Health Market Science

We’ve found a recipe for innovation that fuels ever higher-growth — combine audacious goals with delivery-focused, agile execution.

Day one of my first job out of college, I discovered two books on my desk: Art of War by Sun Tzu and Built to Last by Jim Collins, gifts for each new employee from the CEO.  Both books made an impression, but Built to Last, as my first “business” book out of school, molded some of my early and lasting attitudes towards entrepreneurship.

Among many takeaways from Built to Last, I embraced the idea of “Big Hairy Audacious Goals” (BHAGs).  Collins saw BHAGs as a way to stimulate progress. 

“To build a visionary company, you need to counterbalance its fixed core ideology with a relentless drive for progress. While core ideology provides continuity, stability, and cohesion, the drive for progress promotes change, improvement, innovation, and renewal. One way to bring that drive for progress to life is through BHAGs,” Collins wrote.

More specifically, I’ve found that developing BHAGs creates an innovative mentality. Collins and Porras describe BHAGs on a corporate level as “nearly impossible to achieve without consistently working outside of a comfort zone and displaying corporate commitment, confidence and even a bit of arrogance…The driving element of a BHAG is willingness to completely change your mindset and commit to doing something differently from the way you have been doing it.”

Establishing BHAGs forces teams to consider what’s possible rather than operating in what’s known to be achievable mode.  If a company operates with the latter mentality, progress and growth are stunted because the company waits for the market to prove what’s achievable before acting.

Traditionally BHAGs are long-term goals with decade-long time horizons.  However, when combined with Agile development I believe BHAGs are just as powerful for short-term motivation. One of the risks of using BHAGs in the short-term is managing expectations and correcting course.  We know there is a giant chasm between proving something is “possible” and developing and deploying production quality software.  If the team is accustomed to discussing what may be “possible”, stakeholders may misinterpret that as commitment, resulting in mismatched expectations.

Agile largely mitigates this risk and allows for rhythmic, predictable course correction.   In Agile, teams commit to goals monthly, while targets are set quarterly.  To build confidence and predictability, a team must deliver on its commitments.  This leaves room to apply BHAGs to quarterly targets, allowing the team to operate in a “what’s possible” mode when setting targets then immediately grounding them in month-by-month commitments.    This also gives stakeholders the opportunity to course-correct if experiments and early “possibilities” aren’t panning out.   Aligning around the terminology of monthly commitments and quarterly targets to achieve unifying, audacious goals helps mixed-company conversations and keeps expectations in line, while allowing teams to think outside the box and rally around seemingly impossible objectives.

Since BHAGs (and the quarterly targets) are necessarily riskier, stakeholders can plan accordingly.  All the while, Agile tenants are not lost.  Teams are working the highest priority and riskiest items first.   We’ve only introduced context to the work and made it motivational

This potent combination of innovative thinking, Agile software development and open-minded goal setting fits perfectly with Health Market Science’s core value of innovation.  The recipe bakes innovation into our core processes and vernacular, which, in turn, delivers innovation to our clients.   And when delivered through a SaaS business model, our clients reap the benefits of that innovation at a fraction of the cost and a lowered risk associated with its initial development.