Ambition versus Realism

How to manage the tension between being ambitious and realistic when setting your objectives

Objectives need to be specific. You need to be clear about precisely what it is you want to achieve.

They also need to be measurable. You need to be able to recognise clearly whether you have achieved your objectives.

And they need to be time-bound. Either what you want must happen by a particular date, or within a particular time frame.

These criteria can be challenging enough to get right, but the more difficult part of setting an objective is usually making it both ambitious and realistic.

The most obvious reason why it’s challenging to be both ambitious and realistic is that these two criteria are in tension. The more ambitious you are, the less realistic and vice versa.

But it can also be hard to know where to set the bar for the amount of change you’re aiming for, especially if you’re new to campaigning or an issue area. Plenty of campaigners struggle with not knowing whether they have the right level of ambition and realism in their objectives and the reality is that you never truly know until you’ve won your campaign.

I was once asked in a training to define ambition in the context of setting an objective. My answer: the maximum amount of change possible with the resources you can reasonably expect to have.

How, then, would I define realistic in this context? The maximum amount of change possible with the resources you can reasonably expect to have.

The difference is that the first answer puts the emphasis on “maximum”, and the second answer emphasises “possible”.

Put another way, you want to be able to strive for as much as you’re able to, as long as in your judgement you are not breaking with reality. And this is why it can be so hard: we’re talking about human beings without perfect foresight making judgements.

It’s still worth making an effort to limit the uncertainty you’ll inevitably take into setting an objective. This is best served through information and knowledge about your subject matter, your potential targets and other stakeholders, demographics, opportunities and risks, and of course knowing your own capacity.

Gathering information

That’s where a great situational analysis comes in. If it’s clear what your ultimate goal is, start analysing that goal; ask questions, speak to people with information, conduct research, use campaign planing tools like SWOT analysis and power mapping, and start making decisions about what matters most regarding your ability to achieve your goal.

Make sure you consider yourself as part of that analysis. Whether that’s as a person, team or organisation, what are your strengths and weaknesses? What do you bring to the table when considering a campaign? What’s your capacity in terms of people, money, skills, connections, and so on. One of the biggest factors when determining how ambitious you can be is what your own capacity is.

Try as well to get additional perspectives on your situational analysis. Seek the input of people who might not be as “in the weeds” of the analysis as you but who will have a valuable perspective. People who will be required to deliver the campaign with you and anyone who might need to sign off your objective are definitely worth consulting.

You are unlikely to end up with absolute certainty over hitting the mark of maximum ambition without breaking realism. But short of becoming more experienced and familiar with campaigning and your topic, this is the best way to narrow down what’s possible and more clearly see what’s on your horizon of ambition.

Who is responsible?

It can also help to ensure it’s clear who is responsible for achieving an objective. If an objective is imposed upon a campaigner who considers it far too ambitious to be considered realistic, then perhaps it’s better for the objective to be the responsibility of their manager or someone more senior, and the role of the campaigner should be to contribute to it in some way.

You have to believe you can win. If you don’t, that disbelief will filter through to the work you deliver and contribute to a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure.

Assuming the campaigner is responsible for the objective, it might also be beneficial to determine who else is required to contribute to that objective. Maybe there is a team member whose time and effort needs to be spent in service of the objective, or is responsible for a sub-objective that the objective is dependent on. These are important clarifications to make, so that everyone involved knows their level of responsibility and accountability, and ensure they have matching authority and resources to deliver what they are on the hook for.

The costs of being too realistic and too ambitious

There are risks and costs to getting it wrong in either direction.

Being too ambitious, especially so ambitious that realism has long since disappeared, is a recipe for disaster. Most of this disaster results from the impact of failure, which will demoralise the campaigner or team working towards the objective. This can be even more pronounced in teams where there is a disparity between the level of ambition on one campaigner’s objectives versus another’s.

A campaigner’s job is to win campaigns. So their performance would rightly be judged to a great extent on whether or not they won, and why. I know I would find it paralysing to have to achieve objectives I know deep down are not realistic or, to an earlier point, I don’t have the means to achieve.

It is also less likely that the good work done on a campaign can actually be appreciated as effective. Maybe you’re pushing for a policy change and your campaign was effective enough to get your target to internally contemplate doing what you want, but you just fell short and didn’t get any meaningful commitment out of your target in the time-frame you wanted. Even 90% of nothing is still nothing, and unless you can get some reliable feedback from your target or a third-party about what did or didn’t work, how are you supposed to know whether you were even being effective?

