Get a Brand New BHAG

I like the sound of it. What is a BHAG anyway? Big Hairy Audacious Goal. BHAGs have been adopted by the business world. It is a term you hear frequently. Some have left the hair off and just refer to BAGs. Personally. I like leaving the hair in. It is a jealousy thing. A BHAG is a five- to ten-year result. BHAGs have got to light the organization up. On the face, they need to be worthwhile.

A BHAG has got to be something that fulfills on a “missing” within the organization that would be most positive when attained. It is unreasonable, yet still possible. A BHAG is not predictable, and yet its attainment would be worthwhile and gratifying. Collins and Porras say that the BHAG should have a 70% chance of happening. I have seen value for organizations in simply rolling around in this BHAG territory. It allows a Leadership Team to be audacious and put some positive, bold future results in front of the organization.

To begin the BHAG process, what you do is sit around in loin cloths and smoke a peace pipe with some very special type of tobacco. As the smoke wafts to the top of the corporate wigwam, you imagine what the company could produce and be. For real now—come back! You are actually sitting in your business-casual uniform in a generic conference room at the company or some other meeting place.

The first part of creating the BHAGs for your business is to ask individuals to speculate on what they would consider to be worthwhile goals for their organization. Ask them to consider goals that are not probable and by their very nature would require people within the organization having to live out of the Reason for Being and Values of the organization. These are the ones that were recently created. See? It is all coming together.

Again, these are charted and posted for discussion. Again, in larger groups they are synthesized and shared. A facilitator then gets involved and works with the group until there are 1–4 BHAGs . A group is created to wordsmith and fine-tune with a leader and a time frame is generated for the wordsmiths to get back with the group. This process is similar to the one utilized for creating the Reason for Being and the corporate Values.

A personal example of a BHAG and its usefulness for me personally is writing a book. When I first articulated this goal, it seemed impossible. It was not really impossible but it sure seemed that way. However I could see that engagement with this BHAG—whether it happened or not—would be beneficial.

Engagement with my BHAG would push me along. I would have articles for publishing, my blog and my newsletter. This BHAG would engage me in improving my writing. It would force me to take the next steps in developing myself as a consultant. Now I think of myself as a writer and author and so do others. This is a new development. There is still a slight chance that I will not fulfill on this BHAG, however the very engagement of it has sent my life into a completely different trajectory.