Before the Targets: Creating the Conditions for Change in the New Year
As January approaches, many organisations return to work full of good intentions.
New year’s resolutions.
Fresh objectives.
Personal development plans.
Ambitious targets for the year ahead.
Yet one of the most common — and costly — mistakes in business change is that we set the targets without first creating the conditions that make success likely.
We focus on what we want to achieve, without paying enough attention to whether people are actually equipped to achieve it.
Targets without foundations don’t motivate — they overwhelm
A phrase I often use in change work is this:
Before you ask someone to do something, they need the competence, capacity, drive, and desire to do it.
If any one of those is missing, setting objectives doesn’t inspire performance — it sets people up to fail.
- Competence – Do people have the skills and knowledge required?
- Capacity – Do they have the time, energy, and space alongside business-as-usual?
- Drive – Is there motivation and belief in the value of the work?
- Desire – Do they genuinely want to take this on, or is it imposed?
Without these foundations, objectives quickly become a source of stress, frustration, and disengagement.
The hidden cost of “too much, too soon”
Another common January trap is volume.
Being handed a long list of priorities at the start of the year can feel productive — but in reality it often leads to:
- Task switching
- Cognitive overload
- Shallow progress on everything
- Deep progress on nothing
In many cases, people would achieve far more if they were asked to focus on one meaningful priority at a time — perhaps one per month, or one per phase — rather than trying to juggle dozens simultaneously.
Fewer priorities:
- Make capacity visible
- Reduce overwhelm
- Improve quality of thinking
- Increase follow-through
Why psychological safety comes first
Before strategy.
Before delivery plans.
Before personal development plans.
The real foundation of sustainable change is psychological safety.
Psychological safety means people feel able to:
- Speak up
- Question assumptions
- Admit uncertainty
- Challenge poor ideas
- Try something new
- Take a risk without fear of blame
Research led by Amy Edmondson shows that teams with high psychological safety consistently outperform others — not because they make fewer mistakes, but because they surface and learn from them faster.
Without psychological safety:
- Objectives become compliance exercises
- Innovation dries up
- Ownership is replaced by box-ticking
With psychological safety:
- People step into responsibility
- Services are improved, not just maintained
- Accountability becomes meaningful rather than punitive
There is a world of difference between owning an outcome and simply ticking off tasks.
Ownership requires support, not just permission
Psychological safety is necessary — but not sufficient on its own.
Even when people feel safe to step up, they still need:
- Support
- Space to think
- Opportunities to test ideas
This is where:
- Coaching
- Mentorship
- Peer discussion
- Practice and trial
become critical enablers of success.
People need sounding boards.
Thinking partners.
Opportunities to reason things through before committing them to paper.
Change is rarely linear, and very few people get it right first time. Support mechanisms allow learning to happen early, cheaply, and safely.
January and February: the overlooked phase of change
In many organisations, early January is treated as a time to finalise objectives.
In reality, it should be a time to explore prerequisites.
The most effective leaders and teams use this period to ask:
- What will it take to succeed this year?
- Where are the constraints?
- What skills or support are missing?
- What needs to change before delivery can begin?
- How do individual goals and organisational goals align?
Only after that dialogue do objectives and personal development plans get written — not as edicts, but as co-created commitments.
Change works best when it’s designed, not imposed
Written objectives matter.
Personal development plans matter.
Targets matter.
But they work best when they are the output of thoughtful conversation — not the starting point.
When people understand what success requires, feel safe to engage honestly, and are supported to grow into their responsibilities, the chances of delivering real change increase dramatically.
As the new year begins, the most important question may not be:
“What do we want to achieve?”
But rather:
“What do we need to put in place so people can succeed?”
Get that right, and the objectives tend to follow.