What’s the Goal of the Goal?

Editor's note: Sometimes all we know is that something isn’t working. But how do we figure out what that something is? And even if we figure it out, how do we get back on track? In Reset, best-selling author Dan Heath sets out to help readers answer these two questions. He combines thinking from the worlds of design, operations management, and organizational behavior to help readers identify what’s not working and then shift resources to the activities that matter most. In the excerpt below, Heath explains how asking yourself the simple question, “What’s the goal of the goal?” can help you get unstuck and see previously hidden pathways that will get you where you want to go. Heath also released an audio-excerpt of "What's the Goal of the Goal?" on his podcast What It’s Like to Be.... You can listen here. — Evan Nesterak, Editor-in-Chief

* * *

Occasionally, you might discover that your actual work is making a mockery of your mission. To see how that could happen, consider the experience of Ryan Davidsen.

On July 15, 2022, Davidsen bought a new pickup truck. A Ram 1500. To celebrate, he planned to take it on a camping trip the next weekend.

Then, a few days after he drove it off the lot, the survey shakedown began.

The dealership texted him on July 20 asking for a rating from 0-10 on the “overall buying experience.” He texted back a 9.

On July 21, Brittany—a customer care assistant—emailed him, asking, “Is there anything that we could have done better?” The next day, a Friday, she sent another email, wondering, “How could we have made your experience more pleasant?” The next Monday, undeterred by his nonresponse, she sent a third email: “There is just one thing that we would like to know. How could your purchasing experience have been better?”

That same Monday, another person from the dealership, Megan, texted him to see if he needed anything. And his salesperson texted too. (You get the sense that if a loved one died, the salesperson would send flowers and a survey.)

On Wednesday, the dealership texted him again, suggesting “our team would really appreciate your positive responses.”

Davidsen could sympathize with the dealership’s desire for feedback, because at the time he was in charge of customer experience for a health care software firm. He too had to keep tabs on customer satisfaction. He could relate.

So he took the time to fill out the survey. Gave some high scores, some low, reflecting his experience. He left thoughtful comments so the dealership could understand his ratings. He also replied to Brittany, who’d been desperate for that “one thing” that would have improved his experience.

He wrote, “I liked the people I worked with—my salesperson and my finance specialist. They were easy to work with and made it an enjoyable experience.” Then he elaborated on what could have gone better:

“Things I didn’t like was the experience of seeing all of the additional items that get added to the final purchase price that I then have to negotiate out or negotiate down with a lot of back and forth as everyone had to check with a higher up while I wait. I hated that.”

Still, he concluded on a positive note: “I’d buy from you again and intend to stick with this dealership for service. Thanks for asking.”

He never heard from Brittany again.

Within hours of submitting his survey, his salesperson texted him again: “Hey Ryan did I do anything wrong? I got a low score.” Davidsen wrote back “Not at all—had nothing but great things to say about you. I hope they let you read it.” The salesperson replied: “I understand that but every single score mattered.”

Since then, Davidsen said, the dealership “lost” the paperwork on the bed cover he bought with his truck. “Two months later I still don’t have a bed cover and every text and email I sent have gone unanswered, which leaves me feeling it is ‘payback’ for the fair and helpful survey I sent,” he said.

Let’s lift our view of Davidsen’s horror story to the systems level. Because this is a story of change gone wrong. Badly wrong.

The leaders at Stellantis (the multinational that owns Dodge, Chrysler, Jeep, and Ram) were surely not intending to produce stories like this one. No doubt their original intent was pretty respectable: We want to create a great car-buying experience for our customers! That mission is big, long-term, and somewhat diffuse. What kind of shorter-term goal might serve that long-term mission? Boosting customer-satisfaction scores.

And my guess is that the team at the dealership where Davidsen bought his truck did, in fact, make progress toward that short-term goal. Probably their customer-satisfaction scores were outstanding! But their success was due not to their passion for improving the customer experience but rather to their prowess at browbeating customers into providing falsely inflated scores. That’s a sad kind of excellence.

And for even sadder excellence: When Davidsen was still in the process of buying his truck, the sales rep brought over a framed version of the survey that Davidsen would eventually be asked to fill out. The sales rep walked him through every question on it and told him what the “right” answer to each question should be! For instance, on the question “How would you rate your sales consultant overall?” he instructed Davidsen to give him a 10 out of 10. The sales rep also thoughtfully gave Davidsen a laminated take-home copy of the survey, with right answers filled in, for further study and reflection.

