AI Can Write Your Goal. It Can’t Hear You Hesitate.

What changed in ninety minutes

The format is so simple that it almost sounds like it shouldn’t work. We teach a small amount, then stop talking and give people time to do the work right there, while it is still fresh. After that, they go into breakout rooms in pairs or small groups to talk through what they have written, and then everyone comes back together, and a few people share with the wider group.

What that produces is quite different from an hour of being talked at. People learn something, apply it immediately, explain it to somebody else and then reflect on it in front of the room, and by the time we reached the final shares you could hear how much the goals had moved on from the first draft. They were more specific, more honest about what was actually being attempted, and in several cases considerably smaller than where the person had started.

Justin was able to listen to a few of them and say, with no hedging at all, that the person had nailed it. That is a useful moment for a room to witness, because it tells everyone else what “clear” actually sounds like.

Three things other people do that you cannot do alone

First, they make the goal real. There is a noticeable difference between privately writing something in a notebook and having to explain that same thing out loud to another person who is paying attention. Sharing forces clarity, partly because somebody else will spot the vagueness you have learned to read straight past, and partly because saying it aloud sometimes makes you realise it isn’t quite what you meant.

Second, they ask the obvious question. Most of us have a question about our own goal that we have been carefully avoiding, and a person sitting opposite you will usually ask it within the first two minutes, without malice and without any idea that they have done something clever.

Third, and this is the thing that struck me most in both sessions, they create a room you want to be in. Within minutes of the breakouts starting you could feel people land on the thought that these are my people and I am in the right place. They listened to each other properly, shared what they were trying to achieve, and genuinely helped each other think, and all of that happened between strangers, in a short session, on a video call.

Where this leaves AI

I use AI every day, and I am not about to argue against it. If you want help writing a goal, structuring it, breaking it into actions or working out what to do on Monday morning, it will do a competent job, and it will do it at two in the morning.

What it cannot do, in any way that counts, is hear the hesitation in how you say something. A person listening to you picks up that you went quiet for half a second before saying “by the end of the year”, and they ask about it. They can sense how hard to push and judge what you probably need to hear at that particular moment, which is a different skill from knowing the right answer. They can also tell you what happened when they tried the same thing and it went badly, which is information you will never get from a model that has never had a bad quarter.

My honest expectation is that human accountability becomes more valuable as these tools improve. When advice is abundant and nearly free, the scarce thing is somebody who knows what you said you would do, notices that you haven’t, and cares enough to bring it up.

The milestone thing

One idea came up almost by accident in both workshops and ended up being the part people responded to most strongly, which was milestones.

A goal set twelve months out can be genuinely demotivating, because nothing you do today visibly moves it. Breaking it into meaningful milestones gives you something close enough to aim at this month, and it gives you visible evidence that you are moving, which matters more than people tend to admit when the goal itself is still a long way off. We will be developing this further, both in the workshops and inside the Accountability Club itself.

If you take one practical thing from this, it is to stop staring at the finish line and work out what your next milestone is.

What I took away

If I had to pull a single theme out of both sessions, it would be the power of sitting in a room with other people who are trying to do something similar to you.

People do need clarity about what they want, and they need goals specific enough to act on and milestones close enough to reach. Alongside all of that, they benefit enormously from having other people around them who understand what they are attempting, listen properly, challenge them when it is warranted, and encourage them when things are not going well.

Accountability gets reduced to a checkbox far more often than it should, as though the whole thing were a matter of somebody verifying your to-do list. What we saw across both workshops was something considerably more useful than that, which is a group of people who were actually invested in each other getting somewhere.

Accountability Circles run for one hour a week, with up to twelve members and the same group every time. Our workshops are free and open to anyone who wants to try the format first. If you have a goal that keeps sliding down the list, you will find both at accountabilityclub.org.