It's in the BHAG

Social Velocity’s blog has a new post today on boldness and big goals for non-profits. They argue that most non-profits are risk-averse and have trouble setting impressive, scary, crazy goals, and yet that’s exactly what they need to do in order to make serious headway. (Note: they don’t say how many could fail along the way.)

This makes me think about the risks inherent in the work we do at the Foundation. When you set big goals, you up the ante; it's inevitable that the risks involved are just as big—if not bigger. Towns, likewise, need to be willing to be bold. I’ve advocated strongly for our Project Towns to set some clear goals for attendance and participation at community events, and I think they’re often reluctant to do so for the same risk-averse reasons that Social Velocity discusses. It’s hard to shoot for 300 people at a meeting when the most you’ve ever had is 50; but attendance will never get close to 300 unless towns aim for more than what’s expected.

Author Jim Collins in Good to Great advocates for taking risks in conjunction with setting those bold goals—what he calls BHAGs—Big Hairy Audacious Goals. Collins says, “A BHAG is a huge and daunting goal—like a big mountain to climb. It is clear, compelling, and people ‘get it’ right away. A BHAG serves as a unifying focal point of effort, galvanizing people and creating team spirit as people strive toward a finish line. Like the 1960s NASA moon mission, a BHAG captures the imagination and grabs people in the gut.”

And social entrepreneur Dan Pallotta agrees, stating more specifically that we need to take out the wiggle room; big goals, with concrete timelines, become a way to move the organization (or town) forward. They become rallying cries and organizing principles, and they are the basis of nearly all true transformative change.

Martin Luther King Jr. knew this, too. He concluded his most famous speech with the line, “When all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics will be able to join hands and sing...” There are few BHAGs more ambitious than that one. And had he left out the Protestants, or conceded that freedom didn’t need to ring from the curvaceous slopes of California or the hills and molehills of Mississippi, we might not be enjoying its reverbations in as many places as we do today.

I think lots of organizations don’t get around to articulating their own BHAGs, which really means they're not directly challenging themselves to create big, hairy, audacious CHANGE. As Pallotta notes in his article entitled “What Nonprofits Can Learn from the Apollo Program,” “A blueprint for achieving the impossible emerged out of the sheer audacity of the context [landing on the moon at a time when no American had even orbited the earth]. In the absence of the challenge, we'd still be dreaming.”

Risk aversion always kicks back in, of course, when it’s time to lay it on the line, so I like to keep Robert Schuller’s quote in the back of my mind: “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?”

I'll start: within 10 years, I think every American ought to have—and make use of—a voice in his or her community. Is that hairy enough?