* * *

You don’t want to fall into the dealership’s trap of relentlessly chasing a goal and triumphantly moving the numbers only to discover (whoops) that it was all misdirected energy. One simple way to avoid that misalignment—a goal that’s inconsistent with the real mission—is to ask a simple but powerful question: What’s the goal of the goal?

The British advertising guru Rory Sutherland gave a great example of this idea in action. In 2007, Eurostar had finished upgrading the rail route from London to Paris, shaving the travel time from 2 hours 35 minutes to 2 hours 15 minutes. The total price tag was roughly 6 billion GBP, and the goal of the investment had been to speed up the route. Mission accomplished. But what was the goal of the goal?

If the goal, ultimately, was to make things better for the passengers, was that investment well spent? Sutherland was dubious. “For 0.01 percent of this money, you could have put wi-fi on the trains, which wouldn’t have reduced the duration of the journey, but would have improved its enjoyment and its usefulness far more,” he said in a 2011 speech. “For maybe 10 percent of the money, you could have paid all of the world’s top male and female supermodels to walk up and down the train handing out free Château Pétrus to all the passengers. You’d still have 5 billion pounds in change, and people would ask for the trains to be slowed down.”

We can get so fixated on a goal that we miss the bigger picture. And when we lock into a particular goal too quickly, we blind ourselves to alternate routes forward that might have been better and easier.

When we lock into a particular goal too quickly, we blind ourselves to alternate routes forward that might have been better and easier.

In early 2023, I studied a group of people as they set New Year’s Resolutions and began to work toward them. Marisa Lavars, an Australian mother of two, had initially declared this as her goal: “I’d like to get fit, or fitter. To be able to go about my daily activities without being breathless and to lose a bit of weight so I can fit into my pre-covid clothes.”

Lavars had significant health challenges. She was struggling with heart problems triggered by COVID, and as if that weren’t enough, she had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer. Her reference to being “breathless” was no exaggeration: Everyday activities like showering could exhaust her. Her heart rate sometimes spiked to 180 even when she was lying down.

After Lavars submitted her resolution to get fitter, the survey prompted her to consider why that goal was important to her. (In other words, what was the goal of her goal?) Here’s what Lavars wrote: “Absolutely my kids. I want to be the best Mum I can be for them and part of that is being healthy, but it also means modelling for them living my best life.”

Then, the survey asked her: What are 10 different ways you could achieve or approach that aspiration, other than by following your initial resolution? Suddenly, her answers changed dramatically. Some of her alternate pathways included:

  • “Things have been pretty serious for us this past year. I could find some ways to bring back some fun into our lives as fun at times has been in short supply.”
  • “We used to have some pretty locked-in routines in the evening, where things stopped and we did some reading, writing, and maths and then I would read to them. This has been pretty pared back or hasn’t occurred at all. This would be important to get back to doing.”
  • “I would like to bring back music into our lives.”

Lavars realized, immediately, that these ideas would get her closer to “success” than the fitness-oriented goals. “I already feel a sense of light-heartedness through going through this process,” she wrote. “It feels more connected to the why.”

You don’t want to fall into the trap of relentlessly chasing a goal and triumphantly moving the numbers only to discover (whoops) that it was all misdirected energy.

Within a few months, she had dreamed up a variety of ways that she could create moments with her twin 7-year-old boys, despite her poor health. She’d bought some rocking chairs for the veranda. They would sit outside and rock and watch their guinea pigs play. She bought the Harry Potter 6,000-piece LEGO set—they’d been opening one bag of the kit each week.

She had also started a tradition of playing board games. Even at her worst—lying on the couch with an ice pack, trying to bring her heart rate down—she could still participate. She’d call out, “Who’s gonna roll the dice?” She’d tease, “Did you cheat?”

“Even if I’m vomiting, I’ll still be playing the bloody board game,” she laughed. “It just feels really doable. And it’s great for the kids too—they’re just so much more settled because they know that mum is still mum.”

She looks back with amusement on her initial resolution. She had been thinking, “I have to get fit, because I have to spend more time with the kids. . . . I look back now and go, I would never have actually done that, or I would have felt bad about it.”

By reconsidering her first goal—and contemplating instead the “goal of the goal”—she was able to ensure that the progress she made amounted to something meaningful for herself and her kids.

* * *

Achieving clarity on the way forward is not an incremental victory. It is transformative. It can mean the difference between stuck and unstuck.

