Research Shows Backup Plans May Keep You From Achieving Your Goals

Goal setting theorists have long debated whether one should have a backup plan when setting goals, or not. One school of thought believes you should be prepared if things don't go as expected, while the other feels that having a backup plan will lessen the urgency of reaching your goal in the first place.

The results from a study done at the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison sides with the second viewpoint. The findings show that a backup plan can actually hurt the chances of successfully achieving your goal and reduce goal performance.

Katherine L. Milkman of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania together with Jihae Shin, assistant professor of management and human resources, showed that making a backup plan could cause people to be less successful at attaining their primary goal and not to work as hard.

The concept was tested with a series of experiments. Participants were ask to perform a sentence-unscrambling task. They were told that if they showed high performance on the task they would be given the chance to leave the study early and a free snack.

Some of the groups were instructed to come up with another way in which they could save time later in the day or get free food on campus in case they didn't do well enough to earn the reward. These groups showed lower performance on the task. A follow-up experiment revealed that a critical factor driving this was the reduced desire for goal success.

Making a backup plan has important benefits such as making people feel more comfortable about the future, thus reducing perceived uncertainty. There may however also be potential costs that are less well known. Understanding those are important, especially in cases where goals can be achieved through effort. On the other hand, where goals can be achieved by luck or innate skill, goal performance is not reduced by making a backup plan

The researchers warn that this does not mean that people should go through life without ever making backup plans. Exploring ways to lessen these costs -- such as being strategic about when you make a backup plan - is an option that needs to be explored. One technique could be to wait until you have done everything you can to achieve your primary goal before making backup plans.

The study titled, “How backup plans can harm goal pursuit: The unexpected downside of being prepared for failure,” was published in the journal of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

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