Everyone has heard the old adage… If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail. But you can plan all day and all night, 24/7, and if you’re focused on the wrong things, it is still possible that you might fail or at the least come up short of your organization’s full potential. Certain things in strategic planning are table stakes, and you simply can’t be successful without them.

Of course, you need to have some sort of vision about where you plan to be in the future and an idea of how you will get there. You need to know what’s realistic regarding the scope of your potential impact in your marketplace. You need to know who’s on board and who can help you achieve your vision. You need to know what resources you have and have some ideas about what will happen when you encounter the inevitable roadblocks or delays that impede your course. All of these are critically important, and a glaring deficiency in any of them will seriously undermine your organization’s opportunity to succeed. We could all make a list of 20 or more situations or conditions that can lead to the failure of a strategic plan. Many of us could probably make a much longer list from our personal experiences. Although each of these is detrimental to sound strategy implementation, one major strategy killer is nearly impossible to recover from. That organizational killer is unrealistic goals from the outset.

Most organizational goal-setting exercises start with some form of a leader asking themselves or team members, “what does success look like for us? What are we setting out to achieve?” That seems pretty straightforward, but in actuality, those are probably the wrong questions. They are the wrong question because, at its heart, those questions are just a way of exploring and envisioning what the benefits of success will be like.

In the goal-setting process, rather than considering what type of success we want, we should probably ask ourselves, “how much am I willing to endure to achieve a specific measure of success?” If you think about it, what measures of extreme success wouldn’t someone want? Who wouldn’t want to be recognized as the number one leader in their field? Who wouldn’t want to write a best-selling book, have amazing relationships, lose weight, earn more money, etc.?

Everybody wants to achieve those goals. The real challenge is not determining if you want the positive result… but determining if you’re willing to embrace the sacrifices that will be required to achieve your goal. How much discomfort, inconvenience, isolation, and loss of work-life balance… am I willing to experience to realize my goals? How you answer this complex question will be the number one determinant of what goal you will ultimately be able to achieve.