What's Your Desired Outcome?

by Russell Tibbits

On my afternoon commute last week, I was listening to ESPN radio hoping to catch insight into what team to pick for my college basketball bracket. What I heard instead was an ESPN broadcaster talking about his movie script. Apparently after working sporadically on his script for over two years he was convinced this project would actually never be completed. There are many things that I look forward to hearing on ESPN radio; the announcer talking about a poor attempt at a movie scripts isn’t one of them. However, in the end, he gave some really great advice.

This ESPN announcer had once attended a script writing class. The teacher of this class explained that he actually enjoyed reading almost all of the scripts that he received. The plots in these scripts were, for the most part, genuine and creative. When there was a problem, the teacher found it often occurred about halfway through the script, when the writer lost sight of his or her original goal. At that point, the story began to lack energy, creativity, continuity. The teacher prescribed a remedy, which many thought was the one action not to take when writing a script: write the title and subtitle first, no exceptions. The reason for writing the title and subtitle first, the teacher said, was that it gave the writer a constant reminder of his or her goal when the project got tough. This constant reminder of your goal kept all writing consistent and progressing forward.

This idea is in line with a piece The Effective Edge teaches. In our Getting the EDGE class, we teach professionals how to create personal projects. The first two steps in the five step process are to create the title of the project and then to write the desired outcome, what the project will look like and feel like when completed. The reason for this is the same reason that teacher advised creating a title and subtitle for a script. Without a title and desired outcome, we tend to lose sight of the original goal for the project. Creating this desired outcome keeps our actions consistent with reaching our goals, regardless of any outside influences.

Try creating desired outcomes for your projects; this should help us all to keep our actions focused on our goals.