Effort in the Wrong Direction Only Takes You Further Away
Goals are often clear. They can be concrete, measurable and tangible.
The direction to achieve them is not.
We know where we want to end up. A finance system live by the first of July. A promotion within two years. A business that no longer depends on one client. We can write the goal on a whiteboard, and everyone in the room can read it.
What nobody can write on the whiteboard is the path. The path is not a straight line from where we are to where we want to be. It rises and falls. It doubles back. Some weeks it looks like we are almost there, and the next week we are further away than when we started.
Every action pushes one way or the other
Our actions, our effort and our decisions may lead us towards our goal, or pull us away from it.
That sounds obvious. The difficulty is that, in the moment, both feel exactly the same. Hard work in the right direction and hard work in the wrong direction are equally tiring. They fill the same hours. They produce the same sense of progress. On the journey, it is unclear whether our direction is right or not.
Pilots have a rule of thumb for this, called the one-in-sixty rule. If a plane is one degree off course, then for every sixty miles it flies, it ends up about one mile away from where it should be. One degree feels like nothing. Nobody in the cockpit would notice it by looking out of the window. But over a long flight, one degree is the difference between landing at the right airport and running low on fuel over the wrong city.
The pilot’s answer is not to fly harder. Flying faster in the wrong direction only gets you to the wrong place sooner. The answer is to check the heading, again and again, against something that tells the truth.
What we need is a signal
So what we need is a signal to understand and assess whether our path is correct.
The signal can come from milestones, the tangible checkpoints we expect to pass on the way. It can also come from more intangible signs: the quality of conversations, the kind of questions people are asking, whether problems are surfacing earlier or later than they used to.
Milestones are easy to put on a plan. The intangible signs are harder to pin down, but they are often the first to tell us something is wrong.
Consider a council replacing its finance system. The goal is clear and written into the business case: move to a modern, standard platform and retire years of customisation and spreadsheets.
The team works hard. Very hard. Extra hours through the design phase, weekends during testing. The status reports are green. The milestones are being met on paper.
But look at what the effort is actually going into. Each business area has asked for the new system to behave exactly like the old one. Each request, on its own, sounds reasonable. The team, wanting to be helpful, builds them. The number of customisations climbs. The testing effort climbs with it. By the time anyone steps back, the organisation has spent a large amount of money and energy rebuilding the old system on a new platform.
Every person on that program worked hard. The effort was never the problem. The direction was. And the signal was there the whole time: a rising count of customisations, in a program whose goal was to reduce them.
The same pattern shows up in individual careers. Someone wants to move into senior leadership. They respond the way they always have, by working harder at what they are already good at. They take on the most difficult technical work, stay late to solve the problems nobody else can, and become the person everyone relies on. They are rewarded for it. And slowly, without intending to, they make themselves too valuable to move. The effort is real. It is simply pointed at the role they already have, not the one they want.
The signal here is intangible, but it is there. Are you being invited into different conversations than a year ago? Are people asking for your judgement, or only for your output? If the answer has not changed, the direction probably hasn’t either.
Eyes on the goal, attention on the signals
Our job, then, is to keep our eyes on the goal. Understand the milestones. Know the potential signals. And assess whether our direction is correct.
That means deciding in advance what we expect to see if we are on track, rather than looking for evidence after the fact. It means naming the signals that would tell us we are drifting, before we are attached to the path we have chosen. And it means checking them regularly, not just at the end of the year or the end of the project, when correcting course is expensive.
It is not about effort, but direction. Effort in the wrong direction only propels us further away from our goals.
We celebrate effort because we can see it: long hours, full calendars, visible commitment. Direction is harder to see and harder to reward, so we tend to assume it will take care of itself. It rarely does.
Here are some questions to ponder.
Do you know your goals vividly, clearly enough to recognise them if you were halfway there?
Do you know the milestones and signals you should expect to see on the journey?
And do you consistently check your direction, by comparing the signals and milestones you expected with the ones actually in front of you?
