It’s not rocket science, is it?

Two great stories this week with a really important message!

Firstly, we landed a spacecraft on a comet. Just saying it seems so ‘sci-fi’ and yet, it’s when you hear the numbers involved that you realise quite how extraordinary this story is. The 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet has travelled at speeds of up to 135,000 km per hour, is currently travelling at nearly 67,000 kph and Rosetta has travelled a cumulative distance of 6.4 billion kilometres to get to and land on a comet that is only 4 milometres wide!

The secondly very interesting story is that Australia and China have just signed a ground-breaking Declaration of Intent that, from 2015, there will be a new trade agreement between the two nations giving unrestricted access to each others markets.

What is fascinating about both of these stories, is that they have both been the result of a long term view with a clear goal.

The comet landing has been 25 years in the planning and the Rosetta mission launched just over 10 years ago. The Australia / China deal has been in negotiation for over a decade!

All too often, when we are under pressure, our focus becomes very short term and our goals become very small scale. This is not saying that we should ignore short term issues, but we seem to reduce our expectations and our timescales at the very time when we should be looking for a bigger vision – how many companies have a 10 year business plan with a clear, major objective?

Also, try and imagine that first conversation when one scientist said to another “How about we try and land an object on a 40,000 miles per hour comet in 25 years time!!”

Clearly a great deal can change in a 10 year timescale and there are always going to be short term priorities, but it is important to remember that choosing a ‘big’ objective and then planning how to get there, will often achieve a much greater result than looking at this year and adding a bit for next years objective.

The risk with short term planning is that we end up focused on ‘urgent’ issues and neglect the ‘important’ issues.

This is one of the key drivers of our unique, new Focus7 programme – helping businesses to take a longer term view, setting clear and challenging goals and then planning how to achieve them.

But like the China / Australia deal and the Rosetta mission, Focus7 is a journey, with analysis and review along the way, constantly adapt to the changing circumstances – but always helping you to move closer to your goal – after all, it’s not rocket science – or is it?

Top Featured Image and animation courtesy of European Space Agency