Think of a goal you are currently trying to accomplish.

Choose something ambitious. Something that will take months or years rather than days. It could involve completing a significant creative project, changing your career, building a business, or becoming someone you are not yet.

Try to picture the finished version.

You may see the destination clearly. You have published the book, launched the business, completed the body of work, or established yourself in a new field.

Now turn your attention to the distance between where you are and where you want to be.

How much do you actually know about the path forward?

Consider the decisions you have not made, the information you do not have, and the circumstances that could change before you arrive. Think about the people who will affect the work and everything you will learn by attempting it.

Notice how the goal feels from here.

A large creative goal can produce resistance, confusion, and overwhelm. You may find yourself searching for the right plan, questioning which step comes first, or waiting until you feel more certain.

The destination appears specific. The path toward it does not.

We often read that tension as a problem with our discipline, planning, or ability to follow through. Before reaching for a better goal or a more detailed plan, it's worth asking what kind of environment the goal was built for.

The environment goal-setting requires

Goal-setting carries assumptions about the conditions in which it will be used.

A goal places success in a future state or outcome. Finish the book. Launch the course. Earn a particular amount. Become a full-time artist. Once that state has been defined, you can work backward, divide the distance into stages, and measure your progress.

This works when the destination remains stable, the relevant variables can be predicted, and repeated actions produce comparable results. These conditions describe what is often called a "kind" environment.

Kind does not mean easy. It means the environment behaves consistently enough for experience and feedback to guide us toward a known outcome.

Bowling is a useful example.

Imagine setting a goal to bowl a score of 200. The lane has fixed dimensions. The pins begin in the same formation. A strike always means ten pins, and the final score provides an exact measure of performance.

A ball thrown in the first frame and one thrown in the tenth ask essentially the same thing of the bowler. The player can repeat the action, observe the result, adjust, and try again.

Goal-setting depends on an environment that behaves like this.

Now imagine the lane turns to water as you release the ball. It sinks somewhere, and the pins scatter. All 37 of them. You score 7, which turns out to be the best score available this round.

For the next frame, someone hands you a pogo stick with no instructions. You look at the other lanes and discover that everyone appears to be playing a different game.

Should you keep working toward a score of 200?

Creative work changes the landscape

Creative work rarely changes this visibly. The shifts are usually gradual, interconnected, and difficult to interpret while they happen. Still, creative work behaves much more like the second scenario than the first.

So do careers and attempts to plan far into an uncertain future. These are better understood as wicked environments.

Wicked does not mean hostile or impossible. It describes conditions in which variables change, feedback is incomplete or delayed, and the relationship between an action and its outcome cannot be reliably predicted.

Writing the first chapter changes your understanding of the book. Testing a workshop changes your understanding of the people it is meant to serve. Sharing an early version introduces responses and possibilities that did not exist when you designed the plan.

Your engagement changes both the work and your understanding of it.

The environment is also changing without your involvement. Collaborators respond unexpectedly. Technologies appear. Financial conditions shift. Health, family responsibilities, and emerging opportunities change what is possible or important.

This becomes more pronounced as the planning horizon expands. A plan made in January is based on what you understand and anticipate in January. By December, your actions and the surrounding world have produced conditions you could not have fully anticipated.

The farther we plan into a wicked environment, the more likely we are to create a detailed map of the landscape as it appeared at the starting point.

When uncertainty becomes failure

Goal-setting turns an early prediction into an obligation.

Once the desired outcome has been fixed, every decision is framed by whether it moves us closer to or farther from it. An experiment could waste time. An unexpected possibility could become a distraction. Changing direction could mean abandoning the goal.

Some of what we experience as resistance begins here. Any deviation from the plan can be interpreted as failure. Before committing to an action, we feel we need to know exactly what will happen next.

We research longer, revise the plan, compare paths, and wait for enough confidence to act. We try to identify the correct answer ahead of time, even though it can only emerge through engagement with the environment.

Movement stalls because we have made certainty a condition of starting.

A framework intended to direct and motivate the work begins discouraging the experimentation, adaptation, and risk creative work requires.

When uncertainty becomes fuel

Recognizing that mismatch leaves us with a practical question: How do we direct our work in a wicked environment?

I've found it more useful to focus on the direction I want to move than on a hypothetical destination. I do this through intention design.

An intention names a meaningful direction and commits us to behavior aligned with it. It is often expressed through a verb such as explore, develop, strengthen, learn, create, or contribute.

The verb describes the process we are willing to engage in rather than a state waiting beyond a finish line. That commitment becomes concrete through the behaviors we choose.

A single intention can draw on several forms and scales of action.

An intention such as Develop a more useful way to help independent creatives work with limited time and changing priorities creates space for multiple approaches.

You might create a project to prototype a learning experience, establish a practice of speaking regularly with independent creatives, and develop a habit of protecting two mornings each week for the work.

The beauty of this approach is that there is never a state of failure. Some results may be stronger or weaker in terms of serving the intention, but even the weakest results provide useful information.

As new information emerges, these behaviors can adapt and reinforce one another while carrying the same direction forward.

Exploration of and engagement with the uncertainty of the wicked environment becomes material for the next aligned action.

Reexamine your goal

Return to the ambitious goal you chose at the beginning.

Look beyond the finished state and consider the environment between here and there. What would need to remain stable for your current plan to work?

Then consider the direction beneath it. What are you trying to explore, develop, strengthen, create, or contribute?

Choose one behavior that would allow you to engage with that direction now. It could take the form of a project, practice, or habit. You can add or change containers as the work develops.

The finished state can remain a possibility without being treated as a certainty. You no longer need it to provide certainty the environment cannot support.

You have a direction and a behavior you can commit to now.

Until next week, may your direction hold when the ground shifts.

Jeff