21 CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: Don’t just pick a target—try to hit it!

Accountability is vitally important to healthy individuals, families, organizations, and societies. It is important to set goals so you know what you are trying to do and why. But holding yourself and others—and getting others to hold you—accountable to milestones in progress toward those goals is every bit as important. Making a plan and then never checking whether you are following it is as foolish (and ineffective!!) as getting directions to a destination and then ignoring them and driving wherever you want. You will most assuredly, to quote Yogi Berra, “end up someplace else.”

The idea, of course, is not new—just one we can easily forget. Most of us have heard the adage, “What gets measured gets done” and can think of many examples of this truth. In health care, for instance, patients whose weight or blood pressure are regularly checked are much more likely to make lifestyle changes to improve those numbers. And Proverbs 13:24 tells us (I’m quoting the contemporary version, which avoids talking about rods) “If you love your children, you will correct them; if you don’t love them, you won’t correct them.”

In families, organizations, and societies, the costs of failures in accountability goes beyond ending up someplace else—they result in disfunction: when people see that others don’t care about the goals or plans (or laws!) and that there is no consequence to ignoring them, resentment will develop between those who are trying and those who aren’t, and chaos will ensue. Worse than just the failure to succeed, the lack of accountability can result in demoralized and even caustic cultures, where no one is happy.

And yet it is so easy to go about our business, “doing our best” with only a hazy sense of what we are trying to accomplish and whether it’s happening. When I realize I’m doing this the picture of an archer with no target comes to my mind—the form may be perfect, but to improve as an archer one must be willing to identify a target and then make adjustments after observing where each arrow has landed. A great archer must be accountable to hitting an agreed target and be willing to do the hard work necessary to accomplish that goal. Greatness of any kind requires that, and the people and things we love deserve that.

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