A group of federal government leaders experienced this transformation several years ago when they rethought the goal of a program that served people with disabilities, including veterans. Some context: Anyone with a “total permanent disability” can, by law, have their federal student loans discharged. But thousands of veterans didn’t take advantage of the program. This was a disappointment to many government leaders, whose goal was simple: Make it easy for veterans to apply for the benefits they deserve.

What was holding back participation in the program? To some extent it was knowledge: Many simply didn’t realize they were eligible for forgiveness. Others got derailed by the cumbersome application process.

The stakes were high: Some of these borrowers were actually in default—potentially having their social-security-disability payments garnished to make loan payments. The government was reaching into their pockets to claim money for loans that they shouldn’t have owed!

So what could be done? In 2016, a team at the Department of Education thought: Rather than make the borrowers responsible for discovering this benefit, let’s proactively tell them about it!

They hatched a plan that led them to compare the databases at several agencies, including the Department of Education and the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA). The Department of Education database could tell you: Who has student loans? The VA database could tell you: Which veterans are permanently disabled? Anyone who matched both databases was eligible for a loan discharge.

By mid-2018, the VA and the Department of Education had identified around 50,000 veterans who qualified for forgiveness. (Thousands of them were in default on those loans-they-didn’t-really-owe.) Letters were sent to all of them, informing them that they were eligible for forgiveness and specifying how to claim it. So far, so good.

Ah, but then came another problem. The notification sent to veterans came under the letterhead of a private organization: the student loan servicer. The letter directed people to file their applications at a URL called “disabilitydischarge.com.” To recipients, it smelled a little fishy. Uh, why isn’t this coming from the VA? Why isn’t it a .gov address? Is this story going to end with someone absconding to Cabo San Lucas with the remainder of my checking account?

As one government insider told me, “Veterans just wouldn’t do it. They were scared. I mean, it was every red flag you could possibly imagine.”

If your goal, in their shoes, was to encourage veterans to file their applications for forgiveness, how could you make that happen? Well, maybe send a less suspicious letter. Or set up a .gov website. Maybe some tweaks would ease the veterans’ concerns.

But in 2019, the agency leaders stopped trying to iterate a broken process and took a hard look at the goal of the goal.

What’s our goal? To help veterans apply for the loan forgiveness they’ve earned.

And what’s the goal of the goal? To improve their financial security.

What are alternate pathways for achieving that goal, other than having them apply for forgiveness? Um, well, why don’t we forget about the whole application process? Why do they need to apply at all? We can figure out who they are! Let’s tell them that we can just forgive their loans. And then after their “okay,” we’ll let them know it’s done. (They needed an “okay” first, because there was a tax issue in some states: Forgiven loans might be treated as income, meaning that the vet would get an income tax bill for the forgiven loan. That’s why the loan couldn’t be forgiven automatically.)

To make sure your work aligns with your mission, ask yourself, “What’s the goal of the goal?”

“There was a recognition that the letters clearly weren’t working and there was a big push to make this automatic,” a senior official at the Department of Education said. “It would be good for the borrowers but it could also be good for us—it could save us the time of processing a bunch of applications, sending them back again if they need to be corrected. Could this be a win-win for everybody?”

It was a radically simple idea, but it was no easy feat to implement. Just getting permission from different government agencies to compare databases—essential for forgiving loans—required a blizzard of paperwork that had taken months and months to push through.

The ripple effects of this policy shift have been broad and profound: Tens of thousands of disabled veterans—many of whom, again, had been in “default”—had their financial lives transformed. One disabled Navy veteran saw her loan balance go from over $72,000 to … zero. “I felt immense relief,” she told a reporter. “I mean, I cried about it. I ugly cried about it.”

The program was so successful, in fact, that it has since been expanded to other situations where people have earned (but not claimed) loan forgiveness.

This success was earned by a set of government leaders who refused to treat their original goal—increasing loan forgiveness applications—as sacrosanct. After reconsidering the work, they hatched a new (and superior) plan.

You can do the same. To make sure your work aligns with your mission, ask yourself, “What’s the goal of the goal?” Answering the question can you help uncover better, simpler routes to the destination you care about.


Adapted from Reset: How to Change What’s Not Working by Dan Heath. Published by Avid Reader Press. Copyright © 2025 by Dan Heath. All rights reserved.

Disclosure: Evan Nesterak and Heather Graci of the Behavioral Scientist served as editorial consultants on Reset. Behavioral Scientist’s Visual Editor Liam Speranza designed the cover of Reset.