help people be more resilient when facing obstacles or hitches in their work. Studies show that practicing if-then plans can more than double employee effectiveness and allows groups to reassess how realistic their plans are. Keep in mind that if circumstances change, your if-then plans may need to change as well.