How to rally people to an ambitious goals

John F Kennedy’s goal of putting a man on the moon motivated 400,000 people to work together to achieve a single objective.

We were recently talking at work about writing objectives and how hard it is to write great ones. Using the guidelines set out by Google's OKR process (Objectives and Key Results), they should be:

1. New and ambitious
2. Clearly defined
3. Achievable/believable

But you can easily check the box on all these criteria and still write uninspiring, ineffective objectives that people don't rally around. Like so much in communication and leadership, what separates the great from the average is often nuanced and intuitive.

I'm really interested in those nuances and that intuition, especially for something like objectives that have such huge downstream effects as they motivate people or don't.

One of the greatest objectives of all time is John F Kennedy's "Put a man on the moon by the end of the decade." It rallied nearly half a million people across hundreds of disciplines, to work together, solving millions of problems, towards the same purpose.

There's no question this was a legendary goal but what made it that? It checks boxes above of a well-written goal, but there must be more.

As I thought about it, I came up with one characteristic that I think was more important than any others: it was easily understood and inspiring to each type of person needed to achieve it.

• The adventurer imagined what it would be like in this unexplored place.
• The scientist thought about all those unanswered questions of the universe that might become answerable.
• The engineer started sketching and calculating energies and trajectories to get into space.
• The maker thought about fabricating and assembling a spaceship.
• The storyteller started writing the tales of these wild new worlds and the adventures we'll find.
• The philosopher started wondering what it meant to be a being that leaves the place it came from.
• The businessman thought about new industries, costs, and money that could be made.
• And on and on.

All these people got excited and started thinking and doing what they were great at, not because they were told to, but because they were pumped to!

By definition, achieving something new and big takes a lot of different people working at the edge of their abilities. If any one of these groups isn't inspired, the whole thing becomes a lot harder if not impossible. If Kennedy inspired business people but not engineers, no one was going to space. If he inspired business people and engineers but not storytellers, the public wouldn't have cared and they wouldn't have recruited the 400,000 people needed. He needed to inspire everyone, he did, and they achieved something that is still mind-boggling today.

Most of our goals are much more humble than going to space but the same mechanics hold true. If you think about everyone you need and find a way to position the goal to inspire them, you're that much closer to reaching it.

That famous line (8m50s)