The other costs to being too ambitious and failing are to your team or organisation’s reputation and reporting back to other stakeholders like funders or senior management. If you raised money on the basis that you were going to achieve something and then didn’t, a funder has every reason to ask some challenging questions of you. A good funder will listen to an intelligent rationale for why an objective wasn’t met but you’ll likely be testing their patience if your explanation is that you were too ambitious, especially if there is an obvious gulf between ambition and realism in hindsight, or if being too ambitious is a repeated explanation.

If a campaigner in a medium-large organisation doesn’t meet their objectives, that can reflect poorly on them as well as the organisation. An organisation with proactive performance management should weight the achievement of objectives pretty heavily. Setting objectives that are quite obviously too ambitious could be setting up both the campaigner and the organisation for failure from the start, and why would we ever want to do that?

The costs of being too realistic on the other hand begin with looking (and potentially being) too conservative or weak. I would like to think higher-ups within organisations and funders will see glaring examples where ambition is lacking and remedy those. For example, some objectives I’ve seen over the years are better described as tasks (or key performance indicators, if I’m being generous), or are simply the likely result of the normal course of business.

But it’s more common that you won’t notice you’ve erred too much towards the side of realism until after you start the campaign. Achieving something after 6 months that you were aiming to accomplish in two years might be the result of a truly awesome campaign, but it could also stem from a lack of ambition. Either way, a few questions about raising the level of ambition are warranted.

Another cost of being too realistic is the disruption it can cause to a campaign. You may have spent a lot of time and committed resources to a campaign that meets its objective earlier than expected. You’ll need to pause and consider your next steps, probably cancel some planned tactics (which is not a bad thing in and of itself, but we want to avoid this being the result of poor decision-making when setting objectives) and maybe even design a new campaign. This is more likely to be an issue when fixing an unrealistic objective requires switching your target, pivoting to another topic, or changing the strategies you need to prioritise.

Remember: when you’re setting an objective you are programming your campaign and how it’s going to run. How you’re going to build power, who you’re going to need to take action in support, what the strategies are that you’ll pursue… literally how you’re going to spend all of your time flows from that objective. So we want to avoid circumstances where we need to change it, as it is likely to change up the work we and our teammates do.

Another cost could emerge if your objective is the same as your ask and all of a sudden you find yourself needing to ask for much more from your target, effectively changing the goalposts you have created for them. This isn’t a problem I can recall directly encountering as my asks are typically much bigger and broader than any immediate objective, but if you ask for something from your target, get it, then ask for something more it could damage your relationship with them. It’s up to you to determine whether that matters.

If you’re really unsure…

For most campaigners, if you’re narrowing down the overlap between ambition and realism but still aren’t too sure whether to lean towards the ambitious end or more realistic, I recommend to lean towards realistic, even if just a little bit. As long as it’s a fairly tight call, and you’re not making a decision that results in a fundamentally different (i.e. weaker) campaign, then sacrificing a small amount of ambition for the sake of improving your chances of success is worth doing.

This can be a hard thing to recommend. After all, don’t we want to aim as high as possible? On critical issues like climate change can there be any justification for, in the face of doubt, lowering the bar for success?

But this recommendation is about maximising success, just with a view that extends beyond this one campaign. Keep in mind that I’m not recommending anybody sacrifice ambition where they don’t need to. You’re still aiming for the maximum amount of change possible with the resources you can reasonably expect to have.

We need people who know how to win, and you can’t really say you know how to win unless you win things. By leaning a little bit towards being realistic and improving your chances of success, even in the context of a campaign that is still very ambitious and challenges you and whoever you’re working with, there’s more of a chance that you’ll see the fruits of your work, learn the lessons from your campaign and really understand what it takes to win. You can take those lessons and just as importantly, that confidence and drive, into your next campaign.

In fact, it’s only really for those very experienced campaigners who I recommend the opposite: to lean a bit more towards being ambitions. Aside from the fact that more experienced and successful campaigners will be better at knowing where to set the bar for success, they also have their prior history so if they fall short of their next campaign objective, are not missing out as much on the lessons learned from winning. They are also much more likely to be able to see when and how their campaign is going off track, and if that ultimately leads to the need to change strategies or even an objective.

smARt

Satisfying the SMART acronym (which for campaigners should expand out to specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-bound) is one of the things a good objective will do. We need to focus on all aspects of it, and plenty of other qualities that will be the subject of other posts.

Working on objectives that are both ambitious and realistic allows campaigners to relentlessly pursue their desired outcome, driven on by the scale of the challenge, while remaining confident that with a big effort, they can win their campaign.