T is for Target

You would think this would be the easiest stage of QWERTY®. You defined your question, wondered about how to find a solution, explored the viable possibilities and then ranked them. You've done all your thinking and decided on your best option, so now you just need to go for it! Putting your plan into action. Easy, no?

Aim for success!

No, as you'll no doubt have found out for yourself, it isn't that easy. To start with, QWERTY® might have found you the what but not the how. You might need to go through QWERTY® again to work out how to achieve the solution you have decided upon.

In our playground exercise, the Target was met by deciding on the final design. The Learners in each group had selected a theme and five items that complemented that theme the best. Interestingly, although the remit had said 'not a swing, a slide or a roundabout, unless they are very unusual', each group chose to include either a slide or a roundabout (remember the slide through the shark tank, the multiple varied slides created from octopus legs and the interplanetary roundabout). Given the inventive twist they had put on them, though, we had no problems with that. We really wished we could have brought some of those playgrounds to life. If that had been the case, we would need to have done another QWERTY® on how to build what they had designed (and probably other ones on how to fund it, where to build it, what materials to use, how to meet health and safety objectives, how to publicise it etc.).

Once you've got your solution, it still has to be implemented. That can be tough. Where the early parts of QWERTY® are all very proactive, the implementation can be largely reactive. What do you do if the plan doesn't work as you imagined? How do you amend something that is holding the plan back? Do you have to involve other people in your plan? What happens if their input is different from what you had planned?

Sometimes you need to go on to the YaY! stage, where you evaluate and review, before the Target stage is actually complete to see if you can fix the glitch. Is there a better solution than the one you had originally devised? Do you need to add something extra (or take something out of the equation) to make it work properly?

The Target stage is a large proportion of the QWERTY® process (we talk about timings for QWERTY® in a separate blog) - you need to be sure you have allowed enough time for it. There's no point in spending the whole lesson planning the wonderful story you're going to write if you don't then have time to write it!

The key element of Target, though, whatever the challenges, is to implement your plan. If you don't, then all your thinking has been wasted.

We look in more depth at the Target stage in our YouTube clip T is for Target.