If you don’t know where you are going any road will get you there. If any road will get you there then you don’t really need me.

I really don’t know who to attribute this line to but it makes a lot of sense. For years I set up workshops for the NASA Aerospace Education Services Program at Goddard Space Flight Center. Because AESP is a free program to requesting educational entities it is a very popular program. My problem as the scheduler (coordinator) was finding out what topic the school would like for a workshop. When I would ask what they would like for a topic the answer was almost certainly, “I don’t know. What to you do?’ My reply would be, “it doesn’t really matter what I do. What matters is what the teachers need to make the students successful.”

The more I had these conversations the more I realized that the schools lacked focus. They were looking for something fun and cheap for their teachers to do on their inservice day. How were we to know if we could make any difference in their school if the school didn’t know where they were going? If they didn’t know where they were going with their professional development, did it really matter if we participated? If requester didn’t know what they needed, why would we spend taxpayer money to get them there?

Over time I started to lead the conversation. I learned early that you never ask for what they need. The answer to that question is always time and money. You never ask what people want. The answer to that question is always more of the same. What you need to ask is what would make your ultimate client or audience successful? In education the ultimate client is the student. My question for the schools, if they didn’t really know where they were going, was, “what do your students need to be successful?” If you ask that question there will be dead silence. It seems that people hardly ever think about what is best for their ultimate client.

The concept of ultimate client or audience can be extended to almost anything. Once you answer the question of needs for the client you have your goal. From the goal you start to build objectives to meet the goal. I don’t think this is a new concept to anyone. From the first grade we are taught that in writing you start with a topic sentence (the goal) and develop it by adding sentences that support the topic (objectives). As we started writing multiple paragraphs we still had one goal, multiple objectives, which became topic sentences, and many supporting sentences for the objectives.

This concept can be extended to public speaking as well. If a public speaker is going to get into trouble it will be because they failed to find out what would make their audience successful. What was the goal of their talk? What was the one thing that the speaker wanted the audience to walk away with?

AESP is an outreach arm of NASA. As such, lead scientists from spacecraft or missions would come to us for advice on what teachers would want. My first question to them was, “what one thing do you think the general public needs to know about what you are doing?” When I would ask that question I would get that dead silence again. Then they would come up with four or five things. Again, what this would show me is a lack of focus. No spacecraft or mission has more than one overarching goal. Inside of the overarching goal, say the study of Saturn’s system, there may be several objectives (i.e., the moons of Saturn, the origin of the rings of Saturn…). There is one goal and probably several objectives.

Can an objective of an overall goal become the goal (or main topic) for a talk? Yes. If your ultimate audience is interested in a single objective, the objective becomes the goal and you produce objectives under that.

Can we extend this into business? I can certainly do that. One organization I worked for had this habit of starting a project not knowing what the outcome would look like. They would assume that the client needed something without checking out what the client needed to make their client, our ultimate client, successful. If I questioned what they wanted this product to do I would get a vague answer. The organization always wanted to start with what we had and build until they got to an end point. This idea would drive me crazy. How do you know if you have reached your goal if you don’t know what your goal is? I finally told a few people that if they couldn’t tell me what the final product was going to look like, I couldn’t get them there.

NASA and several other organizations use a process entitled the critical path method. In this process you start with what you want and work backwards. What makes up the final product? What makes up each part of the final product and so on. In this manner you can look at what you need before you start and get your resources in order. Also during development you will know how each part interplays with the other parts. Do they connect and how?

When I started with this other organization they would start us on a step. When that step was complete they would devise another step. When that was complete they would add another. The problem with this approach was that some steps did not get us to the next step. We would need to go back and change the process, which would leave us with unfinished projects that needed “rework.” To me it was like building a road and then stopping. To continue on you would have to turn right or left and then move on. This would leave dead ends that needed to be cleaned up later. Because management didn’t think ahead our team got the reputation of never being on time with material and always having to go back and fix things. They called it rework. I called it lack of focus on the final product.

I think you can see that education, business, and outreach are much the same. Each should start with a goal and a set of objectives. Whatever you do or produce should be focused on this set of goals and objectives. This is not rocket surgery. If you are focused you will produce what you need.

There are several other topics that stem from this article. In the near future I will add other articles with titles such as, “Producing a Field of Dreams”. “ The Client, the Organization, the Team, and Then Me: Or How to Make Good Business Decisions”, “How to Get and Keep Volunteers”, and “How to Work Effectively With Schools.”