The Alternative Manager’s Guide to Goal-Setting

This story is excerpted from the cover story from INSTORE’s January 2026 edition, “The Alternative Manager’s Toolkit” by Chris Burslem.

Challenge/Task: Goal Setting

Traditional Playbook: Most business owners sit down just before the start of a new year and craft beautiful, intricate plans that may include ambitious targets, vast spreadsheets and rigid timelines. Their hope is that clear goals will direct energy and keep everyone accountable.

The Problem: You only have to look back as far as the collapse of the Soviet empire to appreciate central planning’s patchy record. The real world rarely likes to play along with our expectations. Rigid goals can become obstacles rather than motivators. When circumstances shift and teams feel boxed in, your workers get demoralized or disengage altogether. If progress isn’t obvious, momentum slows. Those audacious goals suddenly seem unrealistic, leading to a sense of failure before the year has barely begun. Compare the traditional approach with the insight of Stephen Shapiro, whose book GOAL-FREE LIVING makes the case that you can have some kind of direction without obsessing about the specific destination. “Opportunity knocks often, but sometimes softly,” he says. “While blindly pursuing our goals, we often miss unexpected and wonderful possibilities.”

The Alternative Manager’s Fix: Ditch the 5-year plan. Embrace uncertainty. Adopt a “ready, fire, aim” mentality — launch small initiatives quickly, learn from immediate results, and adjust course accordingly. This agile philosophy prioritizes progress over prediction and learning over long-range forecasting.

How to Make It Happen

• Replace fixed targets with adaptive milestones that guide teams without chaining their hands. This enables a “ready, fire, aim” mentality that favors launching quick modest initiatives to learn from real-world feedback before adjusting course.
• Instead of that “Big Hairy Audacious Goal”, opt for a really stimulating VAGUE goal, like “foster a kickass company culture”. Through the year, spend time working on this goal but don’t measure your progress towards it. Just follow your vision and go with the flow.
• Focus on achieving fast small wins along the way to build confidence and momentum; aim to launch or test something within days or weeks. Create an environment where continuous improvement feels more like a flow than a rigid sprint.
• Such an experimental approach naturally requires a shift in focus from distant outcome goals to immediate process goals. “Your goal has to be the process because you do not control the outcome,” says Maria Konnikova in “The Biggest Bluff”, adding “If you put yourself in a position to win you’ve done your job. Whatever happens next, happens.”
• Regularly review and recalibrate; don’t wait until the end of the year to re-evaluate.
• Use visual cues, like progress bars or team dashboards, to subtly motivate consistent effort and maintain focus without the pressure of strict deadlines.
• Celebrate small wins frequently to build psychological momentum, maintain high levels of engagement, and reinforce that culture of continuous progress.
• Prioritize quick experimentation and learning—or “ooching” (taking tiny low-risk steps to test an idea) — over a slow, perfectionist approach, allowing you to gather real-world data quickly and reduce the risk of investing in flawed long-range plans. (More on this later)
• Remember New Coke. Maybe do nothing for a year. Many business owners tend to think that doing something is better than doing nothing, and that activity equates with productivity. But often the best thing to do is to do nothing, says Annie Duke in “Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away”. “But it has to be a choice. It can’t be because of inertia or because you’re scared or because you don’t know what to do.”